That summer after the middle school entrance exams, rain was scarce. The sky held a kind of quiet, white-hot heat — burning without flame.

It was that summer that Jiang Du ended up at the police station. At the time, she was still a month away from her fifteenth birthday.

The incident had a simple enough beginning. She had taken a shortcut home on her bicycle and, passing through a narrow alley, stumbled upon a group of boys in a fight — or more precisely, a single tall boy being surrounded and beaten.

The sight immediately reminded Jiang Du of something she had seen as a very young child at her maternal grandfather’s hometown: a pack of stray dogs tearing into one of their own.

The boy lashed out with a kick — vicious and precise. Someone attempted to sneak up behind him, only to be driven back hard by his elbow, dropping to the ground in a heap.

Even so, the group gradually began to gain the upper hand. Jiang Du watched, her face draining of color, as one of them lifted half a brick and brought it down toward his head. He tilted his head just in time; the brick scraped across the corner of his forehead, and the blood that followed was so red. She had no idea where the courage came from, but she shouted at the top of her lungs: “The police are coming!”

If a story must have a beginning, it wasn’t the cloud blooming furiously in the sky overhead, nor the neighbor’s electric fan churning away, nor the cars on the street each bound for their own destination. The beginning of everything was simply those five words: “The police are coming!”

What went wrong was that the lie only gave the fighting boys a brief pause. Jiang Du had no idea how they figured out she was lying, but that miserable business somehow dragged her into it — her hair clip was knocked off, the front basket of her bicycle was dented, and she was so frightened her crying didn’t even sound like itself.

The police did come, eventually. Everyone was taken away.

At the police station, the boys were giving statements. From time to time, the stern voice of an officer reprimanding someone drifted through the air. The boy who had been beaten hadn’t wiped the blood from his face. He tilted his head back, and his voice floated through the heat of summer, untouched by any emotion.

“Young lady, even when you’re doing the right thing, you have to know your own limits — don’t you think?” The officer took one look at Jiang Du — quiet, gentle, and rather delicate in appearance — and his tone softened into something helpless.

She couldn’t bring herself to cry anymore. She pressed her lips together, blinking back tears, and in her peripheral vision she caught a pair of eyes that held not the slightest trace of gratitude.

The boys who had been doing the fighting were students from a vocational high school, suspected of extortion.

After that, parents had to be called.

When asked about her parents, Jiang Du shyly and softly pleaded with the officer — she could go home herself, please, please don’t call her grandparents to come.

Outside the window, a kind-hearted man had already taken it upon himself to repair her broken bicycle.

By the water basin in the courtyard, the boy was rinsing the wound at the corner of his forehead with tap water. He was bent over at the waist, a lean and slender curve.

Jiang Du watched him through the glass, as though looking into another, clearer world. When he raised his head, he saw her too. Neither spoke a word. Jiang Du immediately looked away, her palms burning — though in truth, the scraped skin on her own hands hurt quite a bit as well.

She reached into the pocket of her skirt and pulled out a small pack of tissue paper.

The tissues had grown slightly damp from being held in her palm. By the time Jiang Du walked over, the boy had just straightened up. He was very tall, his hair dotted with beads of water. Below that, a face with clearly defined features.

Their eyes met without warning. Scorching summer.

“Here, for you.” She held the tissues out to him. Her voice was soft and light, like a handful of tender young grass in spring.

He didn’t take them. Instead, he lifted the hem of his shirt and wiped his face with it in a rough, careless swipe. His gaze passed directly over her, toward a figure approaching from the doorway.

His throat moved — water still clinging to the skin — catching the light, shimmering faintly. His expression was one of controlled composure. He stood exactly where he was, without moving. A few drops of water he hadn’t wiped away still clung to his dark, dark brows.

Jiang Du pressed her lips together tightly. Her ears burned as she put the tissues back in her pocket and stepped aside. Only after the tall man who had come to collect him entered the police office together with the boy did she slowly raise her head and steal a few glances after them.

What followed was entirely beyond anything Jiang Du had expected.

Coming out through the doors of the police station, she crouched down and slowly turned the pedal, convinced the bicycle chain didn’t feel quite right.

It was this brief pause that allowed her to witness the uncle who had come to collect the boy — who suddenly turned, his expression transforming completely, the civility he had shown the police vanishing in an instant. A single slap landed hard, sending the boy staggering sideways. Jiang Du froze.

The beating did not stop at that one slap. The man’s violence came down like a sudden, furious storm. In the end, the boy — mouth bloody, clutching his abdomen — was shoved into a black sedan. It looked far worse than anything the group fight had produced.

Jiang Du watched in stunned silence, a speechless, bewildered dread crossing her face.

But just before he got into the car, the boy clearly glanced in her direction — just once, impossible to say whether deliberately or not.

In that instant their eyes met, his gaze was blank and clear. He was in a terrible state, yet he seemed utterly indifferent to it, as though being beaten were simply the natural order of things — no resistance, no pain, as unremarkable as breathing.

That summer, she found herself thinking back to that pair of eyes again and again.

Her best friend Wang Jingjing would come to stay with Jiang Du whenever her parents went on work trips. Wang Jingjing would lean close to her ear, breathing warm air against it, and say: “My mom bought me a bra — did you know? I’m done with undershirts. A real grown-up one. Do you have a bra?”

Jiang Du’s face went hot in the darkness. Wang Jingjing took her hand, careful and exploratory, and placed it against something soft. Jiang Du’s heart hammered in her chest.

Wang Jingjing continued: “My mom says once a girl develops enough, she should start wearing one. Feel that — right? I’m not like you, Flat-Chest Jiang Du.”

She said it while muffling giggles and snickers at the same time. Jiang Du’s face burned even redder.

“Can I feel yours too? Is that alright?” Wang Jingjing negotiated with her — then went ahead and gave Jiang Du a quick feel anyway. “Oh!” She clapped a hand over her mouth, eyes going wide. “When did you develop too?”

Jiang Du pulled her grandmother’s silk-filled blanket, made back in the countryside, up over her face. Her voice came out muffled: “I don’t know either.”

Wang Jingjing kept laughing — stifled laughter, careful not to alert the adults next door, pressing the sound down until it came out barely above a wheeze, like a little hen gasping for air. Wang Jingjing was formidable. She was fierce and outrageous, always managing to reduce the boys in their class to total submission. Her deskmate, a boy named Tan Kai, had his ear twisted by her on a regular basis while she demanded to copy his math homework — utterly unreasonable about it — and yet, after three years of this, Wang Jingjing somehow pulled off a stellar performance on the middle school entrance exam and got into the very best school, Mei High, right alongside Jiang Du.

Tan Kai didn’t even score as well as she did. It was genuinely baffling — she’d been copying his homework for three years, and still managed to outscore him?

Some things in this world simply defy all logic.

For instance, Wang Jingjing had been using sanitary pads since seventh grade. Jiang Du was actually a few days older than her, and here she was, about to start high school, and had still never used one.

But thank goodness — after Wang Jingjing spent a few nights staying over and whispering with her in the dark, Jiang Du woke one morning just before the start of the new school year to find a red stain on her sheets.

Wang Jingjing immediately gave her a thorough education on the matter, took her to pick out sanitary pads, showed her how to use them, and issued a string of reminders: don’t get cold, don’t eat ice cream… on and on, fussing like a little old woman.

The bathroom held the faint, delicate scent of a first period, along with the nameless sorrow of adolescent girls — slightly embarrassing, like a piece of finely-grained jade stone being slowly turned over and over in the palm.

At this point, it began to rain in the city — steadily, persistently. Her grandmother glanced at the waste bin and asked Jiang Du if her period had started. For reasons she couldn’t quite explain, Jiang Du felt a sudden wave of shame. Outside the window, raindrops fell against leaves and branches. Time felt like a bronze mirror overgrown with green patina — damp and misty, the absolute opposite of the brilliant summer sun that had come before.

Jiang Du worked to scrub the bloodstains she had accidentally gotten on her underwear. She embarrassed easily. The faint mark that wouldn’t quite wash out of the white cotton underwear was, in this moment, the very shape of her embarrassment.

That late summer, the young girl Jiang Du truly stepped into the long, hazy stretch of adolescence.