News of Jiang Yan and his friends’ fight spread across the entire senior year quickly. By evening self-study, students in class were still talking about it.

“I heard Jiang Yan gave someone a concussion this time. The other kid’s parents are already at school making a scene — they’re all at Blackie’s office right now.”

“So what, Jiang Yan’s family has money to burn. In the end they’ll probably just pay their way out of it.”

“……Maybe, but I just heard from someone in another class that the other family are all trained in law. It probably won’t be that easy this time.”

The classroom buzzed with chatter. Lin Tao sat at her desk and absorbed the gossip about Jiang Yan piece by piece.

Some people said he was the son of a government official — that his family had power and influence all over Xi City. Others said he was some wealthy magnate’s illegitimate son, with mountains of gold stacked up at home.

Lin Tao listened to it all as entertainment.

The first evening self-study period ended, and the chatter in class erupted again. Lin Tao lay face-down on her desk, scrolling through her phone.

After a while, the voices in the classroom slowly faded away, and the whole room grew quiet. By the time Lin Tao noticed something was off, Jiang Yan was already standing in front of her.

She looked up, met his gaze, then shifted her eyes — and spotted a faint palm print on the right side of his face.

Neither of them spoke. No one else in the class spoke either.

Lin Tao watched as he bent down, pulled his black backpack and uniform jacket out from his desk, and walked out through the back door of the classroom.

She turned around. In the back row, Song Yuan and Hu Hanghang were still sitting there, not moving. But their eyes had gone red.

After Jiang Yan left, the class slowly came back to life. Someone said, almost involuntarily, “Jiang Yan hasn’t been expelled, right?”

Xu Yichuan shot to his feet in the back row. Thud. He kicked over the trash can behind him, his voice sharp with fury. “Who the hell’s getting expelled? Your mother never taught you not to run your mouth when you don’t know anything?”

The boy who’d been called out was frustrated but not brave enough to fire back directly. He settled for rolling his eyes and grinding his teeth in private.

Just then, Old Yu walked into the classroom with a grim expression. “What’s all the noise about?! Think things aren’t bad enough yet? If any of you don’t feel like being here, get out!”

Lin Tao was a little taken aback. This was the first time she’d ever seen Old Yu lose his temper like this. As far as she’d been able to tell before, Old Yu was the type who would keep a perfectly unchanged expression even if the sky were falling.

Old Yu didn’t stay long — he was gone a few minutes later. Xu Yichuan, Hu Hanghang, and Song Yuan followed right after him.

Lin Tao stared at the empty seat beside her, lost in thought.

No. 10 Middle School hadn’t arranged supplementary classes for Senior Year 2, so the weekend was still a normal holiday.

Lin Tao spent a day and a half at home. On Sunday afternoon she made a trip to the hospital. She’d left late, and by the time she came out it was already past five.

The sky had taken on the first colors of evening. Rosy clouds had spread across half the western sky, and the sun was gradually softening, pulling back its glare.

Lin Tao walked along the narrow path beside the road.

At the end of the path stood a towering, modern shopping mall dozens of stories high, surrounded by the crisscrossing branches of old alleyways.

By this hour, rows of small stalls had already set up at the entrance to the alleys, most of them selling local specialty snacks from the southern part of the city or small trinkets and novelties.

Lin Tao wove through the stalls, entered the mall, and headed straight for the gaming arcade on the fifth floor.

It was a weekend, and the mall was in a busy part of the city, so the arcade was full of people. Lin Tao went straight to the counter and exchanged two hundred yuan for tokens.

When Lin Tao was small, her parents were often traveling for work and would leave her at the after-school daycare program. The teacher’s daughter used to take her down to the arcade on the ground floor.

As she got older, she started coming alone, sometimes spending an entire afternoon there.

Lin Tao only liked the claw machines. She could play one for a very long time.

She walked up to a claw machine in the corner, inserted a token, moved the joystick, pressed the button — missed. Put in another token and tried again.

Over and over. Lin Tao slowly found her rhythm, and the pile of stuffed animals growing at her feet kept getting larger. The crowd gathering behind her to watch grew, too.

After a while, Lin Tao had emptied out two-thirds of the machine. When she finally stopped, she realized there was a ring of people standing around her.

She didn’t react much to that. She found one of the staff members, got a cloth bag, stuffed all the plushies inside, then carried the bag off to buy something to drink.

The arcade had vending machines inside — drinks of all kinds, alcoholic and otherwise — priced a little higher than outside.

Lin Tao dropped in five coins. A can of cold cola dropped out.

She bent down, took the can from the bottom slot, and set it on the nearby table. She hooked her finger through the pull tab — tng! — and cracked it open. A thin layer of cold mist drifted up from the mouth.

Lin Tao stood right where she was, leaning against the table beside her. The cola sat nearby, and she picked it up for a sip now and then, her gaze wandering idly around the hall.

Beside her, someone was holding a basketball shooting competition at one of the machines. Cheers and shouts of encouragement rose and fell. Lin Tao looked through the crowd but could only see the arcing trajectories of basketballs flying through the air.

She didn’t pay it much attention. After drinking most of the can of cola, she went to the nearby restroom. When she came out, a wave of cheering erupted from the basketball machine crowd.

“Incredible, man! You just broke the record!”

Lin Tao’s footsteps slowed. She looked back at the crowd, and just as the spectators began to disperse, she saw the person standing at the basketball machine.

The boy was wearing a white T-shirt and black athletic pants with the cuffs rolled up partway, exposing his lean ankles.

He was leaning against the machine, looking down at his phone. The colorful lights overhead fell across his shoulders, smoothing away his usual sharpness, lending him an unexpected softness.

Lin Tao was still debating whether to go over and say hi when the person at the front suddenly lifted his head — and saw her.

The two of them stared at each other across the crowd for five seconds.

Lin Tao watched him narrow his eyes slightly, as if trying to confirm something.

A few seconds later, the great man walked toward her, stopping about a meter away. “Why are you here?”

The boy was tall and lean, standing in front of her and blocking out most of the light and shadow behind him. His dark eyes watched her without looking away.

Lin Tao couldn’t help wetting her lips. “Just out.”

Jiang Yan looked at her, then looked at the bag she was carrying. He raised an eyebrow slightly. “By yourself?”

“What, am I half a person then?” The words were out of Lin Tao’s mouth before she could stop them. She scrambled to soften it somehow, opened her mouth — and found she had absolutely nothing to add.

Jiang Yan stared at her caught-between-words expression and suddenly recalled Friday afternoon — the look on her face as she stood upstairs looking down.

Stunned, with a trace of relief that came from narrowly escaping something terrible.

He raised his eyes, his slender fingers brushing lightly against Lin Tao’s cast, and said in a feigned tone of warning, “Classmate. You’ve got some nerve.”

“……” Lin Tao quietly took a small step back. Her gaze landed on his left arm, where she found a way to change the subject. “Oh — where’s your cast?”

“Took it off.”

Silence again. Lin Tao fell back into the spiral of what should I say, what can I ask, what shouldn’t I ask.

Fortunately, Jiang Yan broke the deadlock first. “It’s getting late. Have you eaten?”

Lin Tao was still trying to figure out a polite way to explain that they didn’t know each other well enough to be having dinner together — when the great man spoke again. “Come on. Let’s get something to eat.”

“……Oh.”

Jiang Yan seemed familiar with this area. After they left the mall, he walked straight toward the old alleys that Lin Tao had passed through on her way in.

The two walked in silence. Only when they reached the place to eat did Jiang Yan say, “Take a look — what do you feel like having?”

Lin Tao took the handwritten menu from the restaurant owner, circled two dishes without much thought, and handed it back. “Done.”

Jiang Yan scanned what she’d ordered, eyebrow ticking upward. “That’s all?”

Lin Tao nodded. “That’s all.”

Jiang Yan said nothing more, bent his head, and marked five or six more dishes in quick succession before handing the menu back to the server.

They sat across from each other with nothing to say. All around them was the noise of eating and drinking and laughter. The contrast made them look less like two people who’d come for dinner and more like two people who’d come to pick a fight.

Fortunately this particular street stall was fast with their food. Before long, the small table was crowded with plates. Seeing that her hand was inconvenient, Jiang Yan unpacked a set of chopsticks for her, cleaned them off, and set them in front of her.

Lin Tao was touched beyond what she expected. “Thank you.”

Jiang Yan glanced at her, then slid the two plates she’d ordered — stir-fried baby cabbage in chili, and garlic hollow-heart greens — in front of her. Then he pulled everything he’d ordered to his own side.

Lin Tao: “……”

She looked up, staring at him blankly. “Do you have some kind of condition?”

Jiang Yan looked at her with something between a smile and not, tilted a can of beer to his lips and took a swig. “Isn’t this how it goes — whoever ordered it, eats it?”

“……”

Lin Tao nearly leapt out of her seat. “Jiang classmate, I think I need to make something very clear to you: you — you — were the one who told me to come eat with you!”

Jiang Yan watched her all but jumping with indignation, and couldn’t hold back his laughter. He picked up the plate of spicy crayfish from in front of him and slid it over to her. “Eat.”

Lin Tao looked at the vivid red, plump-meated crayfish in front of her, then at her arm in the cast, took one deep breath, and looked at Jiang Yan with a perfectly flat expression. “I think you’re deliberately making things difficult for me.”

The night market lights blazed bright. The girl’s delicate face in the lamplight was pale as snow, her lashes curled, her dark eyes clear and luminous.

“Jiang Yan.”

It was only after the name left her lips that Lin Tao realized — this was the first time, in all the time they’d known each other, that she’d called his name directly to his face.

And now she had no idea what to say next.

Evidently, Jiang Yan was having the same realization. The two of them stared at each other across the lamplight, both looking equally at a loss.

About ten seconds passed. Jiang Yan looked away, reached out and pulled the shrimp plate back toward himself, slipped on a pair of disposable gloves, and began peeling one with practiced ease.

Then he reached out and placed the peeled shrimp tail into Lin Tao’s bowl.

“……”

Lin Tao was so rattled by this that she couldn’t get a word out. She swallowed silently, her left hand holding her chopsticks without moving.

During her hesitation, Jiang Yan peeled another one and dropped it into her bowl. Seeing that she hadn’t eaten, he asked, puzzled, “You’re not eating?”

“I’m eating!”

And with that, Lin Tao used her left hand — somewhat clumsily — to pick up a piece of shrimp and put it in her mouth.

This bowl of mala crayfish was extra spicy — Jiang Yan had specifically told the owner to make it the inferno-level heat. The moment Lin Tao ate it, the deep, numbing heat bloomed across her tongue, frantically stimulating every taste bud she had.

Her eyes were nearly watering from the spice, but she swallowed it anyway.

The great man had peeled it with his own hands. She would eat it through tears if she had to.

Fortunately, Jiang Yan stopped after peeling a few. The heat had left Lin Tao’s lips completely numb. She grabbed the iced drink on the table and drained most of it in one go.

To prevent him from peeling any more shrimp when he had nothing better to do, Lin Tao took the initiative and started a conversation. “So what actually happened that day?”

“Hm? Which day?” Jiang Yan seemed caught off guard, as if he hadn’t expected her to bring it up. A few seconds passed before he understood, but even then he didn’t say much — he brushed it off with a vague excuse. “Disagreement.”

Lin Tao could tell he didn’t want to talk about it and didn’t press. She offered a quiet reminder instead: “Li Kun is taking this seriously. Old Yu is pretty angry too.”

“Got it.” And then he reached out and placed another peeled shrimp into her bowl.

“……”

Author’s Note: —Tao-sis: [date], sunny weather, location: outdoor food stall, event: Jiang Yan peeled shrimp for me. I suspect he’s trying to poison me. Very scared qwq—

Yan-bro: [date], sunny weather, location: outdoor food stall, event: peeled shrimp for my wife. Ahhhhhhhh so happy qvq

Happy May 20th, darlings!!!!!!!!!!!!

Your author is sending out red envelopes!! !!