Chapter Five: Who Breaks First

In the first, twelve-year-old Lin Mo stood before a classroom while forty children mocked his stutter. In the second, his mother told a doctor, “He isn’t shy. He breaks whenever people look at him.” In the third, Lu Chen threw his proposal into a trash can while his coworkers pretended not to see. “Breaking someone’s defense isn’t making them sad,” Xu Zhao said. “It means taking the judgment they most fear people believe and making it something everyone has always believed.” The classroom’s laughter flooded the corridor. Lin Mo tried to call it an old recording, but Qiao Qi was looking at him with unfamiliar pity. Words appeared on Zhou Ye’s board: SO YOU REALLY ARE SICK. Zhou Ye had not written them, yet he did not erase them at once.