The Steps to Love You

Chapter 2. About Mistakes.

***

Luckily she only had to be in the school at ten. It had taken her two mugs of coffee to feel awake and ready for the day, but actually it was a bit difficult for Bai Lu, her body was sore and she was feeling uncomfortable. Today she also had to work in the performances of the kids for the festival, it would be quite hard to endure through the six hours she had ahead.

" Dew, are you going to Tao's birthday party tomorrow?"

Bai Lu turned around when she heard her nickname. It was how people in the school called her, and even though she'd long started to dislike it, she couldn't bring herself to ask them to stop using it either. It was Peter who first called her that. Dew.

"Is it tomorrow already?" She sighed, there she had to go buying a present as well, and giving up her Saturday night. "Of course I'm going."

She still had to socialize once in a while with her co-workers, and she owed it to Tao, who was always so nice to her. It could be said that he and Zhing Yi were her closest friends at the school, but Bai Lu still dreaded to have to spend time with large groups of people.

"Great, we could go to get a present tomorrow morning and have lunch together, what do you say?" Zhing Yi suggested.

"Sounds good, we can meet at the shopping Mall at 11."

" I'll send you the location tonight, okay?"

They finished their coffee and had just enough time to enter their classrooms before the bell rang, so Bai Lu picked her folders and the bag with pencils and paintbrushes to hurry up to her class.

"See you later, Zhing Yi! Have fun!"

Of all the teachers in the school, Dew was the youngest one, and it was made more obvious when she told everyone to have fun, Zhing Yi thought. She was the home room teacher in a class of twelve-years-old kids, so what fun could she have in a class where most students were only so-so?

But Dew, who was usually quiet and introverted, transformed when she entered a room full of kids, she had seen it herself, so in her friend's mind having fun was just the rule. Zhing Yi had started working in the school at the same time than Dew, but she had been working for years in another city before, so things were a bit different for her, a woman in her thirties who was pressured to get married quickly.

The young always had more enthusiasm, there was still a hopeful road of possibilities ahead.

***

Some of the kids who finished the tasks earlier usually drew something for her. That was how Bai Lu had gotten to collect a folder full of pictures, letters and glitter where she added something every week.

It was her hobby to look again at these works and remember the situations and faces of the kids she'd worked with in the past, and that was how she went through the days she was feeling down.

For the first time in her life, she had slept with a stranger.

Actually, Bai Lu didn't have that much experience about relationships. She'd had her first love in high school, but Peter was the first man she had actually dated and things between them got serious pretty quickly. She still remembered her parents were extremely upset when she moved in with him. Looking back, all that had been a mistake, a silly girl's mistake.

But now she had just slept with someone she didn't know, no matter how nice he might be, it was still someone she didn't have feelings for. The courage she had last night, when she'd been bold and daring, had disappeared and she felt like a fraud.