The Attic

Ji Minghuan sat silently in his chair, staring motionlessly at the isolation door in the darkness. After a long while, he suddenly closed his eyes and let his shoulders slump, as though he had fallen asleep in the chair.

I haven't seen her in so long... he thought.

These were perhaps the longest five minutes of Ji Minghuan's life.

It felt as though a clock in his mind was ticking away, its second hand slowly turning clockwise, lap after lap. He could not wait for those meaningless five minutes to end;

yet the hour hand was rapidly moving backward, taking him back to memories of the Welfare Home.

Ji Minghuan had only been nine when he first met Kong Youling.

It had been one morning, three years ago.

Ji Minghuan learned from the Nurse that a new child had arrived at the Welfare Home. He heard she was a mixed-race girl whose entire body was frighteningly white, and that she was deaf and mute. Because of her, the Nurse made all the children start learning sign language early. Some of them could not sit still and blamed her for it all, so they had disliked her from the beginning.

She liked to wear a wrinkled white linen dress and carry a sketchbook with a pencil tucked inside.

When she first entered the classroom, the children were all startled by her appearance and instantly fell quiet. Her entire body was a sickly white; even her hair and eyelashes were white. She was unlike anyone they had ever seen.

The classroom windows were open. She lowered her eyes beneath the sunlight pouring in, as though she could not open them, because the eyes of people with albinism were sensitive to light.

Back then, she walked onto the platform with her eyes closed and nearly fell. Amid everyone's laughter, she got back up and quietly wrote in her sketchbook alone.

Then, beneath the children's curious gazes, she turned the front of the sketchbook toward the classroom. Looking closely, they saw three slightly crooked characters written in pencil:

—Kong Youling.

That was her name.

Her light-sensitive eyes were still closed, but she lifted her chin as high as she could. The teacher never drew the curtains, only laughed along with the children.

She was deaf and mute, so she could not hear the piercing laughter. She faintly opened her eyes in the sunlight and saw the smiles on their faces, thinking everyone liked her.

So although she did not like smiling much, nor did she know how to smile, she still slightly curved the corners of her mouth.

Forcing out the faintest smile.

That day, Ji Minghuan, sitting in the corner of the classroom, froze for a moment. The girl smiled all alone in the sunlight, her snowy white hair gently swaying in the breeze. He did not laugh or say anything. He only watched her quietly.

Ji Minghuan also knew that she could simply have asked the teacher to write her name on the blackboard. There had been no need to do this.

Later, Ji Minghuan asked her why she had done it. She wrote in her notebook that she did not like making everyone learn sign language just for her, because it felt as though she had become a burden to others.

She was a very considerate child and did not like troubling others.

But even so, the children still often made things difficult for her. They all knew the Nurse had made them learn sign language only to keep them from causing trouble in class and give them more things to do.

But no one dared provoke the Nurse, so they turned to the White-haired Girl. Some said she was a Yokai abandoned even by her mother, thrown away because she was too ugly. Others said she was the child of a foreigner, that some foreign man had played with her mother before abandoning them both.

Others said she was a devil. Devils had red eyes, after all. They did not know that the lack of pigment made her irises translucent, which was why her pupils looked red to others.

She could not hear what they were saying, so she wrote in her notebook, but no one paid attention to her.

Half a sentence was written in it: "Do you want to play with me?"

Then, Ji Minghuan, who had been sitting in the corner of the classroom, suddenly stood up and pulled her by the hand as they fled.

They ran quickly, as though they were riding the wind. The other children chased after them but could never catch up. In the end, they hid in the attic above the Library. None of the orphanage children dared go there, because it was where the director punished people. They were all afraid the Nurse would lock them inside, so no one followed.

In the quiet attic, only the wall clock ticked away. Ji Minghuan climbed onto the bookshelves by stepping on mountains of piled-up old books, then leaped from the old shelves to the skylight and climbed onto the roof. Then he turned back and held out his hand to her.

The girl looked up at him. Though the sunlight that day was fierce, and the light streaming through the skylight kept her from opening her eyes, her eyelids trembled as she forced them wide, earnestly looking at the boy's smile on the roof and the hand he held out.

After hesitating for a moment, she... began to run.

It was the first time Ji Minghuan had seen her run.

She ran very fast, her slender pale legs rising and falling. Her figure was as light as a white deer wading across a river. She stepped across two or three ever-higher bookshelves and jumped toward the skylight through the sunlight.

Ji Minghuan caught her hand and pulled her up onto the roof.

At dusk that day, the two children sat shoulder to shoulder on the roof, bathed in the afterglow as they watched the sun slowly sink below the horizon. Ji Minghuan had read many books and knew that people with albinism had sensitive eyes, so he gently placed a book he had casually picked up from the attic on top of her head.

In the book's shade, she opened her eyes and quietly studied this person who usually did not talk much.

"Kong Youling, your name sounds lovely." The boy took her sketchbook without asking and wrote in it with a pencil.

"Don't you dislike me? I can't speak, and I can't hear anything." The White-haired Girl wrote in the notebook. "And I'm... very ugly."

She still had the book on her head to shield her from the light, like a little frog hiding beneath a lotus leaf.

Ji Minghuan took her notebook and pencil, wrote something, then handed them back to her.

Several neat characters were written in the notebook: "You're not ugly at all."

Kong Youling lowered her eyes to look at it, then wrote in the notebook: "But... everyone hates me."

After thinking for a while, she continued writing, then turned the notebook toward Ji Minghuan:

"Is it because I'm disabled?"

Ji Minghuan stared at that line for a long time.

He took the girl's notebook and wrote in it, then hurriedly turned the page toward her. "You're disabled? Then I'm mentally ill!"

Having written that, he blinked slyly like a puppy. "Let me tell you, I often see strange scenes. Sometimes, I see myself fighting in the Second World War, with soldiers all around me shouting something at me. Sometimes, I see myself playing the violin on the streets of Paris, with everyone applauding me. Sometimes I even see... see myself destroying the world! I dream of sitting on the moon, looking at an empty Earth. I stretch out my right hand, and black bandages wrap around the entire planet like enormous snakes, and then..."

Kong Youling paused, then wrote in the notebook: "And then?"

"Then I swallowed the Earth!" He gave two smug little hums as he wrote solemnly in the notebook.

"You're amazing."

"Right? Right?" Ji Minghuan wrote, and there seemed to be inexplicable pride in his crooked handwriting.

That year, Kong Youling was eight, while Ji Minghuan was only one year older, nine. The two children sat on the eaves, gazing at the crimson sky in the distance as plane trails stretched overhead.

The sun sank beyond the horizon, taking away the final trace of light in the sky. In the pitch-black darkness, Ji Minghuan braced both hands against the roof tiles and looked up at the Night Sky.

The first ray of moonlight fell from above. Silently, he spoke with his lips:

"We're the same. We're both weirdos... You're not alone."