Li Kuiyi had never really spent much time around boys growing up, so she didn’t have a very good grasp of how they thought. She wasn’t sure what it meant, from a boy’s perspective, to invite a girl to watch him play basketball. From where she stood, it felt like the kind of thing that crossed the line into romantic territory.

She considered for a moment, then offered what she thought was a safely hedged reply, her voice coming out a little tentative: “Sure. You go ahead — I’ll get a few of the girls to come with me and cheer you all on.”

If He Youyuan did have feelings for her, this was a roundabout way of putting some distance between them — she wasn’t going to go alone to watch him play. And if he didn’t, if this was purely a friendly invitation, her reply was still perfectly natural and not the least bit self-important.

“Alright.” He Youyuan, pleased she’d agreed, spun the basketball in his hands. “We’re on the innermost court, playing against Class Fourteen.”

“Okay.”

From the playing field, the basketball courts weren’t far — just a grey cement path about three metres wide in between. Li Kuiyi watched He Youyuan through the fence as he jogged over and joined the boys from their class. They talked for a moment, then shed their school jackets and slung them casually over the basketball hoop.

Class Seventeen only had six boys. Li Kuiyi wasn’t sure that was enough to make a proper team.

While she was still wondering, she spotted six or seven girls from the class gathering together and heading toward the basketball courts — apparently to watch. She got up and followed. The girls were a little surprised to see her join them, since the class president generally seemed rather strict — managing the class, helping classmates with problems — not the type who’d have much interest in watching boys play basketball.

A girl named Zhao Jiawei asked tentatively: “Do you like watching basketball, class president?”

It sounded like a question, but it was really a gentle reminder: Class president, we’re going to watch boys play basketball — not heading to the school shop or the bathroom.

Li Kuiyi didn’t follow basketball at all, but she nodded without a trace of self-consciousness.

Perfectly normal. The class president was still a teenage girl, not an enlightened monk who had transcended all earthly things.

The girls quickly let go of any lingering doubts and trooped happily toward the courts.

The basketball area was divided into six courts arranged in two rows of three. All the courts were in use — the thud of balls hitting surfaces was constant, mixed with the squeak of trainers against the rubberised ground. The girls made their way through, commenting loudly on everything.

“Nice — a three-pointer!”

“No one good-looking in this one.”

“Look at that guy’s legs, oh my god, they’re so thin…”

After making the rounds, they finally arrived at the court where the Class Seventeen boys were playing. The match had already started. Five of the boys were on the court; only a boy called Wang Jianbo sat off to the side. The girls settled down beside him, and the class’s academic secretary Zhang Yun asked curiously, “Why aren’t you playing?”

Wang Jianbo gave her a look that made clear his low opinion of her question. “If you don’t even know basic basketball rules, what are you here watching for?”

That was a pretty sharp thing to say. Zhang Yun’s expression tightened, but she wasn’t going to start a fight with a classmate, so she gave a cool huff: “None of your business. It’s not like there’s an entrance exam to sit by a basketball court.”

“Exactly,” the other girls chimed in. They all felt Wang Jianbo had gone too far — not everyone knew basketball, and if someone didn’t understand something, you just explain it; there was no call to be snide about it.

Wang Jianbo seemed to sense he was outnumbered and fell silent, but moved pointedly further away from the girls, not wanting to sit beside them.

Well, they hadn’t come to watch him anyway. The girls didn’t care, and turned their full attention to the court, fixing their eyes on one particular figure. Some of them were genuinely watching the game, but some were there purely to watch the player — and the girls of Class Seventeen who had turned up to cheer clearly belonged to the second group.

There really was something to watching a handsome boy play ball.

He Youyuan had also shed his school jacket, leaving only a slim-cut black hoodie underneath, which made him look lean and sharp. The ball moved back and forth between his hands; his eyes were calm and focused on the opponent in front of him. Then, without warning, he accelerated and cut past the defender from the side. He drove into the paint, leapt, and slammed the ball through the hoop with a resounding crash.

It was precisely the kind of moment the girls had come for. They let out a small collective gasp and broke into enthusiastic applause.

He Youyuan landed easily and walked out from under the backboard. Though his head was lowered, a smile played at the corner of his mouth. Without thinking, he glanced sideways toward the group of girls.

She was there.

The match continued. He Youyuan played with greater intensity than before, giving his opponents almost no room at all. After one fluid spin, the ball flew from his hands and traced a beautiful arc through the air — but it bounced off the rim with a hard clang and failed to go in.

“Come on, come on!” The girls rallied with encouragement.

But somehow, as though something had gone wrong, He Youyuan’s dribbling and shooting — each stance more stylish than the last — grew progressively less accurate, with three consecutive attempts missing the basket entirely.

Hmph. All flash, no substance.

Li Kuiyi nearly snorted. She’d always assumed He Youyuan was exceptional at basketball, but watching now, he seemed rather ordinary. Still, he had plenty of confidence — ordinary players didn’t usually invite audiences.

He Youyuan, are you actually any good at this?

Having little interest in basketball to begin with, and now watching He Youyuan miss shot after shot, Li Kuiyi grew bored. She tugged out a foxtail grass from a gap in the ground and started twirling it between her fingers. After a while, she noticed the game on the next court over was actually quite good — baskets dropping one after another, scores neck and neck. It looked like they might be reaching a decisive moment.

She turned her head to watch through the iron mesh divider.

He Youyuan had no idea what was happening to him — his body felt strangely tense, nothing responding the way it usually did, which was why he’d been throwing such dreadful shots. Now, watching the Class Fourteen score creeping closer, he shook his damp hair out of his eyes, exhaled slowly, and bent into a low crouch, eyes locked on his opponent. At last, a teammate grabbed the ball and passed it to him. He took one step back, jumped, and released — a clean three-pointer, nothing but net.

Some face salvaged. He Youyuan’s first instinct was to look back at where the girls were sitting, grinning with all the unguarded triumph of someone who knew exactly what they were doing.

But his smile froze.

He saw Li Kuiyi with her head turned away, watching the next court over. It was only when the girls around her burst into surprised cheers that she flinched slightly and turned back toward him.

The moment their eyes met, He Youyuan glanced away.

The first half ended.

The plan had been for a boy named Meng Ran to sit out so Wang Jianbo could come on, but He Youyuan no longer felt like playing. “You five go ahead,” he said. “I’ll go to the school shop and grab some water — I’m thirsty.”

The girls exchanged glances at that and, with a small collective sound of disappointment, stood to leave as well. Zhao Jiawei suggested: “There’s still twelve minutes before class ends — what if we go play badminton?”

Someone immediately agreed: “Let’s go — though I’m terrible, don’t judge me.”

Li Kuiyi fell in with the group as they left the court, but she didn’t feel much like badminton either. She thought she’d walk a lap around the field first and then find a bathroom, and that should use up the remaining time.

As it happened, after completing her lap and walking alone toward the bathrooms, she ran into He Youyuan coming back from the school shop with a few bottles of water.

He blocked her path.

Still irritated about the whole watching-the-other-court business, he looked down at her with an air of deliberate indifference. “Nice game?”

Li Kuiyi assumed he meant his own performance. She didn’t think it was anything exceptional, but openly saying so to his face seemed unkind, so she nodded. “Good.”

He Youyuan turned his face away in annoyance.

That was rich — he’d invited her over specifically to watch him, and she’d spent the time watching some random strangers play, missed his clean three-pointer entirely, and then had the audacity to tell him how well the other lot had played.

This was what people meant by adding insult to injury.

Li Kuiyi looked at his expression, puzzled as to why he’d turned sullen again.

Surely not? Now even a compliment isn’t allowed?

Could it be that she’d sounded too unconvincing and he’d seen through her?

Feeling mildly guilty, she furrowed her brows and tried to offer what she thought was a more balanced assessment: “Actually… it wasn’t quite as good as all that. There’s still room for improvement.”

He Youyuan: “……”

My lady, if you’re going to walk something back, please at least make it a little less obvious.

Even so, the remark worked — he felt his irritation ease. Was it not the case that Li Kuiyi had chosen to placate him? Whatever her intention, it showed she was willing to.

He Youyuan held back a smile, keeping his expression carefully controlled, and brushed past her. As their paths crossed, he fished something from his school jacket pocket and pressed it into her hand, then strode off without looking back.

Li Kuiyi looked down. A carton of milk. Warm.

She ran her fingers over the warm surface of the carton and, quite without meaning to, bit down on her lip: This is bad. This is really, genuinely bad.

Just as she’d expected, He Youyuan began invading her daily life from every angle, using his conveniently located seat to full advantage.

Every time she got up to throw something away, he would pull open his bin bag and look up at her with bright, expectant eyes — though of course Li Kuiyi had learned her lesson and never used his bin again. This made him sulky; sometimes for one class period, sometimes for two, during which he wouldn’t speak to her.

He liked to spin his pen, and when he dropped it, he’d reach out a long leg and tap her stool, pointing at the floor: “Pick up my pen for me.” At first Li Kuiyi would help, but as it kept happening she stopped bothering. He’d find other ways to retaliate — when she’d been turning everything upside down looking for her eraser, he’d hold up his Sakura eraser and wave it in front of her face: “Beg me.”

Sometimes she fought back. When he couldn’t recite a passage and Jiang Jianbin made him stand, she’d deliberately turn around to look at him with a look of satisfied contempt.

Life passed like this — full of noise and small skirmishes — until late March arrived and it was time for the monthly exam.

The change of season is always prime time for colds, and the unpredictable weather made dressing nearly impossible. In the week before the exam, the class managed to bring down a good number of its own — this person had a cold, that person was coughing, the sound of nose-blowing competed for dominance throughout every lesson. Even Jiang Jianbin had caught a cold and stood in front of the class holding a tissue at all times, ready to blow his nose. He advised those who hadn’t been struck down yet, in his muffled, nasally voice, to go home and drink astragalus tea as a preventative measure.

Li Kuiyi was lucky enough not to catch anything. For all her dramatic performances during running, her constitution was actually quite solid — she rarely got sick. He Youyuan, for once, behaved himself. From somewhere he’d obtained a large batch of cold remedy sachets and tossed one to her every day, declaring with great self-importance that he was defending the last uninfected territory.

On the Saturday before the exam, Li Kuiyi received a message from Zhou Fanghua on QQ, asking whether she’d like to go to the bookshop together the next morning and then come back to school to study in the afternoon.

“Sure.”

Since the subject split, Li Kuiyi had only seen Zhou Fanghua twice — once on the way to do the morning exercise routine, once after school — and both times they’d only exchanged a few hurried words.

Sunday morning at ten, they met in front of the bookshop. Zhou Fanghua was carrying a plastic bag and handed it to Li Kuiyi the moment she saw her. Li Kuiyi looked inside — it was a small aloe vera plant in a little pot.

“My aloe vera in the dorm room has been putting out offshoots. I split one off for you.”

“Thank you,” Li Kuiyi said, and then added after a moment, “My seat is still by the window, so I can put it on the windowsill.”

Zhou Fanghua’s cheeks flushed faintly as she nodded.

I give you an aloe vera plant, and you put it in your classroom window — there’s something quietly lovely about that.

They browsed the shop for two rounds. Li Kuiyi bought a copy of Animal Farm, and Zhou Fanghua chose a poetry collection by Mu Xin. They agreed to eat lunch early so they could get to the classroom and study sooner.

In a rice noodle shop, they ate and talked. The conversation turned to studying since the split. Li Kuiyi said she found it manageable — the solid geometry in maths was quite straightforward, the second maths textbook’s unit on “Political Life” was easier than the first unit on “Economic Life,” and geography had moved into the “Human Geography” section, which was more interesting and less demanding than “Physical Geography”…

Zhou Fanghua laughed and said, maybe it’s just you who finds it easy?

Most of the time it was Li Kuiyi doing the talking — which was one of the distinctive things about this particular friendship. In other relationships, Li Kuiyi tended toward listening. But before, when they’d been desk partners, there hadn’t been that much to say — they were going through the same days, experiencing the same things; what was there to report? It was different now. They were in separate worlds, and each other’s lives had suddenly become interesting by virtue of being unfamiliar.

After lunch, they went back to school and settled in the first-year top class’s classroom. The room was the same as before — just thirty desks now, each spaced apart, with no one sharing a desk anymore.

Familiar and strange at once.

Zhou Fanghua took Li Kuiyi by the hand and walked her around the room. Eventually they stopped in front of the blackboard, where a sheet was pinned on the left side. Looking closely, Li Kuiyi saw it was the seating chart for the upcoming monthly exam, arranged by results from the subject-selection exam.

Exam Room One, Seat One: Qi Yu

Exam Room One, Seat Two: Xia Leyi

Exam Room One, Seat Three: Qin Weiwei

…

Exam Room One, Seat Thirty: Zhou Fanghua

Li Kuiyi’s eyes lingered on the last name.

Beside her, Zhou Fanghua’s grip tightened around her fingers, her voice faintly unsteady: “You never knew, did you… I placed last in the science top class.”

Li Kuiyi wasn’t sure why she suddenly seemed so moved, and only turned her hand over to hold hers back.

But Zhou Fanghua’s voice broke completely: “That day when we went to look at the subject-placement results together, when I saw I was last — I was on the edge of falling apart, because before that moment, I’d been hoping the whole time that you’d choose science… But — but…”