EPTAnyhow, they're all standing in a circle around her, talking to her, and I try to walk to her but they keep pushing me away. Then they all walk out of the apartment and I'm alone again.
I walk back into the bedroom to go back to sleep, only now I realize the bed has my sixth girlfriend on it. Uh-oh. I immediately feel a sense of dread. I slip into the narrow bed carefully, trying not to wake her, but I fail and she does wake up. Immediately she starts grabbing my crotch and whispering "I like this" (squeeze) "so much, if you don't tell me where you were tonight, I'll tear it off." I shut her up by kissing her, she responds by turning towards the wall and crying that "you never really loved me, you just wanted a girl to fuck because you were lonely". Which was somewhat true. I try to keep her quiet, tell her I still like her so I can sleep, but she kicks me. I get off the bed, walk out into the living room, and I see my older brother walk in with his most recent girlfriend, a Maplestory addict that's a year younger than me, and they're talking about some "gold houndtooth" or whatever. I ignore them. He goes into a different bedroom, but somehow I know it's offscreen (yes, at that point that was the word my brain used to describe where he was).
I go back into my bedroom that I don't recognize again, my sixth girlfriend has left the place a mess. I try to tidy it up, but I fail halfway through and collapse on the floor from lack of sleep. I get tickled awake. It's my fourth girlfriend, the one who I wanted to marry and who wanted to marry me back. She talks to me in her bossy tone and tells me that she's thirsty. Somehow her hair is no longer permed, but straight and nerdy, the way it was our first year in college. So I go to the kitchen and she starts whispering in a quiet voice next to me, using those grammatically strange phrases that meant she wanted something without really sounding like she wanted it. I don't remember the exact wording, but I remember her telling me that she wanted something "cool" (as in hip, awesome, not temperature-wise) to drink. I said "why not something alcoholic", because I knew that's what she really wanted, and she giggled. Win! So I ask her where her parents keep the whiskey. We walk into the kitchen. She reaches up, behind a small pink hello kitty pencil box holding kitchen utensils, and produces a bottle of Johnnie Walker. While watching her do it, I notice the roof of the kitchen has exposed metal piping, and it all comes flooding back--the twin bed, the apartment with the crappy remodeling job, cramped, but somehow extremely expensive and precious location--and I remember where I am.
I'm in her parents' apartment in Beijing, the one which she showed me dozens of times while we webcam'd between first and second year of college, but which I was never invited to visit because the when I was in Beijing in 06 I barely knew her, while when I was in Beijing in 08, she was in Hong Kong, busy with her banking internship, and her parents had moved to North Africa for her dad's job managing the African projects of some Chinese SOE. The layout is remarkably similar to the apartment of my fifth girlfriend, who lived about 4 blocks away from my fourth girlfriend in Beijing. They grew up on opposite corners of the massive Gongzhufen interchange between Fuxing Road (aka West Chang'an Avenue) and 3rd Ring Road. For anyone familiar with Beijing, that neighborhood is where a lot of officials live--one family got their apartment parceled out in the mid nineties from the Ministry of Finance, the other got their apartment parceled out in the early nineties from the Ministry of Railways.
I open the bottle. She fumbles around in a noisy old fridge filled with vegetables and produces a 2-liter bottle of peach nectar, the real cheap kind you see on sale in every supermarket in mainland China and hands it to me.
I'm mixing her a drink, but somehow I have to do it in a pot that was filled with rice congee (粥). So I dump out the congee, wash the pot, trying to be quiet as not to wake her parents up, I mix the peach nectar with the whiskey and pour her a glass, but there isn't another glass left, so I drink the rest out of the pot. She says that her parents will notice the congee being missing, so I have to make a new pot of rice congee before they wake up. I mix the rice and water in a 1:4 ratio of volume like my mom always taught me and set the heat to high, remembering to turn it to low when the water starts boiling. She's standing there drinking the whisky, holding the glass in both her hands, like a little kid.
Now, after I've awoke, I remember that was how she drank any cold drink when it was just me around, when no one was watching her. When she was in clubs and around other people, she would always drink with this exaggeratedly sexy motion that was funny as hell to watch.
Anyhow, she's drinking, and we're whispering, trying to be quiet. Then my brother emerges from offscreen, talking excitedly about the girl he's dating. He mentions something about how he's "sure that she really likes [him], since she is willing to give up a level 95 gold houndtooth for me. A golden houndtooth!" I'm trying to keep him quiet, but it doesn't work. With that last exclamation, I hear her parents wake up and push open their bedroom door. Then I wake up.
