CHAPTER 283: I SHOULD BE HAPPY

InRan was taken aback by the words and seemed to have slipped. Though YanLan couldn’t see it well, he could see that for a moment it wasn’t acting that had caused InRan to slip on her own script. Rather it felt real. It’s as if something had pricked her conscience and though she regretted it, she didn’t have the gut to say that she does as she knew how shameful it would be.

After considering how she was also one of the few people who had been behind AiLin’s bullying, YanLan wondered if InRan had finally understood the magnitude of her own action as she continued the script.

Like a haunting ghost, the script itself had shown and magnified all the things that she had done, all the bullying, and the damage it had caused to the poor victim who had also been just a high school girl who had dreamt to become a normal high school girl.

Though it was just an acting, InRan had finally understood the damage she had caused to AiLin who had also taken the victim role in the film.

Ironically, AiLin’s action and the main character was not too different. The bullies worrying about their pasts and future being destroyed by AiLin out of revenge was also too similar like a foresight to the future.

But YanLan wasn’t happy about it being similar.

Because the ending of the story, though he hadn’t finished reading it entirely, was something he recalled very well... too well in fact. In the ending the victim died from an illness while the man who had loved her had gone spiraling out of control and eventually chose to take his own life to follow her in the afterlife.

A bittersweet and tragic ending with no winners.

And AiLin told him how she had loved the novel due to how the plot have moved very realistically which meant that it has no happy ending at all.

Perhaps why YanLan had felt this ending to be very eerie and had disliked it was because he could see it happening in the future. If Li ZiChen and AiLin hadn’t been so strong. If they hadn’t been kept around family members who truly care about them.

If they had...

If AiLin had a terminal illness like the main character and died as soon as she finished her revenge, solely living in revenge and dying with it... Li ZiChen would have taken the same approach as the main character in the story.

He would have....

YanLan sighed as the topic grew heavier in his heart.

The next scene rolled in with AiLin who had entered to a hotel room to find her mother who was drunk out of her head. Her body swayed and she was holding a wine bottle and hugging it as if it was her own baby.

Then a word came from AiLin who had read the script.

"Even the wine bottle has been hugged better by you than me when I was still a baby."

Her mother snapped her eyes on her, "Here you are," she then grinned, "Today a group of people came to me and they asked where you are."

"And did you told them where I was?"

Her mother chuckled, slurring her words as she leaned against the walls for support."I almost did," she said with a smirk that was colored in greed and satisfaction. "But then I thought, I had this bright idea- why make it so easy for them?"

AiLin remained by the door, slowly closing the door behind her. Her fingers clenched slightly around her dress and everyone who had seen her expression through the scene could see the intensity in which she had stared at her mother.

It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t hatred.

Only a pure exhaustion of someone she had tried to believe. Someone who should have became her guard and protector.

Someone who had eventually turned into her greatest enemy which she could never get rid of.

She sucked her breaths, pushing her hand to her forehead and recalled the lines which had been written for the scene which she should deliver with expression, but the bitterness in her voice when she had questioned her mother had not been acting. It had come too easily, too naturally, just like what she would have said to Madam Jiang only except she never seen a reason why she should ever try to speak with the madwoman who had only and always been addicted to her sufferings..

Her "mother" took a shaky step forward, stumbling as she approached closer to her. "They said you have been making trouble. Stirring up things best left buried. Well I wasn’t too surprised as you have always been like this. A stupid little thing I shouldn’t have given birth to, a stupid little girl who could only cry and wail and doesn’t know when to shut your mouth and learn of your own position. You have always been so annoying like a duck, pecking down under the garden where things are supposed to be buried and left alone, digging, digging, and digging until something nasty crawls out."

AiLin gave an empty smile. "Then it’s good I’m not scared of worms anymore."

That made her mother pause. She squinted at her daughter, as if trying to see someone she hadn’t really looked at in years. Something wasn’t right with her and as a mother she knew but why would she bother to truly understand AiLin and who she really is?

She had never cared and would never. Then she laughed again, dry and haughty, "Do you think you are better now? You think hurting them makes you somehow better? As your mother I can tell you this: you don’t replace wounds with more wounds. It will only leave you as a gaping mess."

AiLin’s smile faded as her mother in the story never gave her an ounce of warmth or love yet now spoke to her as if she knew better without considering the suffering she had gone through. "No. You are right. It doesn’t make me feel better but it makes the silence less loud and I could sleep better at night."

The room felt colder. YanLan, watching from off camera, felt a sudden tightness in his chest, as if something had gripped his heart a whole. This scene wasn’t fiction anymore as he could see the way AiLin’s shoulders trembled ever so slightly after each line, like each sentence was pulled from a deeper place than the script could ever reach, like her memories, or maybe like something she had expected to happen.

He glanced briefly at the script in his hands which belonged to AiLin. Every page was written with emotions that she should act her script and lines with but only this page was empty as if she had told herself that for this scene she didn’t need to bother acting. That it would simply come out so naturally that reading through and between the line wasn’t necessary anymore.

It became even worse as the next line was AiLin’s mother saying something cruel, something that would drive the scene to its climax and something about how AiLin should simply accept forgetting her revenge as her mother had signed the contract for her silence to be bought with money. But her mother, the actress playing her, hesitated.

The silence stretched.

Then she finally spoke, not the scripted line, but a soft whisper, "Can’t you pretend to just be dead for once?"

AiLin looked up slowly, her eyes dark and unreadable. The answer wasn’t in the script but the actress playing her mother was a seasoned actress who had acted since her youth and knew what would work best. It was an improv and though sudden it wasn’t unwelcoming or foreign.

"No. I already pretended to be dead for years. I can’t do it anymore, pretending like I don’t exists just for you. That day when I told you I had been bullied or assaulted you took pictures of the wounds and I thought it was because you cared. Because you wanted to bring this matter to the police so we could have gotten justice."

She sighed and pulled a wretched smile, "Turns out I was wrong. You had only said it because deep down you just want the money that you could get from reporting this problem. Because you know that their parents would pay you hefty money just like now."

The room was silent. No director called "cut." No one moved. The rawness in the air was too real, too sharp for them to interrupt. Even the cameras seemed reluctant to blink. After all it would be a shame to waste such a perfect opportunity and though it was improved, it had worked well for the director who had wanted to capture this novel in a different light.

YanLan closed his eyes briefly, the image of AiLin’s face burned behind his eyelids. A character could die in a novel. But in real life, sometimes people were walking around with parts of themselves already gone.

"Mother," said AiLin, "I won’t be quiet anymore. If you want me to be quiet again, you would have to kill me."