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墨書 Inktalez
I stared at the water droplets condensing on the glass window, my fingers unconsciously caressing the warm coffee cup. The convenience store's air conditioning was always set too cold, making the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. This was already the seventh time I had sat in this orange plastic chair at three seventeen on a Thursday afternoon, and even the school bell ringing across the street was alarmingly punctual.
"Student, your oden is ready." When the clerk pushed the paper cup toward me, I instinctively glanced at his name tag—his surname was different from last week. The sight of the fish cakes bobbing in the broth suddenly clashed with my memory; last week at this time, there had clearly been two slices of fish cake in my bowl.
The day Xiao Ya discovered my diary, I was crouched in the storage room sorting through my mother's old qipao. The scent of mothballs mixed with her citrus-scented shampoo suddenly overwhelmed me, and I nearly knocked over the blue-and-white porcelain lamp. "What’s this?" she asked, shaking a notebook with a leather cover, her eyes sparkling in the beam of light filtering through the skylight. "A time-traveling savior? When did Writer Lin switch to writing novels?"
My attempt to snatch back the notebook was too hasty, and a yellowed instant photo fluttered out between the pages. It was a snapshot of me falling on the track during the sports meet in eighth grade; there should have been Chen Hao’s hand helping me up at the edge of the photo, but now only a blurred cuff remained. When Xiao Ya picked up the photo, her fingertips paused: "This boy in the blue striped shirt..."
Suddenly, a piano prelude blared from the convenience store's speakers, causing my paper cup to tilt dangerously. The kelp knot splashed back into the broth, sending a wave of heat that drowned out all sound. When I looked up again, ink stains from uniform sleeves were spreading along the lines of School Emblem, and the cherry blossom hair tie on a girl’s ponytail in front swayed blindingly—this was spring 2009, and I was sitting by the window in the third row of my middle school classroom.
"Lin Xiao!" A piece of chalk struck my forehead with precision; my homeroom teacher's glasses glinted coldly in the sunset. "Come up and solve this problem." The quadratic function question on the board wasn’t supposed to appear for another three months, and my hand holding the chalk froze mid-air. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of what should have been an empty seat in the back row; Transfer Student, wearing black-rimmed glasses, was doodling strange totems in his textbook.
On my way home after school, I stopped that junior who was always being extorted. The weather doll hanging from his backpack zipper should have been blue, but it now oozed dark red stains. "Stay out of it!" he shouted as he shook off my hand, revealing a bruise on his wrist. The next morning during self-study period, his seat was cordoned off with police tape, and half a bloody shoe print glistened on the windowsill in the morning light.
The week when cherry blossoms began to fall, I encountered Xiao Ya on the rooftop feeding stray cats. A stethoscope peeked out from her white coat pocket, and her fingertips were still stained with iodine. "So you loved climbing rooftops even in middle school," she said as she crumbled a salmon rice ball onto an old newspaper; ten paw prints suddenly overlapped in my memory like waves on an Electrocardiogram Monitor in an operating room.
As dusk painted the playground track red, I finally found that old piano in the music room. A ginkgo leaf wedged between its keys still retained its shape from last autumn but now bore pencil-written equations among its veins. The moment I pressed middle C, cherry blossoms outside defied gravity and rose back to their branches as I heard the electronic chime of the convenience store's automatic door.
"Which year do you plan to start from this time?" When Xiao Ya pushed a hot cocoa toward me, cherry blossom petals clung to her hairline. The stethoscope in her white coat pocket pressed against that yellowed photograph; I could clearly see the blue shirt’s cuff reflecting light. "From when you first called me coward," I said as I wiped away cocoa powder from her nose, and the wind chime under the eaves rang out sounds from thirteen years ago.
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