Jiang Du looked at Wei Qingyue in stunned disbelief. In that moment, her secret was like a balloon stretched to its absolute limit — someone had just driven a needle straight into it — and yet she had to summon every last fragment of her will and intelligence to keep the boy before her from hearing the sound of it burst.

“Why would I write you a letter?” The words came out before she could stop them; they sounded like a challenge. But she was past caring. How strange — in the midst of adolescence, she would rather offend the boy she liked than say a single word of truth. As though admitting she liked Wei Qingyue would make her ordinary — indistinguishable from everyone else. As though keeping the secret locked away made her world singular and separate, a country unto herself.

Wei Qingyue seemed to have expected every possible response she might give. He showed not the slightest embarrassment, nor did he press further. He smiled with all the inscrutability of shifting light: “Not just anyone who writes to me gets a reply.”

Jiang Du startled again. She could not tell whether this was Wei Qingyue’s arrogance slipping through in some unguarded moment — whether he believed being written back to was the greatest honor he could bestow on a girl.

The thought made her heart grow dim. And more than dim — quietly indignant.

She didn’t know how to respond to that. She looked at him; her heart gave its helpless, insubordinate flutter; she rubbed her hands together and said: “I’ll go order the fruit platter.”

“I’ll do it.” Wei Qingyue said it in that same unhurried tone. He said he would do it — so Jiang Du stood there not knowing whether to follow or to go back. He tilted his head and gestured for her to come along. She hesitated for a few seconds, then went.

On the way back, Jiang Du suddenly called out to stop him: “Why don’t I go in first?”

Wei Qingyue let out a short, dismissive laugh: “Avoiding suspicion? There’s nothing between us worth suspecting. Look at you — you won’t even write to me.”

It was peculiar — this person, who had never seemed to particularly enjoy teasing anyone, had developed a sudden fondness for doing exactly that. Jiang Du heard that jarring word “continue” and rushed to deny it:

“I haven’t been writing to you. There’s nothing to continue or not continue.”

Wei Qingyue made a soft sound of acknowledgment, gave her a long, meaningful look, and smiled: “Slip of the tongue on my part.”

She scurried back into the private room, heart in her throat. A cluster of girls had gathered around the microphone to sing I Am a Girl. When they spotted Jiang Du coming in, Liu Xiaole grabbed her and pulled her into the group, pressing a microphone into her hands.

Jiang Du could not sing at all, and she certainly couldn’t produce the natural, unselfconscious swaying that everyone else seemed to manage with ease. She stood there stiff as a board while Liu Xiaole bellowed at Lin Haiyang and the class representative:

“Audience in the back — let me see your hands! Come on, everyone together!”

This was the classic act of impersonating a pop star, and Lin Haiyang played his part with gusto — waving his arms, wolf-whistling — until the whole thing felt genuinely like a concert.

What made it unbearable was that Wei Qingyue came back shortly after. He sat there watching Jiang Du get pushed left and shoved right in the shifting lights, and smiled again.

Jiang Du’s mind went completely blank. This was not singing — this was humiliation in progress. She was quite certain no one in the world could be more acutely mortified than she was in this moment, and she wished desperately that Wei Qingyue was somewhere other than this room.

The one mercy was that the spinning star patterns everywhere were enough to disguise everything.

When it was over, Jiang Du felt as though she’d been granted a reprieve. She set the microphone down as quickly as possible and retreated to the corner, picking up a piece of honeydew melon to occupy her mouth and chewing at it with careful, slow concentration.

“Wei Qingyue, really not going to give us one song?” Zhang Xiaoqiang asked. “Everyone’s waiting!”

Amid the collective encouragement, Wei Qingyue relented. He chose his song, shrugged off his padded jacket, gave it a casual toss — and it landed square in Jiang Du’s lap. A wave of dry, warm osmanthus fragrance washed over her face. Jiang Du instinctively caught the jacket, then caught herself, and hastily moved it aside.

What was he doing? Why throw it in her direction? But everything Wei Qingyue did carried an air of complete self-evidence. He was not performing or being coy — he had simply tossed aside a jacket. No one would read anything into it. Only she, in the private country of her own heart, had seized upon this meaningless detail and stretched it outward — stretched it into something she both longed for and believed impossible.

The jacket was not far from her; she only had to reach. Jiang Du feigned resting her hand on the sofa cushion, moving it little by little until she made contact with the edge of the fabric. Whether it was the hem or the sleeve, she couldn’t be sure. Her small finger pressed lightly on the cloth, and her expression betrayed nothing.

Wei Qingyue opened his mouth to sing — and several girls made involuntary sounds of admiration. His voice was warm and clear; he stood there in a loose, unhurried posture. The stage light caught his nose one moment, his shoulder the next. Jiang Du watched him quietly. He didn’t sing a pop song; he didn’t sing the flashy English songs everyone liked to show off.

He sang Half a Heart — a song Jiang Du had never heard before.

The opening melody was languid and lingering — steeped in nostalgia — and the lyrics, when she read them across the screen, spoke of longing that had nowhere to go.

“I didn’t realize you knew how to sing love songs, Wei Qingyue!” Zhang Xiaoqiang was the first to tease him — as only she dared. Half-seriously, she asked: “Don’t tell me you’ve got a crush on someone?”

The girls perked up immediately and turned their collective gaze on Wei Qingyue as he walked back and settled beside Zhang Xiaoqiang. He reached over and retrieved his jacket; by then, Jiang Du had long since moved her hand away.

She felt her heart suddenly seized and lifted into midair, hanging, unresolved.

Wei Qingyue drank his fizzy drink with a smile, shaking his head: “Boring. How do you manage to make everything about that? Someone has to be in love to sing a love song?”

Doesn’t like anyone. Boring. Ridiculous. Jiang Du felt as though a hammer had come down on her head, again and again. He had no feelings for anyone — and the very idea of liking someone, in his view, was a ridiculous triviality. Even Zhang Xiaoqiang, in his eyes, was someone being boring and unreasonable…

Zhang Xiaoqiang was visibly awkward for just a moment, but her ability to recover was as swift as ever. She laughed it off: “I was only joking — you’re so prickly. At least when you were teasing Jiang Du at dinner, she didn’t say a word.”

Wei Qingyue had a particular talent for generating awkwardness. He had a deeply contrary streak that surfaced at unexpected moments — having just dismissed Zhang Xiaoqiang, he could calmly reach past her to take a can of her drink and crack it open without a second thought.

Though to be fair, Zhang Xiaoqiang seemed to know her old classmate’s temperament inside out and took it entirely in stride. Fortunately, the extravagant flashing lights in the room were ample cover for the flicker of surprise that crossed Jiang Du’s face — and beneath the surprise, a faint, barely formed sadness.

Lin Haiyang was a true microphone hoarder — and his singing was genuinely good; he’d been belting away for ages without so much as a hint of hoarseness. At the end, he deliberately queued up A Rainy Night and pointed at Jiang Du: “Your favorite. Tonight you get to hear it properly — tell me how I compare.”

Jiang Du wanted to prove that she wasn’t as closed-off or as out of place as she might seem. So after the initial second of panic, she composed herself and gave Lin Haiyang a round of genuine applause.

I get along perfectly well with my classmates, she told herself quietly. I’m not Lin Daiyu. I have friends. I am not a loner.

As the song played, that autumn evening with its cold, drizzling rain floated up before her eyes — she remembered every second of that chance encounter with Wei Qingyue in the canteen, remembered the slant of the rain beneath the streetlamps.

And this song — A Rainy Night — was part of that memory.

Lin Haiyang finished his immersed performance. Jiang Du clapped harder than anyone else, her palms going slightly pink from it. Lin Haiyang preened, shoved the microphone at Liu Xiaole, and told Jiang Du: “Not bad, right?”

Before long, the music surged into something louder and wilder. Liu Xiaole had taken it upon herself to challenge something from her idol Xie Tingfeng — Alive — at full, deafening volume.

Without Jiang Du noticing, Wei Qingyue had shifted position. He had stepped out once midway through; on returning, the first thing he saw was Jiang Du clapping enthusiastically for Lin Haiyang. Beneath the backdrop of Liu Xiaole’s impassioned howling, he suddenly sat down next to Jiang Du, tilted his head, and spoke with his lips nearly at her ear:

“You like A Rainy Night? I know that song too — I sing it better than your classmate.”

He was so close. Close enough that the warmth of each breath fell against the curve of her ear. Every word arrived with startling clarity, as though placed there directly. Jiang Du’s entire body gave a single involuntary shiver; on pure reflex, she pulled back — her eyes wide and unsteady, blinking rapidly at Wei Qingyue.

He seemed to have come over solely to tell her this one thing — a simple statement of fact — and then, just as simply, he swung his long legs over her pressed-together knees and settled into the middle of the sofa.

After that, there was nothing else. Nothing at all. The music, the voices, the wild spinning lights — who sang what next, what fruit was picked from the platter, what heartbroken lyrics scrolled past on the screen — none of it left any trace in Jiang Du’s memory. Only that sentence at her ear — his breath carrying the words, impossibly real — real enough to seem like a dream; contradictory and harmonious all at once.

By the time they came out, it was early evening — the first lights of the city were coming on, neon signs beginning to shimmer along the streets, pedestrians moving in pairs and small clusters, traffic flowing steadily past. Objectively speaking, the birthday gathering had been a complete success — good food, good drink, good company. Everyone had been happy.

All the restless, peculiar emotions of the day softened subtly in the open air.

Liu Xiaole linked her arm through Jiang Du’s with easy familiarity and walked close. Jiang Du wasn’t quite used to being this physically close to people, but a shared meal and an afternoon of singing had, as if by their own logic, drawn people nearer to each other.

They walked on for a while before the group split up reluctantly — each heading their own way. Only Jiang Du was going in the opposite direction from everyone else. As for Wei Qingyue, even Zhang Xiaoqiang had no idea which part of the city he lived in.

“Jiang Du, will you be alright on your own?” Zhang Xiaoqiang asked. Before she’d finished, Lin Haiyang had already volunteered to see Jiang Du home. Jiang Du quickly insisted it wasn’t necessary: “I can take the bus — my stop is about a hundred meters from home. It’s very close. Please don’t go to the trouble.”

“Alright then, the bus is safer anyway, and there should still be ones running now.” Zhang Xiaoqiang glanced at her watch, then prepared to share a taxi with Liu Xiaole and the others. She turned and asked Wei Qingyue with a smile, “What about you — how are you getting back?”

But Wei Qingyue’s gaze had gone slightly distant. He said nothing. Everyone followed his line of sight — and saw a tall middle-aged man in a long black coat approaching. The man was striking: commanding posture, exceptionally well-dressed.

Of the whole group, only Jiang Du and Zhang Xiaoqiang had ever seen Wei Zhendong before.

In middle school, Wei Zhendong had once been invited to speak at the school as a parent representative. He had made an impression — considerable presence, genuinely good-looking. Zhang Xiaoqiang remembered him clearly; Wei Qingyue’s father was undeniably a handsome man, the sort who drew eyes the moment he entered a room.

As for Jiang Du — she had seen this man too. But the memories that came with him were violent ones. She suddenly felt more anxious than Wei Qingyue himself.

“Hello, Mr. Wei.” Noticing that Wei Qingyue seemed to have no intention of moving, Zhang Xiaoqiang hesitated for a moment, then greeted the approaching Wei Zhendong out of politeness.

Wei Zhendong was indeed tall. He had a natural air of authority that preceded him by three steps — sharp brows above the kind of eyes that smiled, he said: “Zhang Xiaoqiang — you’re the vice class representative called Zhang Xiaoqiang, right?”

The group exchanged uncertain glances; none of them knew Wei Zhendong, but it was evident from Zhang Xiaoqiang’s demeanor that she did, and the man radiated wealth and authority in every detail. The young people fell involuntarily into a slightly stiff attentiveness.

To be remembered by name by such an impressive adult — Zhang Xiaoqiang felt a quiet flutter of pleasure. She nodded: “Mr. Wei, you still remember me! I was celebrating my birthday today — I invited my classmates out for dinner. What a coincidence, running into you here.” She gestured with a smile: “These are all my classmates.”

Naturally she then looked to Wei Qingyue, feeling the next step — introducing his father — was more appropriately his to take. Strangely, Wei Qingyue showed no intention of doing so whatsoever. Wei Zhendong gave his son a thin, skin-deep smile, narrowed his eyes briefly, then turned that warm expression back to the group:

“Hello, everyone.”

“Hello — hello, sir.” The greetings came back scattered and uneven.

Only Jiang Du said nothing. She watched Wei Zhendong with something close to wariness — even hostility.

“I’ve been looking all over for you — phone off, and now here you are with your classmates.” Wei Zhendong cast his son a light, drifting glance. To Jiang Du, that glance was the prelude to a storm. She felt it instinctively, and in spite of herself, her eyes went to Wei Qingyue.

The air was piercingly cold. For no reason she could explain, Jiang Du shivered suddenly — and stepped forward:

“Mr. Wei — I was borrowing Wei Qingyue’s phone to play some games, and I ran the battery flat. I’m sorry.”

Her back teeth clenched; she felt her jaw trembling.

Wei Zhendong smiled — gracious and expansive: “A small thing. As long as you all had a good time.” He mentioned that he still had business elsewhere and told Wei Qingyue to make his own way home.

The moment he left, the group came back to life. Liu Xiaole said that Wei Qingyue’s father was extraordinarily handsome — she’d never seen a middle-aged man that good-looking — but then she noticed Wei Qingyue listening with a blank, expressionless face and stopped. Without waiting for the rest of them to finish their admiration, he stepped to the curb to hail a car.

The mood shifted — went oddly quiet. Zhang Xiaoqiang sensed it, of course. Unsure how to ask, she thought quickly, straightened up, and put on a bright smile: it was getting dark, everyone get home safe, she said — a whole stream of thank-yous, and by the time she glanced back at Wei Qingyue, he’d already flagged down a car. He gestured to the group:

“Come on. Get in.”

One by one they said their goodbyes. They watched the others climb into two cars; Zhang Xiaoqiang stuck her head out and waved. And then the street held only Wei Qingyue and Jiang Du, standing beneath the deep, ink-blue night.