Chapter 5: Indifference

Qiao Lan So probably all right!

Qiao Lan's English grades are not good, and the assignments are almost always copied, like memorizing the text and memorizing the vocabulary, which are not written assignments, are never cared about.

This morning Qiao Lan even asked her to dictate the words of the first unit, and she didn't even know where she had learned them.

But now, she actually wrote it all correctly!

Not only did she write all the words in this unit correctly, but Qiao Lan also wrote all the words in the previous units that she got wrong.

So Qiao Lan actually knew which unit she was going to dictate and had memorized the words long ago, but she actually pretended that she hadn't memorized them and asked her!

Thinking of the thought in her heart in the morning when she intentionally ignored Qiao Lan, this moment, besides the burning pain on her face, she even hated Qiao Lan for intentionally pretending to trick her into losing face.

Old Liu was very happy with Qiao Lan's sudden change of attitude and praised Qiao Lan for a while, but when he turned his head and saw Qin Yang staring at Qiao Lan with an expression on his face, Old Liu was immediately furious again.

"What are you looking at? Look at what others have written. Look at what you've written. You've got 14 out of 23 words wrong, even a pig is smarter than you, you still have the face to look at it! All of you, except Qiao Lan, write the wrong words a hundred times, and bring them to me for checking."

The table's face darkened even more.

By all accounts, she was already a good writer, but because of Qiao Lan, even she was the one who got punished. When she returned to her seat with a black face, she was probably furious. She was probably furious, and probably thought that Qiao Lan was still the same Qiao Lan who used to be so easy to bully, so without thinking, she asked Qiao Lan, "Didn't you not memorize it?"

Qiao Lan lazily turns a page in her book.

What did you say? It's too windy for me to hear.

Shit! Qiao Lan just ignored her?

The table was shocked, the table was blue in the face.

Just a compliment from Old Liu and you really want to go to heaven? Song Yao's group has already made up their minds to ostracize Qiao Lan, and now that they've pissed her off, we'll just have to wait and see who regrets it later!

After the study hall, the same table as soon as the class ran to find usually play well with a few students, a few people get together to talk about what, while talking also to the Qiao Lan side to see, sitting around the classmates, roughly hear a few girls said Qiao Lan loaded.

Qiao Lan's classmate said that Qiao Lan deliberately asked her if she had memorized the words, saying that she had a deep heart. An introverted boy sitting next to her thought for a long time, but he couldn't figure out how Qiao Lan's memorization of the words could show that she had a deep heart, and he couldn't even figure out why a few other girls nodded their heads in agreement.

"What's the point of pretending, who doesn't know what kind of a person she is", several people said more and more vigorously, "Only Song Yao is kind enough to feel sorry for her."

"Yeah, yeah, Song Yao has been so nice to her, and she doesn't thank Song Yao at all, she actually likes Chen Yaoyang, how can she be so nice?"

"That's because she still likes Chen Yaoyang. Chen Yaoyang doesn't like her. If I were Song Yao, I'd be disgusted by her."

The boy sitting next to him in silence was even more unsure of what to think in his mind.

Chen Yaoyang's grades are the highest and he is so handsome that 90% or 90% of the girls in his class like him, and the girls who scolded Qiao Lan said the other day that Chen Yaoyang likes him a lot.

All of you like Chen Yaoyang, why don't you guys get sick of it.

But how to spit in the heart, but in the end is an introvert, didn't dare to say it, just want to have a chance in the future or change seats with the current table, behind the back of chewing the root of the people or less to deal with.

Qiao Lan's classmates take advantage of the class period to pull a bunch of Avengers, deepening Qiao Lan's ostracism. Qiao Lan doesn't react to this, she goes to the bathroom, and when she comes back, she meets Tan Mo, who has just entered the classroom slowly with his wheelchair.

Tan Mo, his school uniform clean again, fresh gauze wrapped around his hand, his head bowed as usual, silent and lifeless.

Qiao Lan thought about it and quickened his pace.

She remembers that Asperger's is still a bit different from regular autism, whereas autism rejects alienation and Asperger's actually wants friendship, except that there are misunderstandings over socialization that are always botched.

The crowd coming and going around makes Tan Mo tense up uncontrollably, his muscles become stiff and his emotions become very disturbing.

Once when he was still living with his mother in the United States, she took him to see a psychiatrist, who, after getting to know him a little better, said to his mother, "The pressure your child feels inside when facing a crowd is increasing in direct proportion to the number of people on the scene."

He was only about ten years old at the time, yet he already fully understood the meaning of incrementalism, and he quickly worked out in his head, using mathematical formulas and geometric shapes, what the doctor meant: two people interacting with only one connection, three people with three connections, four people with six connections, five people with ten connections...

And at this point there were so many connections around him that they could not even be counted, and no one could see what intense tension and anxiety he was facing inside underneath his silent and deathly still countenance.

In such a situation, even when someone calls out his name, Tan Mo subconsciously thinks that he has misheard it.

Until the voice shouted again, Tan Mo's hearing, superior to that of the next person, recognized the direction of the sound's source at the first opportunity.

He looked up and saw the girl who had told her she was sorry and pushed his wheelchair yesterday standing nearly 1.5 meters from him smiling at her.

"Good morning," the girl said.

Tan Mo's thin white fingers gripped the wheelchair tightly, his amber eyes staring at Qiao Lan, his facial muscles as if necrotic, his whole face without a trace of expression.

He could tell that it was a simple greeting, and he couldn't tell if someone was crying or laughing like he could when he was very young; now he could tell for sure that the girl in front of him was smiling at him.

But that's all.

There are many kinds of laughs, smiles, cold smiles, bitter smiles, big smiles, sarcastic smiles and so on. Normal people, with the increase of age and experience, can understand the meanings behind these expressions without any knowledge, but Tan Mo cannot.

Tan Mo used to look up the meaning of each word in the dictionary, but Asperger's still left him clueless, and it took him a long time before he could simply differentiate between a smile and a laugh, and mentally memorize people's facial expressions when they smile and laugh.

His mother told him to smile when she took his picture and told him that a smile is a slight grin, with the corners of the lips slightly upturned, even showing a little bit of teeth, and that a big smile is because someone once laughed so hard they burst into tears.

The girl in front of him was smiling at him.

But remembering the smile behind the expression, Tan Mo lowered his head anew, and like a machine that had received an incorrect command, he resumed his old silence after a brief moment of discernment.

He thought back to the time when he was seven years old, when the neighbor boy had talked to him in a very friendly manner, with such a smile on his face, but the next moment the boy had pushed him so hard that he had hit the hard concrete floor, and as the blood slid down his cheeks, all he could hear was his mother's voice shouting his name in the distance and the boy's unabashed harrumphing laughter.

He also recalled that when he was ten years old, he was approached by his classmates who had often teased him about being an idiot, and they told him that they were ashamed of the pranks they had played on him in the past, and asked him if he would accept their apology. He forgave them, and they gave him a soda, which he opened, only to have a mad hornet fly out of it.

Such teasing and bullying never ceased, and the rest of the children usually took pleasure in it.

They call him a fool because he falls for it over and over again, but he can't help it. Asperger's fogs up his eyes when dealing with people; he can't distinguish between malice and kindness, he can't distinguish between good people and bad people, and he can't distinguish between help and trickery, because all trickery begins with the deception of "well-intentioned help".

In time, both good and bad intentions, he attributed them all to malice, and he stopped trusting anyone but his mother, so that there would be no more catching, and no more pain of being hurt every time he believed and then being hurt again.

Therefore, he still kept his head down and passed by Qiao Lan in silence without giving her any reaction.

No one will like him or treat him kindly.

He was born mentally insane, an outcast cripple.

And the remnants.

Doomed to be accepted by no one.