Zhang Xiaoxiao had never thought of herself as a good person.
She was vain, a bully who threw her weight around, and fiercely jealous... She was practically covered in labels that marked her as a bad person.
When she was little, her classmates treated her differently because her mother was disabled.
When children encountered problems they couldn't solve, they went to their parents for help.
"Do they hit you?"
Her mother asked her that.
Zhang Xiaoxiao remembered it vividly.
Back then, she counted off her troubles on her fingers.
People tossed her pencil case around. They deliberately stepped on her feet when she bent to pick up her pencils. She had to do more than her share of the cleaning, and everyone was always mocking her...
Her mother merely nodded wearily.
"All right, I understand. It's just kids messing around. Don't take it to heart."
Zhang Xiaoxiao didn't understand what her mother meant. She only felt wronged.
After that, her life grew more and more stifling. By the time she was in middle school, when her classmates really did punch her in the face, she didn't go to her mother anymore.
She swung her fists and fought them in a tangled heap.
Later, their parents were called in. Zhang Xiaoxiao would never forget the day they left the teacher's office, when her mother looked at her with a face full of worry and disappointment.
"Xiaoxiao, couldn't you... just give me a little less to worry about?"
In that moment, she suddenly felt that the fists that had rained down on her before hadn't hurt at all.
She stopped fighting back.
Then, one day, a transfer student came to her class.
During her first week, she witnessed several acts of bullying. Like an idiot, she rushed in to stop them, and,