Free Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li

would sleep on the unpaved dirt floors of village schools, and in the meeting halls of People’s Communes from the fifties that were no longer in use, and in the field, our whole squad squeezed together in a small patch of space. I would soon learn to let my defenses down, but on that first night, when the mountain air chilled our bones and made our teeth chatter, I again refused to share a bed with a squad mate.
    At three o’clock in the morning, I was shaken awake for my night-watch duty. I wrapped myself in a quilt and went into the yard, and took my position under the brick wall. The night was clear and cold, the stars so close that one could almost reach them by raising a hand. An owl hooted and was answered by another, and I remembered the story—one of the few my father had told me—about the owls that carried the message of death: They would spend each night counting the hairs in a person’s eyebrows, and when they finished counting at daybreak, that person would die. When the owl hooted again, I shivered and rubbed my eyebrows, as my father had done for me when I was little, so the owls cannot count your eyebrows, he had said, his gentle touch on my eyebrows a comfort.
    Jie, the other girl on night duty, shone her flashlight at me from where she was sitting at the foot of a tree. I clicked on my flashlight and waved back. A minute later she trotted over. “Are you cold?” she said.
    “Yes.”
    “Are you afraid?”
    “No.”
    “Are you lonely?”
    Jie arranged her quilt around her and said she would sit with me, and I did not remind her that, if we were discovered, we would both get into trouble. We sat back to back, leaning onto each other, both huddled with our machine guns, though we had not been supplied with ammunition. Jie had behaved casually around me since the winter, and I wondered if it was natural for friendship to be formed out of shared secrets; she was the closest friend I had ever had.
    “If some bad guys came, we could do nothing,” Jie said.
    “We’d whistle and then run,” I said, searching my quilt for the whistle I had been supplied along with the gun.
    Jie laughed lightly and asked me if I realized the irony of our hugging guns that would not shoot. I don’t understand, I said, though I did; Jie was fond of telling me off-color jokes, as if my reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover for her had qualified me to hear all the secrets she said she could not share with the others.
    “Have you ever been in love?” Jie said.
    “No,” I said.
    “Sometimes you miss someone so much that all of a sudden you can’t remember how he looks or sounds,” she said, and asked if I had ever experienced that.
    I thought about Nini’s father, whose face I could call up if I wanted to, though I rarely did; I thought about Professor Shan, whose voice came more easily to me than her face.
    “My boyfriend and I—we did it in the winter.”
    “Like they did in the novel?” I asked.
    Jie told me not to believe anything I’d read in that book. “You think you will remember every moment, every detail, but the truth is, I can’t remember much about it. Can’t even remember how long we were at it.”
    How could one forget such things? I could recall many details of the afternoons in Professor Shan’s flat, the last sunshine of the day slanting in from the window, her fingers slowly turning the pages, a cricket chirping from under one of the old trunks; I had not forgotten a single word that Nini’s father had said to me on the night of his divorce.
    “Let me ask you—if two people love each other, doesn’t it mean that every minute of one’s life matters to the other?”
    I had never loved someone, I said, so I would not know. Jie said that in that case, she was asking for directions from a blind person. Her boyfriend was not interested in her life in the army; he saw it as a nuisance that kept them apart for a year. “But won’t you remember tonight fifty years from now?” Jie asked. “I