“A Summer of Skylarks”

[01]

It had just rained that day. The air wasn’t too hot.

But summers in the south are humid — and Chucheng, relative to Beicheng, is definitively southern — all along the road from Jiangcheng to Chucheng, the trees grew in a green so deep and saturated it looked as though it might drip.

Yan Sishi slept most of the journey — sometimes feigning sleep, sometimes truly asleep.

The person who had come to pick him up at the airport was a subordinate of Huo Jizhong’s named Luo Weiguo. The man was thorough and attentive, but his enthusiasm overflowed into something closer to flattery, and that was where he fell short.

Yan Sishi neither liked nor was skilled at dealing with people like this.

By the time the car reached Chucheng, it passed through a factory district on the outskirts. Luo Weiguo went inside to handle some matter and, on his way out, ran into a girl who seemed to be the daughter of a relative or friend, waiting for a ride.

Luo Weiguo, looking to do an easy kindness, offered her a lift and asked for Yan Sishi’s opinion.

Truthfully, Yan Sishi disliked complications — but sometimes his aversion to complications ran so deep that he simply couldn’t be bothered to say much of anything. Whether some stranger hitched a ride or not, it wasn’t important enough to warrant an opinion. He gave a faint, indifferent “mm” and left it at that.

The girl was clearly uncomfortable when she got in, aware that she was imposing.

He could sense her watching him from the corner of her eye. But there was no scrutiny in her gaze — only a plain and simple curiosity.

He had expected that with a third person in the car, Luo Weiguo would rein in his excessive eagerness to please. But perhaps because Yan Sishi had been asleep for most of the journey, and had only just “woken up,” Luo Weiguo seemed to feel the need to seize the moment and prove his dedication.

The conversation left him inwardly exasperated, but out of respect for his maternal grandfather, he could not shut it down with any real firmness. He wanted to put his earphones back in, but remembered that his iPod had long since run out of battery.

It was then that he noticed the MP3 player in the girl’s hand.

He had expected her to refuse — they were strangers, after all, with no reason for such a gesture.

But she handed it over without hesitation.

For the remainder of the drive into the city, Yan Sishi did not sleep. He lay with his eyes closed, listening. The girl’s playlist was full of Japanese songs — probably theme music from anime or drama series.

From time to time he opened his eyes slightly, and would catch her staring hard at the MP3’s screen, visibly tense. He didn’t know why, and didn’t ask.

The car dropped the girl off first. He returned the MP3 and thanked her.

Just before she got out, she glanced back at him — a look as though she had something to say. But she didn’t say it. She only thanked Luo Weiguo and stepped out.

This final glance, though, gave him a clear view of her eyes.

A lovely, clean pair of eyes — one that made you think, naturally and without effort, of go stones, black and white, resting at the bottom of a white ceramic bowl filled with clear water.

[02]

The small incident in the car made little impression on Yan Sishi afterward.

Too many things were draining him of energy — especially Huo Qingyi.

The Yan Family maintained a careful silence about Huo Qingyi’s condition. In truth, so did his maternal grandparents. Publicly, they only said she had fallen ill. Their reasoning was that small cities were even less accepting of mental illness — and if word got out that Huo Qingyi had “lost her mind”: “Little Yan, your studies and daily life would be affected too.”

His grandfather’s well-meant concern wasn’t something Yan Sishi had much standing to argue against. In order to give him access to a better education, his grandfather had personally led the effort to establish an international track at Mingzhang Secondary, the best school in Chucheng, and had gone to considerable lengths to bring in teachers from Jiangcheng or other larger cities.

His grandfather often said to him: Little Yan, having to come back to a small place like this — it must be hard on you.

Yan Sishi didn’t find it hard. Only powerless — because whether or not there was an international track, he could still apply to the schools he wanted. But when it came to Huo Qingyi, it seemed no amount of intelligence could offer any solution at all.

There weren’t many students in the international track. One of them was a girl named Tao Shiyue, whom he already knew. His grandfather always hoped he and Tao Shiyue would spend time together, worried that he would feel out of place and alone in an unfamiliar environment.

He didn’t have many friends at Mingzhong, but he didn’t feel lonely. He often had the sense of being a mayfly drifting through a vast expanse — as if he didn’t truly belong to Mingzhong, as if he would leave eventually. And he didn’t belong to Beicheng, either.

It seemed that ever since Huo Qingyi became ill, he had lost any feeling of belonging to any place at all.

Even without making an effort to publicize it, the origins of the international track and Yan Sishi’s family background quickly spread through the school by themselves.

Many people treated him as someone exceptional. Some approached him with preconceptions, assuming he must be aloof and difficult to reach; others who sought him out seemed to always carry some ulterior motive — curiosity, a desire to show off, or something else.

Because of this, Yan Sishi had even less interest than before in making the first move toward anyone.

Wang Chen was an exception among these people. Wang Chen sat in front of him and, naturally enough, turned to him with English questions. From there, they gradually became familiar.

Wang Chen had a kind of absorption in his own inner world — a quality of being entirely self-contained. Many people said his emotional intelligence was low, but he paid them no mind, always going his own way.

If there was one other person he could say felt completely effortless to be around, it was “that girl.”

He didn’t learn “that girl’s” name was Xia Li until they met the second time.

That day, he was going to the bookstore to buy something.

His childhood friend Wen Shubai could be a little thoughtless sometimes — or perhaps his way of showing care was to package it as thoughtlessness. That weekend, Wen Shubai had insisted he come online to play Counter-Strike together, and while they played, they kept voice chat running, talking back and forth about nothing in particular. Wen Shubai worked around to asking about his situation in roundabout ways, and he said things were alright. They wandered through all sorts of topics, and at some point Wen Shubai mentioned a film and some books he’d been into lately — said he’d read this manga that was incredibly soothing and funny, called Mushishi, and told him to check it out.

Around that time, Huo Qingyi’s condition had been deteriorating steadily. She had even begun to mistake him for Yan Suizhang. She had lost the ability to communicate rationally; no matter how he tried to explain who he was, she refused to let him near, only demanding that he get out of her sight.

His grandfather had another residence cleared for him, and Yan Sishi reluctantly moved out.

On Saturday he went to see his grandfather, but when he arrived, Huo Qingyi was asleep. Hearing that she had been more stable lately, he decided not to stay and wait for her to wake — worried that his presence might agitate her.

With nowhere particular to go, he thought of Wen Shubai’s recommendation. His grandfather had mentioned a privately-run bookstore on Yangfeng Road, which should have a wider selection than the state-run Xinhua Bookstore.

When he arrived, he found only bestsellers and periodicals like Comic Fan Monthly. Not what he’d come for.

He had made half a loop of the store when, unexpectedly, he recognized someone.

He had a good memory, so two glances were enough to place her — it was the girl from the car who had lent him the MP3. He hadn’t imagined the world would be so small; to meet again someone he’d encountered so briefly.

He took out his earphones and said hello. The girl was clearly surprised, too. Through conversation, he learned she also attended Mingzhong, and her name was Xia Li. A very summery name — the kind that made you picture the clear, shimmering surface of river water in the early days of summer.

He didn’t want to have come all this way for nothing, so he tried asking if she knew of any other bookshops that sold manga — given her playlist was full of Japanese anime and drama theme songs, she might have a lead.

She did, as it turned out.

The bookstore called Shangzhi was genuinely tiny. In that translucent, moth-wing-thin dusk, it seemed like a corner the world had simply forgotten.

He browsed the shelves at his own pace, and found a stillness he had long been without.

Xia Li was on the other side of the shelves, but she was like the slant of evening sun falling in through the door — simply present, without intruding.

By his count, she had helped him twice now, though she called it no more than a small gesture either time.

He didn’t like owing people kindness — no matter how minor the favor, he always wanted to return it in kind. So he gave her a single-volume manga as a reciprocal gift.

As he thought about it later, their friendship had properly begun from that moment.

[03]

After that, Yan Sishi spotted Xia Li twice around the school.

Once in the cafeteria — he and Wang Chen were going to buy water, and he saw her at the back of a queue at one of the serving windows. The second time was at the end of the last class one afternoon: he was about to step out of his classroom when he saw her rushing past in the corridor, evidently on her way somewhere.

It was after a monthly exam, when Nie Chuhang from Class Eighteen came by to ask about the last physics question, that Yan Sishi discovered he and Xia Li had someone in common. In a school this size, the odds were actually quite slim — his friends at Mingzhong, when you named them, amounted to Wang Chen and Tao Shiyue, and the latter he didn’t interact with all that often.

Many people had the wrong idea about him, assuming he thought himself above others.

He couldn’t be bothered to explain. He simply disliked meaningless socializing.

He liked spending time with people who were genuine and, in certain ways, single-minded in their passion: like Wang Chen, like Nie Chuhang with his stubborn dedication to physics.

So when Nie Chuhang suggested they eat dinner together, he didn’t say no.

He rarely ate out. At home, three meals a day were arranged by the housekeeper according to his preferences.

He knew that people in Chucheng liked spice, but when they were ordering that evening, he was in the middle of discussing a problem with Nie Chuhang and didn’t pay attention to what was being chosen. By the time the dishes arrived, everything was beyond his ability to eat.

He was deliberating about whether to order additional dishes when Xia Li got up and brought water for everyone, then added one non-spicy vegetable dish to the table.

Her intention had probably been to accommodate her own needs — but in doing so, she’d considered everyone at the table, and especially him, right at the moment he needed it.

A kind of consideration that hit exactly the right note.

Later, at the sports festival, Yan Sishi finished the hundred-meter final and happened to run into Xia Li in the corridor.

He had actually been heading out to buy water, and when she held a bottle out to him, he accepted it naturally — because her manner was exactly the same as it had been in the restaurant: a matter-of-course helpfulness that asked nothing in return. The reason he hadn’t accepted the water bottles from the girls waiting for him at the finish line was that he understood clearly what lay behind those gestures.

He had no interest in accepting that kind of meaning.

He took the water and was heading back to the classroom when, remembering that his phone was with Wang Chen, he turned around — and found Xia Li crouching against the wall, arms wrapped around her knees. She looked uncomfortable.

By his count, she had been considerate toward him quite a few times. So it came naturally to show some concern for her in return. When he found out she was only cold, he tossed his track jacket to her.

Sports days were honestly the sort of thing that set Yan Sishi’s nerves on edge — too loud, too much going on. But the international track had so few students, and the athletics committee representative had asked so persistently that he couldn’t refuse.

When he committed to something, he gave it everything. He ended the day with gold medals in the hundred meters and the eight hundred meters, and silver medals in the high jump and the relay race.

After the relay, he didn’t stay for the medal ceremony — he headed back to the classroom on his own.

In the evening, the school organized an outdoor film screening. He wasn’t interested. He was packing up to leave when he got intercepted by Tao Shiyue’s mother, who had come to pick up her daughter.

Yan Sishi didn’t dislike Tao Shiyue. She could be a little proud, but she was direct enough — not too taxing to deal with.

What he did dislike was the tangle of social obligations that came with her, and the way people would always try to find out about Huo Qingyi’s situation by working around to it.

Those prying inquiries only reminded him, again and again, how powerless he and Huo Qingyi were — both of them stuck in a situation with no way out.

Yan Sishi had never been a rebellious person. His core sense of self was stable enough that he didn’t need to assert himself through opposition. The kind of deliberate, performative defiance that announces I am different — he found it, honestly, tiresome.

But during that period he was genuinely adrift and deeply troubled — like being lost in a fog so thick it blocked every direction. And so he had begun turning to certain things outside himself for relief, though afterward, if he assessed it honestly, the results were minimal.

Cigarettes, for one. He was fully aware it wasn’t the nicotine — it was the act itself, a way to let some of the helpless feeling discharge as anger.

He was reaching into his pocket and finding that his lighter was gone when Xia Li appeared.

Truthfully, in that moment, he felt a flash of irritation at having his solitude interrupted. But she was on the phone — and the words that drifted over, the kind of ordinary, caring small talk you’d exchange with your mother, left him feeling unexpectedly soft inside.

She returned the lighter and the track jacket. The jacket had been washed — it carried the scent of clean laundry detergent.

She was clearly a model student — exactly the kind who followed the rules. He couldn’t quite put into words what he was thinking in that moment, but after he lit the cigarette, he asked her: “Are you going to tell a teacher?”

He realized, thinking back, that the question had come out sounding like a threat —

As if he were a well-connected troublemaker cornering a good student and asking whether she planned to report him.

What choice would a good student have in that situation?

But Xia Li’s answer surprised him. She seemed to summon a kind of courage she had to dig for, and told him there was a secret space on the fourth floor of the bell tower — a place where you could “do something you weren’t supposed to do” without any teacher coming to bother you.

That startled him. He revised his assessment of her: she might be a model student in the conventional sense, but she was certainly not the rule-following kind.

Same as him, in that regard.

He went to that secret space a few times afterward. It really was a good place — the right kind of spot to sit alone, listen to music, let the mind go blank, and allow the absurd world to temporarily forget you existed.

[04]

Yan Sishi didn’t particularly enjoy group activities.

But it wasn’t the activities themselves he disliked — it was the inefficiency of the communication that came with them.

In his view, certain things could be done far more efficiently alone than through rounds of discussion, argument, and compromise. This conclusion was confirmed for him time and again when he did group work during his undergraduate years.

The main reason he agreed to do the translation and editing work on the Xi’an Incident drama script was precisely that it was something he could handle entirely on his own, without needing to negotiate with too many people.

But to understand the overall intent of the creative team, he did attend the initial concept meeting.

Predictably, the discussion started out inefficient — the basic question of whether to write an original script or adapt one existing material went back and forth for several rounds.

Just as his attention was drifting away, Xia Li arrived late — and proposed an entirely different direction involving a historical drama. At the moment when everyone was about to spiral into another debate over which topic was better, she delivered a conclusion so persuasive and definitive that it brought the whole discussion to a clean, unified end.

He had always thought of her as someone who didn’t stand out much. Compared to her two close friends, she seemed to take more of a listening and observing role in groups. But her contribution to this meeting had been both incisive and decisive.

She was, in fact, someone with strong opinions. Forceful on the inside, restrained on the outside — an iron fist in a velvet glove.

After the translation was finished, the day they went to the library to discuss it, it rained.

He got out of the car to find a girl shivering slightly in the cold drizzle at the top of the steps. He walked over naturally and held his umbrella over her. Weather like this — getting soaked in it would mean catching a cold.

The discussion about the translation went efficiently enough. But Yan Sishi quite hoped someone would push back on the finished draft.

As the saying goes, a single leaf can blind you to the whole forest. Literature wasn’t his strongest area; what he’d achieved was, at best, something close to “faithful” and “clear.” “Elegant” was still far out of reach.

After the translation, the conversation turned to casting.

Taking on a role would inevitably mean large amounts of inefficient back-and-forth with the script writers, the director, and the other actors — which was enough to put him off. So from the beginning he had turned down the invitation to play one of the leads.

The library on a rainy day was very quiet — a good environment for studying. Besides himself, Xia Li and a few other classmates stayed as well.

He was working through a programming exercise from his textbook, but the progress was halting.

A small interruption came when Xia Li asked him about a word she didn’t know — and it gave him a moment of relief.

He noticed the book she was reading seemed to be the English original of Guns, Germs, and Steel — the same one he had recommended to Wang Chen. He didn’t ask about it, and didn’t find it particularly remarkable that she was reading it.

Some things only become evidence later, once you’ve drawn a conclusion — tiny, scattered details that start to cohere into a pattern.

At the time, he had no awareness at all.

Afterward, he gave her and her friend a ride home.

He happened to have someone coming to pick him up anyway, and the rain still hadn’t let up — a simple gesture of common courtesy, nothing worth mentioning.

Just before she got out of the car, Xia Li offered a substantive suggestion about the translation he had polished.

“Parallel structure,” “rhyme,” “momentum” — all of it pushed toward the literary register, toward precisely the “elegance” he had yet to achieve.

She had, perhaps, an intuition for English rhythm that went beyond most people.

After that, rehearsals for the drama began. Yan Sishi didn’t involve himself much in any of it — not so much out of a reluctance to be troubled, but because Huo Qingyi’s condition was worsening, and he had no choice but to pour more of himself into managing that.

The atmosphere at home during that period was tense. His grandparents were always on high alert, because the swings between Huo Qingyi’s better and worse states followed no discernible pattern.

Nie Chuhang invited him to a birthday gathering. He accepted — and then the situation at home quickly made any thought of going impossible.

On the actual day of Nie Chuhang’s birthday, Huo Qingyi “drove him out of the house.”

His driver asked whether to take him back to the separate residence. That day, the winter wind cut straight through to the bone, and he found, unexpectedly, that he didn’t want to go back to an empty villa alone. He told the driver to take him to the karaoke place instead.

Once he arrived, he realized he hadn’t thought to ask Nie Chuhang for the room number, and didn’t have his contact information.

He didn’t overthink it. He flagged a taxi to go back — and then Xia Li appeared.

It struck him, then: it seemed like there had been quite a few times when she appeared at exactly the right moment. Like the time she returned the lighter.

They went inside together. He noticed she was wearing a white knit sweater under her down jacket.

She usually wore the Mingzhong uniform blazer. This outfit suited her — there was something clean and quiet about it, like the first thin layer of snow on the tips of branches under moonlight at the very edge of midnight.

The karaoke room was noisy. His mood was poor, so he sat out everything, just put his earphones in and listened to music.

Days of accumulated sleep deprivation, combined with this kind of environment — loud enough to shut out the world, yet enclosed — sent him off quickly.

It was Xia Li who woke him. When they went downstairs, he found it had started snowing.

Huo Qingyi was from Chucheng herself. He knew it didn’t snow every year there — sometimes the winter went by with barely a scattering of ice pellets, and that counted as the season.

He wasn’t sure whether everyone from the south longed for snow, but at least Huo Qingyi did. And Xia Li did too.

Xia Li watched the snowflakes drifting down with light in her eyes.

It made him think of Huo Qingyi’s expression every winter in Beicheng when the snow came.

That pure, unguarded wonder and joy — almost exactly the same.

Afterward came the full dress rehearsal for the drama. Yan Sishi was brought in by Wang Chen to help from the outside.

He wasn’t, by nature, the type who enjoyed teaching others. But this drama did include a portion of his translation work, and he did want whatever was ultimately presented to be as good as it could be. So when someone came to ask about pronunciation, he tried his best to answer.

He noticed, however, that Xia Li was the one person who never came to ask him anything.

The day of the performance itself arrived.

He happened to run into Xia Li dealing with a problem when he got there. He remembered that she wasn’t responsible for makeup or hair, yet she looked more frantic than anyone who actually was.

She probably genuinely cared about this group effort.

He had been half on the outside of everything all along, but in that moment he felt something catch — and volunteered to help.

It was also through this that he came to see her thoughtfulness and attentiveness more clearly: the way she took a photo of the soiled collar as evidence, kept the stained garment herself and left the cleaner one for someone else, and — once the group photo was done — how she alone noticed the dropped banner, picked it up, and carefully folded it away.

She said she treasured her friendship with the students in Class Seven.

He believed her. That was her most sincere reason.

She was always sincere, generous, and without pretense.

[05]

That New Year, Yan Sishi spent it in Chucheng.

Because of Huo Qingyi, there was always a cast of gloom over the holiday.

His grandfather had brought in a new therapist, but the treatment was showing no progress with Huo Qingyi yet.

Shortly after school resumed, it was Yan Sishi’s birthday.

Birthdays and anniversaries — he had always found them tiresome. Too much unsolicited enthusiasm, all of it requiring his management.

Being the one who had to firmly decline other people’s goodwill carried its own particular weight.

So on his birthday, he stayed out of sight during every break between classes. Once the afternoon ended, he went straight to the empty classroom in the bell tower.

He had just settled in to put on his earphones when the sound of Farewell? Dear Ghost came drifting in from the school radio broadcast outside the window.

That song was remarkably obscure. To hear it played on a small school radio station was genuinely unexpected.

If the first song was a surprise, the ones that followed — Matt Duke and Sonic Youth, one after another — were something beyond a surprise.

Either someone out there happened to share his exact taste in music, or someone had specifically requested those songs for him. After all, it was his birthday.

The weather that day was clear. The air was faintly cool, and the sun had come out — a thin, pale winter light that draped the entire school grounds in a soft gold.

After Heidenröslein ended on the radio, Yan Sishi finally got up and went downstairs.

He wanted to know whether this was a genuine coincidence — or whether someone had given him an unusual kind of birthday present.

He asked the broadcasting booth attendant on duty, but got no answer.

He would be lying if he said he wasn’t at least a little disappointed — but he could also appreciate the spirit of it, the anonymous care behind it.

A blessing that didn’t impose.

He went back up to the empty classroom. It had been a long time since he’d felt anything like “in a good mood.” Today was a rare exception.

Xia Li arrived then, and shared a red bean bread roll with him.

Perhaps because of the good mood, he genuinely agreed with her that it was the best bread from the school shop.

As they went downstairs together, Xia Li made a specific point of reminding him: when he came back to this classroom in the evening, be absolutely sure to turn off the light, because she’d once been caught skipping a class here.

That confirmed what he had thought before — she was not the rule-following kind of model student.

At the bottom of the stairs, Xia Li asked if he was in a good mood.

He hadn’t realized it was so obvious from looking at him. In that moment, it was some impulse toward sharing that made him say it out loud: “Today’s my birthday. I heard a song I like.”

Xia Li wished him a happy birthday. In that instant, something lit up in her eyes — a genuine delight, like the look of someone who has gotten exactly what they hoped for.

Those bright eyes, glowing in the gathering dusk, made him pause for just a moment.

[06]

Mingzhong was preparing for its hundredth anniversary celebration in April.

Yan Sishi had no interest in large-scale events of this kind. When the homeroom teacher asked him to give the student representative speech, he declined outright.

The homeroom teacher went to Wang Chen next. Wang Chen had strong convictions about whether something was “constructive” or not, and a speech of this sort struck him as entirely without constructive purpose — so he declined as well.

In the end, Tao Shiyue took on the responsibility.

While everyone else was preoccupied with preparations for the anniversary, Yan Sishi was teaching Wang Chen basketball.

Wang Chen and basketball were not a natural combination, but he put himself into learning things with genuine dedication, which meant Yan Sishi, as the one doing the teaching, didn’t cut corners either.

A ball sailed wide and nearly hit someone — it was Xia Li, who had appeared at the edge of the court without him noticing.

He jogged over to make sure she really was unhurt, and realized it was the first time he had looked at her this closely. Her gaze shifted slightly away; in the fading afternoon light, her skin was the cool, pale white of a pear blossom.

Later, when they were buying water outside the school grounds, Wang Chen mentioned Shangzhi bookshop.

She turned her head toward him in an instant.

He immediately understood what that look meant, and felt somewhat sorry for having told Wang Chen without asking her first.

Everyone has their own private refuge, something they consider especially theirs. She had shared it with him, but that didn’t mean she necessarily wanted it shared with anyone else.

And he realized: in her eyes, he held a different level of trust than most people.

What exactly motivated what he did next was hard to untangle with any precision — but he decided that from that point on, the location of that secret place would remain an exclusive secret between the two of them.

The anniversary celebration day was something Yan Sishi would rather not revisit even now.

Huo Qingyi had come very close to a crisis. For a long time afterward, they all lived like people walking a tightrope — every step taken in dread, terrified of the fall.

He requested a leave of absence from school and stayed home. He was afraid to be away too long in case something irreversible happened while he was gone.

By the end of April, the Chucheng spring — without anyone noticing when exactly — had already quietly ended.

The day he went back to school, he stopped at a newspaper kiosk on his way and asked about the new issue of a magazine. The proprietor told him the last copy had just been sold. He found it hard even to feel disappointed — it was as if he had grown accustomed to the constant low hum of everything deteriorating, that ordinary, everyday sense of things coming undone.

But that afternoon, after eating dinner with Wang Chen, he returned to the classroom to find that someone had left the exact issue he hadn’t been able to buy sitting on his desk.

An unexpected bright spot in a grey stretch of days.

Nice weather today. Hope your mood is good.

He was grateful to the anonymous “S” — whoever they were — for giving him two rare hours of genuine good feeling.

Wang Chen had a notebook with a line printed on it: Life goes on.

No matter what happens, life always continues.

During the May holiday, he accompanied Xia Li to the computer market.

She and Wang Chen were the only people at Mingzhong he genuinely considered friends. For a friend, he always tried to do what he could within his means — and drawing up those two spec lists hadn’t taken much time at all.

She insisted on treating him and Wang Chen to dinner, which he found overly formal.

Letting the guy pay — that was simply how things worked, as far as he was concerned. He genuinely couldn’t understand why she seemed annoyed about it.

He thought it was the first time he had seen that particular expression on her face — defeated, almost deflated. His instinct was immediately to find some way to fix it.

He didn’t like sweet drinks, but he suggested she treat him to one instead.

At that, the light came back into her eyes in an instant.

And in that moment, he understood, just a little, why she hadn’t wanted him to pay.

With Wen Shubai, theirs was a relationship built over years — they’d grown up together, and after so long, a lot of things went without saying. Wang Chen, meanwhile, sometimes seemed to be missing a particular wire entirely.

By comparison, a girl’s feelings were perhaps far more layered and subtle: perhaps, in her mind, friendship was something that had to be reciprocal and balanced — give and take, a cycle of mutual exchange.

If he thought of her as a friend, then he ought to follow that same rule of equality, and not treat her differently simply because she was a girl.

[07]

It seemed to be that summer — when Yan Sishi went to Singapore for the SAT exam and visited the aquarium while he was there — that he fell in love with the ocean.

Vast and profound, yet brought alive by the fish moving through it. That kind of liveliness was different from the noise of a crowd — it simply existed, without intruding.

He had gone alone that day. He hadn’t traveled with Tao Shiyue or Wang Chen.

Going alone meant he could follow his own pace entirely. The aquarium happened to be running a stamp-collecting activity, and he was able to make his way through every section of the venue without rushing, completing all of the stamps.

The postcard he stamped had originally been intended as a bookmark, but that morning, walking through the school corridor, he overheard a conversation between Xia Li and some boys from their class — and realized it was her birthday.

Too little time to prepare anything else; he worried a last-minute gift would seem careless. So he thought of the postcard.

When he gave it to her, her delight far exceeded what he had anticipated — even though he had gotten the date wrong.

It was only later, when he was back in the classroom, that he realized: the first day they had met, that day in the car, had been her birthday.

A girl born on the summer solstice.

He found himself wondering whether that kind of coincidence had shaped some particular quality in her character.

During the summer before senior year, Yan Sishi stayed home — looking after Huo Qingyi on one hand, and beginning to prepare his application materials on the other.

The whole summer passed without leaving much of a trace, as if time had simply moved mechanically forward, not really marking anything at all.

Once school resumed, the atmosphere across the entire senior year shifted noticeably.

The international track had been relocated to the same floor as Class Seven. Now, passing through the corridor to use the bathroom, he would go by their classroom.

Sometimes he’d glance in, without quite meaning to, as he walked past. But the space was packed — every desk buried under a mountain of textbooks — and it was hard to tell at a glance where Xia Li might be sitting behind any particular pile.

Even in the midst of this pressure, Xia Li still found time to celebrate a close friend’s birthday.

Though she had been reckless about it — no backup plan in place — and had nearly walked straight into the class teacher.

It was after moving to the senior year building that Yan Sishi got his first impression of Class Seven’s homeroom teacher, the man they called Old Zhuang: he had a habit of coming to stand outside the Class Seven classroom during evening study hall and patrolling the corridor with a strict expression, as though if his students let their guard down for even a minute, the sky itself might fall.

If he had caught her, even a model student like Xia Li wouldn’t have escaped a lecture — and the chances of keeping that cake would have been none whatsoever.

He found himself unwilling to watch such a “disaster” unfold, and so he volunteered to run interference.

The cake sat on his desk, unclaimed. He went to the bathroom during a break, and returned to find Class Seven in the middle of a math exam.

The international track dismissed early; he should have left long ago. Still, he waited until Class Seven’s exam ended, then handed over the cake he’d been guarding. He managed to get a share of it too.

Wang Chen got a slice as well.

Wang Chen finished his own piece and then set his sights on Yan Sishi’s. “You’ve been holding it this whole time. It’s not like you were going to eat it anyway.”

“Who said that.” He picked up a fork and cut a small piece.

That entire autumn was, in Yan Sishi’s memory, a relatively easy stretch of time — Huo Qingyi’s condition had stabilized somewhat, and the worst of the constant relapses had calmed.

Then one day in early winter, having apparently heard about the improvement, Yan Suizhang called, saying that his grandfather wanted him to bring Huo Qingyi back to Beicheng. A mother and son couldn’t go on staying at the mother’s family home indefinitely, he said.

Yan Sishi rarely lost his temper. The exception was conversations with Yan Suizhang. He couldn’t understand how the person responsible for all of this could have not a shred of self-reflection about the situation he had caused.

There was nothing Yan Sishi could do. The only thing he could do was refuse to cooperate with Yan Suizhang’s performance of filial devotion.

After he hung up, he heard a faint sound and realized the empty classroom wasn’t empty.

He walked closer and found it was Xia Li.

Perhaps the same kind recognizes the same kind — he could tell the moment she made a sound that her mood was also bad.

Her voice had a slight roughness and heaviness to it. The light in the room was dim, too dim to make out her expression clearly, but just from the sound, he could tell she had probably been crying.

He didn’t like the weight of this kind of low atmosphere, and he knew he had nothing useful to say. The only thing he could offer, perhaps, was to step outside together, to walk and let the air clear things a little.

When they reached somewhere properly lit, he glanced at her — her nose was slightly red, and her eyes still held a faint, damp glimmer.

The wind was cold, cutting right through them. She sneezed, and without thinking much about it, he took off his jacket and put it around her — just not wanting her to catch a cold.

When he was at the drinks stall, he noticed she ordered red bean milk tea.

Last time it had been red bean bread. Now red bean milk tea. Maybe she had a thing for red bean flavored things.

Walking through the deep, narrow pedestrian street, Xia Li asked him a very serious question — about the end of the world.

In that moment he felt a heaviness that was hard to put into words. Everything around him felt like a dead end, with no way through in any direction.

If the end of the world was real, then at least he’d know: December 21, 2012 would be the day when everything beyond his reach simply stopped.

The tragedy was that he didn’t believe in any of it. He was too clear-headed for that.

Clear-headed people can’t even bring themselves to take momentary comfort in something meaningless.

The one thing he hoped for was that, before the “end,” everything would get better.

But that hope was not his to control.

He wasn’t certain whether going out for a walk had done more harm than good. His energy was low, and sometimes he would even turn his frustration inward, against himself. And even sitting together in Shangzhi afterward, the heaviness didn’t fully lift.

He hoped Xia Li didn’t regret skipping evening study hall for this.

What he hadn’t expected was that at the end of the night, standing at the foot of her building, she called out to him — and instead of saying what he’d anticipated, she turned it around and asked: Has your mood gotten better at all?

He was caught off guard for a moment. The lamplight was in her eyes, flickering in and out — a kind of hidden, unspoken thing hovering at the edge of words.

It was perhaps at this moment that a belated feeling stirred in him.

But like the wind blowing past them, it dissolved before he could catch it.

And that feeling — half-glimpsed, not quite understood — came back again in the corridor on the day it snowed:

It was Christmas. The English teacher in Class Seven had started it, and before long, every class on the floor had spilled out into the corridor to watch the snow. Class Twenty was no different.

Every one of them, though the corridor was packed, went silent without agreement. It was a strangely moving scene.

Snow was nothing new to him. He looked at it for a moment and then turned to go back inside.

As he was about to step away, he glanced, without meaning to, toward the far end of the corridor — toward Class Seven.

He hadn’t expected to find Xia Li looking back in his direction.

Their eyes met.

In that instant, something moved through the air — faint, unnameable — and lingered in the chest.

Just like that night.

Xia Li invited him to go seek blessings at Fu’an Ancient Temple. He didn’t refuse.

He could treat it as hoping for good luck.

The thousand-year-old temple stood in ancient, solemn quiet. When he bowed his head before the statue, his mind was empty.

Only a kind of clear, pure grief.

He wasn’t without reverence — but precisely because he had reverence, he couldn’t bring himself to say something he didn’t mean.

So he asked for nothing, and walked out.

As he left the hall, Lin Qingxiao was outside asking a girl from Class Seven if she’d seen Xia Li.

He found himself searching for her without thinking — and spotted her standing beneath an old cypress tree, writing on a red blessing strip.

He walked over, and the sound of his voice startled her. Her hand slipped — he saw her quickly cover over what she had been writing.

May wishes be granted.

The words seemed to have no particular direction.

She picked up the red strip and stood on her toes to hang it — trying to reach as high as she could.

He helped, hanging it as high as possible — far enough that no one else could reach it. Perhaps that would let her wish arrive at the Buddha’s ear just a little sooner.

When it was done, he turned around.

Xia Li was looking up at that small patch of red, swaying in the cold wind — her expression more sincere than anything he had seen from her.

As if everything written on that strip were the most important thing to her in this moment.

Something she would give up many things to make real.

Yan Sishi looked at her, and said nothing.

In that moment, a verse came to mind — from a book, or a film, he couldn’t remember which:

It is not the banner that moves. It is not the wind that moves.

[08]

In those turbulent, unsettled years, a faint, half-formed feeling that had barely had time to become a story was suddenly and completely undone by the caprice of fate.

That afternoon — the afternoon of the accident — was a nightmare he struggled to break free from for many years after.

Later, he forgot many things.

Even though there had always been threads to follow, they were buried beneath the dust of memory.

Like a small box thickly coated in years of dust — inside it, every story from that summer solstice onward, waiting.

Waiting for someone to blow the dust away in a single breath, and reveal them one by one.

To complete for him the second half of that verse:

It is the heart that moves.

〈End〉