Wei Lan was sitting in the priority seat, which was technically for the elderly and pregnant and disabled, reading a book with a red cover that she held very close to her face. She was maybe nineteen or twenty. She had the kind of thinness that wasn't fashionable or sick but simply structural, as if she'd been made with less material than other people. Her hair was cut short and uneven, possibly by herself. She was wearing a coat that was too big for her, army green, and her hands coming out of the sleeves looked like a child's hands, except that they weren't — the knuckles were too prominent, the tendons too visible. Alice noticed hands the way other people noticed faces. She couldn't help it. Hands told you what a face was trying not to say.
The train stopped at Xiaozhai and Alice moved toward the door and Wei Lan looked up from her book and their eyes met and Alice felt — later she would try to describe this to herself and fail — something like recognition, except she'd never seen this person before in her life. Not recognition of identity. Recognition of texture. As if they were made of the same wrong material.
Wei Lan said, in English that was accurate and completely without fluency: "You are also going nowhere."
It wasn't a question. Alice almost laughed. She didn't.
"I live here," she said. "This is my stop."
"Then you are going nowhere very specifically," Wei Lan said, and turned back to her book.
Alice stepped off the train. The doors closed. Through the glass Wei Lan didn't look up again. Alice stood on the platform and breathed the sweet fungal air and thought: that's not how people talk to strangers, and then thought: that's not how I talk to anyone.
She went home and lay on her bed and stared at the ceiling and didn't sleep until three.