“Took you long enough.”
Yanli gritted her teeth and yanked at the handle of the car trunk. Stupid latch always got stuck in the cold. “Easy for you to say,” she snapped, not bothering to look over her shoulder. “It’s not like you have anything to pack.”
Cold breath brushed against her ear. “Here,” Jing said. “Let me try.”
After a moment, Yanli backed away, and Jing knelt down on the muddy roadside and reached for the trunk handle. Yanli couldn’t see precisely what she did, but soon there was a click, and Jing straightened back up with a smug expression. When Yanli tugged again at the latch, the trunk popped open with an easy hiss.
“Thanks,” she muttered, hauling her suitcase inside with a grunt. Jing’s snort of laughter was loud in the still air.
When Yanli opened the driver’s side door, Jing was already sitting in the passenger seat, making a show of brushing invisible dust off her pristine jeans. Yanli bit back the urge to tell her to wear a seatbelt, and instead pursed her lips and jammed the key into the ignition.
“Are you taking the G42 Expressway?” Jing asked, resting her chin in her hand as Yanli backed away from her apartment and turned toward the main street. “That’ll be pretty busy this time of year, you know.”
“It’s the Spring Festival,” Yanli said. “All of China’s going to be pretty fucking busy.”
A playful note entered Jing’s voice. “Wow, someone’s grumpy.”
“It’s six in the morning and I haven’t had any breakfast. Of course I’m grumpy.”
Yanli’s eyes were fixed on the road, but she could feel Jing’s gaze boring into the side of her head.
“Why didn’t you take the train?”
“No more tickets,” she said shortly.
Jing leaned into Yanli’s line of sight, eyebrows raised. “Why didn’t you book several months in advance, then? How surprisingly… irresponsible of you, Miss Valedictorian.”
Yanli’s grip tightened on the wheel. “Look, can’t you go haunt someone else, for once?” she said through clenched teeth. “It’s the New Year’s, for god’s sake. Leave me alone and just—go be with your family, or something.”
“My family?” For the first time, Jing’s voice turned as frosty as the winter air outside. “Since when did you care so much about filial piety?”
Not even five minutes away from home and already Yanli wanted to break something. She pulled over to the side of the road with a jerk, earning her a few angry honks from the other drivers on the street. None of them frustrated her nearly as much as the spirit sitting in the passenger seat of her car, wearing the same shirt Yanli had given her for her nineteenth birthday, studying her with those deep brown eyes that always seemed far too knowing.
Yanli stared at the ghost of her once-best friend, empty stomach churning. “You wouldn’t understand,” she said when she was sure her voice wouldn’t break. “You never did. Now,” she unlocked the passenger door, useless though it was, “get out of my car.”
“This is the fastest you’ve ever wanted me gone,” Jing said as though commenting on the weather. The car seat didn’t squeak as she leaned back against the headrest, deliberately relaxed. “We’ve been through this before, Yanyan. You know the date.”
“And I’ll keep telling you the same thing every year,” Yanli snarled. “Get. Out.”
Jing smiled at her, all teeth. “You already know that’s not going to work.”
Yanli rested her forehead on the wheel and counted to ten. Then she counted to twenty.
“Fine,” she said. “Fine. If you want to sit and watch me drive for twenty hours, go ahead. You’ll be gone by the end of it, anyway. Why should I care?”
“Glad we got that settled,” Jing said cheerfully as Yanli pulled back onto the road. “Twenty hours, huh? It’s a good thing you’ve got me here with you. I’ll make sure you stay awake, or else we’ll end up with two ghosts in this car.”
“I used to live around here, you know,” Jing said, peering out the window at the surrounding streets of Changzhou. “After I left.”
Yanli hadn’t known, actually. She’d driven through this area a few times before on the way to visit her parents, but had otherwise never given it a second thought. “I thought the plan was to go to downtown Shanghai,” she said.
Jing waved a hand. “Plans change. Besides, I couldn’t have lived in Shanghai without you.”
The taste of iron burst on Yanli’s tongue. It took her a moment to realize she had bitten her lip so hard it bled.
“You seemed to do just fine, living on your own,” she said before she could stop herself.
Jing scoffed. “Now we both know that’s bullshit.” She gestured down at herself. “I died, didn’t I?”
Before Yanli could respond, Jing suddenly flapped a hand in front of her face. “Hey, there’s a great congee place right down this street. You should get yourself something to eat before you continue.”
“I’m not really in the mood for congee,” Yanli said, but she started to scan the roadside for a parking space anyway.
“You will be once you see this place,” Jing vowed. “I used to get takeout here all the time. It’s a family-run restaurant, real homey. They have a super cute dog, too.”
“That doesn’t sound very sanitary.” Yanli backed her car into the space between two trees and killed the engine. When she got out, Jing was standing on the sidewalk, stretching expansively as though it were possible for her muscles to get cramped.
“Let’s stop here for today,” she said, giving Yanli that familiar little grin of hers. Yanli’s heart lurched. “I’ll show you around. We can walk around the lake and visit the temple in the city centre. Come on.”
Jing extended a hand toward Yanli, like she wanted her to take it. Like she thought the two of them could still touch.
“My parents are waiting for me at home, A-Jing,” Yanli said, curling her fingers into fists at her sides. Jing’s hand hovering between them looked terribly, achingly alive. “The Spring Festival is in two days. You know I can’t stay.”
Jing huffed and dropped her hand, just as petulant as she had been at nineteen. “Do I really have to spell it out for you? Why can’t you just—”
Yanli turned on her heel and started walking. Jing’s voice trailed off.
“Hey! Where are you going?”
“To the restaurant, so I can eat and leave,” Yanli said. “I have to make it to Henan by tomorrow and Shaanxi by the day after. Stay here if you want to so badly. I don’t care.”
Silence. There were no following footsteps, but when Yanli glanced over, Jing was ambling by her side, scanning the street signs above them with a bright look in her eyes.
“The apartment I used to live in is around here,” she said. “Think we have time to visit?”
“No.”
“Aw, come on. I died in that apartment, you know. Don’t you want to see my final resting place?”
“No.”
“Please?” Jing wheedled. “It’s right on the road going out of town. All you need to do is drive by.”
Gods help her. “…Fine. But we aren’t staying any longer than we have to.”
Five hours later, they stopped for gas at a tiny locale between the cities of Xuzhou and Huaibei. Yanli kept one eye on the gas pump and the other on Jing, who was sprawled across the hood of the car like a sunbather on a beach.
“D’you remember the first time I came to see you?” Jing asked, tracing patterns on the dirty windshield with one finger. The dust motes parted slightly in the wake of her ghostly presence, but she left no fingerprints behind on the glass.
“Before your death or after?” Yanli said under her breath. There was a bored-looking man attending to his own car at the pump adjacent to them, and she didn’t want him to think she was talking to herself.
Jing shrugged. “Up to you.”
“I think you nearly gave me a heart attack both times,” Yanli said without thinking. She immediately winced at her wording.
“I’m sorry you had to find out that way,” Jing said unexpectedly. Yanli glanced up.
“Find out about what?” she asked warily, though she had an inkling of where this was going.
“My death.” Jing was still running her fingers over the grimy windshield, and Yanli noticed with a faint jolt that she wasn’t drawing random patterns at all; rather, she was writing the character 永 over and over again, in neat straight lines up and down the right side of the windshield where the dust was heaviest. She’d always had nice handwriting. “I would have told you, if I could.”
“You did,” Yanli pointed out, though her heart was starting to hammer in her chest. “You popped up in my bedroom a year later and said, ‘Guess what? I’m kind of dead.’”
Jing made a frustrated noise and slid off the hood of the car. Yanli reached out to steady her and only realized her mistake when her hand went right through Jing’s torso. She flinched backwards, hitting the side mirror of the car with a thump, and the man using the other gas pump immediately looked up and narrowed his eyes at her.
“That’s not what I meant,” Jing said right into Yanli’s ear, and Yanli tried not to react as the man continued to stare at her. “You, of all people, deserved to know when it happened. If—if only my father had told your parents, somehow, and your parents had told you—”
“And why the hell would they do that?” Yanli yanked the fuel nozzle out of her car inlet with a crack. It was almost funny, the way the man watching her jumped and hastily ducked into his own car after shooting one last wary look her way. She glared right back at him as she jabbed at the buttons on the gas pump.
“My parents thought you corrupted me,” Yanli bit out. She had to swipe her credit card twice before the payment went through. “Even if they’d known, they never would’ve bothered to tell me. They thought I was better off without you in my life.”
“Is that what you think, too?” Jing said quietly. “That you’re better off without me?”
Yanli’s hands went up to fist the strands of her long hair. “God damn it, A-Jing,” she hissed. “Just don’t.”
Silence, save for Yanli’s heavy breathing. Then:
“Just wanted to say sorry, ‘s all.” Jing was a cold presence at Yanli’s side, just barely short of comforting. “It wasn’t fair to you. None of it was.”
Yanli breathed out slowly and untangled her fingers from her hair. “It’s been years,” she said. “We both have plenty to be sorry about.”
It was raining when they left the gas station. The windshield wipers swept away Jing’s neat, dusty rows of 永 永 永 永 until only faint streaks of dirt were left behind.
So much for permanence.
It was nearing nine in the evening when they finally reached the outskirts of Zhengzhou.
“All things considered, it’s kind of a miracle we made it here as fast as we did,” Jing mused as they pulled into the parking lot of a roadside inn. “I thought that traffic jam a few miles back would kill me all over again.”
Yanli’s lips twitched as she hauled her suitcase out of the trunk. “That’s because you have no patience whatsoever.”
“I don’t know how you can stand a whole day of just driving,” Jing groused, trailing after Yanli as she stepped through the sliding doors of the inn. “We could’ve visited that museum in Shangqiu or browsed the market in Lankao County. That has to be more fun than some stuffy dinners with your parents.”
Yanli’s shoulders tensed. “We’re only halfway to Xi’an and I have one day left to get to my parents’ place,” she said. “I can’t waste any more time.”
Jing opened her mouth as though to protest, but Yanli turned away and stepped up to the front desk. “A room with two single beds, please.”
“Of course,” the receptionist said pleasantly. “Are you expecting someone to join you later?”
Yanli opened her mouth, then closed it. Jing was watching her with an unreadable expression.
“Actually,” Yanli said again, haltingly, “I misspoke. I only need a single room.”
Fortunately, the receptionist didn’t seem to think anything of the change. She tapped a few keys on the computer and her face brightened. “You’re in luck,” she said to Yanli. “Room 8 is a single room, and it’s available.”
Yanli moved the muscles in her face to smile. “An auspicious number.”
Jing breathed cold air down Yanli’s neck. “Lucky indeed,” she murmured.
An hour before midnight, as Yanli lay in bed with the covers pulled up to her chin, she found herself saying, “I used to imagine us living together like this.”
Jing, form flickering and translucent now, lifted her head from where she’d been curled up on the room’s cramped armchair.
“When we planned on running away,” Yanli said, “I pictured us staying in little hotel rooms like this.” She propped herself up against the pillows and rested her chin in her hand. “Travelling through cities by bus and train.” She smiled sadly. “Buying groceries together.”
Jing sighed, an airy and defeated sound. “And eventually, a little apartment of our own in Shanghai,” she finished softly. “That was the dream.”
Yanli turned her head and fixed Jing with a look. “Why didn’t you ever call, after you left?”
Jing raised an eyebrow. “Would your parents have let you answer?”
“You could’ve tried.”
“Yeah,” Jing said, resigned. “I could have.”
The space heater in the room clicked and sputtered, loud in the hush.
“I thought, at first,” Jing said, “that you had abandoned me.”
Yanli’s eyes flew back open from when she’d closed them. “What?”
“I waited at the station for nearly twelve hours, you know,” Jing said. Yanli was starting to hate that phrase. You know? Of course she hadn’t fucking known. How could she have known?
“My parents caught me before I could leave,” she said. “I told you this, A-Jing.”
“Yeah, well, nineteen-year-old me didn’t know that.” Jing looked out the window, though there was nothing to see but grey pavement and watery yellow streetlights. “I thought you’d given up on the dream. On us.” She stood slowly and stretched, a long, sinuous curve in the centre of the room. “I did try to call you, then. Probably hundreds of times, but none of them ever went through.”
“My parents took my phone away for months,” Yanli said, that old helpless fury rising again in her stomach. “But you could’ve tried calling again, afterwards. How could you think I’d just—give up on you? That I’d give up on everything we planned like a coward? For god’s sake—it was my idea to leave in the first place, A-Jing.”
“It was, wasn’t it?” Jing met Yanli’s eyes. “And now, five years later, living in Shanghai like you always dreamed, you’re running back across three provinces to be with the people you tried so hard to escape. What’s up with that?”
Yanli’s fists clenched in the bedsheets. “Why didn’t you ever call?” she said again, the question pounding against her ribs like a drumbeat.
More silence. A car trundled by on the street outside.
“I did put it together eventually,” Jing said, which wasn’t an answer. “When I realized what must have happened, I wanted to come back to get you.”
Yanli stared down at her white-knuckled hands. “What could you have done against my family?”
“I don’t know. Something. Anything.”
Yanli exhaled and closed her eyes. “Well. It’s too late for that now, isn’t it.”
The air above her hand went cold, and she knew without looking that Jing had come to sit with her on the side of the bed. They stayed like that, not quite touching, and yet not not-touching, either, until the clock passed the midnight hour and Jing’s presence, like newly fallen snow, melted away.
At five-thirty in the morning precisely, Yanli woke up alone in her hotel room.
Her eyelids were swollen from the tears she hadn’t shed the night before. She splashed her face with cold water in the bathroom, dressed with quick, robotic movements, and left her room key with the receptionist without acknowledging his polite farewell.
The car trunk’s latch was stuck again. There was no one to help her get it open, so she ended up putting her suitcase in the backseat instead.
The morning air was a little too quiet. Yanli flipped on the radio and toggled the volume of her GPS to maximum, just so she could have something to listen to.
It was New Year’s Eve, and another long day of driving lay ahead of her. She considered, selfishly, that this year’s Spring Festival had fallen on the worst date imaginable.
Yanli turned her car toward the road, but hesitated.
She thought of Jing’s not-touch. Of her dark eyes, playful and all-too knowing. Of permanence, etched in the glass of a dusty windshield.
She shook her head and began to drive. Back up the road, headed east, in the direction of home.
Short fiction, 2900 words
Originally published April 2021 in Lake Effect 10, Upstart Press.
Reposted online with minor revisions.
M. Li Zeng 