During homeroom, the homeroom teacher announced that there was big news while handing out parent notice slips. The class was already abuzz after seeing the two large words on the blackboard.
FIELD TRIP
“Formosan Village?”
“Janfusun Fancyworld?”
“I hope it’s not Encore Garden. My family goes every Lunar New Year, Children’s Day, Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day. I’m sick of it.”
“Window on World1! My dad says it’s Window on World this year!” Xinni butted in, and the whole class fell silent.
Ahhh, was this what the experience (torture) of being in the same class as the parents-teacher committee’s head’s daughter was like? It was like trying to catch up to Kewei’s progress, making it halfway through renting Case Closed books every day after school, when Xie Yanzhi rushed over to tell you, ‘The broker was the murderer!’
“Marvelous work, discipline officer. I didn’t even need to take out the loving hand2 and everyone had already quieted down.”
The class laughed, and Xinni awkwardly lowered her head.
Do they hate me?
Xinni mouthed to me. I shook my head with an awkward smile and mouthed back to her: The teacher’s just kidding.
When Kewei turned around to give me the notice slip, she saw me gesturing to Xinni two columns of desks away.
“When did you get close to Xinni?”
“What?”
“Aren’t you secretly talking to her right now?”
“Yeah.”
“Talking in class isn’t allowed.”
“But, don’t we do it, too…?”
“That’s an order as the class leader.”
She whipped her head back around, almost hitting me in the eyes with her ponytail.
???
What was that supposed to mean???
“…The day of the field trip, please split into groups of two and stay with your buddy.” The homeroom teacher was able to explain since everyone was quiet, “The vice class leader has a form. Please find your buddy outside of class time and sign up with the vice class leader.”
“Kewei…” I cautiously reached over, intending to lightly pat her shoulder. I had the feeling that she was mad at me for some reason, but what did I do or say wrong?
I hadn’t touched her yet, when she raised her hand to ask a question. I drew my hand back.
“Teach, will there be one group of three?”
“Thanks for reminding me, Kewei. Because our class is an odd number, there’ll be a remainder when dividing by two.” Our teacher seemed delighted. It was as if being able to bring up division when talking about the field trip proved that math was useful. “But that’s alright. That means there’ll be one very lucky student who’ll be going around with me.”
Waugh!
The whole class was abuzz again.
The teacher must have known how unlucky the last student would be, so that’s why it had been presented as something “lucky”. That student wouldn’t just have to spend the one day in the whole semester when we could be free with the homeroom teacher, they would also indirectly be shown to be the most friendless person in the whole class.
“Keweeeii.”
“Kewei!”
“Kewei Kewei!”
Before I could react, a huge number of “Kewei followers” surged over, pushing aside the person who had sat closest to her, me.
If this were a fairytale, Kewei would be the princess living at the top of the castle. Princesses from neighboring countries would fight among themselves to invite her to a tea party, and princes would also line up just to see her in a good humor.
And I, would be in the bottom bottom bottommost corner of the picture, a little frog looking up at the castle’s peak from my pond.
“…Xiaorong, um, about the field trip groups…”
At lunch, as everyone was waiting to have their trays filled, Kewei purposefully went to the back of the line to find me.
Normally she always seemed devil-may-care, but now she was fidgeting as she hesitantly said, “You sit right behind me, so you must have seen. A bunch of people surrounded me right after class, wanting to pair up with me. I just wanted to say…”
Everything about her expression screamed that it was bad news!
“Ah! My stomach suddenly hurts! I’m going to the restroom!”
I tossed my lunch tray and hid in the bathroom.
Kewei really was just too nice. She looked so apologetic even after she’d found a buddy. Honestly, she didn’t need to feel guilty over me. I was happy just being able to sit behind her in school. It was okay if we wouldn’t be doing the same things on the day of the field trip. Mhm, I’d already mentally prepared myself for going on the carousel, looking around the souvenir shop, and spacing out in the food court with the teacher. I’d had a lot of experience with it, after all. I’d also spent my first and second grade field trips with my homeroom teachers at the time. Either way, I’d never really liked the really intense rides and wasn’t up for much talking on the bus. Kewei would be bored out of her mind if she went with me.
Yep.
Reigning Champion at Field Trip Leftover! Wu Xiaorong!
In the afternoon, during the 20 minutes of off-class sweeping time, I finally worked up the courage to confirm with Wen Yizhen that I truly was the “Field Trip Leftover Reigning Champion”.
“Vice class leader, hey… For the field trip, I’ll be the one buddying with the teacher… I’m number 29…”
“You want to go with the teacher?” Wen Yizhen interrupted me, “But you already have a group.”
Wha?
“Wu Xiaorong, you stupid idiot!”
Kewei had been dusting the windows when she abruptly put down her duster and ran over to grab me.
We ran nonstop to the back corridor before she let go of my hand. She said, annoyed and irritated, “You! You’re not allowed to avoid me in the future! Got it?! It’s okay if you avoid me when you’re in a bad mood or don’t want to talk. I know that you like to be by yourself sometimes-”
Wait, then, when I closed myself off and hid away to not talk, Kewei knew? She hadn’t just completely forgotten about me because she had so many friends with her? Then she’d always known that sometimes I just needed to hide away and purposefully hadn’t come to bother me?”
“-but for something like today’s situation, you are absolutely, absolutely! Not allowed to hide from me!”
“Okay… But what was the ‘situation’ today exactly?”
She sucked in a breath. I felt really bad. I really wanted to understand what she was saying, but I had no idea where to start.
“I wanted to buddy up with you! But other kids surrounded me after each period, and I didn’t have a single chance to talk to you. Lunchtime finally came around, and I was going to sneakily confirm with you, but then you ran! You’ve been getting along so well with Xinni recently too, so I didn’t know if you were going to buddy up with her. Later, when I saw that Xinni had buddied up with someone else, I immediately signed up with Yizhen. Then you ended up telling her that you were going by yourself. So Yizhen would know that I hadn’t confirmed with you, right? I’d even said sorry to all our classmates who had asked me and told them that I was going with you. Jesus, you’re really going to make me turn purple.”
Wait, wait, hold up. This was too much at once. W-W-What should I even say?
“Wu Xiaorong! Say something!”
“So, you want to buddy up with me?”
“You don’t want to?”
“Of course I want to! I really wanna! You can punish me with writing lines 20 times like corrections for the monthly quiz! Or even 50 or 100.”
Kewei’s furrowed brow finally loosened somewhat, though her eyes were still wide open as she stared at me.
“It’s so embarrassing. Yizhen definitely thinks that I’m the only one who wanted to buddy up, and that you would rather go with the teacher than with me.”
“I! I’ll explain to the vice class leader right now!”
“It’s fine.” She patted my curly-haired head. “Let’s finish cleaning first, or we’ll make more work for our classmates.”
“Okay.”
“You really can’t hide from me anymore, got it?”
“Meow!”
“What ‘meow’? You’re terrible!”
“Terrible? You said I was stupid before.”
“You’re both!”
I went back to the area I was responsible for sweeping. I was almost done sweeping before the realization slowly hit.
I remembered what the older girl at the National Museum of Natural Science had said. Because some dinosaurs had such long bodies, their brains might take a long time to process that their tails had been stepped on.
Kewei had called me stupid and terrible, but today, I, Wu Xiaorong, had not just lost the reigning seat for a two-win streak of Field Trip Leftover, I would also be spending a whole day alone with Kewei in the future.
“Woah! Xiaorong! Your nose is bleeding!”
“How did that happen? Go to the nurse’s office!”
My classmates sweeping the backdoor with me all ran over to fretfully tell me that my nose was bleeding. I felt around my nose and my pointer finger came back wet. It was red. I did have a nosebleed.
I walked to the nurse’s office, and the school provider immediately told me to rest and stopped the bleeding.
“I’m okay. I get nosebleeds really often. My mom brought me to see a traditional medicine specialist, and they said it’s my constitution. Eating too many hot-property3 things or getting too emotional can cause this,” I explained.
The provider thought that I was upset about something and looked at my sympathetically, but she didn’t know that I was this close to laughing. My cheek muscles hurt so, so much. I’d never smiled so much that my face hurt to this extent before.
1All four are amusement parks.
Formosan Aboriginal Culture Village is named “nine tribes” in Chinese, a nod to its theming around the nine main Taiwan Aboriginal tribes. It opened in 1986 and is currently quite popular with 24k Google reviews, helped by how it is a stone’s throw from Taichung, the second-largest city in Taiwan.
Junfusun Fancyworld is a standard amusement park. Opened in 1988 and still in operations, it is in the rural eastmost county of Taiwan.
Encore Garden / 亚哥花园, opened in 1981, was the most popular theme park in Taichung before 1999. The 921 Earthquake destroyed most of its facilities, which it never recovered from, and it eventually closed in 2008.
Window on World, formerly Window on China, has consistently been called 小人国 in Chinese or “mini-person world/mini world”. Its gimmick is small-scale replicas of different architectural pieces. It’s also one of the oldest Taiwanese amusement parks, if not the oldest, having opened in 1984.
2Corporal punishment in Taiwanese schools was not banned until 2006. The “loving hand” was frequently present in Taiwanese elementary school classrooms and looked like this.
3Hot, warm, cool, and cold properties of food are one component of traditional Chinese medicine. One example of a food in each category might include Chinese chives, lamb, cucumber, and Napa cabbage. (accuracy not guaranteed).
riverFlower 
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