(1)
Can’t sleep.
No matter what, I can’t fall asleep.
Absolutely can’t sleep!
Outside the window, the rain pattered softly.
The dim streetlights cast a heavy mood over the night.
The breeze tapped gently at the glass, sneaking into the room and brushing lightly across An Jing’s quiet face.
Her eyes were wide open like copper bells, as if there was no way to step into that wonderful dreamland.
School let out early today, but for once she didn’t hang around outside.
Instead, she went home early and played games with Zhu Ying all afternoon.
They played until seven o’clock, only stopping when it was time for her family to have dinner.
An Jing herself ate some leftovers she’d missed while gaming, feeling grateful that her period ended a day earlier than last time, and then took a nice, comfortable hot shower.
She originally planned to keep playing, but suddenly thought about getting up early tomorrow to try her luck—see if she could buy some snow pea red bean paste snacks for Zhu Ying.
So she figured she’d better get to bed early.
In the end, she was lying in bed by eight o’clock, but her mind stayed clear as day until midnight.
Going to bed too early just made her overthink, her head filling up with all sorts of messy thoughts.
No matter how hard she tried to clear her mind, she just couldn’t drift off to sleep.
Right now, An Jing wished more than anything for a superpower to hypnotize herself…
The streetlights outside looked so bright.
They were practically like a few small suns fallen to the ground.
An Jing tossed and turned, totally unable to sleep.
She got up to use the bathroom, then simply dug out that gray-green winter school jacket from her closet—the one she hadn’t planned on wearing again—threw it over her shoulders, grabbed a box of milk she’d just picked up, and sat down in front of the computer.
In the silence of the late night, the sound of the computer’s fan was especially loud, whirring away as if she’d turned on a big standing fan in the middle of summer.
The LCD screen she was so used to slowly lit up, reaching the desktop even faster than before.
Late-night hours seemed to stretch on forever, so much so that An Jing felt she could play games until she was sick of them.
Yet one game after another was opened, then closed, opened, and closed again.
***
(2)
No matter which game she started, none of them felt interesting.
An Jing propped her chin up, and that box of milk had never felt so small—she’d only just put the straw in her mouth when suddenly it was already empty.
Her QQ contact list was full of gray icons, and even the few groups she’d joined were dead silent.
Or rather, it had already been quiet for about an hour.
Even the usually lively Anime Chat Group, the last message was stuck at 12:05.
As for the old Chatroom Group, it was silent most of the time anyway, only coming alive during the holidays.
But even those intervals were growing longer.
Maybe, one day, it would be forgotten for good…
After all, everyone has their own lives.
The older they get, the busier they seem to be.
Zhou Chao’s icon was one of the few still lit up and not showing as Super QQ Online, so An Jing sent him a window nudge.
But he didn’t react at all—her follow-up question mark vanished into silence as well.
“Leaves his computer on even when he’s sleeping.”
An Jing grumbled, twisting her lips.
The white mouse cursor hovered over Zhu Ying’s icon—gray, meaning she was already offline.
There was simply no one to chat with.
And no fun games to play.
She remembered a net friend had sent her a website link before, saying you could watch tons of subtitled anime there—way more convenient than the other sites, with friendlier users, and most importantly, just like A Station, it even had danmaku comments.
So she scrolled through her chat history for ages before finding the link, only for it to pop up a maintenance page.
“Maintenance from midnight to six a.m. … Who does maintenance at this hour?”
An Jing muttered in annoyance.
“Well, I guess this is the only time no one’s online…”
She thought about opening A Station next, but remembered the last time she watched videos there, people were fighting in the danmaku comments, and immediately lost interest.
In this wakeful yet endlessly lonely late night, she just didn’t know what to do.
And so, her final choice was—
To open a romance game called “Yosuga no Sora.”
But she didn’t start playing right away.
Instead, she just sat at the main menu and listened to a few minutes of the background music before closing it again.
An Jing pulled her feet up onto the chair, wrapping them with her jacket, then rested her small face on her knees.
Back when she was still a boy, she probably couldn’t have done such a soft pose—at least not as easily as now.
In fact, hugging herself like this even felt pretty comfortable.
An Jing played with her smooth, delicate toes, counting from one to ten, then from ten all the way to a hundred.
Finally, she decided to get up and fetch another box of milk from the fridge.
The pitch-dark living room felt like it could swallow someone whole.
An Jing crept quietly along, using the light from her room, and softly opened the fridge’s upper door.
“Hey.”
“Waa!!!”
“What are you yelling for, seriously… so noisy…”
Yu Mingfei, her hair a mess and eyes drooping, leaned close to An Jing’s face, mumbling indistinctly, “Up in the middle of the night not sleeping, I thought it was some little mouse stealing food. Turns out, it’s a little white rabbit…”
“Wh-What do you mean, little white rabbit!”
“Didn’t you go to bed at eight? Had enough sleep?”
“Couldn’t fall asleep at all…”
“Insomnia?” “No idea.”
“Do you feel tired?”
“No, I’m actually pretty energetic, but I just can’t sleep.”
An Jing looked helpless.
“I don’t even know what’s up with me.”
“You’re drinking cold milk? That’ll make it even harder to sleep.”
“Yeah, I’m not planning to sleep anymore.”
“Usually, sleepiness only comes when the sun rises.”
Yu Mingfei covered her mouth and let out a huge yawn.
“There’s yogurt in there—have some yogurt. Ha—give me one too.”
“Fei-jie can’t sleep either?”
“Yeah, I’m exhausted, but just can’t sleep.”
“Huihui-jie asleep yet?”
“Not yet.”
“She’s up this late too?”
“She’s reading some urban ghost story, totally hooked.”
“Oh… Here, yogurt.”
An Jing split two yogurt packs open and handed over the straws as well.
“Why don’t you just sleep in our room?”
Yu Mingfei took the yogurt, set it on the coffee table, and wobbled into the bathroom.
Her lazy voice drifted out, almost floating in the air.
“Huh?”
“It’s been ages since we slept together, hasn’t it? You used to love squeezing in the middle when you were little…”
“Ahem!”
“Wanna try? Maybe you’ll fall asleep.”
Yu Mingfei washed her hands, yawning as she came out of the bathroom.
An Jing must have caught her yawn, too, because she couldn’t help but let one out as well.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea… I’m grown up now…”
“You’re in a girl’s body now, what’s the big deal? Besides, those sneaky things you did, you really think we didn’t know?”
“I-I never did th-that—!”
An Jing stammered.
“I meant when you were a boy. Come on, come on.”
Yu Mingfei pushed down on An Jing’s head.
“Let’s sleep in our room!”
“Waaah, slow down!”
They pushed open the barely closed bedroom door.
The bedside lamp still cast a soft glow.
Yu Mingfei, trailing behind, closed the door with her foot, keeping the darkness out.
“Feifei, hm? Xiaojing?”
“This little troublemaker couldn’t sleep, and I thought—it’s been so long since we all slept together. Let’s do it! She’ll sleep in the middle.”
Yu Mingfei slurped her yogurt, climbed into bed, and patted the little empty spot in the middle.
“Come on, hurry up.”
“Uh… Isn’t it a bit tight?”
“Don’t worry, there’s plenty of space.”
“Are you sure? I’m not a kid anymore.”
“Absolutely!”
“Xiaojing can’t sleep? Come on, sleeping together makes it easier to drift off.” Yu Minghui smiled gently and nodded toward her.
“Ahem!”
An Jing pressed her palm lightly against the edge of the bed, as if searching for a familiar feeling.
At last, with her sisters urging her on, she crawled into the middle under the covers from their feet.
“So cramped—”
“Haha! It’s supposed to be snug!”
“Mm—Huihui-jie’s hair is covering my face…”
“Hmm? Just a few more pages, then I’ll sleep.”
“Hoo…”
“Well? Feel familiar?”
“Kinda…?”
An Jing nodded helplessly and nestled her head into the pillow.
“I remember the most boring time was one summer when none of us could sleep, so we lay in bed counting the stars outside the window…”
“That’s not true! At first, we were supposed to look for Polaris, but somehow it turned into counting stars because it got so boring.”
“That’s because Xiaojing said counting sheep didn’t help, so we had to count stars.”
“Exactly!”
“Eh? Was that me?”
An Jing coughed awkwardly.
“Of course it was! You don’t remember how hard it was to get you to sleep as a kid? We always had to tell you a bedtime story, like Beauty and the Beast. You never got tired of that one. For a while, we had to tell it every night, and listening to Huihui tell it made my ears go numb.”
“That’s right. Later, to avoid repeating the same thing, we even made up a few new versions.”
Yu Minghui flipped to the last page of her book, then closed it gently, curling up under the covers.
“If you can’t sleep tonight, Xiaojing, how about I tell you the story of Beauty and the Beast again?”
“I’m not a kid anymore…”
An Jing looked helpless.
“No, this time it’s a different story. I guarantee you haven’t heard it.”
“Ah…?”
“Once upon a time, so long ago the forest’s trees hadn’t grown tall and the roadside shrubs had never bloomed, a beast fell into the beauty’s trap. When she saw it, she wiped the drool from her lips and claimed she would eat it…”
“Hey, hey, isn’t that backwards? That’s not right, is it?”
“That’s why it’s a new version! This time, the beauty’s the strong one.”
“Poor Mr. Beast.”
“Haha, this is so nostalgic. Huihui used to always make up new stories from the old ones, and the little one would keep asking questions until—bit by bit—she’d fall asleep.”
“If only it were that easy to fall asleep tonight…”
An Jing muttered, twisting her lips.
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