Chapter 5

I’ll never forget that day: July 2, the week before summer vacation.

The whole college erupted.

Someone was being attacked so fiercely on Weibo that she’d made the trending list.

That someone was Wen Yanan.

Her Weibo account had been exposed.

On it, she flaunted her wealth without restraint.

Expensive meals, designer bags, luxury cosmetics, all accompanied by ridiculously boastful captions.

She kept implying that, although she was only a vocational college student, she already had things other girls would never acquire in a lifetime.

Most damaging of all, she never forgot to thank her wonderful father, the government official.

What set the whole thing off was a news story she’d reposted.

It was about a girl who had been abducted and taken into the mountains. From her lofty perch, Wen Yanan asked why the girl had been abducted in the first place. Surely she had only her own stupidity to blame? What mattered for a girl was being born into the right family. Someone from a family like Yanan’s would never have to worry about anything like that.

That comment, along with all her earlier posts showing off, finally unleashed a tidal wave of anger.

Soon, people online had dug up her personal information.

First they identified her father, only to discover that this government official was merely a bureau chief in some small town—and that he’d been arrested for corruption three months earlier.

Someone claiming to be a colleague of his even came forward to say that, after the arrest, Yanan’s mother had shamelessly become another man’s mistress to maintain her former comfortable lifestyle.

Then someone noticed that the designer bags Yanan had been displaying for the past few months were actually knockoffs.

With her father arrested and no money left for luxury bags, the official’s daughter had resorted to counterfeits to keep playing the socialite online.

Anger turned to ridicule. “Fake-socialite bitch” became her new name, and she stayed on Weibo’s trending list for an entire day.

Back in our room, Wen Yanan was hysterical.

She sobbed and screamed that it wasn’t her Weibo account at all. Someone had clearly stolen photos from her WeChat Moments and set up a fake account.

It was no use. The person in the pictures was her; the clothes and bags were hers. Who would believe her when she said the account wasn’t?

Besides, whether the account was hers no longer seemed to matter.

What mattered was that everyone now knew her father had been arrested, and her mother had gone off to become someone’s mistress afterward.

She was no longer the rich young lady who could summon a crowd with a word.

Her new name was “fake-socialite bitch.”

Wen Yanan cried bitterly in our room for a while.

Then she lifted her head and looked for help from the girls who usually fawned over her.

Not one of them acknowledged her.

That was when she noticed He Xiaorui watching her coldly.

Yanan suddenly lunged at her, screaming, “Was this you, you bitch?”

What Xiaorui did next astonished me: she slapped Wen Yanan hard across the face.

Yanan was clearly stunned.

Then Xiaorui said, slowly and distinctly:

“Your father held office in the imperial court, yet took bribes and perverted the law. Under the laws of the Great Qing, his wife, children, and property should all be confiscated by the state, his family condemned to slavery for life. Now you are the lowest of us all.”

During her last few days at the college, Wen Yanan became everyone’s target.

When she walked on the stairs, someone spat at her from above.

When she went to the cafeteria, someone deliberately spilled soup over her.

Even the counselor who had once been so warm toward her could barely be bothered to respond.

Ordinary people were still the majority at this school.

Many of them seized the opportunity to vent their hatred of the rich on Wen Yanan.

When the new semester began, she didn’t return.

Her mother came to withdraw her from the college.

I’d seen her mother at the start of the school year, a year earlier: a well-preserved woman who might have passed for someone in her thirties.

But when she came to arrange Yanan’s withdrawal, she seemed to have aged ten years overnight.

I ran into Xiaorui as I hauled my luggage upstairs to our room.

“Were you the one who registered that Weibo account in Yanan’s name?” I asked quietly.

She didn’t answer. She only smiled. “There are still a few bitches left to deal with, Li’er.”

Then she leaned close to my ear and whispered:

“But this time, I’ll need your help.”