Rainbow Piercing the Sun

Li Xinlan closed her English textbook and was about to go inside...

Qin An bent over and crouched halfway down, resting one hand on the railing and pressing the other onto Li Xinlan's textbook. His smile faded as he looked at her earnestly. "Xinlan, I'm sorry..."

"What?" Li Xinlan blinked and looked at Qin An in surprise. Had she heard him right...?

"I'm sorry. I won't bully you ever again..." Qin An was especially sincere. Some things seemed merely absurd in retrospect, but for the person involved, they could not have felt good at the time...

Li Xinlan looked into Qin An's eyes. Those clear eyes gazing at her never wavered and held no trace of suppressed laughter. They were bright and clean...

Her heart fluttered in alarm, and she turned away. "Just don't cause trouble for your parents anymore..."

Li Xinlan hurriedly gathered up her textbook and ran home, but her mind was filled with those eyes in Qin An's delicate-featured face...

There were many things worth savoring, but Qin An would no longer enjoy the mean-spirited pleasure of constantly bullying a girl. Occasionally teasing a young girl for her cute reactions was fine, but he would never again trample so recklessly on a teenage girl's sensitive self-esteem...

After finishing his hot rice in soup, Qin An made himself a large mug of milk without being asked, said goodbye to his parents, and raced downstairs...

Qin Huai and Li Qin exchanged a glance, both with a hint of a smile in their eyes. Before, they had always had to chase him downstairs to go to school, never mind him taking the initiative to say goodbye...

Qin An had never drunk milk before because he thought it smelled rank. Now, though, he knew he was still growing and drinking it would do him no harm. Besides, he figured the milk powder at this time probably did not contain melamine yet...

Downstairs, Qin An ran into Li Xinlan wheeling her bicycle to school and went over to her. "Let's go together..."

"It's hardly any distance..." Li Xinlan still did not look particularly friendly, but when Qin An came over, she did not move away either. Slowly wheeling her bicycle, she walked out of the compound with him...

Town Middle School was to the north, and No. 2 Middle School was to the south, so once they left the compound, they would go their separate ways. Sun Pao was waiting for Qin An at the gate. When he saw Li Xinlan, he snickered. "Basketball..."

"Call her Xinlan from now on, and show some respect..." Qin An patted Sun Pao on the head and pulled him along. "Come on..."

Qin An had no intention of dragging Sun Pao over to make a point of apologizing. That would only make Li Xinlan feel worse, and might even make her suspect he was deliberately reopening her wounds. After the pilot incident, Li Xinlan had not dared leave home for three days...

Li Xinlan jogged a short distance with her bicycle, then swung onto it and rode away. Sun Pao sighed enviously. "Qin An, do you think we can get bicycles too when we're in high school? How great would it be if I could ride a bike every day..."

"That's all you aspire to..." Qin An was just about to ask Sun Pao whether he had plucked his hair yesterday when he saw someone stop Li Xinlan up ahead...

Qin An narrowed his eyes for a look. The person stopping Li Xinlan was Tu Gang, who had once been notorious in their compound...

Tu Gang had originally come from a family where both parents were teachers. His father, Tu Ji, had been dismissed from public service for slapping a student who was daydreaming in class so hard that he suffered a concussion and a ruptured eardrum. Later, he opened an auto repair shop of his own. Business was good, and he bought a home in town. They had long since stopped living in the staff quarters...

According to School District regulations, their apartment should have been reclaimed once they moved out, but Tu Gang's mother, Hong Mei, was a formidable woman and had kept holding on to it. Tu Gang occasionally stayed there too, so Qin An was not at all surprised to run into him...

All Qin An remembered of Tu Gang was a rather sensational scandal from his high school years. A girl in her final year and three boys had been doing that in the school building in the middle of the night, and Tu Gang had been one of them. All the students involved had been expelled, and the school had gone to great lengths to quell the matter. Even so, the principal and the director of political and student affairs had both been replaced...

Tu Gang was no pushover. Seeing him stop Li Xinlan and tug at her, Qin An walked over and knocked away the hand Tu Gang had resting on the front of her bicycle and her books. "What are you doing?"

Qin An's tone was somewhat hostile. Tu Gang was tall and thin, a full head taller than Qin An, but to Qin An, he was nothing more than a fifteen-year-old child. There was always something of an adult's dismissiveness toward a teenager in his attitude, and toward someone he disliked, it could more accurately be called contempt...

That contempt came so naturally that Tu Gang was briefly taken aback. "Who the hell are you? You dare smack my hand!"

"Who am I? Li Xinlan's my big sister. Trying to hit on her?" Qin An gave Li Xinlan a push, signaling for her to leave first...

But Li Xinlan stood rooted to the spot. Tu Gang was notorious even at No. 2 Middle School. Never mind the teachers' children in the staff quarters, whose parents kept them too tightly disciplined to dare cause trouble lightly-even the older troublemakers at school feared him somewhat. The Tu family's auto repair shop employed a whole group of mechanics, all of whom had originally been longtime local thugs. Every one of them bore several scars, and just looking at them was frightening...

Supposedly, on Tu Gang's first day of school, some final-year students had demanded protection money from him. When he refused, they dragged him into a corner and slapped him several times. The next day, Tu Gang had people corner those students outside school and beat them half to death...

From then on, Tu Gang had become someone no one at No. 2 Middle School dared provoke. He did not spend all day stirring up trouble at school, but anyone who accidentally offended him could always expect a beating...

How could Li Xinlan not know about someone like Tu Gang? She had never expected Qin An to step in, either, and could not help worrying. Qin An was still only a middle school student and probably had not heard about Tu Gang's misdeeds at No. 2 Middle School...

"She's your big sister? Then I'm your brother-in-law..." Tu Gang laughed, not forgetting to take a verbal liberty with Li Xinlan...

"Brother-in-law, give me a cigarette..." Qin An was brazen too. Playing along with Tu Gang, he reached out and took a pack of Hongtashan cigarettes and a lighter from his pocket, then pursed his lips. "You're not too stingy, are you?"

"Do you even know how to smoke, you little brat...?" Tu Gang did not remember much about Qin An. He had left the staff quarters several years ago...

Qin An lit a cigarette with practiced ease and blew a smoke ring...

One with each puff, one with each puff. With his narrowed eyes and pursed lips, he looked every inch a veteran smoker. The smoke rings drifted diagonally upward in a straight line, their centers actually aligned as each ring expanded, forming an inverted cone. With the sunlight shining through, they had something of a hazy halo about them...

"This is called Rainbow Piercing the Sun. Get it?" Qin An looked at the dumbstruck Tu Gang, took a deep drag, and blew a mouthful of smoke into his face. "Come hit on my sister once you've learned this trick. Otherwise, I'll look down on you. Don't embarrass her..."

Without someone teaching them and deliberate practice, even a veteran smoker would not know Qin An's trick, much less Tu Gang...

"Come on, I'll walk you part of the way..." Qin An nudged Li Xinlan, who was staring at him in astonishment, leaving Tu Gang holding his cigarette and lighter, forced to accept the fact that a child two years younger than him had looked down on him...