Having said that, Jiang Du looked up and pressed her lips together briefly.

It was strange — in the instant their eyes met, it was as though they had each caught, in some magical way, the scent of their own kind. At least for Wei Qingyue, something registered at a level just below awareness. He didn’t press for more details, only allowed a faint smile to settle on his face:

“The library will be empty tonight. Do you have somewhere to go?”

Jiang Du nodded. “I’m going to my maternal aunt’s.” Her heart was hammering. She knew it was impolite, but couldn’t stop herself from asking: “Why aren’t you going home?”

Wei Qingyue held her gaze for a few meaningful seconds — long enough that Jiang Du began to feel something stir with unease beneath her skin. Then, slowly, the corner of the boy’s mouth pulled back into something that was impossible to classify as either a cold smile or a bitter one.

“Didn’t you see for yourself?” He deflected neatly, returning the discomfort to Jiang Du. She bit her lip — it was as though she herself felt more humiliated by the memory of someone else’s embarrassment than the person who had actually lived it.

When they walked out of the library together, the dusk was perfect. It was early autumn, and the evening breeze carried a pleasant coolness. Between the high-rises, a deep scarlet sun was descending slowly — like a round orange-red rose.

People were moving in every direction, streaming away like birds dispersing to their separate destinations.

Jiang Du gripped her bag strap tightly. She had to do something. This day was coming to an end. The unexpected encounter had felt like an accidental gift from life itself. Whenever nervousness overtook her, her instinct was always to tie her shoelace — she forced herself to resist it, and with a faint tremor she could not entirely suppress, she turned to Wei Qingyue and said:

“Wei Qingyue — could I ask you about a problem? There’s one question at the end of the paper I wasn’t able to solve.”

She looked away the instant she finished. She knew the request was abrupt and unreasonable — where had she been all this time? Only when someone was about to leave did she suddenly bring it up.

Wei Qingyue did hesitate for a moment — but still agreed.

The crowd dispersed quickly, leaving no one lingering behind. The boy was entirely unhurried. He dropped his bag down and took a seat on the library steps. Seeing this, Jiang Du hurriedly pulled out her paper and pen. Her hands were shaking beyond her control, and her pen rolled away — it was Wei Qingyue who retrieved it.

She thought the ground was probably quite dirty, but had no space left to worry about that, and sat down beside him — not too close, not too far. Jiang Du felt that even the act of breathing had become something of a luxury.

“Something this simple, and you can’t do it?” Wei Qingyue laughed briefly, took her pen, rested a book on his knee as a surface for the paper, and wrote out the solution.

Jiang Du gave a self-conscious nod.

He was not a patient person — that was clear enough. His handwriting was bold and sweeping, and he moved quickly, writing out the steps in full on a blank page in her diary before asking her in rapid succession: “Do you follow?”

She didn’t follow at all, naturally. But no matter — the diary now held his handwriting, the pen had been returned to her hand still carrying the warmth of his fingers. Jiang Du resented the passage of time. She knew that residual warmth would vanish entirely from the world within a few seconds. She would only have those few seconds.

And so she gripped the pen — gripped it with a futility she knew — and told Wei Qingyue she had understood.

“Your grades are so good,” Jiang Du said, the compliment unoriginal, tacking it on to have something to say. Then, as if the thought had come to her unprompted, she remarked: “You’ll definitely get into a university like Tsinghua or Peking University, won’t you?”

“I’m going abroad,” Wei Qingyue replied. When he spoke of the future, something appeared on his face that Jiang Du couldn’t name — the setting sun lit half his face in bronze, giving it an unfamiliar and vital energy. “I won’t be going to university in China.”

Jiang Du’s heart felt suddenly like a plane that had begun to fall.

She knew, of course, that wherever this exceptional young man chose to study had nothing to do with her. Yet when he said he was going abroad, she had the sudden urge to cry — as though the words, once spoken, placed a great distance of mountains and rivers between them, and they would never meet again in this lifetime.

She didn’t know what to say in response. After fumbling for a moment, she managed: “That sounds good.”

“I’m off.” Wei Qingyue patted his clothes, slung his bag on, and offered this as his goodbye to Jiang Du.

Jiang Du didn’t move. She smiled, a shy, tentative smile: “Goodbye.”

“You’re not leaving yet?” Wei Qingyue was mildly surprised to find her rooted to the spot. He raised an eyebrow, regarding her. She was delicate in build, with a complexion of crystalline, translucent white — the kind of pallor he’d never really noticed before. Wei Qingyue suddenly realized that girls could be born with such a quality of whiteness. He had always assumed every girl looked more or less the same.

“I’m waiting for the moon to come up before I go.” Jiang Du answered softly, her thoughts fine and closely woven, impossible to fully say.

Wei Qingyue found the way she spoke interesting. Waiting for the moon to come up… He had never noticed any moon in particular. Mid-Autumn, for him, was just yesterday repeated and tomorrow previewed — nothing special about it whatsoever.

A thoughtful expression crossed the boy’s face, lasting only a few seconds. He nodded, then disappeared into the stream of people before long. After all, they had only encountered each other by chance — one accidental meeting didn’t make them well acquainted. Jiang Du watched Wei Qingyue’s retreating figure with scattered thoughts.

The evening wind rose, cool against the skin. Jiang Du found, quite suddenly, that standing here alone waiting for the moon to rise was a lonely thing — something hollow opened up inside her. Even if she spent this evening with her maternal grandparents for Mid-Autumn, she believed that when that full moon finally climbed into the sky, she would still feel this loneliness — something unprecedented, entirely new, and strange, as though she alone were left standing in a world that no one else inhabited.

After Mid-Autumn, Jiang Du returned to school. The first thing she did was buy stationery. There were many small shops near the school gate, and the girls loved gathering in groups to sift through celebrity posters, stickers, and pretty diaries and writing paper. Wang Jingjing, in addition to all of that, was especially devoted to photo sticker booths — she’d pull Jiang Du into the cramped little booths, flip through the garish frame templates, and then pose with puckered lips and peace signs, the sillier the better. Jiang Du could never manage expressions like that, and Wang Jingjing always complained she was as wooden as a plank.

The writing paper on offer was far too fussy and over-decorated. Jiang Du chose a relatively plain and simple set, while Wang Jingjing had already picked out her favorite photo sticker prints to send along with a love letter.

“Don’t you think this one’s nice? My nose looks so refined here.” Wang Jingjing admired her own sticker photos with unbridled narcissism. She then nudged Jiang Du impatiently: “Come on, we’re almost at the National Holiday break already.”

From behind them, Lin Haiyang stuck his head in. “I heard everything — you’re writing love letters!”

Jiang Du’s face burned crimson.

Wang Jingjing spun around and punched him — put some real force into it. Lin Haiyang tilted his head to dodge, still laughing, and said to Wang Jingjing: “I’ll tell you right now — the number of people with a crush on Wei Qingyue is probably your number raised to the power of N. Don’t waste your energy.”

“Mind your own business! I’ll chase whoever I please!” Wang Jingjing always spoke to boys with total abandon — though if a particularly good-looking one came along, she’d rein herself in a little and try to behave like something approaching a refined young lady, so as not to frighten him off.

“Do you really think you stand a chance against Zhang Xiaoqiang?” Lin Haiyang gossiped like the biggest busybody imaginable, deliberately lowering his voice and shooting a glance toward the academic committee member Zhang Xiaoqiang’s seat. “Even Zhang Xiaoqiang couldn’t land Wei Qingyue, and her grades are excellent, her family has money, and she’s got a certain something about her even if she’s not classically pretty.”

Wang Jingjing stared at Lin Haiyang in disbelief. “She likes Wei Qingyue too? How do you know?”

“There’s nothing at Mei High that I don’t know about!”

“Sure there isn’t!”

Jiang Du sat in silence, listening to the two of them bicker. Her limbs felt stiff, but she concealed it well — she turned away and pretended she had no interest in any of this gossip, lowering her head to read. Yet suddenly, with painful clarity, she became aware of something darker in herself: Zhang Xiaoqiang was so accomplished, and even she hadn’t won his heart. So his standards must be very high. In a way, that was actually good — it meant everyone was simply holding a secret torch for him from afar.

Jiang Du startled herself with this thought, feeling small and mean-spirited. She felt she had been revealed as someone who couldn’t bear to see others succeed.

The first letter took two full drafts and ultimately said nothing remarkable. Wang Jingjing read it and was a little deflated: “Jiang Du, this is so lukewarm. Wei Qingyue won’t feel even a flicker of my burning heart and my volcano of emotions.”

Jiang Du knew that for Wang Jingjing this was mostly just fun. She was always like that — excitable and noisy, forever announcing crushes on whoever crossed her path, falling head over heels for a stranger’s silhouette on any given school day. But her enthusiasm was usually short-lived, and being turned down didn’t embarrass her at all — she’d just go on laughing.

“A first letter probably shouldn’t be so intense,” Jiang Du analyzed earnestly. She also understood perfectly well that Wang Jingjing wasn’t really invested — after all, Wang Jingjing had come back from the whole Mid-Autumn holiday and was already visibly losing enthusiasm. If Jiang Du hadn’t brought the subject up again, Wang Jingjing would have quickly forgotten the entire plan to pursue Wei Qingyue.

There were her own private reasons for that.

But she didn’t dare let herself think about it too much. It was less a love letter than a kind of soliloquy. Teacher Xiao Xu had already informed the class that the first monthly exam would be held right after the National Holiday, which meant everyone would spend the entire break cramming — though everyone’s mouths would claim, “I barely studied, I was just playing the whole time,” which was absolutely not to be believed.

Lin Haiyang had warned Wang Jingjing to prepare herself for the letter to sink without a trace. The rumor was that Wei Qingyue, upon receiving love letters, would throw them straight into the trash without even opening them — the bin was full of shattered girlish hearts.

That’s alright. That was Jiang Du’s immediate instinct. She had already made the most pessimistic peace with herself.

Still, since Lin Haiyang knew about it now, Wang Jingjing asked him to deliver the letter. When he came back, she grabbed his sleeve with agitated excitement: “Well? What happened? How did he react?”

“No reaction at all. Didn’t say a word.”

“Did you see him throw it in the trash?”

“No — he went into the classroom. What happened after that, I can’t say.”

Jiang Du let these words settle quietly into her ears, her heart rising and falling with the tide. Her face wore an expression of tranquility. She rubbed the desk with a cloth eraser, back and forth, until the surface shone with a smooth gloss.

The school liked to grow roses — pink ones, yellow ones, white ones, but above all the deep crimson variety blazed like a cluster of brilliant fire, brilliant enough to leave an afterimage in the eye. Like a certain dazzling person who was always radiant with a light that outshone everything around him.

Before the holiday, Teacher Xiao Xu spent some time emphasizing the importance of the upcoming monthly exam, then let the class study independently. Someone started it, remarking that everyone already knew first place would go to either Wei Qingyue or Zhang Xiaoqiang — the two of them had both come from the best middle schools with the best entrance exam scores.

Zhang Xiaoqiang was clearly accustomed to this kind of talk. She smiled modestly and shook her head: “Mei High is full of hidden talent — there are no certainties.”

She had attended a strong middle school, and many of her old classmates had followed her to Mei High, so there were familiar faces throughout the class, and people spoke freely and easily with one another.

Strange — before, Jiang Du hadn’t paid much attention to Zhang Xiaoqiang. But ever since Lin Haiyang’s few careless words, she found herself unable to stop observing her — the clothes she chose, the way her expression shifted as she spoke, the consistently energetic way she threw herself into school activities, outgoing and confident and generous in all things.

All of this gave Jiang Du a wordless, ill-defined sense of inadequacy.

“Anyway, even if Wei Qingyue finishes first, it doesn’t really matter,” one of the boys remarked with pointed meaning. “He’s going abroad — it’s not like he’s competing for anyone’s university slot.” Zhang Xiaoqiang smiled and nodded in agreement.

Jiang Du heard every word.

So other people already knew he was going abroad. She had believed, somehow, that no one else knew — she had treated it as a secret to guard carefully, determined never to mention it casually, even though Wei Qingyue had never asked this of her.

Another wave of inexplicable loss swept over her.

Everyone around her talked about Wei Qingyue with easy, unthinking familiarity. She could not. She had thought their accidental encounter had given her something uniquely her own — his body warmth, his plans to study abroad. But it wasn’t so. Everything about him had always been there for anyone at Mei High to mention openly and without ceremony.

On the last day before the holiday, no reply from Wei Qingyue arrived — naturally. But that evening the sunset was extraordinary, stretching far and boundless across the sky. Jiang Du stood alone on the corridor outside the classroom for a long time, watching the clouds burn in silence, before finally going home.