Clothes

The rural passenger bus kept stopping and starting along the way, and only then did Lin Er realize she had miscalculated.

She wasn't the adult she would become, able to travel wherever she pleased. Right now, she was a child who could get so carsick she vomited until she passed out.

On the thirty-minute ride, Lin Er spent more than twenty minutes throwing up. Fortunately, carsickness was common these days, though it was rare for anyone to have it as badly as she did.

So Lin Er took three buses to reach the city.

Well, the drivers hadn't wanted to carry her, and they hadn't wanted to refund her fare either. They had told her to keep the money, finish throwing up, and wait for the next bus.

The fare was five yuan, but she made it to the city for only three. Each driver charged her just one yuan. She had saved money.

On the final leg, Lin Er had nearly dry-heaved the whole way. She really had nothing left to throw up.

Carsickness ran in her family. Her mother had it worst: she got so sick that even the 120 ambulance service didn't dare transport her and treated her nearby instead.

Next was her younger sister, who always threw up on long trips.

As a child, Lin Er threw up as soon as she got in a vehicle, but once she grew up, she hardly felt anything. Her grandmother often said it was because she had fallen and hit her head too many times as a child, and that once she grew up and her brain settled firmly in place, she stopped throwing up.

She took that sort of talk with a grain of salt, but she really had changed the most. Her sister hadn't gotten better like she had and still threw up on long trips.

When they went traveling, trash bags and phones were both indispensable.

Lin Er sat beneath a pedestrian overpass for nearly half an hour before recovering enough to buy a piece of bread from a nearby shop to soothe her stomach, which felt ready to digest itself. It caught in her throat and made it sore; her mouth couldn't produce even a little saliva to moisten it, and in the end she had to wash it all down with bottled water.

The city center barely changed over the next forty or fifty years, so she was completely familiar with it now. After all, she would spend three years going to school here in the future.

After winding through a few alleys, she reached a street selling clothes and shoes. It was a little out of the way, but things were cheap, and many people from the towns came here to buy clothes wholesale.

Lin Er headed straight for the most crowded shop. There were no clothes racks; everything was piled on platform beds, with clothes for men and women, young and old, for every season.

It was nothing like the shops that stocked new clothes with each season.

It was already noon. Clothing shops were usually empty at mealtimes, but there were still students picking out clothes here.

Right, Experimental High School let its students off every Saturday afternoon, while No. 2 Middle School let theirs off every Sunday afternoon. These girls were almost certainly from Experimental High.

The owner sat in the doorway eating from a bowl and paid them no mind. A huge sign hung from each platform bed. The clothes were sold by the piece, with the prices clearly marked.

The students glanced at Lin Er several times when she came in. She looked a little too young to be a high school student, but her demeanor wasn't like an elementary or middle school student's either. In the end, they took her for a first-year high school student.

"Do you want to pick things out with us? If we get twenty pieces, they'll be two yuan cheaper each!"

Lin Er looked at a pair of jeans priced at fifteen yuan and a short-sleeved shirt at twelve. She felt that the clothes she had made herself looked bad no matter how she viewed them. The patterns didn't match at all; only the solid-colored ones were passable.

As the girl beside her spoke, she glanced at the owner twice, looking a little embarrassed. Lin Er glanced over too.

The owner was easygoing. She put down her chopsticks without taking offense.

"It's fine. Go ahead and pick together. As long as you get twenty pieces, the summer clothes are ten yuan each!"

The five girls had been picking clothes for over an hour. Each had two or three pieces and didn't want to pick any more, or their living expenses wouldn't last the month.

They hadn't expected Lin Er to make up the rest of the total. They just wanted to get one more person if they could, and maybe someone else would come along later.

If nothing else worked, each of them could take one more piece and see if anyone wanted it when they got back to school. That way, they could at least recoup some money.

Lin Er examined the fabric. It was much more reliable than the cheap clothes sold online in later years. She didn't turn down the students' recommendations and went over to the children's section to start choosing.

"This one—the one you have is nylon. It doesn't breathe, and it's easy to stretch out of shape in the wash!"

Lin Er couldn't tell fabrics apart. All she could do was feel which ones were soft and see which looked sturdy. Later on, polyester and cotton-linen blends became what she wore most often, but she still couldn't tell how much cotton or linen they contained and how much was something else.

The girl with the poofy hair didn't recommend the hole-riddled denim she was holding. Looking at Lin Er,

she seemed like the well-behaved type at first glance, the sort of old-fashioned girl who might think ripped jeans were damaged and needed sewing up.

So the girl recommended something conventional instead. Lin Er felt the fabric; it felt quite nice.

Lin Er murmured a thank-you and looked through the pile as instructed, then picked out two pairs in different colors.

She didn't need to be choosy about short-sleeved shirts; she just had to find cotton ones. She knew those well. She just had to avoid anything with English designs.

A lot of factories weren't very particular these days. They took advantage of the fact that most people couldn't understand English and printed disgusting words on the clothes.

She picked three short-sleeved shirts, and the girls beside her all breathed a sigh of relief. She even saw one girl put a piece back; evidently, she didn't have much money to spare.

They had reached the twenty-piece wholesale minimum. They paid the owner, and the girls left.

Lin Er asked the owner for a woven plastic sack, packed the clothes, and went to the restroom.

She sent one of the unisex outfits to her young pen pal and asked, "OK?"

He replied, "OK."

She packed the rest into the old schoolbag. With the peanuts gone, it contained only two bags of rice grains, a magic book, a pen, a wand, a broom, and a stack of money. There was plenty of room.

After confirming that the clothes fit him, she came back to pick out more. Foreign children seemed to develop earlier than children back home, huh? There was a five- or six-year age gap between them.

"Kid, if you're picking out more, you need another twenty pieces to get them for ten yuan each!"

Lin Er didn't argue. She asked, "What about winter clothes?"

The owner put down her bowl. When she had taken Lin Er's payment just now, she had given her fifty yuan in change, which meant Lin Er had at least fifty yuan left.

"Padded jackets are thirty, padded pants are twenty. If you take five pieces, I'll knock five yuan off each one!"

Lin Er had looked at those padded jackets. Some styles were new and some were old. She had checked the climate in the United Kingdom; temperatures started dropping around this time, and at the very least, it was too cold for short sleeves.

She had given her young pen pal two adult suits, but they obviously didn't fit. The clothes here were cheap, and she could still afford them.

Besides, it was already mid-September. It wouldn't be long before the temperature dropped here too, and she wouldn't be able to wear short sleeves much longer. She needed to buy winter clothes at the same time.

As for what to tell her family, she only needed to say she had found them in the upstairs storage room, and no one would be suspicious. At most, her grandmother would remind them again to be grateful, since they had all come from their grandaunt.

Two summer outfits for her young pen pal cost forty yuan, two winter outfits cost eighty, and two spring-and-autumn jackets cost thirty. A pack of five pairs of underwear came free. That made ten pieces in all, for a total of 150 yuan.

For herself, she got two summer outfits, two winter outfits, two jackets, a pack of underwear, and two bras. That also came to 150 yuan.

Since she was buying so much, she also bought the same assortment for her younger sister, as well as clothes for her grandparents.

For 600 yuan's worth of clothes, the owner was happy to throw in some underwear and socks.

There were so many clothes that it took her three trips to the restroom to deal with them. So what if someone was suspicious? Even if she was stuffing the clothes into the toilet, it was nobody else's business.

Besides, people shouldn't go around saying things without proof. If someone claimed they had searched the restroom and hadn't seen the three bags of clothes, she could just say she had hidden them somewhere and they had gone missing after that person went in.