The two of them came out of the internet café, unable to find anywhere suitable to sit and properly eat the watermelon, so they picked out a shaded corner in a nearby park and set it down on the stone pavement.

When Fang Zhuo looked over, Yan Lie was doing a rather transparent job of avoiding her gaze, staring blankly at the ground as if lost in thought.

Fang Zhuo said: “Don’t say sorry to me. I won’t know how to respond if you do.”

Ye Yaoling had been gone for so many years now. Even tending to her grave was something Fang Zhuo could approach with composure.

“I wasn’t going to,” Yan Lie said quietly. “I was thinking we don’t have a knife.”

Fang Zhuo said without concern: “What do you need a knife for to eat watermelon?”

She laid a plastic bag down on the ground beneath it, then simply brought the watermelon down hard against the surface — following the split, she broke it apart with her hands, knocking and pulling it into irregular chunks.

Yan Lie watched her do this and muttered: “Eating it that way is going to get juice all over your face.”

Good-looking boys really are fussy. Truly. They even need coaxing.

Fang Zhuo picked out the smallest piece and handed it to him, then pulled him down to crouch beside her.

The watermelon hadn’t been chilled, so it lacked a bit of texture, and even its sweetness had faded. Yet paired with the early-summer breeze threading through the leaves, it had the clean, cool flavor of spring water from deep in the earth.

Yan Lie gazed at the lush green lawn not far away, feeling rather like a small ant wandering through it without finding anything worthwhile. He said in a distracted voice: “Maybe I just won’t go either?”

“Why wouldn’t you go?” Fang Zhuo said. “Haven’t you already made plans with the other classmates?”

Yan Lie let out a sigh full of complicated feelings.

Fang Zhuo said: “I’ve never been to the seaside either. You can take lots of nice photos and send them to me. I get pretty bored in the countryside.”

Yan Lie said listlessly: “You don’t have a phone — by the time you actually see them, we’ll probably be back at school already.”

“Once my supermarket wages come in, I’m planning to buy a new phone. Then I’ll save up a bit more and buy a laptop before university starts.” Fang Zhuo asked: “Would a laptop that costs a little over a thousand last four years?”

“Probably? If you’re only using it to look things up online and make course slides, it should be fine.” Yan Lie lifted his head: “If your laptop breaks down, I can find someone to fix it for you.”

“Thank you,” Fang Zhuo said. “And I can help you write group assignments.”

The exchange of equivalent favors made Yan Lie feel simultaneously like laughing and crying — and yet he moved his facial muscles and produced something that could only be called a not-quite-natural smile.

The sound of cicadas coiling through the branches, juice trickling from his fingertips — both gave him an unreal, dreamlike sensation, as if this summer were stretching on inexplicably long, already exceeding anything he had known before.

His legs had gone numb from crouching. He stood and moved his limbs about. Looking down at Fang Zhuo’s back from above, he drew a slow breath, then crouched beside her again.

Back and forth, three or four times. Unable to make up his mind. Every phrase that nearly slipped out was intercepted by those four words: the wrong moment.

He felt that Fang Zhuo would probably never understand — and he had no way of being open with her.

If he said it, and Fang Zhuo’s answer was some impassive “I have to go to work soon — let’s talk about this after I get off shift,” he would be truly heartbroken.

He knew that Fang Zhuo was the kind of person who, even if she swallowed her pain whole, wouldn’t let a single tear fall. But she was also the kind of person who, when moved, couldn’t bring herself to step on even a fallen leaf. What he couldn’t be certain of was whether he belonged to the domain of things she felt tenderly about.

They ate through two-thirds of the watermelon, declared themselves done, cleaned up the scraps, walked along the road for a stretch, and at the street corner said a quiet goodbye.

A couple of days later, Yan Lie helped her pick the best phone for her budget. Fang Zhuo collected her wages, went straight to buy the phone, and sent her new number to Yan Lie.

Yan Lie: Am I your first contact?

Fang Zhuo stood at the entrance of the phone shop, switched over to QQ, and sent him a “yes.”

Little Sun: This number doesn’t have a texting plan — message me here if anything comes up.

A Name Ablaze: [grinning emoji]

A Name Ablaze: I want to ask you something — would you be especially generous to your future boyfriend, in a way you’re not with other people?

Little Sun: No.

Little Sun: Why would anyone deserve such an unreasonable expectation? [frowning emoji]

It was a while before Yan Lie replied.

A Name Ablaze: Thank you, I actually feel a bit comforted.

Before Yan Lie left for his trip, Fang Zhuo ended her part-time job at the supermarket first.

She packed up her belongings, moved out of the rental flat, and caught an early bus back to the old family home.

The news that she had been accepted to University A had already spread through the village early on — and much of the credit for that belonged to Liu Qiaohong.

He told everyone he met, calling especially on the families of girls who were reluctant to stay in school. For their families’ benefit, he laid out the numbers: how much Fang Zhuo could earn each day running a tutoring class in City A; how many paying opportunities there were at university; and how much financial aid was available for registered low-income students like them through the work-study program.

Sometimes, lifting people out of poverty requires that kind of frankly practical inspiration. Liu Qiaohong had discussed some of this with her on QQ, even half-seriously asking her to fabricate a few payment receipts.

After Fang Zhuo returned, word got out that she was running a summer crash course, and that she was only charging fifty yuan for two hours. Two small classes filled up almost immediately.

After Liu Qiaohong gently pleaded with her, she squeezed in two more girls for free.

Fang Zhuo prepared lessons in the morning, taught from noon to six in the evening — sometimes running over — and spent her evenings marking homework and cleaning up. She had very little time to rest.

July’s sun was as ferocious as a predatory beast. It turned the room she taught in into something like an oven, and the only old electric fan, worn out from overwork, gave out spectacularly after a week — becoming yet another crushing weight of summer.

In that kind of weather, Fang Zhuo came to a profound understanding: studying doesn’t calm the mind at all. If anything, it aggravates it. She felt as though she was losing several pounds of sweat every day, growing thinner at a visible rate.

She remembered summers in childhood not being so unbearable, but now even her capacity to endure had diminished considerably.

In the rare cool of an evening, after fighting mosquitoes half the night, Fang Zhuo took stock and concluded that the true culprit behind her inability to find peace was, in fact, Yan Lie.

The seaside trip he had been dreaming of had finally come to pass, and he had sent her several photos.

To be honest, Yan Lie’s photography skills were genuinely good. Through his lens, the deep blue of the sea and the clear, washed sky melted into one continuous line; the golden sand and the white-crested waves were bright as an oil painting.

Sometimes a distant view captured the crowd of people packed along the shore, but he always found the perfect angle to capture the ocean’s vastness and calm.

Even the play of light on water as it rippled over his forearm looked especially beautiful.

But the messages Yan Lie sent along with them were not so cheerful.

A Name Ablaze: Nearly stepped on a beer bottle on the beach today — so aggravating, who has the nerve to leave that there?

A Name Ablaze: There are so many people at the shore, and every time the tide goes out a crowd comes to comb the beach. An enthusiastic local uncle taught us how to find clams and crabs by looking for their breathing holes — we ended up catching absolutely nothing.

A Name Ablaze: Apparently there are lots of small octopuses near the shore. We caught one today, and the moment I picked it up, it sprayed ink all over my shirt. [picture] [crying-with-rage emoji]

A Name Ablaze: Look, a crab buried in the sand.

When Fang Zhuo managed to catch glimpses of his messages between teaching sessions, her thoughts would lurch back and forth between the breezy, salt-tinged shoreline and the furnace of a room she was sitting in.

Yan Lie was definitely using her account as his personal QQ diary, recording his daily life like journal entries.

Fang Zhuo always replied simply and briefly, giving him no opening to say “then come see for yourself” — because she didn’t know how to turn him down a second time.

July 15th.

Fang Zhuo told her students classes would be suspended for a few days, and went up the mountain early to tidy Ye Yaoling’s gravestone. She scrubbed the stone tablet clean and pulled away as much of the encroaching weeds as she could.

Ye Yaoling’s grave was set into the hillside; walking there from the house at a leisurely pace took over two hours. The path was uneven, and the slopes were muddy and steep — Ye Yuncheng couldn’t visit often, so the grave had a somewhat neglected air about it.

Fang Zhuo took two photographs and sent word to Ye Yuncheng saying he didn’t need to come back this time — she had already cleaned everything up herself.

Ye Yuncheng replied with: You’ve worked hard.

Early the next morning, when the weather had turned blessedly cool for once, Fang Zhuo put on a hat, shouldered her bag, and set off half-walking, half-jogging up toward the mountain.

On the way she thought about what she might say, but had forgotten half of it by the time she was halfway there. By the time she stood before the gravestone, nothing remained but silence.

Occasions with any kind of commemorative meaning always seemed to be Fang Zhuo’s weakness. She had no way of coming up with anything meaningful to mark these particular days.

This time, though, she made a small indulgence — she bought two carnations and gathered a few other wildflowers along the way, and arranged them in front of the stone.

After standing in silence before the grave for a long while, she said, a little awkwardly: “I’m going now.”

All around was still and quiet.

Fang Zhuo took two steps, then turned back: “We’re both doing well. We have new beginnings, new plans. Thank you.”

“There were actually quite a lot of things I used to want to say to you. I feel a little shy about them now. If you could understand — I think you probably would.”

“I have other things to do today. I’ll come and see you again next time.”

Coming down the mountain was much faster. Fang Zhuo jogged home, fished out her phone, and checked the time: nine in the morning.

She saw Yan Lie’s messages.

A Name Ablaze: [picture] They all come in pairs, even the footprints.

A Name Ablaze: [picture] A single soul, companion to no one.

Below the second image was a small crab flipped onto its back with all four limbs in the air.

Disturbing creatures first thing in the morning. Fang Zhuo thought his mental state was heading somewhere unhealthy.

Little Sun: [picture] Little Bald — under siege.

A Name Ablaze: ??

Little Sun: Nothing to be done — our rooster mascot couldn’t hold his own, got beat up, and had the top of his head pecked bald.

Little Sun: His eye-patch came off, and roosters pick fights when they see another of their kind. But Uncle Liu helped me get a few new ones from someone else — he should be fine now.

A Name Ablaze: My heart is broken!

Alarmed, Yan Lie grew worried that the succulent he’d left at home would meet the same unjust fate as Little Bald, and quickly sent his father Yan Chengli a text.

Yan Lie: Dad, is my succulent still okay?

Yan Chengli: It’s fine.

Yan Lie: Send me a photo!

Yan Chengli thought this was inexplicable, but jogged from the study over to take a picture for him.

Yan Lie looked at it and let out a breath of relief.

Yan Lie: Push that little figurine in a bit — don’t leave it by the window, the wind will blow it off.

Yan Chengli considered his words, then asked: That little Fang girl — is she the one who used to sit next to you?

Yan Lie didn’t answer. He had already switched back to QQ.

A Name Ablaze: I’ve been taking good care of you. [picture]

A Name Ablaze: Is there something you forgot to say to me? I thought you’d send it at midnight, but I ended up waiting until two in the morning.