You're My Belated Happiness - Chapter 1 Part 2

Translated by Team DHH at http://dhh-workshop.blogspot.com.

You’re My Belated Happiness

Chapter 1 Part 2

After coming back to Hang City, Ruan Yu started to brainstorm her new story and finished the outline in three days. It was the first time in 11 months of writer’s block when ideas for a story flowed out of her like a spring.

She sent the outline to Shen Mingying’s email. Then she received Shen’s WeChat message: [Aren’t these stories between you and Xu Huaisong?]

[You can say that.]

[You plan to take up the challenge of writing a pathetic story about a female lead’s one-sided crush on the male lead?]

Shen’s words stung her.

Ruan Yu sent a voice chat: “Would I be dumb enough to dig my own grave? It’s not going to be a documentary. If the male lead doesn’t like the female lead, how can it be called a romance?”

Xu Huaisong didn’t like her, but art is inspired by life and can go beyond it. Why couldn’t she adapt the pathetic one-sided crush into a two-way crush?

Shen Mingying asked amusedly: “Understood. So this is going to be the story about the author’s own fantasies.”

Ruan Yu was speechless. Yet, what she had said wasn’t wrong either.

“Alright, then. But I have to remind you. The kind of tall and aloof male persona like Xu Huaisong isn’t that popular nowadays. In addition, with those disadvantageous elements like the school and crush, I figure this novel won’t do that well.”

Ruan Yu didn’t seem to take it to heart. She laughed and said: “I’ll give it a try. If it doesn’t go well, I’ll just think of it as personal amusement. You said it too, it’s just a personal fantasy.”

After hanging up the phone, Ruan Yu poured herself a glass of milk tea and sat in front of the computer. She started to flip through the diary to find some entries that she could try her hands on. She hadn’t written for so long, she had to get the feeling back first.

She stopped on a page which had much more words than the other pages.

The page was crammed with words and the handwriting was lively, each stroke seemed to indicate her surging feelings. The date of the entry was New Year’s day, when she was in 12th grade.

Ruan Yu searched her memory and remembered what had happened that day.

That day was the day she got to be the nearest to Xu Huaisong in her entire time in high school.

The school had organized a firework party at midnight on New Year’s Eve that year. The sports field was filled with people. She pretended to be inadvertently standing right next to his right hand side. What she didn’t expect was the moment when the fireworks started exploding, he suddenly held her hand.

She shockingly turned her head, but only saw the apologetic expression on his face under the flashing lights from the fireworks.

He released her, pushed up the thin-framed eyeglasses on his nose, and embarrassedly said: “Sorry, wrong person.”

Ruan Yu wrote this incident into the file.

But she figured that when readers read about this, they probably would have the same thought as she had at the time: since the male lead said “wrong person,” then there must be a “right” person. Therefore, it seemed the “right” person wasn’t the female lead.

It sucked! Discarded!

She held her head and pondered some more, then added one more line. She added: After saying so, his heart thumped like the beating of drums and his chest was pounding louder than the exploding fireworks above.

-- --With the added line, it implied that “the wrong person” was only the male lead’s excuse.

After she finished writing it, Ruan Yu took a sip of milk tea.

Somehow she did feel that she was just entertaining herself.

*

Around the same time, more than a hundred kilometers away, at an area in Su City which was about to be demolished, a young lady wearing a school uniform ran down the stairs from the attic of the house with a box in her hands: “Mom, is there any use for all this junk?”

Tao Rong took a peak in the box: “This is all your brother’s stuff from his high school years. Pack them up.”

Xu Huaishi said: “Oh.” She put down the dusty box and took out an old cell phone from inside the box: “He used such an obsolete phone when he was in highschool? It does have a vintage feel to it.”

“We were afraid to distract him from his studies, so we specially bought this phone for him.” Tao Rong gave her a glance and said: “Don’t mess up your brother’s stuff.”

“It’s just a broken cell phone. It can’t turn on without a battery……” As she was mumbling, she randomly clicked on the buttons. Suddenly the screen of the cell phone lit up. She jumped.

So many years had passed and the phone was still functional. Was this a cell phone or a fighter plane?

Xu Huaishi was taken aback. Seeing her mother was coming her way, she hid the cell phone and squatted down pretending she was busy sorting through the junk. Then she turned around to discreetly play with the phone.

This phone wasn’t a smart phone. There was no passcode after turning on the phone. By holding down the start key and clicking “confirm”, the phone could be unlocked. She randomly clicked on different keys and easily reached the home page. With a couple more clicks, she saw “contacts”.

But there wasn’t even one name inside.

She returned to the “message” page, there was no message there either.

She thought, very well, this was very “Xu Huaisong” like.

There was nothing there. She was planning to turn the phone off. Before she backed out, she noticed that right next to the “draft” box there was the number 327 on it.

Three hundred twenty seven drafts? Was her brother doing math calculations on this outdated phone?

Xu Huaishi hesitated for a moment, then clicked on it, and read a random one.

The receiver was left blank. Date created: 12:10 AM, January 1st, 2010. The contents: [I lied. It’s not the wrong person. Happy New Year.]

Xu Huaishi’s hand shook. She could smell puppy love even across from the screen.

Puppy love? A person like her brother?

The way she was holding the phone became rather reverent.

Because it was possible that this wasn’t just any outdated cell phone, it was actually…… a new world which hadn’t been discovered by anyone.

Translated by Team DHH at http://dhh-workshop.blogspot.com.