The Odd One Out

Chapter 16

Summer had seen this face on the underground!

Her face and half of Yimin Zheng's face behind her could be seen on the black screen, and Summer instantly matched the ghostly face of Yimin with the one she had seen on the underground when she and Oriella had looked out the window. Apart from the difference in colour code, the contours of the two faces were eight times more alike. In the light of what he had said, Summer somehow remembered a ghost story that had been circulating on the internet, something along the lines of...

"A boy took the last bus home at night. After getting on the bus, he noticed that this last bus was very strange. It was so late and a relatively remote route, but the bus was full of people only one empty seat was left, and no one was talking. When he sat down in the empty seat, the girl next to him whispered to him that this bus was not for the living, that it was full of ghosts, but that she could help him escape. So the two try to escape through the window. The boy listens to the shout of 'I let him escape' coming from the car and is about to thank the girl when he sees her give a strange smile and say, 'Now, I don't need to share you with anyone.' "

Fuck, how does this look like a realistic replica of her and Yimin Zheng!

Summer was in a cold sweat, her fingers tapping around on the screen pretending she was looking at something while her mind raced: what excuse should she think of to get out of his sight and give herself a chance to escape. If she waited until she got on the bus with him and the other party said, "There's no one to steal from me," she would be close to death.

From Yimin's point of view, it looked like Summer was looking down at something on her phone, which he couldn't quite see from his angle, so he waited for a while and asked, "Are you done?"

"Yes, it's ready." Summer put the phone back in its place without showing it, and it actually only took a few minutes in total.

Taking the pancakes, the two of them ate as they continued on their way. Summer stuffed them into her mouth in two bites and filled up as fast as she could. She looked around her, finding a few landmarks and comparing them with the map of the city she had seen in her head to get a rough idea of where she was now. Coincidentally, she had come around the area when she had run to the school to look for memories, and she still had a little memory of the nearby roads, which would just facilitate her escape later, or at least not be stuck in any dead-end road.

Summer saw a stop sign on the side of the road and remembered that a huge shopping mall was only a block away, so she swiftly decided on her next action after calculating the pros and drawbacks. She purposefully moved in the direction of the enormous mall, and as the mall's main entrance sign came into view, she stopped. Summer bowed down silently, her stomach covered, and her face lit up with exactly the right amount of anguish. She muttered in a loud tone.

"My stomach hurts so much!"

Yimin obviously wasn't expecting this out of the blue and looked a bit overwhelmed by his reaction. With a mouth full of pancakes, he reflexively said, "Are you okay?"

Summer covered her 'aching' stomach with one hand and swung strongly with the other, hissing and huffing, "I'm fine, I can hold on, don't worry about me. Let's get a move on."

She tried to straighten up and took a few steps forward, and for the sake of realism, Summer quietly twisted her thigh so hard that tears came to her eyes and her face turned white with pain.

Yimin didn't see her little gesture, only that her face didn't look fake, and his brow furrowed in a frown, "We have a long way to go, you can indeed hold on, can't you?"