"I hate being late," said Lady Zhao, even though she was always late. "This time I am late for a suicide."
The door to Bingbing's apartment had been left unlocked. Lady Zhao banged a few times to no answer, then tried the knob and, not expecting it to actually open, entered ungracefully in a half lunge.
A malicious breeze whirled around the apartment, all the doors and windows were wide open and fluttering slightly, and magazines and plush toys lay scattered about in mayhem. Had Bingbing been a few inches taller, her torso bowed over the balcony railing might have seemed precarious, dangerous. As she was, standing a petite five-seven, her center of mass hung well inside. When Lady Zhao called her name and leapt towards her, Bingbing began a lame, sloth-like effort to climb into a position to do herself fatal damage. She didn't get a chance to lift both feet off the ground before Lady Zhao grabbed her by the elbows and dragged her down onto a rug.
"You are so crazy," Lady Zhao said in Mandarin.
"I must die. Tonight! My life is so over." Some wails, a feeble struggle to escape Lady Zhao's encircling, a sad Canto-pop tune lingering in the background between Bingbing's vocalized anguish and the jingling of trinkets with every gust of wind. Ander studied the girl's face, which was round and pink, like the rug she had collapsed onto, and pinched, rather like the face of the cat printed on that rug that looked up at the ceiling in inane pleasure, only Bingbing's conveyed utter despair.
Lady Zhao stroked Bingbing's ponytail with impatience. Through an excruciating interrogation, made worse because both Lady Zhao and Ander were certain Bingbing wanted to tell them, and because they believed Bingbing knew they knew she was playing up â she kept making poorly disguised looks at Ander when it seemed she had antagonized her interviewers too much, then flinched signs of guilt â it transpired that her lover of three months, Pierre, a Hong Kong-er whose name Lady Zhao kept disparaging in asides at every mention of it ("why choose a silly French name?"), had blocked or deleted Bingbing on three different social media platforms.