Kindergarten Story: Part One
“Are you out of food? Why do you have to steal from others? Believe it or not, I’ll tell the teacher!”
A young boy stood firmly in front of a little girl who was being bullied.
Behind the boy, a small figure tugged at his sleeve and whispered a plea for peace: “Forget it, Lu Siheng. He’s too fat; you won’t win.”
“But… my mother said a real man should draw his sword to help when he sees injustice,” little Lu Siheng reasoned with Gu Qingyi.
Gu Qingyi tilted his head, looking up and down Lu Siheng’s body before asking earnestly, “But you don’t even have a sword?”
Lu Siheng patted himself down and only realized after a long moment: “Oh, right.”
At that moment, the “Little Fatty” across from them, who had failed to steal the food, raised a fist the size of a sandbag and made a threatening gesture.
“My grandma said, as long as I want it, it’s mine!”
Another four-or-five-year-old boy chimed in, “Which class are you from? What else can you do besides tattling? You little snitch.”
“You’re already so fat. If you eat any more, you’ll turn into a ball,” Lu Siheng offered objectively. “You should lose weight; it’s healthier that way.”
“You don’t understand. My grandma says I look ‘blessed’ like this. Give me that phone to play with!” Little Fatty had set his eyes on the “phone” hanging around Lu Siheng’s neck.
“This isn’t a phone,” Lu Siheng lied without batting an eye. “This is a magic stone shaped like a phone. ‘Blessed’ people can’t touch it, or they’ll never be able to eat delicious food again.”
Little Fatty patted his growling stomach. At the thought of never eating delicious food again, he was instantly intimidated. “Then I don’t want it.”
He then turned back fiercely. “Hurry up and give me the delicious food! If you don’t get out of the way, believe it or not, I’ll beat you up too!”
“Forget it, Gege.”
The girl sniffled, clutching a lunchbox her mother had carefully prepared for the picnic.
The skirt she was wearing had been splashed with mud from the ground, and her pale little face was now covered in dust. She held back her tears, gripping Lu Siheng’s clothes with one hand.
“We can’t beat him. The vice principal is his aunt; the teachers won’t do anything.”
Little Fatty came from a well-off family and had been spoiled since birth. He got whatever he wanted at home, and relying on his connections, he always stole things from other children.
Initially, he had been somewhat restrained. But once, after he had cracked a classmate’s head open and the parents were called, his parents didn’t scold him. Instead, they complained that the other parents were making a fuss over nothing, and the two parties ended up in a heated argument.
The teacher had merely tried to smooth things over, and in the end, the matter was dropped.
After getting a taste of success, Little Fatty became even more arrogant. He acted like a local bandit, seizing anything he liked. His father was an executive at a top local company, and with the vice principal backing him, no one dared to offend him.
Lu Siheng wasn’t in the same class and hadn’t seen him in the kindergarten before, so he didn’t know about the boy’s notorious reputation.
This time, it was a school-wide wilderness camping trip. Participation was voluntary, and the rule was to be self-sufficient and forage for food together. However, many parents, worried about their children, had secretly stuffed food into their bags, and the teachers could only turn a blind eye.
There were over thirty children in total with five accompanying teachers. Four had gone to gather firewood and pick fruit, leaving only one male teacher to look after the kids. With so many children, it was inevitable that some would be overlooked.
Lu Siheng still remembered what Ms. Jiang had said: people who bully girls will wet the bed at night.
He looked at Little Fatty and suddenly blurted out, “You’re doomed.”
Everyone present was startled by his confident shout. Little Fatty’s lackey blinked a few times and leaned in to report, “Boss, he’s going to hit you.”
“What? You dare to hit me?! If you hit me, my dad and grandma won’t let you off!” Little Fatty used his usual threat.
Children are, after all, children. To an adult, no matter how harsh the words, the tone remains soft and harmless.
But he was facing a group of children his own age. The little girl was on the verge of tears. “Gege, just go. He really will hit you. I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“Hey, I’m not hitting you. I’ll treat you to something delicious.”
Lu Siheng rummaged through his backpack and pulled out an exquisite lunchbox. “My mom made this for me. You can have it.”
When Little Fatty heard there was food, his eyes lit up. He had finished the snacks he brought while on the bus. He huffed, “At least you’re sensible. Fine, I won’t take hers then.”
“Run, quickly!” Seeing that Little Fatty was distracted, Lu Siheng urged the two to run.
Gu Qingyi didn’t understand why, but he followed instructions, grabbed the girl’s arm, and chased after Lu Siheng.
Once the three ran back to the tents, Gu Qingyi asked, “Why did we run? Didn’t you give him the lunchbox?”
“That was made by my mom,” Lu Siheng explained.
“Will he come back to hit us after he finishes it?” Gu Qingyi quickly looked back to see if Little Fatty was chasing them. He had clearly witnessed the “power” of that cooking before.
But the little girl didn’t know. She only knew her friend would be hungry. “It’s because of me that your food is gone. You can eat mine, Gege.”
Lu Siheng’s small face was full of solemnity. “Next time he bullies you, step on his foot and dump the food on his head. Do you understand?”
“Oh.” The girl nodded, opened her lunchbox, and shoved it into Lu Siheng’s hands. “Eat, Gege. My mom’s cooking is really good.”
Lu Siheng pushed it back and shook his head. “I won’t eat it. I can’t eat things from other girls, or my wife will be angry.”
The girl’s voice was soft and milky. “What’s that?”
To be honest, Lu Siheng didn’t quite understand either. “My mom said a wife is… someone very beautiful who eats with you, sleeps with you, and plays with you. Someone very, very good.”
Gu Qingyi listened with a serious expression. “Then I want to find lots and lots of wives to play with me!”
The little girl followed suit: “I want lots of wives too.”
Gu Qingyi: “I want 100 wives.”
“Then I want 200!” The little girl refused to be outdone.
“No!” Lu Siheng corrected them sternly. “You can only have one wife. Otherwise, you’ll be arrested.”
“Oh, okay.” The two lowered their heads in disappointment.
Lu Siheng’s gaze moved from the rice balls shaped like penguins in the lunchbox to the penguin hair clip on the girl’s temple.
He noticed many girls in class wore these strangely shaped things. He asked curiously, “Do all you girls like these?”
“Yes! Do you like them too, Gege? I have one more.” The little girl crawled back into the tent, rummaged around, and found a translucent purple star hair clip with a pearl embedded at the end.
“Gege, this is for you.”
This time, Lu Siheng didn’t refuse. “Thank you.”
…
Lu Siheng held the hair clip and searched the campsite, but he couldn’t find the person he was looking for. Eventually, he ran to ask the supervising teacher, “Teacher, have you seen where Jun Qianyu went? I can’t find her.”
The teacher was busy helping others set up tents and took a moment to coax him: “Maybe she went to pick firewood with the other teachers?”
These kids looked well-behaved, but they were young and could be quite a handful. In the short time they had been there, one kid needed the toilet, these two were arguing, and another cried because they lost their clothes—only for it to turn out they had taken them off because it was hot and forgotten them in their bag.
Such incidents were countless, and the teacher was human; he couldn’t handle the constant fussing. He was just an assistant teacher and wasn’t familiar with these children, so he didn’t take Lu Siheng’s words to heart.
“Don’t worry, little one. Wait for the other teachers to return. Go play with the others for now; Teacher is very busy,” the man said dismissively.
Lu Siheng stood there for a while longer. Seeing that the man had no intention of paying him any more attention, his handsome brows furrowed. Knowing he couldn’t count on this teacher, he decided to look for her himself.
“Jun Qianyu is missing. Have you seen her?”
A little girl from their class replied, “She went to the bathroom. Over there.”
“Okay, thank you.”
…
The children were tired after playing for half the day. After eating and drinking their fill, the teachers shooed them back into the tents like chicks for a nap.
Every now and then, Lu Siheng would poke his fluffy head out of the tent, his eyes darting around. He watched in one direction for a long time, but Jun Qianyu still hadn’t returned from the bathroom.
Mountain weather is fickle, and the rain was an unexpected accident that caught everyone off guard.
The teachers complained as they ran back through the rain, shielding the dry firewood. Seeing the male teacher setting up a large umbrella canopy in the middle of the campsite, they immediately ran over and dumped the wood on the ground.
“Teacher Zhang, you are truly our savior!”
Several people agreed.
Teacher Zhang scratched his head sheepishly. “You’re exaggerating.” Just as he spoke, he felt someone tugging at his trousers.
He looked down and saw a little boy who looked somewhat familiar.
“Jun Qianyu hasn’t come back. She went to the bathroom.”
When the teachers heard this, they quickly did a head count and realized one person was indeed missing. Realizing the gravity of the situation, they hurriedly took umbrellas to search.
Lu Siheng was taken back to the tent by a teacher. The teacher comforted him: “The other teachers have gone to look. You take a nap first, and when you wake up, your friend will be back, okay?”
The tone brooked no refusal. Lu Siheng nodded, and once the teacher left, the boy who was supposedly sleeping turned around and immediately left the tent.
“Lend me your umbrella and your phone-watch.”
Gu Qingyi was groggily shaken awake. After dizzily handing over the items, he couldn’t hold out and fell back asleep.
Little Lu Siheng, holding the umbrella alone, followed the direction the female classmate had pointed and left the campsite, entering the dense forest.
When his voice grew tired from shouting, he used the phone to constantly adjust the focus, looking at distant areas through the screen.
…
In the corner of a dim cave huddled a child of about five years old, soaked to the bone.
The cream-colored long-sleeved dress was stained with patches of yellowish-brown mud. The green ribbons on the twin braids had come loose, and the hair was messy.
The child’s back was pressed tightly against the uneven stone wall, lying in the dirty mud and water, trembling all over. The cave was tiny, barely able to fit an adult, but the child had curled into a ball in this cramped environment, leaving quite a bit of space.
Outside, the sound of torrential rain drowned out the weak breathing inside the cave.
The water slowly began to seep in.
As time passed, the child’s clenched hands slowly lost their strength. In their eyes, the forest outside began to blur.
Vaguely, there was a “hissing” sound approaching, distinct from the rain. The child’s eyelids flickered, but they couldn’t open them.
Suddenly, a tender voice of pain broke through the haze and reached their ears clearly.
The child’s fingers, resting in the mud pit, twitched as they slowly opened their eyes.
Outside the cave, Lu Siheng, his face covered in mud, had thrown the umbrella away. In the curtain of rain, the umbrella lay on the ground, and beside the broken frame was a spine-chilling brown snake.
“Are you okay, A-Yu?” Even the mud on his face couldn’t hide the sudden brightness in Lu Siheng’s eyes when he saw her. “I finally found you.”
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