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older, Moran explained. She was almost from a different generation.
    “Why does he not live with his parents?” Ruyu asked.
    “I don’t know,” Moran said. “I think it’s because they’re very busy with their work.”
    “But his sister lived with their parents before she went to America?”
    “It was a different case with her,” Moran said, feeling uneasy, afraid of saying the wrong things about Boyang and his family. Already she felt she was betraying him in some way that she could not understand. He preferred not to talk about his parents, and his grandmother spoke of Boyang’s uncles and aunts who lived in other cities more than she talked about Boyang’s father, her eldest son. Moran wondered if the family harbored an unsavory past, though she would never ask, as seeking an answer to her curiosity would make her less worthy of Boyang’s friendship.
    “How so? Is he not their child by blood?”
    “Of course he’s their biological child,” Moran said, worried that by simply speaking such truths she was compromising her best friend.
    “Why ‘of course’?”
    Taken aback, first by Ruyu’s insensible calmness and then by her own stupidity, Moran fell into a profound bewilderment. Growing up in the quadrangle was like growing up with an extended family, and nothing made her happier than loving everyone unreservedly. Certainly she had heard tales about neighbors in other quadrangles who did not get along and sabotaged one another’s life: uprooting newly cultivated flowers, adding extra salt to a neighbor’s dish where a kitchen was shared, swiping a frozen chicken left on a windowsill overnight in the winter, making unpleasant faces and noises to frighten small children the moment their parents turned away. Thesestories baffled Moran, as she could not see what people would gain from such pettiness. In the last year of middle school some of the girls in Moran’s class had become cruel, trapping other girls—the pretty ones, the sensitive ones, and the lonely ones—with a net of mean-spirited rumors. If there had been any harm intended for her—and there must have been at times, though Moran had Boyang, best friends for as long as either remembered—she’d hardly ever considered herself in a vulnerable position. Even within a family, people could behave viciously toward one another; the evening newspapers offered abundant evidence with their tales of domestic conflicts and unspeakable crimes. Still, for Moran, the world was a good place, and she believed that it would be a good place for Ruyu now that she was their friend. Yet the ease with which Ruyu had raised the possibility of deceit and abandonment regarding Boyang’s upbringing dispirited Moran, as though she, unprepared, had failed an important test to win Ruyu’s respect.
    “Are you offended?” Ruyu asked.
    Might it be natural for someone like Ruyu to doubt everything? Right away Moran felt ashamed of her own unfriendly quietness. “No, not at all. It’s only that I’m not used to the way you ask questions,” she said.
    “How do other people ask questions?”
    At least their conversation was not taking place in the quadrangle. Anyone overhearing them would think Ruyu unnaturally childish for her age, and, even if no one would admit it, Moran knew that a connection would be readily made between Ruyu’s background and her lack of tact. With a maternal patience, Moran explained to Ruyu that normally one did not ask questions that would cause others discomfort; in fact, she continued, one did not start a conversation by asking questions but waited for the other person to talk about herself.
    “What if people won’t tell you anything about themselves?” Ruyu said.
    “When people are your friends, they will tell you things. Andwhen you’re with friends, you can also tell them about yourself,” Moran said. She wished Ruyu could understand that neither she nor Boyang would press Ruyu about her past. The truth was, Moran had