After everything that had happened, Fang Jiabei took the initiative to invite Lin Weixia to her place after school on Friday. Lin Weixia hadn’t expected it.

“I have a cat — would you like to… come over?” Fang Jiabei’s eyes shifted a little uneasily, drifting toward the tips of her shoes.

Lin Weixia looked up and nodded: “Sure.”

On Friday, Lin Weixia was at her desk doing homework when a sudden chill pressed against her cheek. The clear shadow of a wrist fell across the green grid of her notebook.

Lin Weixia held her pen. Ban Sheng stood there with one hand in his pocket, the other pressing a cold cup of salted lemon soda against her face, and asked: “Coming to my place after school?”

“I’m going to a classmate’s place.” Lin Weixia took the drink, inserted the straw, and had a sip.

Ban Sheng nodded, and his tone shifted slightly: “Want me to come pick you up after?”

Lin Weixia laughed: “No need. I’m not three years old.”

After school, Lin Weixia carried her black school bag and stood with Fang Jiabei at the bus stop, waiting. It wasn’t long before they boarded the bus.

The bus made its way slowly through the stops and finally reached the one near Fang Jiabei’s home. Fang Jiabei lived in a lane off the main part of the city — a self-built house with some history to it.

The lane was full of people, with delivery bikes constantly pulling in, the sound of brakes cutting through the air. Fang Jiabei unlocked the door with her key. Light from outside flooded in.

“Meow — meow — meow…”

Lin Weixia was changing her shoes in the entryway and saw from across the room a small white munchkin cat waddling over. Fang Jiabei immediately set down her bag, crouched down, and placed the water bowl in front of the cat.

“What’s its name?” Lin Weixia bent down to pat it on the head.

Fang Jiabei stroked its fur enthusiastically: “Jude. My dad gave it to me as a birthday present. He’s working in South Africa right now.”

“The Beatles’ Hey Jude? You like the band?” Lin Weixia guessed.

“Yes! Come see my room.” Fang Jiabei scooped up Jude with some effort.

The cat draped itself across Fang Jiabei’s shoulder. Jude was not shy at all — it fixed a pair of round eyes on Lin Weixia and stared. Fang Jiabei had clearly taken good care of the cat; it was pleasantly round and full, its coat shiny and bright.

And Lin Weixia noticed something else — around Jude, Fang Jiabei was visibly more animated. She kept talking to the cat in a playful, half-coaxing tone, nothing like the heavy quietness she carried at school.

The room was small, but clean and tidy. What caught the eye immediately was a tall stack of manga beside the bookshelf, and walls covered from top to bottom in vintage posters for various rock bands. Lin Weixia stood in front of the wall and scanned them — The Beatles, Queen, and Shiina Ringo.

“I love Shiina Ringo too. My favorite is her Stem,” Lin Weixia said, pointing to the impossibly cool artist on the wall.

Fang Jiabei looked a little embarrassed and touched her nose: “Same here.”

The two girls sat side by side on the carpet, shoulder to shoulder, reading manga together and listening to rock music for an entire evening. Fang Jiabei said, quietly:

“It’s been a long time since anyone sat with me to read manga and talk about the story.”

“Then you can come find me from now on,” Lin Weixia said, turning a page, her voice completely natural.

Fang Jiabei pressed her thumb to a page, holding it open. The panel it had stopped on showed various characters each presenting their version of events to a judge, while in a small circle in the distance, a figure drove a sword into another person.

“Actually,” Fang Jiabei said, still looking at the manga, “I’ve seen you before.”

Lin Weixia looked up in surprise: “Where?”

Fang Jiabei named a place. Lin Weixia’s long lashes shifted and then fell. “Then why didn’t you say anything?”

“What would I have said? You’ve helped me so many times.” Fang Jiabei took her hand.

The light fell down on the two girls’ clasped hands. The grip was tight, the kind where you could feel the force of blood rising to the surface, unwilling to let go — as though straining to hold back an emotion too large to speak.

Fang Jiabei asked: “When you’re sad — have you ever thought about leaving?”

Lin Weixia released her hand. She sat on the carpet and leaned her head back against the bed. The fluorescent light was direct overhead, and it was so bright it made her eyes ache. A single reflexive tear ran down from the corner of her eye. She said softly:

“I have. But I haven’t seen snow yet. And someday I want to have a little dog that will lick my palm.”

“So neither of us should give up.”

On the other side of the city, at the hospital, Liu Sijia lay in her hospital bed. She had grown so thin that the shape of her bones showed through, her skin like paper stretched over a frame. From the sleeve of her hospital gown, the veins along her exposed wrist were clearly visible.

Liu Sijia stared at the clock on the wall, her eyes hollow, feeling nothing but the unbearable slowness of time.

The housekeeper came in with a travel bag, looking uneasy: “Miss, your mother said something came up at the last minute, and the chairman is also away on business, so she sent me today to help you pack.”

“Oh.”

The door creaked open. A tall, lean figure stepped in, the particular chill of a young man’s voice preceding him: “I’ll take care of it. Please, go rest.”

“Oh — alright. Thank you, dear.”

After the housekeeper left, only two people remained in the room. Ning Chao folded the clothes with quick, deft hands and tucked them into a bag, then moved on to the other things — sweeping her perfume and lip colors into a separate bag. Then he reached into a bag, pulled out a small blue triangular pouch strung on two fingers, and asked:

“What’s this? Looks pretty old. Should I just toss it?”

Liu Sijia, half-lounging on the bed, looked over lazily — and froze. She rolled upright and crossed the room to Ning Chao, snatching the pouch from his hand:

“Don’t throw it away.”

The alarm in her expression made Ning Chao’s eyes shift. He asked with easy provocation: “Some pretty boy give it to you?”

“No. Your seatmate gave it to me.” Liu Sijia carefully wiped the surface of the small charm.

She couldn’t even bring herself to say Lin Weixia’s name out loud anymore.

Even though it had worn thin, with threads beginning to fray at the edges.

She still couldn’t throw it away.

Lin Weixia had gotten matching good luck charms for the two of them once — both given. One had stayed on Lin Weixia’s bag ever since. The other had been with Liu Sijia all this time.

Something in the sight of it must have stirred an old feeling, because Liu Sijia sat on the edge of the bed, holding the blue charm, and gave Ning Chao a light kick as he continued packing:

“Hey — how is she doing?”

“Want to know?” Ning Chao flashed a grin, his tone needling. “Then contact her yourself. What kind of strength is it to keep hiding?”

Unusually, Liu Sijia didn’t snap back. Her lashes lowered: “She probably doesn’t want to see me.”

Going through a serious illness had a way of shifting your perspective on many things, of clearing away the fog. During that period, her disordered eating had been at its worst. Her father was away on business much of the time, and sometimes she desperately wanted to see him — but it was always only over the phone. As for her mother… that was also the time when her sense of losing control had been most crushing, which was why she had clung so desperately to the one thing she thought she could still control.

And in doing so, she had hurt the friend who had been kindest to her.

Liu Sijia sniffed, tucked the charm into her pocket, and gave Ning Chao another kick:

“Ning Chao — take me and run. I really don’t want to go to that stupid facility in the suburbs.”

She called it a facility — somewhere to treat her condition — but what it really was, was a closed treatment center. Like a psychiatric ward in everything but name, a place where you became another controlled variable in someone else’s experiment.

“I don’t have any money,” Ning Chao said.

“I do.” Liu Sijia looked at him steadily.

“I don’t know where we’d go,” Ning Chao said.

“Anywhere is fine,” Liu Sijia said.

“My ID’s expired.” That was a lie.

“Never mind then.” Liu Sijia let it drop.

Silence settled between them. Ning Chao finished packing and pulled the zipper shut. In the quiet of the room, the sound was startlingly loud. A deep helplessness welled up inside Liu Sijia, and she fell back heavily onto the bed, the sound of it seeming to echo like something being pulled apart piece by piece.

After leaving Fang Jiabei’s, Lin Weixia was utterly exhausted — head heavy, the world inside her feeling battered and hollow.

Back home, she opened the green refrigerator door and poured herself a glass of iced water. She crouched in front of the fridge, sipping slowly in small mouthfuls, her eyes blank, lost in thought.

Just then her aunt came home from work, hung her bag on the hook by the door, and looked over to find Lin Weixia crouching there like a stray cat, and immediately started: “Oh, goodness — I told you, with your blood sugar you can’t crouch down like that, you’ll faint again—”

Her aunt hadn’t even finished the sentence before a wave of cold water spilled toward her. There was a loud crack as the white glass cup hit the floor and rolled, and Lin Weixia collapsed along with it.

Her aunt immediately called Gao Hang, and in a panic, the two of them rushed Lin Weixia to the hospital. She had developed a high fever — it broke in the middle of the night, then climbed back again, keeping the whole family up all night.

After she recovered, Lin Weixia went quieter than before. She spoke less, and the coolness in her manner deepened. Her aunt assumed it was the pressure of the university entrance exam and found new ways every day to make her nourishing soups.

Gao Hang had the feeling something was different about his sister, but couldn’t put his finger on what. In the end he put it down to his own imagination.

Ban Sheng was the first to notice the change in Lin Weixia. She hadn’t even told him she was sick — he only found out because Gao Hang mentioned it.

“Why didn’t you say something when you got sick?” Ban Sheng passed her the milk.

Lin Weixia shook her head: “It wasn’t a big deal. Besides, I’m better now.”

Another weekend arrived. Lin Weixia sat at her desk working through test papers, and her phone buzzed. She opened it — a message from Ban Sheng:

Ban: 【Want to go surfing? I’ll teach you.】

Lin Weixia typed “Maybe not” into the reply box, thought about it, and deleted “maybe.”

Xia: 【No.】

As she’d expected — once sent, Ban Sheng didn’t message again. Someone as proud as he was would not lower himself to ask a second time after being turned down once.

Lin Weixia went back to her homework. When she finished, it was just about evening. She would make dinner for the family, and after eating, she’d take her usual evening walk with her aunt.

Over the following days, Ban Sheng sent her messages here and there. Lin Weixia rarely had her phone on her, and by the time she got back and saw his messages, it was always late.

Sometimes she replied. Sometimes she didn’t.

Monday arrived. The heat was building. Lin Weixia walked into school with her bag and made her way down the corridor, just about to move forward when — thud — she walked straight into something solid.

Looking up, she saw the name tag on the left side of a boy’s chest: Ban Sheng.

That familiar oud wood scent. She looked up further — his white shirt collar was open two buttons, showing a clean stretch of throat. Ban Sheng had stepped directly into her path, taken hold of her arm, and bent his head to look at her:

“Something’s wrong with you.”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Lin Weixia said.

“You’re not replying to messages,” Ban Sheng said.

Only then did Lin Weixia look directly at him. Her voice was gentle, but the words cut straight to the point:

“There’s no law saying I have to reply to your messages.”

Ban Sheng slowly relaxed the grip he had on her wrist. He looked at her and asked plainly:

“What do you mean by that?”

Lin Weixia’s shoulders dropped. She shook her head. The edge in her manner dissolved: “Sorry. I’ve been sick — just tired.”

After that conversation, the exchanges between them grew fewer and fewer. They were no longer close in the way they had been — the easy togetherness, the going everywhere in step. They had drifted apart.

They still walked home together sometimes, and Ban Sheng still gave her the milk. But the time they spent together had grown quiet, as though something had been placed between them.

There were just over a hundred days left until the university entrance exam. Most students were buried in their final sprint. A handful — those whose families had already laid out a path for them — were less tense than the rest.

Before long, people started to notice that something was off between the two of them.

Lin Weixia was leaning over a problem with Fang Mo when a burst of laughter came from the corridor not far away. Lin Weixia was scanning the questions on the test paper, reading to herself as she went: “As shown in the diagram, a flat board AB is placed at an incline, with point P on the board closer to end A—”

“Ban Sheng! Look at him!”

That was Li Shengran’s voice.

Lin Weixia caught a glimpse of fingernails painted with shimmering flecks resting on the prominent bone at Ban Sheng’s wrist, pale fingertips pressing against the faint blue veins there.

She looked away and went back to the physics problem.

Ban Sheng stood there with that lazy ease of his, pulled his hand back without drawing any attention to it, and gave Li Shengran a look. She, suddenly self-conscious, put some distance between them.

Only then did Ban Sheng raise a hand with that unhurried air of his, beckoning another boy over.

“The coefficient of friction between the small block and the incline decreases gradually from A to B—”

“What did you do to her?”

Ban Sheng’s voice.

His articulation had always been precise — like ice in a glass, cold and carrying its own particular cadence. The question, just those few words, left the other person fumbling and unable to produce an answer.

[Ban Sheng treats you really well — he stood up for you.]

[Of course he does — he’s my brother.]

[Why don’t I have a brother like that — I want one too.]

Lin Weixia’s eyes returned, cool and unhurried. She bent her head back to the test paper and noticed the printing quality of the school’s self-produced paper wasn’t great — a strong smell of ink, and at the bottom of the letter A, a small black dot.