Chapter 59: Dawn

Tan Mo leaves, and Qiao Lan sits on the sofa, wrapped in the thin blanket she didn't have last night before she went to bed.

Qiao Lan didn't know where Tan Mo had gone or what he had done, but whether it was an illusion or not, she seemed to sense a sense of determination and resolve in Tan Mo.

The vacation passed quickly, and when school resumed Tan Mo still didn't come to school.

From the beginning of the last semester, students were surprised when Tan Mo didn't show up, and by the beginning of the new semester, they had become accustomed to not seeing Tan Mo at all.

Qiao Lan's classmate was replaced by a boy who was not very close to Qiao Lan, but who was at the top of the class.

This boy is a bit like Pei Ning, not in looks, but in personality and grades. He is a bit introverted, and was even a bit shy when he first sat at the table with Qiao Lan, but he slowly opened up later on.

Pei Ning's grades are also the same as Pei Ning's. He also excels in science, but his English is lagging behind. The homeroom teacher loves this student, so he puts him next to Qiao Lan on purpose, probably because he wants Qiao Lan to have time to help him with his English.

Qiao Lan is used to Tan Mo sitting next to her, and sometimes when she can't solve a problem, she turns her head to think about it, but when she turns her head, she realizes that Tan Mo is no longer sitting next to her.

The new tablemates are nice, but Qiao Lan can't help but miss sitting with Tan Mo, listening to songs with headphones on and passing notes together.

Qiao Lan works even harder than before, studying so hard that even Bai Yu is afraid, and the students around Qiao Lan and in the dormitory all somehow work hard because of Qiao Lan's energy.

Tan Mo is no longer with us, but after a few exams, Qiao Lan has secured the top spot in her grade, and no one can shake her position. A few of her friends who are close to her say that Qiao Lan's first class scholarship is secure again this year.

Someone laughed and said it was a shame Tan Mo wasn't there.

Tan Mo has been gone for a long time, and everyone seems to have forgotten the insults they once hurled at him and at Qiao Lan. When students mention Tan Mo again, most of them only sigh with regret that they once knew such a genius.

Someone in the class was playing Zhihu, someone asked what it was like to have a genius classmate, and someone in the class wrote a whole bunch of words, all of which were nothing but praise and no more insults.

In our spare time we talk about the day and the future, like graduation and college.

Hao Ying asked Qiao Lan what university she wanted to go to in the future.

Qiao Lan had once rejected Hao Ying, who later realized what Qiao Lan meant, but never gave up.

After seeing such a beautiful and excellent girl, it's hard to look at anyone else. Hao Ying didn't blame Qiao Lan, who experienced being rejected for the first time in his life, and finally learned how to look at the girls who once liked him with equal eyes.

Hao Ying has changed a lot. She has improved a lot in her studies and her personality has tightened up a lot.

Keep your distance and Qiao Lan will only be friends, and Qiao Lan won't even agree to that.

Qiao Lan casually mentions the highest institution of learning in the country today because she needs a large sum of money so she has to go there.

After hearing this, my friends didn't think anything of it, Qiao Lan is the first in her grade, she is fully qualified to say this, Hao Ying rubbed his face sadly, although his grades have gotten a lot better, but there is still no possibility for him to go to that school.

"So what do you want to major in?"

This time it was someone else who asked.

"Finance," Qiao Lan says as she writes on her paper. She doesn't even think about it, but when someone asks her, she casually replies with the specialty she once studied, and when she finishes her answer, Qiao Lan suddenly stops writing.

In fact, there was a time before when she thought about another major because Tan Mo.

But it's just a thought, after all, it's still early for the entrance exam.

Finance wasn't her favorite field of study anymore, but Qiao Lan didn't have to explain that to the crowd, and when she was in bed at the end of the day, Qiao Lan picked up her cell phone and sent Tan Mo her usual good night.

As usual, Tan Mo didn't answer his letters, and Tan Mo's answers usually came at 3 or 4 in the morning, which is 3 or 4 in the afternoon in New York.

Very regular.

Tan Mo had finished a day of rehab, and his whole body felt like it had been pulled out of the water, and he was so weak that he had no strength left to lift his hands.

Ouch.

When Tan Mo was in a car accident, he thought that the pain of his broken legs was the worst pain in his life, but it was not until he started rehab that he realized that the pain of his broken legs was nothing at all.

The hospital in New York stayed with him and said Tan Mo's leg could be cured, but it would be very, very hard work.

The operation to repair the crushed patella was redone, re-cracking the muscle and bone that had healed but grown crooked, and then operated on again. As the anesthesia wore off, Tan Mo's legs, which she hadn't felt in a year and a half, began to ache, bones, nerves, muscles, nowhere good.

Both legs do not dare to move, so after the operation caused serious stiffness of the leg, the knee bending is seriously impeded, the wound hot pain, every day to apply ice packs to relieve pain and swelling, feel the wound in the tearing over and over again.

Because of her AS, Tan Mo's pain is far more sensitive than normal people's, and sometimes when the pain hits, no medicine will work, and she ends up going into shock and fainting from the pain.

When she wakes up, Tan Mo looks out the window at the stars and thinks she's gone through hell.

Tan Mo lay on the hospital bed for nearly two months after the operation, and after two months, she finally started to try to get down on the ground, and when she landed on the ground for the first time, one of her legs instantly turned black and purple, as if she had been run over by a wheel over and over again, Tan Mo grunted and grabbed Uncle Chen's hand, and Uncle Chen felt that his own hand was almost crushed with that force.

The pain can be debilitating at times, but for a moment of clarity, Tan Mo's heart swells with a joy she's never known before.

It hurt, but it was the first time he'd stood on his feet on the ground in two years.

He wanted to try to take a few steps and was ordered to stop by the doctor and told to take it one step at a time.

And that step-by-step is where rehab really begins, where curvature rehab begins.

There's no way to bend the leg at all, and rehab is all about getting the leg to bend bit by bit, starting a little bit with leg pads, passively creating angles, and then moving on to what is commonly known as breaking the leg at the back.

It's like that every day, one day at a time.

Because it hurts so much, successive rehab maneuvers can easily cause the patient to go into shock again, and if he or she is not careful, the muscles that have only just grown can tear again.

Early mornings always start with legs plastered with various test machines, then the day-to-day presses to straighten and break legs to bend begin, Tan Mo feels as if the bones are misaligned, disassembling and then reassembling them again each day, the muscles overlying them warily maintaining the stretches and tears.

Tan Mo was in a single room, and in the next room was a young man in his twenties who had also been admitted to the hospital after a car accident.

He was brought in immediately after the car accident, to a far easier extent than Tan Mo, but at the start of his daily rehab, everyone could still hear his heartbreaking cries of agony through the walls.

A big man in his twenties, in that kind of pain, Tan Mo's rehab was even harder than his, but from start to finish, Tan Mo did not cry once, nor did he cry out in pain.

He always gritted his teeth and gripped the sheets of his hospital bed with both hands, occasionally stifling a grunt when the pain got to be too much, and nothing else.

But by the time the daily rehab was over, his clenched teeth had hurt so much that he couldn't eat, the sheets that his hands gripped had long since been torn and ripped, and his body had been drenched in cold sweat over and over again, and his entire body no longer had a single ounce of strength.

After a night's rest, the next day was a repeat of the same.

Some people in the hospital couldn't take the pain of the rehab and eventually gave up, Tan Mo was the first to come in, and he stayed until the end of the day, when one group of people left.

Two months of post-operative rest, eighty days of rehab, Tan Mo all gritted his teeth and persevered, and when his legs could finally be bent to thirty degrees, some patients who couldn't hold on asked him, "Why are you still able to hold on?

Tan Mo was silent for a long time and spoke, "Because someone was waiting for me to get back on my feet."

"Someone important?"

"The most important person."

The teenager was pale and tired by the end of the day's rehab, but he was still practicing walking with his crutches.

When he first came here, the doctor said he was too weak to withstand the pain and exertion of rehab, but he gritted his teeth and held on.

And it went all the way to the end.

Seeing the light.