Jiang Ruoqiao didn’t know what she was so happy about either — but she simply couldn’t keep the corners of her mouth from curling upward.

She made a point of explaining to Lu Yicheng: “This is the bus to my high school — the one I took the most during my three years of high school.”

Lu Yicheng smiled. “Ah, I see.”

The two of them boarded the bus one after the other.

It wasn’t the time for school to be out, and it wasn’t the hour when the older students finished evening self-study. There were almost no other passengers. Jiang Ruoqiao walked lightly toward the back of the bus, found a window seat, and sat down. Lu Yicheng sat beside her. Both of them were people who noticed small things, and this was already the kind of moment that made awareness all the more acute — Jiang Ruoqiao found it strangely wonderful: she was actually riding a bus with a man, showing him the view she had looked at for three years.

Lu Yicheng leaned slightly over her to look out the window.

Was this the scenery she had seen for three years?

“I always hated taking this bus.” Jiang Ruoqiao kept her voice low, complaining with a fond sort of exasperation. “All the buses have been replaced now. Back when I was in school, they were tiny — packed with students, everyone crammed together like sardines in a tin.”

Lu Yicheng nodded, a knowing sound. “I understand — I eventually started cycling to school.”

“A classmate of my grandfather’s granddaughter was hit while riding her bike to school. Luckily nothing serious came of it, but after that my grandparents refused to let me cycle.”

It was as though being back in the place she had grown up made something loosen in Jiang Ruoqiao — she was noticeably more talkative than usual.

She had an uncharacteristic impulse to share everything. She told Lu Yicheng how stifling the bus had been in summer, how she had suffered through the smell of someone eating boiled eggs beside her in winter.

Lu Yicheng listened attentively, patiently, as though following the thread of her words back to her high school years, bearing witness to that time.

In his mind, something like a scene seemed to form: her struggling to squeeze onto a packed bus in Xi Shi, him weaving through the streets on a bicycle.

Xi Shi was far smaller than Jing Shi. From Jiang Ruoqiao’s grandparents’ home to the high school was only about twenty minutes by bus.

Getting off the bus, there was still a short walk to the school gates.

Jiang Ruoqiao and Lu Yicheng were close in age, and talking about their high school lives gave them all sorts of things to find common ground on. Looking back now, most of it was those nights and early mornings streaked with starlight and dawn — knowledge points on blackboards, the countdown on class bulletin boards ticking down the days until the university entrance examinations. Jiang Ruoqiao knew that Lu Yicheng had never dated anyone before. But now that the subject of high school had come up, she couldn’t quite help being curious. “You know, you’re almost twenty-one. In all this time, has there never been anyone who caught your attention? Anyone who ever made your heart move?”

She found it genuinely hard to imagine.

In her own three years of high school, she had also been buried in her studies, resolutely shutting out the world around her — but even she had developed a small fondness for someone in the lead-up to her university entrance examinations.

Only that small fondness had been nowhere near as important as her own studies.

But what about Lu Yicheng?

Had he truly never liked anyone?

As for her almost-boyfriend’s past, Jiang Ruoqiao wasn’t all that invested in it. Everyone had a history, and she had never gone out of her way to pry. It was perhaps the mood of this particular moment that had given her the sudden interest to ask.

Lu Yicheng, in his black down jacket with both hands in his pockets, paused his step at this and glanced at her uncertainly.

*Should he answer this question?*

He had, of course, liked someone.

But was now really the right time to say so?

Jiang Ruoqiao, reading his expression, stumbled over herself slightly. “So… before you turned twenty, did you really like anyone?”

Lu Yicheng immediately relaxed.

Before twenty.

That made the question much easier to answer.

“No.” He answered honestly, and gave a self-deprecating smile. “Had no right to — no means, no time.”

Jiang Ruoqiao asked, “What do you mean?”

“I actually don’t have that strong a sense of self-discipline,” he said — this was his honest assessment of himself.

Jiang Ruoqiao: “?”

“Lu Yicheng, that’s taking modesty too far.”

In a world where he didn’t think of himself as particularly self-disciplined, how many people could even claim to be?

“It’s true.” Lu Yicheng smiled. “If I grew fond of someone, I’d end up giving an enormous amount of thought to that person. I’ve heard of upperclassmen who dated in high school without it affecting their studies, both getting into their dream universities — that kind of thing seems like it never would have been an option for me.”

“Is that so?”

“It is.” Lu Yicheng gave a helpless nod. He tried to imagine it — if he had met Jiang Ruoqiao in high school, if he had liked her back then, he thought there was a rather strong possibility he would not have gotten into University A.

“Because I’d keep paying attention to her involuntarily. If she was in a bad mood, I’d wonder why she was in a bad mood. If she was beside me, I wouldn’t be able to focus fully on studying. And…” Lu Yicheng paused. “If she were spending a lot of time with some other boy, I’d probably be restless and unhappy about it. Given all that — do you think I’d be in any state of mind to study?”

Jiang Ruoqiao listened to him speak, and with each sentence, her heartbeat quickened a little more.

He hadn’t said anything so remarkable, yet this was exactly how she felt.

And the more she followed his words to their natural conclusion — if in his high school years he had truly met a girl like that —

Something stirred uneasily inside her.

*Wait. Surely not. Was she turning into the kind of person who couldn’t stand the thought of her almost-boyfriend having any history, any past?*

“That’s fair,” she replied.

Far less warmly than a moment before. She genuinely couldn’t feel cheerful about it anymore — she had discovered, to her own mild horror, a possessiveness toward Lu Yicheng’s past that she had always privately looked down on in others.

Lu Yicheng didn’t notice her shift in mood. He went on lightly, “Though I’m also grateful — glad that during those most critical years of studying, I didn’t happen to meet someone I liked.”

Jiang Ruoqiao muttered under her breath, “Not *happen to meet* — more like you forced yourself not to pay attention, and if you never pay attention, of course you’d never end up liking anyone.”

Lu Yicheng said, “It truly was that I never met anyone.”

Before Jiang Ruoqiao had fully recovered her equilibrium, Lu Yicheng turned the question back on her: “What about you?”

Jiang Ruoqiao: “?”

How had the topic swung around to her so suddenly?

Lu Yicheng asked with an easy smile, “What about you — did you like anyone in high school?”

Jiang Ruoqiao’s expression abruptly turned very serious. “Can’t remember.”

Lu Yicheng laughed. “So there was someone.”

Jiang Ruoqiao laughed it off. “Mm, yes — I heard he’s put on quite a bit of weight since then.”

Lu Yicheng was visibly amused.

—

High schools generally had fairly strict rules and didn’t let people in and out freely. But Jiang Ruoqiao had let her old English teacher know in advance that she was coming to visit, so the security guard let them through. It had been two and a half years since graduation, and Jiang Ruoqiao had only been back a few times — always with other classmates, to visit a teacher they all missed. Those previous visits had been during the day. This was the first time she had come at night. The second- and third-years were all in evening self-study, and the paths on campus were unusually quiet.

Jiang Ruoqiao made a point of going around to the display case in front of the academic building.

When she found her own photo still there, she let out a breath of relief, adopting a joking tone: “Mostly I wanted to show off. If the school had taken my photo down, I’d actually be heartbroken.”

She opened her phone’s flashlight and tugged on Lu Yicheng’s sleeve, leading him to one side, pointing to a particular corner. “See that? That’s me.”

Actually, before she had even pointed, Lu Yicheng had already spotted her photograph.

Beneath the photo it read: *Jiang Ruoqiao, from Class 5 of the third-year cohort, admitted to University A.*

“This was taken in third year.” Jiang Ruoqiao smiled. “I looked so blank and clueless back then.”

Lu Yicheng mimicked her earlier phrasing: “That’s too modest.”

He said this, but his gaze remained fixed on the photograph — the seventeen- or eighteen-year-old Jiang Ruoqiao in it. High ponytail, her forehead clear and unobscured. She was wearing the plainest school uniform, and her lips were turned up at the corners, her eyes bright and lit up, so full of expression it seemed like they could speak.

Lu Yicheng thought to himself: thank goodness he had been studying in Jing Shi, not Xi Shi. Thank goodness he hadn’t gone to Xi Shi No. 1 High School.

Otherwise there was a genuinely high chance he would not have gotten into University A.

Though…

He thought for a moment — even if he had met her then and liked her then, the odds were very high it would have been a one-sided affair.

Jiang Ruoqiao said, “Wait here a moment — I’m going to see my old teacher. Her office is in this building.”

Lu Yicheng: “Of course.”

Once he was certain Jiang Ruoqiao had gone far enough, Lu Yicheng moved as furtively as a thief — and fished his phone out of his jacket pocket. He angled it toward the display case and took photo after photo of Jiang Ruoqiao’s school ID picture, but couldn’t get the resolution he wanted, which vexed him. With enough determined effort, he finally managed to capture one shot he was reasonably satisfied with.

He was simply worried that next time he came, the school might have already refreshed the display case and taken her photo down.

—

While Jiang Ruoqiao was on this nighttime tour of her old school with Lu Yicheng, Lu Siyan was perched on a small stool on the balcony, craning forward with great effort, trying to use his large eyes to discern whether the people coming back were his beloved mom.

Though the balcony was fitted with security grilles, Grandpa still wasn’t at ease and stood right behind Lu Siyan, hands steadying him, murmuring under his breath, “This is too dangerous — come down, come down. Great-grandpa’s heart is going to give out from fright.”

Lu Siyan turned around with an exasperated look. “Great-grandpa, this is the third floor. The *third* floor.”

“Third floor is still high!”

“There are security grilles on all sides — nothing’s going to happen!” He wouldn’t be tempting fate at the edge of danger. He had conducted a thorough assessment before daring to drag over his little stool.

Grandpa: “When your mom gets back, I’m telling her — let her give you a talking-to.”

Lu Siyan pouted. “But she’s not back yet! Something’s really strange! Dad’s hotel is right out there on the next street. Even if they were turtles, even if they were snails, they should be back by now!”