During the National Holiday, Wei Qingyue sprained his ankle playing basketball. The letter was one he unfolded idly one evening, lying on the balcony with nothing to do.

He had received many letters. He usually tossed them aside without a thought. Wei Qingyue felt entirely unmoved by this sort of infatuation common among middle school students. He had never liked a girl. Not once.

Growing up, the melodramatic circumstances of his life had already given him more than enough to deal with. He didn’t understand what the point was of liking someone.

If there was any coincidence at all, it was this moment: the lingering light was gentle, like a pair of tender hands resting on him, and he opened the first letter.

The girl’s handwriting was like a primary school student’s — excessively neat. Wei Qingyue’s first impression was unfavorable; he unconsciously furrowed his brow ever so slightly.

“Hello.

I know this letter may intrude on you, but I couldn’t help myself. I imagine this might be just one of many letters you’ve received — nothing special — so if these words do reach your eyes, that itself already feels like good fortune.

If you do open this letter, I wonder what moment it might find you in. I don’t know how these pages will pass through your hands, or what it might feel like when these words first enter your eyes. Perhaps nothing at all.

But I want you to know: I wrote this letter at night.

Night is my favorite time. Many of my classmates are afraid of the dark, but I’m not. The night is quiet and still, and I find it makes me feel safe — especially when I have something on my mind. The darkness is like a barrier that shuts out all the noise, and I can sit alone and think, and no one knows. So I chose the moment I love best to pick up my pen.

I wonder which part of the day is your favorite.

It’s autumn now. I don’t know if you’ve noticed — if you stand in the corridor outside the classroom and look toward the southeast, you can see the plane trees near the library. Their leaves have already begun to turn yellow. By winter, they’ll be bare, like an old monk with a smooth, broad crown of bone.

Somehow, whenever I think about the few beautiful corners of the school, the thought that they may have once held your gaze makes me very happy — as though you have given them new life and soul (is that too much?). Of course, it’s not entirely that. Even if you’ve never noticed them at all, I love Mei High’s surroundings.

I think I may have written a great many useless things — idle things, childish things. I hope someone as serious about studying as you won’t hold that against me. I would like to stay up all night writing these useless words to you, but that’s impossible, because I also have to study, and I have to prepare for university — as I’m sure you do too. May I ask, rather boldly, what university you have your heart set on? I want to go to Beijing for university. My grades aren’t good enough for a top school — I’ll probably end up somewhere quite ordinary. I may be the only person who wants to go to Beijing for university because of the writer Yu Dafu and his essay “Autumn in the Old Capital.”

You don’t have to answer any of this. As long as this letter reaches your eyes, I’m already happy.

In case this letter gets thrown away and someone picks it up and reads it — whoever you are, please don’t laugh at me too much. Thank you.

Oh — there are stray cats outside the window, calling out one after another. I saw them in the daytime, with their jet-black eyes — they look at you for a moment, then turn and walk away without a sound. My grandmother often takes leftover food out to feed them.

I wanted to end on something lasting and graceful, but the cats have rather broken that spell — so I’ll stop here. Take care.”

The letter ended abruptly.

What is all this? Wei Qingyue read it with a steadily creasing brow. Was this what a girl’s love letter looked like? He had opened one or two before. He didn’t think it had been like this.

But he was forced to admit — he had read to the end with patience. Maybe, possibly, simply because someone else also loved the night the way he did.

Only then did Wei Qingyue notice: no name in the salutation, no signature at the close. Meaning this letter, had it not been delivered specifically to him, could have been addressed to anyone.

At the time, when the boy from the neighboring class had handed it over, he hadn’t paid any attention to the girl’s name. Now, no matter how he tried to recall it, there was only a vague, faraway sound.

But it didn’t matter. Wei Qingyue knew this sort of thing would always run its course — the only question was how long. He wouldn’t write back. Nor did he have much interest in finding out who liked him.

Especially one with such poor handwriting. How had he managed to read through it? Absurd.

He folded the letter and tossed it into the storage cabinet on the balcony. The compound had planted osmanthus trees, and their fragrance drifted in thick waves, one surge after another, rising with the wind like a flood tide. The boy suspected every residential compound in the city had flowers this pungent. He got up and closed the window.

The holiday was long. The municipal library was crowded every day, and Jiang Du came several days in a row — but the figure she was hoping to see never appeared.

She came home feeling deflated. Even her grandmother’s cooking tasted of nothing.

At her desk, surrounded by stacks of books and study materials, she worked through subject after subject without end. Every now and then she lifted her head to stare out the window, thoughts drifting. The moment she thought about the letter she had actually written to Wei Qingyue, a wave of mortification crashed over her — she’d turn and throw herself face-first onto the bed, burying her head under the pillow.

She held her breath for ten seconds before letting go, and every breath she drew afterward was accompanied by a ferocious pounding of her own heart.

Jiang Du rolled across the bed involuntarily.

How could I have written that? The worst of it was, the more she replayed it, the more embarrassed she became. And yet she also knew — she would fall into this again. She’d write another one.

Outside, her grandmother knocked on the door. Jiang Du shot upright and quickly straightened herself.

The door opened to her grandmother’s smiling face: “Darling, Auntie Li downstairs sent you a gift card for Xinhua Bookstore — you can buy books with it. Here you go.”

Jiang Du’s eyes lit up. She could buy more books — and in a sense, for free. She didn’t like to take advantage of people, but receiving a book card from Auntie Li genuinely delighted her.

“Your mother…” The old woman, seeing that reaction, reflexively continued the sentence before catching herself and cutting it short. Meeting her grandmother’s evasive gaze, Jiang Du felt something rush upward into her chest, churning and surging. She nearly let a question slip out.

But she didn’t — she said nothing, just offered a sweet smile, as though she hadn’t heard a thing: “I’ll give Auntie Li one of my little potted plants as a thank-you gift.”

Those were seedlings her grandfather had brought back from the countryside over the summer. Jiang Du had been tending them and they were all thriving, full of life.

The break ended, and Jiang Du never encountered Wei Qingyue at the municipal library. In the final two days, she ran into a few classmates from her own class by chance. They chatted idly — about university aspirations, about which classmates came from wealthy enough families to study abroad. Wei Qingyue’s name came up offhandedly in the conversation, and Jiang Du sat among them like a quiet little creature, listening in silence, inwardly regretting only one thing: why hadn’t she asked him, that day, which country he planned to go to? Which university?

On the final afternoon of the National Holiday, classmates gradually returned to school, and by evening study hall, the classroom was still buzzing — days of accumulated things left unsaid all needing to come out at once.

The letter, it seemed, had come to nothing. Passing by Class One’s corridor, Jiang Du let her eyes dart sideways with a quick glance — but too fast, and all she caught was the blur of overlapping figures, nothing more.

Come Monday’s flag-raising ceremony, Wei Qingyue was conspicuously absent. Jiang Du blinked and confirmed it several times. Still no sign of him.

That was very strange.

He was the flag-bearer. How could he not be here on a Monday? He also hadn’t shown up at the library during the entire holiday. Had he fallen ill? Or… had he gotten into a fight with someone?

Under that impulse, even the most well-behaved and dutiful girl could conjure a surprising measure of reckless courage. After agonizing for a few seconds, Jiang Du quietly tugged at Zhang Xiaoqiang’s sleeve, who was standing in front of her: “My stomach hurts. When the ceremony’s over, can you tell Teacher Xu that I went to the bathroom?”

Heaven knew she had learned to lie. Her face was flushed, her heart racing.

Fate must have been punishing her — the moment she slipped away, her stomach actually began to ache faintly. Jiang Du was astonished at how swift the retribution was, deeply vexed, and had no choice but to run toward the bathroom after all.

The main teaching building had bathrooms on every floor — smaller ones. To the left of the building, near the ginkgo grove, there was also a much larger bathroom that people would walk down to use when the ones upstairs were too crowded.

Dappled sunlight filtered loosely through the trees.

Jiang Du spotted a figure suddenly — standing there, smoking openly and without any concealment. After a whole holiday, she wasn’t sure if it was her imagination, but he seemed to have grown taller. She was reminded, for some reason, of the trees in a primeval forest — no, not the trees themselves. More like the nameless plants growing beneath them, seizing every ray of sunlight without hesitation, climbing upward without missing a single chance to grow.

The boy saw her too. At first, no expression — only the still, sharp edge of someone coiled with a quiet authority. That look, inexplicably, struck Jiang Du as both novel and funny. She genuinely couldn’t hold back — the corner of her lip bent.

So he hadn’t gone to the flag-raising. He was hiding here, smoking. How did he always manage to give off this aura of a wayward, untamed boy?

As though sensing that faint, barely-there smile, Wei Qingyue acknowledged her with a greeting, calling her by name. Jiang Du composed herself and nodded, asking with studied casualness: “You didn’t go to the flag-raising?”

Her stomachache had been completely forgotten.

Wei Qingyue only smiled. He pinched the cigarette between forefinger and thumb, drew several long drags, and said: “What a coincidence — you always manage to catch me. Don’t go reporting me to the discipline office, or I’ll knock you around.”

Listen to that — was that something a first-place student should be saying?

Jiang Du wanted to appear more at ease, but the memory of that letter surfaced again, and the feeling was like being caught fully exposed by Wei Qingyue — he didn’t know it was her who wrote it, but she was mortified all the same. It was too shameful.

She stood there with a burning face, fumbling for a moment before managing: “I don’t like talking behind people’s backs.” Everything else she wanted to say — urging him not to get into fights, not to pick up adult habits like smoking — died somewhere on the way to her mouth. Looking at him in that untameable, untroubled state of his, Jiang Du understood, for the first time, what it meant to want to speak but find, upon opening your mouth, that words had already left you.