The monthly exam results came out a week later — nine subjects total. That day, a cold front happened to arrive, and the skin tightened all at once, dry and taut. Jiang Du had always been very sensitive to changes in the weather. If early autumn had carried a hesitant, lingering quality, then this time, the cold had truly arrived all at once.

Waiting for the scores was like having a string of wind chimes hanging in the heart — every time a teacher walked in, there came a tinkling ring. Nearly every subject teacher was asked the same question: *Has this subject been graded yet?*

The class rankings were posted beside the timetable, while the grade-wide rankings had to be checked at the notice board.

The class monitor and Zhang Xiaoqiang were responsible for posting the rankings. The classroom erupted into a buzz of noise. Jiang Du felt her heart swell enormously, so large that her chest could no longer contain it — it seemed ready to leap out and pound freely. Every time she was nervous, her heart gave her unbearable trouble.

“I’ll look for you, hold on!” Wang Jingjing threw herself into everything with the enthusiasm of someone who loved to be in the thick of things. She squeezed to the front and stretched up on her tiptoes as hard as she could, hearing the people around her cry out in surprise: “Zhang Xiaoqiang is first! The class monitor is second!”

“Wow, I wonder how Zhang Xiaoqiang’s first-place ranking compares across the whole year level?”

“I already looked! Wei Qingyue is first in the whole grade! Zhang Xiaoqiang, you’re ninth in the grade!”

Zhang Xiaoqiang shook her head. The monthly exams at Mei High were never simple. Still, she felt that her answers had come fairly smoothly during the exam — yet the result was ninth place. That score, she could only say, hadn’t been a disaster, but it still fell short of her own goal. After all, she had entered Mei High as the second-ranked student on the entrance exam.

When a top student underperforms, and when an ordinary student underperforms — those are two entirely different things.

“You’re fifteenth, I’m twenty-first.” Wang Jingjing came running back to tell her, patting her chest with relief. “Not bad, not terrible — I thought I’d be near the bottom! Ha ha ha!”

It was clear that Wang Jingjing was quite pleased. Why? Because she simply didn’t care much for studying — she was carefree and easygoing, always sneaking romance novels on the side, endlessly lost in daydreams. Jiang Du worked far harder than she did, yet she couldn’t help admitting that Wang Jingjing was actually probably a very clever girl. Otherwise, she couldn’t have placed around the middle of the class so effortlessly.

As for Jiang Du herself — fifteenth place, fifteenth in the class. It surprised her a little. She had assumed she was probably around twentieth, and in a class of just over forty students, heaven only knew how invisible the students hovering around the middle must seem to their teachers.

When parents asked, teachers always gave the same answer: *The child is average, more or less keeping up with the coursework, but not outstanding — still room for improvement.* A whole cluster of students, faces blurred together, receiving word-for-word identical evaluations.

But at around fifteenth place, things were just slightly different. Jiang Du was genuinely happy inside — her efforts hadn’t been wasted. She wasn’t so mediocre after all, was she? Even the most introverted girl had her own quiet pride, and especially so when Wang Jingjing told her that her Chinese language score was actually higher than Zhang Xiaoqiang’s.

Pressing down the smile tugging at the corners of her mouth, Jiang Du said to Wang Jingjing: “Let’s not compare ourselves to others — let’s compare ourselves to who we were before. I hope we’ll both keep improving next time.”

“Come on, let’s go look at the grade rankings!” Wang Jingjing grabbed her hand and ran downstairs.

Lin Haiyang stuck to them like a barnacle, trailing along the whole way. He’d placed twentieth in the class this time — just two points more than Wang Jingjing — and over those measly two points, he was swaggering in front of Wang Jingjing like he’d conquered the world.

The notice board wasn’t as crowded as expected. A sparse stream of students from various classes drifted through. Without question, Wei Qingyue’s name gleamed at the top in first place. Jiang Du tilted her head back, excitement and shyness tucked quietly in her heart. Occasions like this — where she could openly, legitimately stare at Wei Qingyue’s name — turned out to be plentiful enough. When she realized this, it felt as though sunlight had filled her entire mind.

Chinese scores were always listed first. She looked, and there it was — her score, 141, one point more than Wei Qingyue’s 140. It was the only subject where she had surpassed him. Jiang Du’s head buzzed, her whole body flushed with warmth. She knew it was simply that she was too happy. She harbored no wild delusion that she could ever catch up to Wei Qingyue. It was just one subject — one subject where she could stand beside him as an equal. It felt as though the distance between them had narrowed just a little. Even if, perhaps, only in her own eyes.

In summer, the cicadas outside the window would call without cease, and their singing would spread the heat across every street, every corner of the entire city. Right now, Jiang Du burned with that same restless heat — like a sun had fallen into her heart, brilliant and blazing. The cold air seemed to retreat entirely from the real world.

That day, Class Two’s Chinese lesson was scheduled after Class One’s, so Jiang Du’s Chinese exam paper was borrowed by the Class One teacher first.

Class One carried a kind of restrained pride. Twenty out of the top hundred students in the grade came from their class — quite remarkable, considering there were eighteen classes in the first year of high school.

It was a shame that Wei Qingyue had lost points in Chinese. He rarely memorized texts — whatever poetry or classical prose he’d studied, he learned in the moment. If he remembered it, he remembered it; if he didn’t, he wouldn’t sit there drilling it over and over the way other students did. The teacher found him exasperating, saying that Chinese was the only single subject where he wasn’t ranked first, and that he was fully capable of scoring higher than that Class Two student, Jiang Du.

He paid it absolutely no mind.

“The highest Chinese score in this month’s exam belongs to Class Two’s Jiang Du.” The teacher held up the exam paper and shook it. “Look at this — the handwriting is delicate and elegant, a pleasure to the eyes. I always tell you all to write your characters properly, and some of you just won’t listen. How do you think the grading teacher feels looking at your handwriting that looks like a dog chewed through it?”

“Have them dragged out and executed,” came a fearless voice from somewhere below, and the class erupted in laughter.

Wei Qingyue smiled silently along with them. He had practiced calligraphy before — his handwriting was bold and commanding — and the Chinese teacher unquestionably admired his hand. But she disapproved of the fact that the top student refused to memorize texts. Wei Qingyue possessed a genuinely astonishing memory: even without memorizing, he consistently scored high in the humanities subjects. If he were actually willing to memorize, he would be perfect.

“As for the essays, Wei Qingyue and Jiang Du scored the same — both very high — but personally, I prefer the writing style of Class Two’s Jiang Du.” The Chinese teacher deliberately glanced over at Wei Qingyue as she said it — perhaps intending to cut down his sharp edge, or perhaps hoping he wouldn’t grow too proud, reminding him that in Chinese at least, he did have a rival.

Unfortunately, Wei Qingyue was a rather proud person. Wei Zhendong’s years of domestic violence had cultivated in him a serious streak of defiance. He disliked being lectured, and only endured it because he understood the teacher’s intentions were good.

The teacher began reading Jiang Du’s essay aloud.

Wei Qingyue sat below and listened to every single word without missing one. Something small and fragmented flickered briefly in the boy’s eyes. After class, he asked the teacher if he could see Jiang Du’s exam paper. The teacher assumed his competitive spirit had been provoked, and smiled with a knowing expression.

Very delicate handwriting — the paper clean and neat. It was very much like… her, as a person. Wei Qingyue suddenly recalled the few times they’d crossed paths unexpectedly: a clean face, a clean expression, a clean voice when she spoke. Only, she was very easily embarrassed.

He even remembered that someone in the boys’ dormitory had mentioned Jiang Du’s name before. She undeniably had the kind of appearance that a certain type of boy liked. Wei Qingyue had never paid much attention to whether other people were attractive or not — he had long since decided that all girls were more or less the same.

Jiang Du was very fair — an exceptionally clean kind of fairness. Wei Qingyue finally recalled his own surprise at just how fair she was.

He looked at the essay for a while, then returned the paper to the teacher promptly. The teacher teased him: “Not going to study it a little more?”

This incident — to be precise, the incident of the Class One teacher publicly reading Jiang Du’s essay aloud — traveled back to Class Two in less than one break period.

Jiang Du inexplicably became a kind of female hero in everyone’s hearts, because Class One was always making snide, condescending remarks about Class Two leaving trash by their classroom door during cleaning duty; always complaining that Class Two’s discipline was poor and too noisy; always doing morning exercises more earnestly, only for Class Two to call them fools for it; always following the school dress code properly, while the most they couldn’t stand was Class Two boys rolling their school jackets around their waists to look cool… and so on, a whole heap of petty grievances, all leading to one conclusion: Class One had a superiority complex. What was there to be smug about? They were all parallel classes — so what was all the posturing for?

But Jiang Du had actually scored higher in Chinese than Wei Qingyue. It was the sweetest revenge — even one point counted as higher.

“They read your essay next door,” Wang Jingjing announced, leaning dramatically across the desk like a town crier, nudging Jiang Du who was trying to read. “You’re famous now. Everyone knows Wei Qingyue didn’t beat you in Chinese. And the boys from his class are saying you’re pretty too!”

Jiang Du immediately felt mortified.

She pressed her hand over her book, but couldn’t press down her heartbeat: “What are you talking nonsense about?”

“I’m not talking nonsense — the Class One students said it. Wei Qingyue was apparently so unconvinced he took your exam paper to look at!” Wang Jingjing’s voice was loud enough to rattle eardrums. She was like a frog after the rain — an endless chorus of croaking.

Jiang Du’s heart suddenly, for just one moment, seemed to forget how to beat. She opened her mouth, wanting to say something, but found she had absolutely no idea what to say.

Wang Jingjing seemed to have wiped the entire love letter incident from her memory entirely — her feverish determination to chase Wei Qingyue also felt like something from a previous century. Like so many other girls, her fondness for Wei Qingyue was genuine — he was so extraordinary, so dazzling, that it was completely natural for anyone to develop feelings for him. But precisely because he was unattainable, precisely because so many people admired him, the matter had become something that needed no concealment. And for that very reason, even failure was nothing to be ashamed of. There was only one Wei Qingyue — he couldn’t possibly say yes to everyone.

The world quieted. The break was extremely noisy, but Jiang Du sat alone at her desk with only one thought left in her mind: *He held my exam paper in his hands.*

Chinese was the third period of the day. Unsurprisingly, Jiang Du’s paper had been taken by the teacher and showed no sign of being returned anytime soon, so she had to share one copy with Wang Jingjing.

“Students, this time Jiang Du’s exam paper shows us that scoring 140 in the Chinese university entrance exam is not a dream — first, you cannot get any multiple choice questions wrong.” The teacher launched into an impassioned speech trying to fire everyone up, but Jiang Du kept staring at her own exam paper.

Which part had he touched? The warmth his hands had left behind would have already vanished forever, just like that pen in the library. But what a shame — the temperature of that pen had once been sensed by her, while how many seconds could a thin sheet of paper preserve? Whatever traces he’d left had long since been covered over by someone else — perhaps the teacher’s hands, perhaps the papers of the students above and below. Who could say.

Jiang Du turned her head. Outside the window, the flowers in the small flower bed not far away were beginning to wither — slowly, their colors fading to something she could no longer name.

She compiled all the mistakes from this monthly exam across every subject into a single error notebook. Xiao Xu came into class to inform everyone to prepare their materials fees. The task was divided between two people: boys were to hand their money to the class monitor, girls to Zhang Xiaoqiang.

Everyone was accustomed to paying materials fees — for most families, the amount was nothing significant, and Jiang Du was no different. Her maternal grandparents both had pensions, and supporting just her was manageable. Her biggest expense was books. There was a bookshop near the school gate that often sold secondhand books — Jiang Du had discovered it by chance and loved it. Since her exam results had been reasonably good this time, she decided to reward herself and browse the bookshop.

Compared to Jiang Du, Wang Jingjing was the very picture of someone who took zero interest in academics. She read too — romance novels, entertainment magazines, girls’ manga — and loved buying stacks of colorful diaries to copy out sappy song lyrics and misty, saccharine romantic quotes. So when Jiang Du asked if she wanted to come to the bookshop, she declined without hesitation.

The sky had turned gloomy. A light autumn rain began to fall, carrying a chill with it. Jiang Du went to the bookshop alone, umbrella in hand.

The interior of the bookshop was equally dim. The owner wore his hair long, tied into a small bundle at the back. The two fingers that perpetually held a cigarette were yellowed from years of smoking. He looked young, but word had it he was well into his thirties. His shop sold unusual secondhand books — many with faded covers. He also stocked imported cut-out CDs, which gave the place a certain cosmopolitan character and drew a steady stream of young visitors, including many students from Mei High.

“You’re back?” The owner recognized Jiang Du and greeted her.

Jiang Du gave a shy little nod.

His collection was enormous — there was a small loft above, and even the narrow staircase leading up was lined on both sides with books. If you looked carefully enough, you really could uncover some rare private-collection volumes. The shop carried the persistent smell of old mildew, as though a rainy season had been trapped inside and never quite left.

Jiang Du felt the owner wasn’t particularly tidy — the place was cluttered, and you could easily trip over a book if you weren’t paying attention.

After greeting her and exchanging a few brief words, the owner climbed the creaking staircase up to the loft to find some books for her.

She had assumed the bookshop was empty at this hour, given the rain, but around the corner, there was clearly a figure.

Jiang Du moved to approach, then noticed it was a middle-aged man wearing a hat — she couldn’t make out his face clearly — and he showed absolutely no inclination to move aside. She assessed the situation, changed her mind, and stayed where she was, leafing through the newly arrived titles.

Suddenly a strange smell drifted over — she couldn’t quite place it. She looked up, and without her noticing, the man had already closed in beside her, pressing uncomfortably close. Jiang Du felt a sudden jolt of discomfort, instinctively recoiling from this encroachment on her personal space.

“Do you like your uncle’s big treasure?” the man asked with a low laugh, his hand moving at his waist. Jiang Du was bewildered, and instinctively glanced down.

Something hideously ugly and grotesque came into view.

Jiang Du was still in a state of profound confusion and incomprehension — she hadn’t processed at all what she was looking at, only that the sight was deeply disturbing.

“Want to touch it?” the man asked her.

“How come you came to the bookshop without telling me?” A familiar voice rang out abruptly. Before she could gather her senses, a hand had settled on her shoulder, drawing her slightly back. Wei Qingyue was inexplicably also in this bookshop — his appearance equally sudden — placing himself between her and the man.

—