When she woke up the next morning, she felt like a prisoner going to her execution. The nameless, wordless dread made her sick to her stomach. Everything was changing -- again. Even if it was ostensibly her choice, it didn’t feel like she had any control over it. She had never been in an earthquake, but she wondered if that would be the right metaphor for it. The very ground under her feet seemed to move.
Later, she wasn’t sure how she talked to the staff. She just remembered that her coaches were stony faced and took care to make her feel like a quitter when she told them that she was leaving. She was barely able to look them in the face, but at least she had.
They booked a one way flight for her to go Guangzhou for Tuesday, and paid for it. She had been half-hoping that they would make her family pay for it, and then she could make Zhu-ge Liang pay her family for the flight, but that was simply not going to be the case.
After that, she just had to pack. Tomorrow, she wrote on the silk. I’ll be at home, in Hoipeng. Not sure what time.
“Affirmative,” was the reply she received, again.
Feng sighed and turned back to her task.
She had somehow acquired many more things than she had when she went up to Beijing a year ago. Just a year, it was such a long year. And now it was over. Her life was over. She corrected herself. This part of my life is over. A new part is beginning. She wished she could feel happier about it, instead of defeated.
The packing went slowly. She had so many leotards. She supposed she ought to keep them, but she wasn’t sure when she would ever wear them again. It wasn’t like they had much use outside gymnastics. At the very least, they folded up quite small.
Her fingers lingered over the last one. It was the one they had given her when she had made the national team, the official uniform of the women’s team, with the National Emblem of the People’s Republic of China emblazoned on the breast. She stared at the picture of the Forbidden City, the symbol of the Middle Kingdom that was so potent that even the Communists had decided to leave it standing, even in the wake of the Revolution. She traced its outline, trying not to cry. Good bye. She rolled it up and packed it away.
Then she carefully took down her pictures of home, and put them away carefully. She wasn’t sure if magical people had photographs, but she knew that she would need her pictures when she went away to school again.
Slowly, everything got put away into her suitcase. In the end, her corner of the room was bare. It felt odd, but also painfully familiar. Was it just a year ago that I left Guangzhou? It felt like so much longer than that.
No one went with her to the airport.
It didn’t matter.
She hadn’t expected anyone to go with her.
Song Feng had only flown once before, when she moved to the northern capital from Guangzhou, so she supposed that she should have enjoyed the second flight of her life. She had certainly enjoyed the first.
Everything looked so tiny from the air. She had forgotten. She wondered where the plane was, or rather, where it was above. She wondered how many dozens, hundreds, thousands of people were below.
Feng felt exhausted, but she couldn’t sleep. She felt restless, and her hands itched to be holding on to a bar, or better still, letting go of a bar and then tucking close to her chest as she spun through the air. Her hands opened and closed convulsively, until she forced herself to shove them into her pockets. She wanted to cry, but she felt like even if she tried, she couldn’t manage even a single tear.
Several hours later, she was back in the village. Everything was dustier, dirtier, and shabbier than she remembered.
Her father, Song Bing, had picked her up at the airport. She almost wished that he hadn’t. Her parents were older now, they had decided to stay in the village and work their land instead of living as migrants in the city. The long, dusty bus ride back to the village would have suited her mood, even if it would have been a lot less comfortable. He had caught her mood though, and the drive back was silent.
She trudged to her room, hating everyone and everything. She sat down at her desk, the one that she had never used and that was still slightly too high for her, and pulled out the silk and a pen. She scrawled across it in giant characters, “I’m home.” She left the silk on her desk, not waiting for a response, and flopped onto her bed, her face buried into her pillow. It smelled like home, and tears welled up in her eyes. It smelled like her mother, like the South, like real food, like everything she had missed being stuck in the northern capital.
She was home, she was finally, really, actually home, and she couldn’t be happy about it at all.
Song Feng woke up an hour or so later to a damp pillow and her mother, Song Lin, calling her down for dinner. It was odd. She wondered if this was what being a normal child was like: going home after school, taking a nap, getting called down to dinner.
She didn’t look at the piece of silk before she went downstairs, but she did make sure to wash her face before going to dinner.
When she sat down at the dinner table, she had to take a moment to look at the spread. Her mother had made all of her favorites.
I wonder how long it took Mom to make all of this. Feng was about to remind herself not to eat too much, because otherwise she would gain weight and then she wouldn’t make the final Olympic team... but it didn’t matter anymore. She supposed it didn’t matter if she gained a kilogram, even if she gained two or three. If the wizards have anything like old style standards of beauty, it would be better to be plump than skinny anyway. It was cold comfort.
She ate mechanically, and, even though she had longed all year for her mother’s cooking, she could barely taste any of it. It really wasn’t fair.
Feng heard the conversation around her, but she didn’t, couldn’t listen to it. It was filled with updates of various gossip in the village, things that her brother’s classmates were doing. Song Chun-yin complained about his teachers, his classes, but it seemed like they were familiar things to her parents even if they were utterly alien to her. Even if she tried to pay attention, she wasn’t sure that she would understand it. She barely recognized her brother as it was. He was growing up, and she wasn’t there to see it.
She excused herself after dinner, and went back upstairs to her room. Feng wanted, needed time alone, time to think and absorb everything that had happened over the past week.
She pushed open the door only to find Zhu-ge Liang waiting for her. As usual, he was dressed immaculately in clothes that were out of style by at least a century, probably more. This time, in addition to his staff, he was carrying a fan of crane feathers, and she almost asked him if he was trying to emulate his namesake, the Sleeping Dragon of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, on purpose. Instead, she just sighed.
“I sent a message, but you didn’t respond, young mistress Song” he said, his voice betraying a trace of irritation.
She shrugged. She didn’t know what he expected her to say. Worse, Feng wasn’t even sure that she cared.
After a moment, Zhu-ge Liang asked, “Young mistress Song, where are your parents? You have some paperwork to sign before you can come to the Dragon’s Pearl. Then we should be off.”
Her jaw hit the ground and she finally found her voice. “We should be off? I thought classes didn’t start until after Mid-Autumn. It’s only June!” She was infuriated. She hadn’t been home in a year, and he wanted to take her away already! How dare he!
“Young mistress Song, you do not even know how to write properly. You cannot start school in this kind of condition. Where are your parents? We should be discussing this with them.”
Feng grit her teeth, biting back every angry retort that was boiling in her blood, then stalked back downstairs with Zhu-ge Liang following behind.
She stood in front of her parents for a moment. “Guess who’s here?” she asked, trying not to let her tone betray her.
“Ah, Headmaster Zhu-ge, it’s good to see you again,” her father said, looking up from his book. “What brings you back to our humble home?”
She wished that her father wasn’t such a polite person.
“Well, first, I have some paperwork for you and your wife to sign, along with the young mistress.” The headmaster took out a long hand scroll and began unrolling it, and her father took a pen and began to sign where the headmaster indicated.
The hand scroll was probably made of silk, so the pen did not ‘scratch’ against it, but the sound was just as grating in Feng’s ears.
“He wants me to leave with him. Today.” Feng informed her parents, trying not to shout her frustration or whine. She wasn’t sure if she succeeded at either.
“Today? Feng only just came back,” her mother protested.
The headmaster indicated one last place for her father to sign. “Young mistress Song does not know how to read or write. She does not have even the most rudimentary knowledge of magic. She needs tutoring or she will be terribly behind when school starts.”
It finally sunk in how badly educated she was. He was right, she was barely literate in simplified, she was illiterate in traditional. If she were more literate in the simplified text, she could probably scan traditional characters and understand them, but she couldn’t even do that... not really.
Still, she wasn’t going the day she had arrived home. “I don’t want to leave yet,” she said slowly and clearly. “I was traveling all day. I only got home a few hours ago. I’m. Not. Leaving.” She enunciated each word slowly and carefully, then glared at the headmaster as coldly as she could manage.
Zhu-ge Liang pointed out one last place for her father to sign, then straightened to face her. “Then when do you want to leave, young mistress Song?”
Song Feng was about to open her mouth and retort, ‘never,’ but she couldn’t say that. She had already left Beijing, she was not going to go work in the fields with her parents or in the factories. Magic was her one chance for something new and something better. She pursed her lips, staring at the table.
“Give me at least today,” she said, finally, hating how small her voice sounded. “Please.” Feng finally looked up at Zhu-ge Liang.
“Of course. I should not have been so hasty to take you from your home the day after you arrived, young mistress Song. I will come to call again in a week,” he answered soothingly. “Mistress Song, if you don’t mind?” He gestured to Song Lin, Feng’s mother.
She hurried over. “Ah, of course.” Song Lin began adding her signature to her husband’s on the scroll.
Feng hated that her mother had given in. She hated that Zhu-ge Liang could make it sound like giving her a week at home was a favor. She hated this intense feeling of entrapment, that no matter what she did, she had no real options.
Feng watched her mother finish signing the scroll. It was her turn now. She walked over to the table and accepted the pen her mother handed her. She was about to sign her name, when something occurred to her.
“Why do you even need my signature?”
Zhu-ge Liang paused for the briefest of moments, idly fanning himself, before responding. “Well, of course I need your signature, young mistress Song. You are the one who is to be attending the Southern School, the Dragon Pearl.”
Song Feng considered that briefly. I guess that makes sense. Laws in the magical world are different. Why not? She picked up the pen and signed where the headmaster told her to.
“Well, that is that. I will come to call again, at the end of the week. Until then…” He bowed slightly, and then vanished with a pop.
The rest of the week was dull.
Song Feng went to pay her respects to her grandfathers, more out of a sense of duty than a desire to make sure that they were taken care of in the afterlife. Her grandmothers tried to spoil her with food, with toys and she didn’t have the heart to try and stop them anymore. They told her grandmothers that she was being invited to a special school, but they didn’t really explain what. Her parents had decided that magic would be too much for their old hearts to bear. It was good enough for them that she got vacation time, that she got time to come home.
Feng unpacked her bags and removed everything that she had needed for gymnastics. She would have to buy clothes in the wizarding world anyway, but there was no sense in taking things that were absolutely useless. In the end, she managed to pare down her things to one bag. My whole life is in that bag now. At least that’s how it felt. Her stuffed white tiger, her non-gymnastics clothes, her pictures of home, her jewelry... all of her things were packed in just one bag.
Zhu-ge Liang came as promised. She hugged her parents and her little brother. Her grandmothers weren’t there because no one could think of a way to explain away the headmaster.
She was leaving, again. “I’ll be back soon, don’t worry,” she told her parents, barely managing a smile. Feng picked up her bag.
“Are you ready?” Zhu-ge Liang asked.
She nodded, and took his arm.
They vanished with a pop.