Bored to tears, reminiscing about the past, three minutes went by without notice.
Raising his eyes, he saw that the isolation door of the detention room hadn't opened yet, so Ji Minghuan leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and continued recalling past times.
Three years after he first met Kong Youling, Ji Minghuan, once considered quiet and reserved by the other children, suddenly transformed into the most mischievous kid at the Welfare Institute.
He often got into trouble, like talking back to the director or deliberately scaring away adults willing to adopt him. As punishment, the director would make him sleep alone on the attic of the library. The nurses not only locked the door but also cut the power before sleep so that no matter how he tried, the lights in the attic wouldn't turn on.
Thus, children were all frightened of that attic.
Because it would get very dark at night, and without anyone by their side, the crooked bookshelves looked like menacing monsters in the moonlight. Every time they were locked in the attic, they'd cry out, insisting they were wrong, begging the nurses to let them out. Over time, no one dared to be a troublemaker anymore.
But Ji Minghuan was different; he loved that attic.
He preferred spending the night alone there rather than sleeping with the other boys, and he also enjoyed quietly listening to the "tick-tock" of the wall clock in the darkness.
He was the only one at the Welfare Institute who dared to sleep overnight in that eerie attic without uttering a word. Hence, he also became the only kid unafraid to talk back to the director.
The little kids at the orphanage admired Ji Minghuan, considering him fearless and treating him as their leader. Probably no one in the entire orphanage knew how this previously unremarkable boy suddenly changed so much.
The nurses only knew that because Ji Minghuan spent a lot of time with Kong Youling, no kid dared to bully that deaf-mute girl anymore.
This did save them some worry.
Only Ji Minghuan really understood that the reason he liked the attic so much was that every time he got locked there, he would meet someone.
The nurses locked the attic door, but the skylight wasn't locked. When he read under the moonlight in the attic, waiting until the nurses and directors were asleep, he'd climb over a dusty pile of books in the corner, step on an old bookshelf, then leap to the skylight, grabbing the rooftop with both hands and climbing up.
Every time he slipped up to the rooftop like a fish, as long as he raised his head, the moonlight carried by the night wind would fall upon him, blowing his hair high and illuminating his bright eyes as if opening a window to the sky.
Turning his head, there was the girls' dormitory on the opposite side, very close. The girls' dormitory was slightly lower. At night, Kong Youling slept on the third floor, and her room never changed.
And every time Ji Minghuan was punished to spend the night alone in the attic, Kong Youling would silently count in her bed, suddenly open her eyes in the dead of night, trying not to wake others, and carefully slip out of the dormitory like a kitten.
She would walk barefoot across the corridor, climb the window at the end of the hallway, and then see Ji Minghuan sitting on the eaves of the opposite attic.
He would always extend his hand to her, silently mouthing the words in the night breeze:
"Jump, trust me."
Every time she saw his face, she would muster the courage to leap from the windowsill toward the library's rooftop. Her figure danced lightly in the moonlight like a white deer, and her snow-white hair fluttered in the night wind. Ji Minghuan would always manage to catch her hand without fail.
At this hour in the dead of night, the entire orphanage was silent. If it was winter, snow would be falling, covering the trees and eaves in a blanket of white; if it was summer, the cicadas would be singing, fireflies would dance in the night sky, and sometimes fireworks would explode in the distance, dazzling sparks lighting up the night with a crackling sound.
No matter the season, what remained unchanged was the brightly lit long streets of the city. The welfare institute's walls kept those tempting lights out of reach, only by climbing up the roof could they glimpse the city's neon and realize how big the world was.
But they were not interested in the bright lights of the red-light district; they always lay quietly on the roof of the attic, gazing at the star-studded sky.
That was time belonging to just the two of them.
Sometimes the world felt very small, confined within the narrow confines of the Welfare Institute;
But at this moment, they felt the world become vast, so vast it seemed like the entire night sky belonged to them.
Ji Minghuan rested his arm behind his head, pointing to the sky with the other, introducing her to the stars one by one.
Kong Youling sat beside him, holding her sketchbook, listening quietly. Occasionally, she would write in her sketchbook, asking him, how do you know these? In Kong Youling's eyes, Ji Minghuan knew everything, even more than many adults, like he wasn't a kid of this age.
In those moments, Ji Minghuan would always say he knew from the books in the library: he had nothing else to do when confined in the attic, so he would take time to read through the piles of miscellaneous books there. Over time, he developed a habit of reading, reading faster and faster, eventually gaining the ability to read rapidly. Once he finished reading the books in the attic, he'd naively take books from the library up there during detention, and over time, he naturally knew more than kids his age.