Nuan'an was woken by the light.
Not sunlight. The curtains were pulled tight, their edges clamped shut with binder clips. Not a sliver could get through. It was the glow of a screen. Her laptop was still on. She had fallen asleep face-down on the keyboard last night, her cheek pressed against the space bar. When she woke, an entire page of blank spaces had appeared on the screen.
She deleted them. One by one. It took a long time.
The room was very small. A twin bed, a desk, a wardrobe. The wardrobe hadn't been opened in a long time. All the clothes hanging inside were from three years ago. A few books were piled on the desk, some of them read, some untouched. An empty row of plastic water bottles sat beside the bed. Every time she finished a bottle, she put it there, saving them until there were enough to take out all at once.
Taking them out meant leaving them by the door. Waiting for her sister to collect them.
Nuan'an checked the time. 2:17 p.m.
She didn't know what day of the week it was. She didn't really need to. Every day was the same. Wake up, turn on the computer, look at some things, eat the food her sister left by the door, look at some more things, then fall asleep again at some unknown hour. Sometimes it was three in the morning, sometimes seven a.m., sometimes the afternoon. Her sense of time was different from everyone else's. The people outside had day and night. She had only the screen being lit and the screen going dark.
She opened her browser.
The homepage showed the news. She didn't read it. She switched the browser to another tab—a social media login page. She wasn't using her own account. She had deactivated her own three years ago. The profile picture was still the headshot taken during her freshman year of high school, and her last post had been a reposted funny video with three likes beneath it.
The account she used now had no profile picture, no posts, and followed no one. Its sole purpose was to let her look at other people's pages without being noticed.
She opened the first person's page.
Su Yan. They had been classmates in high school. The first person to say something bad about her in the group chat.
Nuan'an remembered the message. “Isn't Lin Nuan'an disgusting? Last time in gym class, she kept staring at that upperclassman. Does she think she's hot or something?” She hadn't been staring at any upperclassman. She'd just been waiting for the classmate beside her to pass her the ball. But someone had screenshotted the message and sent it to another group, then another, until the entire grade was saying she was “so disgusting.”
That had been three years ago.
Su Yan's page was lively now. Her profile picture had been taken in a café. She was wearing a white shirt and smiling beautifully. Her latest post was from three days ago, a group photo with friends captioned, “Happy graduation! Let's keep working hard together in the future.” There were more than forty likes beneath it, with comments like “So gorgeous,” “Congrats on graduating,” and “Let's hang out sometime.”
Nuan'an looked at it for a long time.
She scrolled down. Su Yan's page was full. Travel photos, food photos, pictures with her boyfriend, pictures with her family. She was smiling happily in every one. She'd been to Japan, South Korea, and Italy. She had a boyfriend now, who looked tall and wore plaid shirts. The two of them held hands on a beach beneath the setting sun.
Nuan'an closed the page.
She opened the second person's.
Shen Man. The one who had made a meme about her online back then. She'd cropped Nuan'an's photo and added the words “Girl who thinks she's hot,” then posted it to an anonymous forum. The image had been reposted hundreds of times. Nuan'an had heard people laughing in the school hallway. When she'd turned around, the image on their phones had been that exact meme.
Shen Man now worked at an advertising agency. Her bio read, “Love life. Into photography and travel.” Her latest post was a street photo she'd taken herself. The composition was beautiful, and someone had commented, “This has such a vibe.”
Nuan'an looked at it for a long time again.
She didn't know what she was looking for. Maybe a trace—proof that those people remembered her. A post mentioning her. An apology. A confession saying, “I did something bad once.”
There was nothing.
She went through five people's pages. Five people who had taken part in bullying her back then. Not one of their pages contained anything related to her. They had graduated, found jobs, gotten boyfriends, and traveled abroad. Their lives had moved on, while Nuan'an was still in this room.
They might not even remember who she was anymore.
Nuan'an closed all five pages. The screen held only the blank browser homepage. She stared at that expanse of white, her hand resting on the keyboard without moving.
Her eyes felt a little sore. Not because she wanted to cry. She'd just been staring at the screen too long.
She stood and walked to the door. A rice ball sat on the floor outside, a convenience-store price sticker stuck to its plastic wrapper. Her sister had left it there last night. Nuan'an picked it up, tore open the wrapper, and took a bite. The rice was cold, and the filling was tuna. She didn't hate tuna, but she couldn't say she liked it either. Her sister bought a different flavor every time, as if trying to figure out which one Nuan'an liked.
She stood by the door and finished the rice ball.
A strip of light came through the gap beneath the door. Light from the living room. Her sister wasn't home, but the living-room light was on. Nuan'an didn't know whether she'd forgotten to turn it off or had left it on deliberately. Maybe it was deliberate. Maybe her sister thought that if the living room was lit, Nuan'an might be more willing to open the door.
She didn't open it.
She crumpled the rice-ball wrapper into a ball and left it on the floor by the door. Her sister would take it away when she came home later.
Nuan'an returned to the desk and sat down.
She reopened the browser, but this time she didn't look at those people's pages. She opened something else—the comments she'd screenshotted and saved three years ago.
A folder containing more than two hundred screenshots.
She didn't open the folder often. But she did sometimes. As if checking that something was still there.
She started with the earliest ones.
“Isn't Lin Nuan'an disgusting?”—Su Yan. “Girl who thinks she's hot.”—A meme made by Shen Man. “Does she think she's popular or something? I'm dead.”—An account she didn't recognize. “Heard the whole class ostracized her, lol. Serves her right.”—Another account she didn't recognize.
She could identify who had written most of the comments. Their tone, their word choices, even the way they made typos—she remembered it all. Su Yan liked to start with “Isn't it just so...” Shen Man liked to end with “I'm dead.” Another classmate typed too quickly and often left out characters. She could never tell “of” and “have” apart correctly.
But there were a few she couldn't identify.
She hadn't paid particular attention to them before. Back then, she had only been in pain. Every comment was like a needle. She couldn't tell whose needle was whose. She only knew she was covered in them.
Now she wasn't in pain anymore. Not exactly. She had been hurting for too long, until the pain became background noise. Like the hum of the old fan in her room. It had been deafening at first, but eventually she stopped hearing it.
So now she could look more closely.
Three comments felt wrong to her.
The first read: “Some people aren't hated. They're impossible not to hate. It's nobody's fault. It's a matter of chemistry.”
The second: “If she knew how other people saw her, she wouldn't still be able to smile. I don't know whether that's courage or obliviousness.”
The third: “Being ostracized isn't necessarily someone else's problem. Sometimes one person gets ostracized by everyone because there's something about her that makes people uncomfortable—something she can't sense herself.”
Nuan'an looked at the three comments together.
They were different from the others. The rest were insults, crude in their wording and exposed in their emotions. It was obvious they were high school students egging one another on. These three weren't. Their tone was calm and detached, like a bystander “analyzing” her. And every sentence struck exactly where it hurt most—not calling her ugly, not calling her disgusting, but telling her, “You're hated because the problem is you.”
That hurt more than the insults.
Nuan'an remembered the first time she'd seen those comments. She hadn't cried. The words “disgusting” and “serves you right” had made her cry, but not these three. She had simply sat on the bed and stared at them for a long time, then turned off her phone, lay down, and stared at the ceiling.
Because she could tell herself that the people who insulted her were “just jumping on the bandwagon.” But these three weren't. They felt like someone had thought about it seriously, then arrived at a conclusion: she was hated because the problem was her.
If even a detached bystander thought that way, then maybe it was true.
After that, Nuan'an stopped going outside.
Now, looking at the three comments again, she felt differently.
She no longer thought they were right. Three years had slowly taught her that those words weren't true. She hadn't been hated because there was something about her that “made people uncomfortable.” She had been hated because Su Yan needed a target, and Nuan'an had happened to be standing there.
But now she noticed something else.
She didn't recognize the accounts behind the three comments.
She clicked on the first account's page. The account still existed, but it had been inactive for a long time. Its last activity had been two years ago. No posts of its own, no profile picture, following three people, followed by zero.
She clicked on the second. The same. Inactive, no trace of a life, only comments.
The third was the same.
Nuan'an furrowed her brow.
These accounts didn't belong to her classmates. Her classmates had accounts of their own, with selfies, lives, friends. These three accounts had nothing. They looked as if they existed solely to leave comments.
And their tone was completely different from her classmates'. Her classmates said “disgusting,” “serves you right,” and “I'm dead.” These three accounts didn't. The things they said sounded like they came from adults, not high school students.
Then who were they?
Nuan'an didn't know. She thought about it for a while, but couldn't come up with anything. Maybe they were students from another school who had seen the memes and casually left a few comments. Maybe they were complete strangers with nothing to do with her who had come across her story while browsing the internet and decided to offer their “objective opinion.”
She wrote the names of the three accounts in a text file. There was no particular reason. She just felt like she should record them.
Then she closed the screenshot folder.
The room was very quiet. The hum of the fan, the sound of the laptop's cooling fan, and, once in a while, the sound of a car passing outside. Those were all the sounds in her world.
Nuan'an leaned back in her chair and looked at the screen.
She wanted to write something.
This wasn't a thought she'd had only today. She had been thinking about it for a long time. Ever since she began retelling her own story in her head in the third person, she'd wanted to write it down. Not a diary. A diary was too close, so close she couldn't look at it properly. She wanted to write from farther away. As if she were writing someone else's story.
She opened a new blank document.
The cursor blinked in the upper-left corner.
Her hands rested on the keyboard. Ten fingers in their proper positions. She had typed quickly in high school, and she still did. She hadn't spoken to anyone in three years, but she'd spent all three years typing.
She began.
“She couldn't remember what day she'd first become afraid to leave the house.”
After typing the line, she stopped. She stared at the twelve words.
Then she continued.
“It wasn't that she suddenly decided one day not to go outside. It happened gradually. First she didn't want to go to school, then she didn't want to go to the convenience store, then she didn't want to go downstairs, and then she didn't want to open her bedroom door. Each time, her world shrank a little more, and each time, it felt safer that way. By the time she realized it, her world had been reduced to this room.”
Nuan'an's fingers paused. She read over what she'd written.
It wasn't good enough. But it wasn't bad. At least it was true.
She kept typing.
The sound of the front door opening came from outside.
Nuan'an's fingers stopped.
Her sister was home.
She heard shoes being changed in the entryway, slippers scuffing across the floor, then footsteps in the hall. The footsteps drew closer and stopped outside her bedroom door.
Nuan'an stared at the door.
The shadow of her sister blocked the living-room light beneath it.
Then she heard a very soft sound. Something being set on the floor. Another rice ball.
Nuan'an waited.
Her sister didn't knock. She stood outside for a long time. Nuan'an could hear her breathing, light but clear in the deep silence of the night.
Nuan'an's hands remained on the keyboard, unmoving. She was afraid the sound of typing would make her sister knock. She didn't know whether she would open the door if she did.
After a long time, the shadow outside moved. The footsteps went in the opposite direction, growing fainter and fainter. The door to the room next door opened, then closed.
Nuan'an lifted her hands from the keyboard.
She looked at the words she'd written on the screen.
“She couldn't remember what day she'd first become afraid to leave the house.”
She remembered. She just didn't want to write it down.
Nuan'an saved the document. She thought about the filename, typed two words, deleted them, typed three words, then deleted those too. In the end, she left it unnamed and saved it as “Untitled Document.”
She turned off the screen but didn't shut down the laptop. The room went dark, leaving only the tiny white dot of the power indicator blinking in the darkness.
She lay down on the bed and pulled the blanket over herself.
The room next door was quiet. Her sister had probably gone to bed.
Nuan'an closed her eyes.
Her thoughts were still spinning. The three accounts. The comments that didn't sound like they had been written by high school students. Her classmates, living perfectly normal lives. The blank document.
She rolled over to face the wall.
There was nothing on the wall. She used to have a poster there, of a band she liked. When she'd moved into the room, she'd torn it down. She hadn't thought about it while doing so. She'd simply felt that she didn't need it anymore. Now there was a faint patch of adhesive residue on the wall, rectangular, with the corners slightly raised.
She saw that patch every night.
She closed her eyes, but she didn't fall asleep. She thought about the blank document. Tomorrow, she would keep writing. She didn't know what it would become, how long it would be, or whether she would finish it.
But she would keep writing.
The light beneath the door went out. Her sister had turned off the lights.
The entire room held nothing but the white dot of the laptop's power indicator, blinking once, then again, then again.