THE COST OF RECKLESS YOUTH

The sweltering heat of the summer after ninth grade felt different this time. As I stood in the middle of our cramped living room, the air was thick with a tension so sharp it could cut. My younger sister, Dao Yen, the girl who had just broken city records with a perfect entrance exam score, was no longer holding a pen. Instead, she held a kitchen knife to her own throat.

“If you don’t let me go to vocational school with Tran Minh Hao, I’ll die right here!” she screamed, her voice cracking with a terrifying fervor.

My parents stood frozen, their faces ashen. They looked at her with horror, then turned to me with pleading, helpless eyes. I stood there, my expression calm, but my fingernails dug so deep into my palms that I could feel the sting of broken skin.

I had seen this before. In my previous life, I was the hero. I had lunged forward without a thought for my own safety, grabbing the blade with my bare hands to save her. My palms were sliced open, leaving three of my fingers permanently disabled, never able to hold a pen properly again. Because of my intervention, Yen was locked away for the summer, her “rebel” boyfriend died in a drag racing accident, and she eventually went on to become a roaring success.

But she didn’t thank me. She hated me. She spent years plotting my ruin, eventually stripping me of my career and reputation, driving me to scavenge for scraps in the streets before hiring thugs to end my life in a dark alley. Her final words to me were: “If it wasn’t for you, Hao wouldn’t have died. You ruined my happiness. Now, feel what it’s like to lose everything.”

Looking at her now, trembling with a misplaced “passion,” I felt a cold wave of relief. This time, I wouldn’t move an inch.

“Yen Yen, you will regret this,” my father choked out, his voice trembling as he finally lowered his head in defeat.

Yen lowered the knife, a look of triumphant satisfaction washing over her face. “I will never regret it. You can study anytime, but a love like this only happens once in a lifetime.”

That night, after the house had fallen silent, I did something I never dared to do in my first life. I walked into my parents’ room and knelt.

“Mom, Dad,” I said, my voice steady. “Since Yen doesn’t want her spot at the key high school, give it to me. Let me go in her place.”

My mother looked conflicted. “Chi Chi, it’s not that we don’t want you to go. But your grades… you barely made it into a regular school. Even if you go to a key school, can you keep up?”

I knew the truth. My grades were average because I spent my youth doing every chore in the house so Yen could focus on her “genius” potential. I had been the sacrifice at the altar of her talent.

“Yen is going to vocational school for free because of her scores,” I argued. “If I go, our family will still have a chance at a university student. I will work harder than anyone. I will do the chores; I just need the chance.”

Reluctantly, they agreed. They saw it as a consolation prize, a way to salvage their pride. I saw it as my lifeline.

The next morning, the roar of a motorcycle engine shattered the dawn. Yen ran downstairs, her face glowing, and hopped onto the back of Tran Minh Hao’s bike. He was the quintessential “bad boy” of the neighborhood—leather jacket, messy hair, and an air of arrogance that Yen mistook for freedom. As they sped away to the sound of loud music, I turned to her desk. Once piled with textbooks and dreams of Peking University, it was now empty.

She thought she was heading toward a masterpiece; I knew she was sprinting toward a tragedy.

While I spent my high school years buried in vocabulary lists and mathematical formulas, Yen was “living her best life.” She dyed her hair a garish yellow, wore midriff-baring outfits, and spent her nights at internet cafes and smoky bars.

Whenever we crossed paths, she looked at me with pity. “Chi Chi, you’re so pathetic. Your youth is just a pile of homework. Come with us sometime; I’ll show you what real life looks like.”

I only smiled. I didn’t tell her that I finally had the use of all ten fingers. I didn’t tell her that the “freedom” she felt was a debt she was accruing with a massive interest rate.

One evening, I overheard Hao bragging to his friends in a dark alley.

“That ‘genius’ girl? She’s a total idiot,” Hao laughed, leaning against his bike. “I bet the guys 5,000 yuan I could get her to drop out of school. She spends every cent she has on me. I’ll have her quit vocational school by next week, just watch.”

A week later, Yen came home drenched in rain, sobbing. Hao had used the oldest trick in the book: “My mother is terminally ill, I can’t let you suffer with me, we must break up.”

Predictably, Yen fell for it. She didn’t just stay with him; she dropped out of school to work as a dishwasher in a greasy village eatery to “earn money for his mother’s treatment.” In reality, his mother had a simple case of pneumonia. Yen was throwing her future into a furnace to keep a liar warm.

By my senior year, I was ranked in the top ten of my grade. My parents, having lost all hope in Yen, finally shifted their attention to me, even paying for me to stay in the dormitory so I could study more.

Then, the accident happened. Just like in the previous life, Hao went drag racing. But this time, Yen was on the back of the bike.

Hao survived but was paralyzed from the waist down. Yen’s face was shredded by the asphalt, leaving a jagged, permanent scar across her cheek.

When I visited them in the hospital after my university entrance exams, the “eternal love” had turned into a toxic nightmare.

“This porridge tastes like trash! Are you trying to kill me?” Hao screamed, throwing the bowl at Yen.

“We have no money left, Hao! Everything went to your surgery!” Yen cried, her hand red from the scalding liquid.

Outside the room, Yen pulled me aside. Her eyes, once bright with arrogance, were now hollow.

“Chi Chi,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “You’re reborn too, aren’t you?”

The air went cold. I stared at her.

“I realized it when you didn’t stop me from quitting school,” she said, a bitter smirk forming on her scarred face. “But don’t think you’ve won. I have the memories of the future. I’ll rise again. I’ll show you that my choice was right.”

“I’ll be waiting,” I replied calmly. “But don’t forget to make more porridge. Your boyfriend is hungry.”

I got into a top-tier medical school. My parents threw a massive banquet, soaking in the praise of relatives who used to mock them for Yen’s downfall. Yen sat in a dark corner, the very spot I used to occupy, ignored by everyone.

As the years passed, I became a surgeon. Yen, meanwhile, tried to use her “future knowledge” to write articles and business plans. But without a degree, without a network, and with a criminal record of “rebel youth,” no one would look at her. A student even stole her work and published it; when Yen tried to sue, she was laughed out of court. People dug up her past—the smoking, the brawling, the dropout status—and labeled her a fraud.

The end came on a cold night years later. I was a respected doctor, married to a kind colleague. Yen was a divorced mother, struggling to raise a son while dodging the blows of a bitter, paralyzed Hao.

In a fit of drunken rage, Hao tried to kidnap their son. Yen, pushed to the brink of insanity by years of “protecting” a man who never loved her, grabbed a kitchen knife. This time, she didn’t hold it to her own throat. She plunged it into his.

At the police station, Yen fell at my feet, weeping.

“I’m sorry, Chi Chi! I regret it! If only I could go back one more time!”

I looked down at her, the woman who had murdered me in another life, and felt… nothing. No joy, no pity. Just a profound sense of closure.

“God gave us one chance to redo it, Yen,” I said softly as the officers led her away. “He doesn’t give a third.”

I walked out of the station into the crisp night air. I had spent this life not trying to save her, but saving myself. And in doing so, I finally found the happiness she claimed I had stolen.