“Who is knocking at the door?” she stood beside the door, with a round face. When smiling, she exposed her tiger teeth.
“I live next door.”
When she noticed the tennis bat hanging on the wall, her eyes brightened, and spotlights were installed in them. She said, “Hahaha, I am not alone now.”
“Why can you see the sea while I can only see the belfry?”
She came beside the window. Cloud clusters were swirling on the sea surface, and sunlight illuminated a small bruise on her back neck.
I saw her at noon at the buffet party hosted by the school. Plenty of parents attended the orientation ceremony, but few of them could communicate with teachers fluently. On the lawn, a Chinese man wearing a dark suit swam in the crowd like a fish.
He was high and sturdy, spoke standard English, sometimes spoke a few words to a female teacher with blonde hair, and sometimes discussed something with another teacher.
Suddenly, he looked left and right, seeming to discover someone, and then he waved his hands to a girl standing below a tree.
The girl saw him but didn’t move. She turned her face to one side. Leaves cast various-sized shadows on the round face.
 
We usually had classes together and played tennis on the weekend. Most of the time, I was the one picking the ball; sweat flew in my eyes. She had to reduce the frequency of smashing the ball.
“How many years have you practiced playing tennis?”
“I am the city champion in the high school group.”
I wanted to appreciate that tennis bat having prosperous and honorable history, her eyes suddenly got dim dark: “This is not that one; a little bastard broke that one.”
“Who?”
“Little bastard.”
“He is ten years younger than me, good at pretending, like his father.”
When she swung the tennis bat, a tennis ball flew diagonally, fell on the ground, and then flew towards the sky.
 
On her birthday, she received two presents from China. When I entered the room, I smelled a strange perfume.
“He is always keen on sending me this kind of gadget.” A delicate gift box, tightened by a pink, heart-shaped silk ribbon, was discarded by the side.
A palm-sized clay statue was exposed as another gift box was opened. It looked like a cat, with ears standing, hearing some sound, rat, or bird. Its limbs were much sturdier than the cat’s.
“This cat does not look adorable.”
“It is not a cat; it is a bobcat.”
I saw a documentary about a bobcat. They were enigmatic animals, usually living alone in high mountains or icy areas.
She carefully put it on the sill. The bobcat seemed to be listening to the mild sound of waves.
“Geezer’s skill is getting better and better.”
“I will array it in my dormitory as I enter an American university.”
Who is the geezer? She didn’t tell. Soon, bobcat emerged in her creative writing.
 
The story is like this:
A Middle-aged man obsessed with sculpture ran away from home and secluded in a desolate, anonymous village. He met a woman and fell in love with her. But he didn’t know that the woman was a bobcat.
“Why not fox?” In Chinese ancient fiction, foxes are usually transferred to beauty.
“The unfortunate thing about his life is that he met a fox spirit when he was young; otherwise, he wouldn’t have run away.”
“The fox spirit cheated on him and had a baby with a kept man.”
This story seemed relevant to the old geezer she had talked about before.
“The sculptor was sunk in art. It was blizzarding outside on the night of that year’s winter; he was finishing a piece. The door was opened suddenly; a woman walked in from the snow-covered outside. Snowflakes fell on her whole body, but they melted easily beside the stove. The sculptor suddenly thought of that spring had already come.”
“Is it interesting?” Her two tiger teeth were as white as snow.
 
When I was a child, I lived in the countryside. One night, I suddenly found a pair of green twinkling eyes outside the window, accompanied by a sad, persistent cry. I got under the covers and wrapped myself in darkness. What is that? I asked my mother. She said bobcats, especially to catch children, if they did not go to bed on time at night. As a result, in those years, I often dreamed of those eyes.
This time, I believe, the bobcat also entered her dream. Late that night, I turned off the light and lay in bed, dreaming of a sea monster singing in the moonlight. A curse or two came from next door, and I held my breath, but the sound died away. Soon, the curse began again, with a woman’s name in the middle.
“Did you have a bad dream last night?” The next day, we had breakfast together in the dining room.
“No way.” Her eyes kept fixed on a lanky figure. “I haven’t dreamed since I was ten years old.”
“Yesterday, I thought for a long time that the story needed to be revised: the sculptor’s visit to that remote mountain village was a call from a dream in which he fell into a pool of black water and was about to sink into the bottom, and a woman appeared with amazing power in her body and dragged the sculptor to the shore. When the sculptor woke up, he found a clear line of footprints on the wet floor, made by a bobcat.”
“Is that a good start?”
She was so absorbed in the story that she forgot to butter her bread.
“Did Mr. Alex like the story?”
The lanky figure had vanished. She said the wrinkles around his eyes were like ripples in water.
 
I asked her to lend me a calculator, but she stared at her laptop on the desk. “Look, it’s in the closet. I’m going to the bathroom,” she said.
The computer opened the search page, and the title was: How much money can American students earn by working?
A person’s search history often hides his or her secrets. That lonely black mouse seemed to tease me. Choosing between morality and immorality, I finally went through her Google search history. Behind this shameful act was more concern than curiosity.
Anxiety disorder: why always have nightmares? Manifestations and symptoms of anxiety disorder. How to treat anxiety?
I continued browsing, and after a pile of school-related searches, my mouse arrow landed on a headline:
Should a mother be forgiven for cheating?
An eerie smell filled the air, and a bushy tail seemed to protrude from the bottom of the bed. I looked over my shoulder and saw nothing. Several pairs of shoes were lying on the floor in a mess as if they had been in a fight.
Then, a search made my heart race: What if my stepfather sexually harassed me?
I had to get up. The room was suffocating, and the bobcat staring at me coldly on the windowsill had a ferocious expression.
It was dusk, the church bells rang outside the window, and the city at the foot of the hill was deserted. A big fish loitered over the city, opening its big mouth, and spitting out bubble after bubble and then lamb after lamb.
The world is going black.
 
Her novel got high marks. But I didn’t see the final version. She said it is a little bloody. After I kept asking, she told me the end of the story.
“That bobcat transformed into a woman every spring must fall in love with a man and then eat him in the fall. It’s her life. If she does not eat him, she will grow old quickly, lose her teeth, and become a pile of rotten meat, which crows will eat.”
“When the sculptor discovered the secret, he fled while she was napping and, in a panic, fell into a mountain stream. In order to survive, he had to chew bark and eat animal carrion. Finally, he climbed out of the mountain stream, only to find that she was waiting for him.”
“He was eaten?”
“The old geezer is no longer the old geezer he used to be; he has no fear. In the struggle, he bit her neck, and the blood stained his cracked lips, and suddenly his two tiger teeth became big and sharp, like a tiger.”
She swallowed a hunk of bloody beef and drank half a cup of black tea. She just finished a plate of pasta.
 
Many students make travel plans before the summer vacation. She also collected information from the computer about many countries, most of which are in Africa. The farthest is Madagascar. She’s not going back to China. Once, I saw her reject several WeChat video calls in a row.
“I would rather go to Kilimanjaro, Hemingway said, there’s a dried leopard carcass on the mountains.”
“And Casablanca, where there are white houses everywhere.”
“I still want to be a volunteer.”
A few days later, I asked her if she had confirmed the itinerary. She shook her head.
“I don’t know where to go.”