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“Hiss—”

Li Kuiyi set down her pen and straightened her back, immediately wincing as a sharp ache shot through her. She glanced up at the clock hanging on the wall of the shop and realized it was already six forty-five — which meant she had been hunched over her math problems, motionless, for nearly two hours.

Fifteen more minutes. If no one came to this optical shop by then, she could close up and leave.

She tidied her draft paper, tucked it into her bag along with the copy of Mathematics Competition Timed Training, then stood up, stretched her arms wide, and walked to the doorway to gaze out at the distance.

Across the road stood several old-style residential buildings. Their pale yellow walls were flaking in places, the security grilles badly rusted, and from the windowsills dangled an old red lace bra and a pair of baggy shorts washed to a faded white. Further away, a few weary sparrows perched on the power lines, like a cluster of fat, round, and dopey punctuation marks.

The sky hung halfway between day and night. There was no sunset to be seen — only a few streaks of rosy light leaking through the gaps between buildings, not particularly brilliant, carrying the strange tenderness of dusk.

Fifteen minutes was easy enough to pass. She watched the hour and minute hands of the wall clock tick-tock their way into a 150-degree obtuse angle, and without hesitation, Li Kuiyi switched off the air conditioner. Just as she was about to turn off the lights, a long drawn-out “Hey—” reached her ears.

“Why are you closing up right when we get here?”

Li Kuiyi turned around to find three boys, around sixteen or seventeen, standing at the entrance. One of them stood apart with a brooding expression on his face, while the other two had their arms slung around each other’s shoulders, grinning like a pair of clowns. Of the grinning duo, the one on the left was tall and stocky, with an intimidating build. The other had a bandage strip above his brow bone and another on his left cheekbone. He was squinting lazily in her direction, his thin lips curving into a loose, indifferent smile.

She grew wary at once. Boys this age could start a fight at any moment, and one of them had clearly already been in one.

“Are you here to get glasses?” Her voice came out a little cooler than she intended.

But the boys paid no attention to the sudden stiffening of the girl’s expression — they didn’t even seem to hear her question. They strode right in on their long legs, completely at their own pace. The brooding, long-faced and thin one glanced around the shop, and his gaze eventually settled on Li Kuiyi. He hesitated slightly before asking, “You’re… the owner?”

Li Kuiyi quietly inched toward the door and said, “If you’re here to get glasses, you can start by picking out the frames you like. My dad is right next door — I’ll call him over to do your eye exam.”

In truth, her parents had taken her little brother, who had suddenly come down with a high fever and a rash, to the hospital for emergency care. But she wasn’t entirely lying, either — the Liuyan Children’s Hospital was only a few hundred meters from their optical shop.

To her surprise, the boys were easy enough to deal with. They nodded and said, “Oh, alright then,” and spread out across the shop to browse the frames. Only the one with the injured face found himself a chair somewhere, and dropped into it with all the ease of an old man claiming his throne.

Li Kuiyi cast him a cautious glance, then picked up the shop’s landline and called her father, Li Jianye, asking him to come over.

Li Jianye said he would, and that he’d be there in five minutes.

The optical shop wasn’t very big, and with three extra boys inside, it suddenly felt packed. The tall, stocky one had his hands clasped behind his back and was drifting idly around the shop, occasionally bumping into the low glass display cases.

All of a sudden, with the excitement of Columbus discovering a new continent, he snatched a leopard-print frame from the display rack on the wall, held it up triumphantly, and called out, “Hey, Qi Yu, come look at this! Aren’t these glasses wild enough? Don’t they suit our dear little prince?”

Our dear little prince… Now there’s a wild nickname, Li Kuiyi thought, the corner of her eye twitching almost imperceptibly.

The long-faced, brooding boy did lean in to look, dropping his gloomy expression as the two of them burst out laughing.

“Zhang Chuang, go to hell.” The target of the teasing, who had been lounging lazily against the back of his chair, raised an eyebrow at the sound of it and cursed aloud.

Intrigued by that particular nickname, Li Kuiyi found herself turning to take another look at the boy slouched in the chair. His shoulders were narrow and slight, wearing a white T-shirt that hung loosely off him — yet where it draped over his shoulder blades, it revealed clean, fluid lines. Below, he wore black athletic shorts, his long legs stretched out carelessly. His calves were lean and firm, pale and slender, without a trace of leg hair.

…Why on earth am I noticing whether he has leg hair, Li Kuiyi thought, giving her head a small shake. She was just about to look away when, as if sensing her gaze, he suddenly lifted his eyelids and looked directly back at her.

Only then did she get a clear look at his eyes. They were beautiful — double-lidded, narrow and long, with a slight upward lift at the outer corners. His irises were dark as lacquer, and his gaze came to rest on her with an unhurried, indifferent air, like a bottle of beer left to chill on a summer’s day, breathing out a cool, faint chill.

A pity, then, that he immediately narrowed those eyes and said to Li Kuiyi, “Hey, could you turn the air conditioning back on? It’s hot.”

Oh. He’s nearsighted.

Li Kuiyi looked away without expression, picked up the remote, and switched the air conditioner back on.

Zhang Chuang, the tall stocky one, spun around and scolded without ceremony: “They call you a prince and you actually start acting spoiled? The shop’s AC was off for what, two minutes? And that’s enough to kill you? What are you, the Princess and the Pea?”

He Youyuan swung his legs in a slow, idle arc, his words trailing off with a lazy, unhurried lilt: “The owner didn’t say anything, did she? What’s it to you?”

The Princess and the Pea.

Li Kuiyi paused for a moment before she caught the meaning — that’s actually quite clever, she thought, and in spite of herself, a faint curve touched the corner of her lips. A smile so slight it was almost imperceptible.

Almost inaudible too — like a barely-there current of air brushing past.

But perhaps when one’s eyesight is poor, other senses sharpen to compensate — because that person unexpectedly caught even this tiny sound. He lifted his eyes to look at her again, his expression caught somewhere between innocent and insufferable, and asked, “What are you laughing at?”

How utterly baffling.

What does my laughing or not laughing have to do with you?

The smile had already been fleeting, gone almost as soon as it appeared. Li Kuiyi smoothed her expression back to composure, and with it, her voice became cool and detached. She turned the question back on him: “Did I laugh?”

He seemed not to have expected her to deny it. His lips pulled slightly at one corner: “I heard you laugh.”

A completely certain tone.

“Then you heard wrong.” Li Kuiyi said it just as certainly.

He Youyuan had no good comeback to that.

How utterly baffling.

She laughed — why won’t she admit it?

His gaze darkened slightly, settling on her face as though searching for evidence that she was lying. But he couldn’t quite make out her expression clearly — he could only see that she was wearing a yellow-and-white striped sleeveless top, standing behind the low glass display case, bright and vivid, like some lush tropical fruit.

A pineapple, or a durian — either way, something with thorns.

“You can try to control the sky and the earth, but since when do you control whether other people laugh?” Someone finally stepped in to restore some order — Qi Yu, who had been hunched over the glass display case this whole time, could apparently no longer help himself and cut in: “Can we just pick some glasses already? I still have to go home for dinner.”

He Youyuan let himself be redirected: “What’s the rush?! If you’d had even the slightest bit of accuracy when you threw that ball, I wouldn’t have ended up with a broken pair of glasses and a messed-up face. Do you have any idea how many girls are going to be heartbroken over this?”

“…”

A silence of roughly three seconds fell over the small space, audible to the naked ear.

Then Zhang Chuang was the first to resume cursing: “Is it physically impossible for you to go one day without being full of yourself?”

He Youyuan was entirely unbothered by the accusation, and simply asked: “Where’s my old pair of glasses? Who’s got it? Let’s just find something similar to that — the closer the better, as long as my mom doesn’t notice they’ve changed.”

“Zhang Chuang has them,” Qi Yu said.

Zhang Chuang rummaged in his trouser pocket and pulled out the “corpse” of a pair of glasses, walked over, and handed them to Li Kuiyi: “Do you carry anything similar to these?”

Li Kuiyi took them. The glasses looked as if someone had stomped on them — snapped clean at the bridge, with both lenses nowhere to be found. It wasn’t any particularly unusual style, just a very common black thin-rimmed half-frame. But Li Kuiyi recognized the brand logo engraved on the temple arm. It was a Japanese brand.

Moving with practiced ease, she went to the left side of the glass display case, searched for a moment, and pulled out a frame to hand to He Youyuan: “Take a look — is this the same one?”

He didn’t take it. “Not that brand,” he said. “Not durable enough.”

Li Kuiyi: “…”

What brand of glasses is durable enough to be stepped on?

She understood that this was probably just an excuse. Since it was the one called Qi Yu who had thrown the ball and broken his glasses, it was logically Qi Yu who should pay for the replacement — and that Japanese brand’s frames were expensive. They all looked like students; they probably couldn’t pull together that much money on short notice.

Still, it was a pretty terrible excuse.

Li Kuiyi thought for a moment, then went back to the display case and swapped it for something very similar: “This style is a bit more suited for sports. Though…” she paused, “you really should try not to step on it.”

Zhang Chuang instantly burst out laughing. He Youyuan, meanwhile, fixed her with a wounded look from those beautiful but nearsighted eyes, then accepted the frame, held it up to examine it closely, and asked, “How much is this one?”

“Three hundred and seventy,” Li Kuiyi said.

He put them on to try, then looked to Qi Yu predictably: “What do you think — does it look like my old pair?”

Of the three boys, Qi Yu was the only one who actually seemed composed. He nodded: “Not bad.”

He Youyuan himself was fairly nonchalant about it — he stood up from the chair. “Alright, I’ll take these then.”

“Okay, could you please sit back down and wait a moment — my dad will be here soon to do your eye exam,” Li Kuiyi replied, almost by reflex.

He Youyuan: “…”

Infuriating — he had literally just stood up!

Fortunately, barely half a minute later, a middle-aged man came bustling through the door: “Sorry to keep you waiting!”

“Didn’t wait at all,” He Youyuan said, slumped back in the chair with all the energy of a dried-out sponge left sitting there for half a century.

Li Jianye went directly to the sink by the wall to wash his hands, working up a lather, and glanced back: “You’re the one getting glasses?”

“Yes.”

“Come with me then.”

He Youyuan followed Li Jianye into the examination room. Qi Yu and Zhang Chuang each found a chair and sat down, heads bowed over their phones.

The shop went quiet all at once. Li Kuiyi retreated behind the counter and pulled out paper and pen to keep working on that Mathematics Competition Timed Training booklet. The summer holiday after middle school graduation was far too long and dull, and she’d bought the exercise book to get a head start. The problems in it were somewhat above regular level — not exactly a proper competition preparation book, but harder than usual.

The reason Li Kuiyi was working through these problems was because of a catastrophe that had unfolded in the just-concluded 2013 college entrance examination. Rumor had it that a certain famous teacher with the surname Ge had set the mathematics paper — and it was so difficult that it dragged the entire province’s average science math score down to fifty-five points.

Terrifying. She was only going into Year One of high school, but there was no harm in being prepared.

Li Kuiyi clicked her mechanical pencil and began working through calculations on the draft paper. For a time, the only sound was the soft scratch of the pencil tip against the page, like silkworms chewing through mulberry leaves.

Some time passed. Then, out of nowhere, someone lightly tapped on the counter in front of her: “Could I borrow your book for a sec — to help my friend test his glasses?”

Li Kuiyi looked up to find Qi Yu standing there. Beside him, the Pea Prince had already been fitted with the trial frame — it sat over his eyes like two large sunflowers blooming on his face, swaying with an almost theatrical flair.

Zhang Chuang was doubled over next to him, roaring with laughter, holding up his phone and snapping photo after photo.

“Sure.” Li Kuiyi passed the exercise booklet over.

Qi Yu was clearly quite taken with it. He didn’t immediately hand it to the Pea Prince, but instead looked through it carefully. Then he asked, “You’re starting Year One this September?”

Li Kuiyi said, “Yes.”

“What a coincidence — so are we.” Qi Yu said, and then read out one of the problems to himself, almost absently: “‘Given triangle ABC, where √2a, b, and c form an arithmetic sequence, find the minimum value of 3/sinA + √2/sinC—'”

This was one of the problems Li Kuiyi had left blank.

Teenage boys — there’s not one who won’t show off in front of a girl.

Qi Yu pressed his lips together, finger pointing at the problem: “For this one, since 2b = √2a + c, cosB equals…” He simply picked up the mechanical pencil from beside Li Kuiyi’s hand and began scribbling through the calculations on the draft paper. “We can determine that 0 < B ≤ 75°, and because…”

A sweep of equations slowly unfolded beneath the pen.

“Mm, the answer is 2√3 + 2.”

The problem had some difficulty, and required careful computation — after all, he was only a middle school graduate, and working through a high school-level problem this effortlessly was a fair display of his mathematical ability.

But what disappointed him somewhat was that the girl across from him showed no trace of admiration or gratitude on her face. She simply listened with a kind of near-expressionless calm, eyes cast downward. Still, she did eventually move her lips slightly and said, “Thank you.”

Qi Yu rubbed his nose, a little awkward: “No need to thank me — this is just Year Two and Three maths content. You’ll get there eventually, no rush.”

He Youyuan, listening to their exchange, leaned in and took the exercise booklet, flipping through a couple of pages. Some of the problems beneath had working steps written out in dense rows, the handwriting neat yet slightly rushed; others were boldly left blank.

Zhang Chuang was carrying on beside them: “Year Two and Three maths content? You two have both been doing holiday prep work?”

The panic was genuine — it was one thing not to have studied yourself, but somehow it was even more unsettling to know that your friends had.

Still, at least there was someone in the same boat as him. He Youyuan tossed the exercise booklet back to Li Kuiyi, shoved his hands in his pockets with a cool air, and said with complete disdain, “People who do holiday prep — nothing good ever comes of them.”

Qi Yu: “…”

Li Kuiyi: “…”

Only Zhang Chuang silently gave him a thumbs up.

Li Jianye noticed the commotion at this end and came over with a smile: “So, how is it? Can you see clearly? Does it feel dizzy wearing them?”

He Youyuan said it wasn’t dizzy, removed the trial frame, and returned it to Li Jianye. Li Jianye then went ahead and fitted him with lenses according to that prescription.

Once the new glasses were ready, Li Kuiyi handed them to He Youyuan together with the glasses case and receipt, and threw in two small bottles of lens cleaning solution.

He Youyuan put the glasses on, and for the first time, the girl’s face came into clear and complete focus before his eyes. Her hair reached her shoulders, framing a face that was fair and clear-complexioned. Her eyes were dark and bright — and yet, strangely, not at all endearing. They looked distant, detached.

Perhaps because they held no emotion in them.

Hmph. Better at playing it cool than I am.

He Youyuan looked away, signed the receipt in brisk strokes, and, just as he’d come, slung an arm around Zhang Chuang’s shoulder and called out to Qi Yu, “Let’s go.”

Like a gust of wind — swift in, swift out.

Li Kuiyi watched them leave, then set the receipt on the glass display case and pushed it over to Li Jianye.

Then, she happened to glance at the signature on the receipt — a single flowing sweep, clean and unrestrained.

Her brow furrowed faintly, and a flicker of puzzlement passed through her eyes.

She knew this name all too well.

And yet the face was completely unfamiliar.

Li Kuiyi turned around abruptly, her gaze landing on the figure who hadn’t gone far yet. The boy’s back was lean and narrow, like a young bamboo shoot breaking through earth, swaying freely — then he broke into a run alongside his friends, the light and shadows falling across him in shifting, alternating flickers, and finally swallowed him whole into the deep dark of the night.