“Classmate Jiang Moumou,” Feng Ning called out to him, beaming.

Jiang Wen’s expression shifted several times. He wanted to speak, pressed his lips together, and stayed silent in the end.

“You’re not my little pet project to torment—and even if you were, that’s ancient history now.” Feng Ning looked embarrassed for all of two seconds, then glanced at him carefully. “Jiang Wen.”

Every time she said his name seriously, his heart couldn’t help but jump.

“Between us, there’s the friendship of a shared bottle of Seven-Degree Space soda. Don’t worry, I’ve decided to accept you as a friend—I won’t mess with you anymore.” There was a hint of flattery in her tone as she bumped his arm with hers.

“…”

Jiang Wen stayed silent, his face growing darker by the second. “You fought for me, I drank for you. In ancient times, what would that be called? A friendship forged in life and death!” Feng Ning waved her hand grandly, speaking with total confidence. “So, let’s wipe the slate clean on all our past grudges. Why don’t we cherish this simple friendship we have now instead? What do you say?”

Every word of hers felt like it was stabbing straight into his nerves. Jiang Wen forced himself to calm down. “Is playing dumb fun for you?”

Feng Ning’s smile looked entirely sincere. “What am I playing dumb about?”

The wind blew gently, somewhere around seventy degrees Fahrenheit, tracing the outline of her body as it passed. Sports day had ended, and the field was nearly empty now. Beside them stood a green wire fence; across from it was the basketball court, where boys’ laughter and shouting drifted through the branches and leaves.

Somewhere, JJ Lin’s mournful voice trailed off at the end of a song, singing about how hard it is to put love into words, how heavy his heart feels.

Something cold and desolate settled in Jiang Wen’s chest. His tone turned icy. “What did I do to deserve becoming your little pet project? You bully me, and then you casually try to end it with ‘let’s be friends’—how convenient for you. You’re happy now, so what am I supposed to do?”

“What do you mean, what are you supposed to do? Whatever you’re supposed to do, you do it. Are you blaming me for something?” She was genuinely baffled. She’d been having a perfectly nice conversation, and now he was blowing up again.

“You make me… so miserable.”

He made her feel so miserable, and yet she still looked completely indifferent about it—why?

She was so cruel to him, constantly dousing him in cold water, and yet he kept getting drawn back in. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t struggled against it. His reason told him not to be so pathetic, but emotionally, he just kept sinking.

In all his years, Jiang Wen had never met anyone who left him feeling as wrung-out as Feng Ning did.

The very first time they’d met, she’d effortlessly tricked him out of his jacket.

And since then, it hadn’t just been a jacket that he’d lost to her schemes.

He’d always looked down on other people’s feelings for him. Now, it seemed, his punishment had finally arrived.

She took in the faint tinge of blue creeping over his face without missing a beat.

Feng Ning thought it over seriously for a moment, then offered, tentatively, “How about this—maybe if you spent less energy thinking about me, you wouldn’t feel so miserable.”

“…”

Without another word, Jiang Wen turned and walked away.

She stood rooted in place, watching him go. Her eyebrows knit together as she mused to herself: had the peacock young master’s heart shattered again?

Supervision was lax on the night of sports day, and Xi Gaoyuan called up a few guys from the school team to go out and sing karaoke.

After a few bottles of beer, the group loosened up, belting Beyond’s “Glorious Years” into the microphones at the top of their lungs.

Cheng Jiajia had come along tonight too, tagging along with the boyfriend on the school sports team she’d started seeing a couple of days earlier. Her makeup was light, her lip gloss smelled of flowers, and she’d dabbed Givenchy perfume behind her ears and on her wrists.

In their social circle—young men and women all from well-off families—dating tended to be essentially random pairing, and casual flings were common. Like some kind of combinatorics problem: today you might be someone’s best friend’s boyfriend, and tomorrow, who knows, you might catch her eye instead and become her boyfriend. So when people saw Cheng Jiajia arrive arm in arm with someone new, nobody so much as blinked.

The boys were making a racket off to the side. Pei Shurou sat alone on a barstool, sipping sparkling wine in slow, half-hearted mouthfuls.

Cheng Jiajia thought for a moment, then carried her glass over. She called out gently, “Shurou.”

“Mm-hmm?”

“You’re not still mad at me, are you?”

Pei Shurou turned to face her. “Mad about what?”

“About me confessing to Jiang Wen a while back.”

Pei Shurou patted her shoulder. “I don’t mind.” She reached out and clinked her glass against Cheng Jiajia’s. “Everyone’s just having fun—as long as you’re happy, that’s what matters. Don’t take it to heart either.”

“What about you…?” After a moment of eye contact, Cheng Jiajia hesitated, then said it anyway. “Do you like him?”

Zhao Binlin suddenly called out, “Hey, has anyone talked to Jiang Wen? When’s he actually getting here?”

“Soon, probably. He just texted saying he’s on his way.”

Just then, the door to the private room swung open. Jiang Wen walked in, and most of the girls in the room turned to look at him. Oblivious, he picked the seat furthest off to the side and sat down.

Xi Gaoyuan pounded the table. “Why’d you come alone?”

Zhao Binlin smoothly went over to the song machine and picked out a song called “Man of Many Loves,” then thrust the microphone into Jiang Wen’s hands, clapping loudly. “The stage is all yours now, Young Master Jiang.”

The group hollered with laughter. “Damn, since when did our top student turn into a romance expert?”

Jiang Wen swore lazily and told someone to cut the song. Seeing his mood wasn’t great, the rest of them didn’t push it further.

After a while, Xi Gaoyuan came over and squeezed in beside him. “So, was the song we picked for you earlier to your liking? Did it help you bare your heart a little?”

He meant the song about how hard it is to say I love you.

That afternoon on the field, Jiang Wen had walked laps with Feng Ning, and a few onlookers had trailed suspiciously behind them—though they’d kept their distance and had no idea what the two had actually said to each other.

He’d hit the exact nerve he shouldn’t have, straight to the core of what was bothering Jiang Wen. “Do you have nothing better to do?” Jiang Wen said.

“Yeah, guess that means it wasn’t much of a hit.” Xi Gaoyuan cracked open a can of beer and passed it over.

“Don’t want it.” Jiang Wen turned his head away.

Xi Gaoyuan grumbled. “Man, your mood’s this bad and you still came out?”

Jiang Wen fell silent for a moment.

After his argument with Feng Ning (entirely one-sided), he’d been too unsettled to eat dinner, had turned down Zhao Binlin and the others’ invitation to go out that night, and had gone back to the dorm alone.

But once he was by himself, quiet, everything she’d said kept replaying in his head. Every replay brought a fresh wave of misery.

He was angry—the more he thought about it, the angrier he got, angry at her and angry at himself. His emotions were such a chaotic, irritable mess that he figured he might as well come out and be around people instead.

“I was going to ask how your battle went today, but I guess I don’t need to ask now.” Xi Gaoyuan took a swig of his own beer and snorted. “Should’ve picked you ‘Awakening from a Dream’ instead.” He started singing under his breath: “I should have known heartbreak was inevitable, so why did you throw yourself into it so deeply—”

Jiang Wen shot him a cold look. “Have you ever liked someone?”

Xi Gaoyuan exclaimed with exaggerated drama, “What kind of question is that? Of course I have.”

“And she wasn’t the person you were supposed to like?”

Xi Gaoyuan brightened. “You mean Feng Ning?”

In the space of a minute, Jiang Wen’s expression shifted several times. He turned his head, staring back at the table in front of him, and said abruptly, “Liking her is just a waste of time and energy.”

His voice was so quiet it was hard to tell whether he was saying it to someone else or to himself.

“Well said—you’ve finally come to your senses!” Xi Gaoyuan let out a snort. “That girl’s got a heartless look about her. She’s a real cold-blooded one.”

When he said this, Xi Gaoyuan had no idea how many more times his buddy would go back and forth on “coming to his senses” in the future. He was still gloating: “There’s plenty of fish in the sea! Our top student here is a prize catch—so many girls out there just waiting with their love tickets in hand.”

Jiang Wen slouched forward slightly, eyes shut. After enduring it for a moment, he rubbed his forehead. “Forget it… get lost.”

Xi Gaoyuan huffed indignantly. “Fine, I’m out. If you don’t want to hear it, Young Master here doesn’t feel like talking anyway!”

After sports day ended, the teacher did a major seat reshuffle in class. Since Feng Ning liked chatting during lessons, she got dragged to the front row of one group. Meng Taoyu specifically went and asked the teacher if she could stay as Feng Ning’s deskmate.

Once midterms passed, the days flew by. Feng Ning had so many small obligations piling up that anything besides studying and her part-time job slipped entirely from her mind.

By the time she thought of Jiang Wen again, it was because she overheard other people discussing the midterm results. Feng Ning had stayed steady at the top three in her grade, while Jiang Wen had dropped clean out of the top ten. The Iron Lady had pulled him into the office for an entire class period of heart-to-heart talk.

That night, back in the dorm, Feng Ning thought about saying a few comforting words to Jiang Wen, maybe swapping some study tips while she was at it. She opened WeChat, sent him a “hi,” and discovered she’d been blocked.

Feng Ning: ……

Whatever. Forget it.

The days turned like pages in a book, one after another. On Christmas Day, a light-to-moderate snow fell.

At noon, Feng Ning was eating lunch in the cafeteria when her phone suddenly buzzed. It was an unfamiliar number. She picked up without much thought. “Hello?”

The voice on the other end sounded frantic. “Are you Zhao Fanyu’s guardian?”

“Huh??” Feng Ning set down her chopsticks. “Zhao Fanyu—what happened to him?”

The moment the call ended, Feng Ning hurried straight to the elementary division’s administrative office.

Zhao Fanyu was filthy, his pants caked in muddy snow, sitting silently in a chair.

“Are you okay?” Feng Ning strode over and grabbed his hand, checking him over.

“He’s not the one who got hurt.”

Seeing Feng Ning in her school uniform, the teacher frowned. “Who are you to him—where’s his parent?”

“I’m his sister.” Feng Ning let out a breath of relief. “Hold on, let me call his mom.”

The last time she’d taken Zhao Fanyu out for KFC, the phone number she’d left had been her own. Zhao Huiyun was usually too busy with work, so whenever anything came up at school, Zhao Fanyu went straight to Feng Ning.

The teacher explained the general situation: at lunch dismissal, Zhao Fanyu had gotten into a scuffle with a boy from his class at the top of the stairwell. In the shoving, they’d accidentally knocked a girl passing by down the stairs, and she’d broken her leg.

Feng Ning took Zhao Fanyu with her, and they flagged down a car to the downtown hospital’s inpatient building. When they got out, they spotted Zhao Huiyun from a distance, waiting at the entrance with two boxes of premium supplements.

Zhao Huiyun had a hot temper, and the moment she saw Zhao Fanyu she made to swat him. “You little brat, can’t you ever give me a moment’s peace?”

Zhao Fanyu ducked behind Feng Ning in fear.

Feng Ning stepped in to block her, coaxing, “Sister Yun, don’t get worked up, don’t get worked up—let’s go up and see what’s going on first.”

They got into the elevator.

Feng Ning put an arm around Zhao Fanyu’s shoulders, a comforting gesture. “When we get up there, apologize properly, and remember to be polite, okay?” Having just been chewed out by his mother, Zhao Fanyu’s eyes welled with tears, and he nodded fearfully.

The girl’s room was on the VIP floor, a suite. They waited outside in the sitting area for a while before a nurse finally showed them in.

Once inside, Zhao Huiyun put on an apologetic smile and said earnestly, “Ah, kids don’t know any better—I’m truly, truly sorry about this. We’ll definitely cover the medical expenses, and I’ve asked a friend to get the best doctor possible involved, plus compensation—”

The woman sitting on the sofa was elegant and refined; she glanced at them and said, none too politely, “Money isn’t something our family is short on.”

“Mom, don’t talk like that.” The person sitting by the bedside, peeling an apple, poured a glass of water and said to them, “It’s fine, Auntie, she’s okay. You can go ahead and take care of your business.”

Yin Yan complained, “What do you mean it’s fine? This is exactly the wrong time—who knows how much class she’ll miss. The doctor says she’ll need to stay home for at least two months.”

“Right, I understand—my child’s in sixth grade too.” Zhao Huiyun paused to think it over appropriately. “How about this… I’ll pay for a tutor. Winter break’s coming up soon—I could send one to your home to help her catch up on what she’s missed.”

She seemed thoroughly sincere, and Yin Yan’s attitude visibly softened. “No need. A tutor wouldn’t know the school’s pace anyway.”

“Hey, I know you!” the girl lying in bed suddenly called out, and everyone’s attention turned toward her. The little girl seemed to be recalling something, and then her eyes lit up. “Sister, is your name Feng Ning? I’ve seen you on the honor board at the school gate.”

Feng Ning was still wearing her Qide school uniform. She smiled. “That’s me.”

Seeing this, Zhao Huiyun pulled her aside for a quick, murmured discussion, then went to talk with Yin Yan again.

Feng Ning stepped forward and crouched by the bed, meeting the little girl’s eyes, speaking gently. “I help Zhao Fanyu with his homework on weekends usually—whatever you’re learning, I probably know it too. When winter break starts, how about big sister comes to tutor you?”

Just as she finished speaking, footsteps sounded from outside. The little girl in the bed suddenly cried out in delight, “Brother!”

As if she’d sensed it, Feng Ning turned her head.

Outside, the snow was falling harder.

Jiang Wen’s jawline was clean-cut, his brows and eyes cold and sharp—aloof and restrained as ever. He wore a pale blue windbreaker, unmelted flecks of snow still clinging to his shoulders.

His gaze landed on her, and he paused, his footsteps faltering for a beat.