Years later, Rolla stands on the Vancouver Lookout. The observation deck gives a lovely view of the downtown, but her gaze keeps locking onto the phone screen. Fingers move back and forth, typing and deleting words in Messages within seconds. Despite the distant light sent up by the Steam Clock beneath - delighting passing pedestrians - its rays also seem to pierce Rolla’s soul and scatter her weary body. With hourly chimes and bursts of steam, the Steam Clock whispers of a lifetime she has passed through. Rolla saw time trickling down; the grains fall too fast...

Suddenly, Rolla opens her eyes with a quiet yawn, blinking into a stillness that feels too precise to be real. For a moment, the world around her is suspended in that fragile space between dream and waking, while her sudden intuition tells her that she is still in her high school classroom. As the blurred vision clears, Rolla sees the biological principles on the blackboard. 

Sunlight is bypassing his shoulder, outlining his silhouette. It somehow warms Rolla’s cheeks before she is even aware…

“I am done here.”Tony is already heading over to his desk and is about to take out his bags back home.

“Wait. You know you should’ve done more than this, right?” Rolla made a quick response to stop him, as she had recalled that her teacher asked her to kind of supervise him to do the penalty – wiping the blackboard after class, for he never finishes homework.

“C’mon. I thought you needed these to take notes.” Albeit grudgingly, he shrugged, put down his bag, just gripped, and went to the blackboard.

“But my guess’s true, yeah? You are interested in biology and want to major in it.”

“No. I’ll apply for economics and go to Hong Kong.” However, Rolla’s inside world knows there are reasons hard to explain, so she added “as what my family expects so.”

Tony got her point, partially, maybe.

 “That doesn’t count. I mean, it shouldn’t be your reason.” In the meanwhile, he picked up the blackboard eraser, but his hand paused suddenly.

“So you do like biology, then you should aim to study that, rather than…Sorry again? What does your sugar daddy want?” Tony snickered at the same time and turned his back to wipe the blackboard.

Rolla feels that this joke is minimal to make people laugh, and honestly, he is not very rude, but based on Rolla’s family situation, she is truly not so happy to hear that. Though, at the end of the day, this joke generally works and is fairly okay.

“Hey, your memory capacity is small as shit, and you shouldn’t make fun of the thing.”

“Oh, I see… Fine. I’m sorry,” Tony is smart - most people agree that, and Rolla must admit this. She knows he has made a correct guess of her underlying meaning, like a lancet, revealing the quivering core of her unrealized aspirations.

He soon added, “But you should go for yourself, I think you want to apply for biology. That’s your thing. You did well in the subject. You liked and remembered everything, with details or not, that you’ve seen about biology easily.”

“However…” Though Rolla had hesitated earlier, her superego refuses to make the decision on her own behalf until there is a strange guy who abruptly makes this sloppy claim.

“Stop saying this, you know what I mean,” he finished his task and is clearly at an end, waiting to go back home. “I want to be back home. Bye.”

Rolla never knows what he is about to do next, which always requires him to rush off so briskly. From this view, Tony is strange. And yet, he gets to the point. Touché. Puzzling over this dilemma, Rolla finished organizing her stationery and walked out of school.

As Rolla stares at the tiles beneath her feet, her uncertainty is splitting herself in fact to two people, and soon she has to choose which person to handle the full control of situations： Granted, if Rolla studies economics or businesses in Hong Kong, as most of her friends also intend to do so, her social circle will remain the same as usual. Perhaps, people around Rolla will compliment her, as if she has made a proper decision under their insightful guidance.

On the other hand, chemistry and biology couldn’t surely guarantee her employment, but they are her talents, since Rolla is proficient at remembering the terms, and because she takes pride in knowing her knowledge, every moment when she explained intrinsic bio-mechanism inside bodies was genuinely entertaining to her. Yet, people might be confused. Without understanding, they do not necessarily think of her as a successful person. After staying at a remote city for a bunch of years, Rolla could lose touch with many of her friends in China, but she will meet new people, too. 

What would her mom think? She would want Rolla to be happy and not care about what others said. Probably, this is also what Tony thinks. 

The old Rolla, the one her friends might be more familiar with, would be dead in a way, or worse,

buried alive.

To be Continued…


(Story inspired by Normal People by Sally Rooney and combined with personal experience recently been through)