You

he ren

You are a girl

you are twelve

this is 2020,

Shanghai.

Don’t forget that you CAN close your eyes if things get too complicated.

Press “ENTER” to start.

One: You

You haven’t been to school for two months now; in fact, no one has. You are stuck in what people call a “lockdown.” You are feeling swollen, your hair is growing greasy, your back and half of your head are aching, you try to bend your neck sideways for them to “crack,” expecting this to help with the pain, but your neck doesn’t “crack.” You place one hand at the top of your head, another at the side of your chin, and twist, but nothing happens. “Maybe a cup of water can help.” The appearance of this idea in your mind surprises you, almost like this thought found you and somehow pretended it was your own, but you distinguish it sharply as an invasion. However, you get up from your table to get a cup of water, squeezing through the two rows of ground-to-ceiling cupboards, your shoulders hit a handle, a sharp pain shoots through your arms, and suddenly, an anonymous rage with no origins fires through your body, and you’re restless in and out, you feel the urge to smash cupboard, you imagine yourself doing it, once, twice, more anger agitates you, your breath becomes heavy, panting…panting, breathing, inhaling, exhaling… You slowly loosen up your tightly held fist and let out a long sigh. You shut your eyes for a brief flash of seconds immune from this timeline, believing you will open your eyes to a different reality. Every time, you are idiotically wrong.

You refill your cup in the kitchen and walk back through the line of cupboards. You place the cup down on your desk. Time leaks between the sips you occasionally take. You pick up the cup and tilt it towards your open mouth, you wait, but your tongue senses no signal of water. The cup has run out of water, just like today has run out of time. You decide not to get a refill. It is getting dark outside.

Some hushed yelling and low murmurings swim into your room from your parents’ bedroom despite their noticeable efforts to dodge you. You fall back deeper into your chair.

“Tomorrow, I’ll shower.” You slip into bed, knowing it’s too early for you to fall asleep. Your mind flies to the game “What if” again, “What if I had to choose between the death of Harry and Ron?” “What if the world has only me alive in it?” “What if I must point my gun at one friend to let that other survive?” “What if I must spin a bottle to determine every yes or no?”... You are carried away by these questions, then upon the sudden realization of their fantasy nature, you feel stupid, incredibly stupid, and you start to fear, “What if others can see all of my thoughts,” this wasn’t new, this is your regular, repeated fear, every night, the sterilization before the surgery incision, right before you start contemplating death, the incision.

Tonight, you spend a little too much time thinking in circles about death. Amidst the darkness, you think you feel your heart twitch and hurt, you think you feel it： tonight, you will die. So, you tell yourself, “Stay awake, this way, you can’t die.” You deliberately inhale at your largest effort and exhale gently, your eyelids are crumpling. You reassure yourself that you can stay awake with your eyes closed. You feel your consciousness drifting, you start to gap longer between thoughts, you feel…

Awake, for a moment you’re not sure where you are, why you are, you feel painfully remote from your last conscious moment, taking yourself out of bed, you timidly anticipate a cooked breakfast, but again, there is nothing on the kitchen table, just a tipped over bottle of blue pills. You grab bread from the refrigerator and then gently nudge the refrigerator door closed. Out of the pale quietness, some configuration of moans and weeps leaks through the closed door to your parents’ room. This time, you hear “quit my job because I can’t…(mumbles) and I’m not going to what the…places or whatever…” “I want to…” Gripping onto a bag of bread you just found, the fear of having your parents open their door and see you, thinking that you have heard everything, pushes you back into your room.

You drop the bread on the table and plop yourself down, waiting for an overwhelming feeling to attack you, but nothing happens. You chew on the dry bread in your room. A message pops up on your phone:

Game at my house?

You don’t hesitate:

Be right down.

You tiptoe outside, wash your hair in the bathroom, and hesitantly go up to your parents’ room. With each step, the wooden floor creaks rudely, and you hold your breath as if it were the troubling noise in the air. You can hear them more clearly, now standing at the door, but your legs swiftly back you away. You leave the house and, on the elevator, text your mom: Went to study math with Zhang.

Two: Game

“Aim it! Aim it! Come on, right there!” He is shouting and pointing, you are leaning toward the screen at a dangerous angle; you can fall over at any moment. You try to aim at the zigzagging targets, “darn it”, you use up the last bullet. The blood-dripping letters “Mission Failed” splashes onto the screen. You fall back onto the sofa, and so does he. The yarn-sewn cushion tickles the side of your face, and your ears slip into a crevice between the blocks of sofa mattresses. “Another round?” Zhang’s voice muffles and swells in your ears. You nod at this question, but he had already started the game before you responded. You sit up, position your control, and start another round of gunfight, and then another and another. You’re getting a bit tired. “Maybe I can sit out for this round,” you announce. He nods and clicks into single-player mode. You sit back and watch him wave and press his control towards the screen. Bit by bit, your sight drifts away from the game and fixates on the window behind it. Slowly, the sound of the game starts to circumvent from your ears. Your parents’ voice comes back, washing into your eardrums, every time, a bit louder than the last. If only you knocked, if only you said something: that hungry morning, that gloomy and damp night, that late afternoon with the orange sunset, by the door, similar conversations, identical despair, again and again, you didn’t take the chance, and somewhere in you, instead of guilt, you feel relieved, then, instead of relief, you sense guilt.

“What’s going on?” Zhang’s close-up voice knocks you on the head. You look up at him, but his sight isn’t venturing down. “Nothing, just tired. If my mother asks, I’m here studying math.” You’re shocked the second these words are shot into the air, knowing your mother wouldn’t bother to ask. He doesn’t reply; the silence feels necessary. You both nestle in the soft silence, but slowly it starts to feel crowded, so you decide to head back. “You coming tomorrow?” Like yesterday and the day before yesterday, and the day… You say yes.

Back home, sleep, awake, eat, game, back home, eat, sleep. You feel the lines between days bleed and mix, you manage to stay awake for longer hours to “avoid death,” you wake up with the same familiar unfamiliarity every morning, and the sticky days roll into one big confusion. Amidst its air bubbles, you still game, the same gunfight, same scenario, but you don’t get better at it.

Three: The kid

On a casual morning, some people show up at the door. You don’t understand why your father’s college roommate decides to visit at exactly this time. Confusion stops you from heading down to Zhang’s house. The roommate brought his family, his son, who you understand to be nine years old, and his wife, who seems too beautiful and bleak at the same time. You know them from previous gatherings, but this time they seem purposeful. You cannot find the right description, but it feels weird, and most of all, it feels as if you are unwelcome. Your mother greets them at the door. Unlike usual, they don’t make that courtesy comment about how tall and beautiful you’ve grown. Instead, they head off into your parents’ room, and your mother slips in with them, shutting the door behind her, and she assigns you to play with their little boy. You nod and realize the door has swung closed before you can pronounce any words. You take the little boy into the living room, he doesn’t stop talking and commenting about how small the house is. He is shorter than you, with light brown skin, and protruding round lips, you feel his light laugh in every sentence. You try to grin in return, but it is awkward. You decide to find a game to pass the time. You dig through some old boxes, the dirt is heavy, you find slim spaces to slip and cram your hands into, and search for some games or toys. You fish out a chessboard and decide to go with it. You lift it to a table and turn to him. Before you introduce the chessboard, he looks into your eyes and says, “You know what? Your father is giving up on himself! He wants to die!” He laughs a bit, not only with his mouth but with his eyes and his mild tilt to the side. You try not to freeze, you want to laugh back, yell at his face that you knew and that it doesn’t bother you, which is true and untrue, but you can’t.

Words and saliva clog up your throat; the more your stomach tries to lift and push them out of you, the more they slide deeper inside. Your stomach is now churning with flame. You are furious that he had to tell you this with confidence of wrecking you, and flaringly ashamed that he was laughing, but you cannot. No one is talking, but your ears are drowning in the cacophony of the possible solutions to replying to him that are galloping through your mind. However, a voice breaks the overwhelming noise. Your mother rushes into the room, and with a stiff smile, she says, “That’s not true, that’s not what…” Those words bring you back for a brief moment, but you are quickly lost again. Then, she turns to the boy and bends over to him to say something. They exchange words you cannot catch. After what seems like a few minutes, your mother takes his hand and they both leave. She turns around and says, “You said you have some homework, right? Go finish that.” You don’t remember saying that.

Tonight in bed, you cannot launch the “What if” games no matter how hard you try, nor can you think about death; your mind lingers on one sentence. “Your father is giving up on himself! He wants to die.” With eyes wide open, you repeat it, not in sadness or pain, but in confusion, anger, in something too much for you to stand. How dare this boy toss some irresponsible words in the air to humiliate you? How dare you let that happen? What is wrong with your father? Why haven’t you spent your destined-to-be-wasted time thinking more about that? What will happen? Must you now speak of everything? You can’t, of course, you can, but you can’t. You clutch onto the cover of your quilt tightly, wishing to fall asleep. You shut your eyes tightly, but instead of darkness, random scenes start flashing into your consciousness: the blue pills on the kitchen table, the crumbled bed sheets in your parents’ room, the faint yet forceful yells and cries of… Endless recollections play one after another like a never-ending trailer. You feel your eyebrows twitching, your head heavier, your heart pounding and swelling, you sense a huge blockage traveling in your bloodstream, and you are sure you will explode the next second. At this point, you are outrageously mad, you feel excruciatingly heated, you want to go back in time and strangle that boy before he can say anything.

One thing you are sure of: you, or anyone, can't pretend to be ignorant anymore.

Four: Pretend

The next morning, you walk into the kitchen, intentionally stepping harder on the floor, feeling the floorboard bend inwards under your weight. You faintly hope to gently announce your entrance. You wait for your mother to pick up on the creaks on the floor and come out of the room to talk to you about what the boy said; maybe she can tell you something about your father. You stand still in the kitchen, panicking, but decide to wait and not slip away this time. “We’ll just get over with it.” You think to yourself, “Now that I know so much, we cannot pretend anymore. This is for the better.” You cushion yourself in the thought of having this conversation with your mother, and shamefully realize that merely the thought of this makes you feel… fresh. Yes, of course, we cannot pretend that I haven’t heard the word “depression” slip in and out of their conversation anymore; we cannot pretend I wasn’t holding my breath at their bedroom door; we cannot pretend anymore, and this is for the better. You’re getting too comfortable with your imagination, but this time, you let yourself indulge in it and take advantage of this about-to-come new reality.

You tap on the wooden counter with your fingertips, looking down, a ray of sun is swaying between the dangling ends of your pajama pants. Still, no one came out.

Your phone buzzes, and a message pops up:

Game at my house?

You do not reply. You keep waiting, “We can talk about everything,” you repeat to yourself again and again. Suddenly, you hear the floorboards creak in your parents’ room, the creaks form a wave and flow towards the door. Someone is coming out. You sit up slightly and grip the cup a little bit tighter. The creaking stops at the edge of the door. “Next is the doorknob.” You hold your breath for the doorknob to turn and make the sound of friction between copper spinning and moving. Silence. Then, the wave of creaking ebbs, retreating from the door. Silence.

You reply:

Be right down.

In the elevator, a tear rolls down, then another, and then another. They curve through your dry cheeks and dangle at the tip of your chin. You brush them off with the back of your hands. Then you press your fingers against your eyes and push them inwards until they start to ache, weirdly, you can’t seem to pull your hands away. The elevator door splits open, and you realize this is your stop.

You take a deep breath and exhale as you step out of the elevator. How stupid, how incredibly stupid, you wish that you had never waited, you wish that you weren’t that foolish to let yourself imagine, you wish you were out of this house, this building, this stickiness. But more than anything, you wish that boy hadn’t said those words to you. You feel a twitch in your heart.

One thing you understood: you can and must still keep pretending.

Press “ENTER” to restart

He Ren is a sophomore at The Experimental High School Attached to Beijing Normal University. She has won the John Locke's essay competition psychology section High Commendation and the Cosmopolitan Writing Award (CWA) Gold prize. She is a beginner at creative writing, but a very enthusiastic one. She attended the Iowa Young Writers' Studio (6 weeks online) and the Kenyon Review Young Writers Online Workshop. She is particularly interested in topics surrounding mental illness, the LBGTQ+ community, and complex family relationships. Her favorite novelist is Celeste Ng, and this short story is created from inspiration from her to capture the deliberate obliviousness and deep fear of vulnerability between family members.