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He Youyuan held his fist with the palm facing upward, the tendons on his wrist pulled taut and prominent — like a faint, clean ridge of mountains raised beneath pale skin. But then his hand trembled slightly with his body, and everything collapsed at once, like an avalanche.

He looked at the girl with her head half-lowered, and in a daze, he let his fingers go slack.

A small, gleaming coin lay still in his palm.

Li Kuiyi simply assumed she had pried it open herself. She snatched the coin with quick hands, pressed down the urge to punch him, and looked up with solemn composure to curse him: “I hope every single problem on your afternoon exams is one you can’t solve.”

Then she turned on her heel and walked away, puffed up with indignation.

He Youyuan stood there in place, his right hand still holding its original shape, the coin having left a pale impression on his palm and fingertips that took some time to fade. The patch of skin that had touched hers grew gradually warm, and he couldn’t help curling his fingers together and rubbing them slowly, leaving a faint, soft crease somewhere deep inside him.

His Adam’s apple bobbed. He walked to the drinks cooler, grabbed a can of ice-cold cola, paid for it, cracked it open, and drank it down in long, greedy swallows. The carbonated liquid fizzed with small bubbles, full and fizzing, as if it could smooth out that crease — or at the very least, cool down that formless, inarticulate heat.

What on earth.

He drained the can, which went clattering into the nearby bin. He Youyuan let out a long breath and told himself: this was definitely just because he’d never been in a relationship before, which was why brief close contact with Sour-faced Pineapple had caused his heart to do something embarrassing.

After all, Pineapple was — a girl, right?

And he was a boy in the prime of adolescence, so being stirred by the presence of a girl was perfectly natural, right?

It just happened to be her, right?

He looked down at his right hand again. Clean. No trace. Only a few droplets of condensation from the cola can clung to the skin, as though nothing had happened at all.

Nothing had happened, after all.

A minor thing.

Nothing of consequence.

Not worth a second thought.

The afternoon exams were physics and chemistry, administered together on a combined paper. The questions were fundamentally basic — with the exception of the final large-question in physics, the rest had virtually no difficulty. Li Kuiyi’s room was Exam Room One, which held the top thirty students in the year. By the time half the allotted time had elapsed, nearly everyone had already set down their pens and was reviewing their answers with idly swinging legs.

Li Kuiyi went through the paper front to back twice and found nothing concerning. She couldn’t help but give a quiet, internal sigh. That morning she had praised the joint exam paper for being well-crafted — only to be completely contradicted this afternoon. Frankly, she disliked exams this easy. When papers fail to create spread between students, the exam is essentially a waste of time.

She wondered if that was a selfish thought. Probably. In a competitive environment, hoping for harder questions necessarily meant some students would end up with scores below their expectations — which benefited her. But then again, others had their own self-interested reasoning too. Students who weren’t strong in physics or chemistry would naturally prefer easier questions, so their scores wouldn’t drag them down.

Well. Every creature favors what serves it.

It was a good thing that one’s character is judged by actions rather than intentions. No matter how self-serving a thought was, as long as it stayed in the mind and went no further, it caused no real harm. And in practice, she had no power to act on it anyway — the paper wasn’t hers to write. Like every other student, she was in a position of being acted upon, and could only silently hope beforehand: let it be hard, or let it be easy……

Li Kuiyi’s mind wandered through a tangle of thoughts. She looked up at the clock mounted on the wall — there were still more than half an hour left. Restless, she started flicking her eraser upward on the desk, which was enough to draw the attention of the invigilator: a middle-aged man with a somewhat receding hairline who came and stood beside her seat without a word and began reading her exam paper.

Li Kuiyi quietly sat up straighter.

He was probably a physics teacher. He studied the paper with evident interest, and after finishing the front, he even reached over and flipped it to the back. When he had read it all, Li Kuiyi looked cautiously up at his expression. He was wearing an inscrutable little smile that gave nothing away.

Unnerved, Li Kuiyi went through the paper one more time from start to finish.

She endured the remaining time until the bell finally rang. She gathered her stationery into her pencil case and turned to Qi Yu. “Let’s go.”

No. 1 Middle School had its rules — even during exam periods, morning and evening study sessions ran as normal. Li Kuiyi could only squeeze out a sliver of time to treat Qi Yu, partly to thank him for consistently printing out competition class materials for her, and partly to find out what he liked, which would help her choose a birthday gift.

The two walked side by side out through the school gates, talking over the afternoon exams. Outside, many small food stalls had set up along the road — selling wheel cakes, pork sandwiches, grilled cold noodles, and the like — along with a handful of small restaurants whose modest storefronts were deceptive, because the food inside was genuinely good. Whenever Li Kuiyi didn’t want to eat at the cafeteria, she and Fang Zhixiao would come here.

“What would you like to eat?” Li Kuiyi asked Qi Yu.

“Anything’s fine.” Qi Yu gave his nose a modest rub, looking slightly uncomfortable. “You really didn’t have to specifically take me out, you know. Printing resources for you is a small thing.”

“It may be small for you, but it means a great deal to me.” Li Kuiyi smiled.

For some reason, the moment she said that, she thought of He Youyuan. He had helped her out of an awkward situation, and she had only said a single “thank you” — and even that had come out without any context, so he might not have even known what she was thanking him for.

Perhaps she ought to thank him properly. But that person was just so insufferable. He was always coming to provoke her for no reason, and his provocations were always small things, insignificant things — if she wanted to raise a fist over them, she’d feel she was making a mountain out of a molehill; but if she didn’t, she couldn’t shake the frustration.

See? He was nothing but a nuisance.

“You pick,” Qi Yu said. “I don’t go out for meals much, so I genuinely don’t know what’s good around here.”

Li Kuiyi thought for a moment. “My friend and I went to a Sichuan-style mixed vegetable pot place called Chuanhun — the food was pretty good. Want to try it?”

Qi Yu said sure.

They passed a wheel cake stall, and Li Kuiyi bought two — one purple rice flavored, one red bean — and asked Qi Yu which he’d like. He smiled and said either was fine.

Fair enough. He really didn’t seem to like making choices.

When it came time to select items at the restaurant, Li Kuiyi ended up making most of the decisions herself. Once they’d ordered, she took a bite of her wheel cake and asked: “Do you usually eat at the school cafeteria?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you there, though.”

Qi Yu pressed his lips together slightly, looking a little bashful. “My parents are teachers at the school, so I mostly eat in the staff cafeteria.”

The main school cafeteria had three floors. The first offered standard set meals; the second was leased to various vendors — braised chicken rice, Lanzhou-style noodles, Yunnan-style rice noodles, and so on. The third floor was the staff cafeteria, which supposedly served better food.

“No wonder. Is the third floor really that much better?” Li Kuiyi asked, curious.

“Not really — it’s all about the same.”

“Oh.” Li Kuiyi left it there. But she couldn’t help thinking: if the staff cafeteria was no better than the student one, yet Qi Yu still ate there, it was probably because his parents required it.

She felt a quiet sympathy. At their age, nobody wanted to eat lunch alongside grown-ups — it was far more comfortable to sit with classmates, scrambling for seats and swapping gossip, one small relief in the middle of a relentless academic grind.

The bowl of mixed vegetable pot arrived — rich red and glossy with oil. Li Kuiyi had just finished the last bite of her wheel cake. Her cheeks were full when she said: “Have you ever noticed that eating something sweet and then switching to something savory makes you feel suddenly very hungry?”

“Really?” Qi Yu watched her and copied her, pushing the rest of his wheel cake into his mouth at once.

“That’s just my impression — not sure if there’s any science behind it.” Li Kuiyi said, and as she broke open the wrapper on a pair of chopsticks, she eased into the agenda she’d prepared: “What do you do in your spare time?”

The intent was perhaps a little too obvious, because her tone came across as slightly like she was conducting a survey — though she didn’t notice.

Qi Yu picked up a piece of luncheon meat with his chopsticks and smiled. “Is this about a birthday gift?”

Li Kuiyi nearly bit her own tongue.

She denied it with uncertain composure: “No, no. I just wanted to know what you like to do.”

“Oh.” Qi Yu gave her an amused glance. “I like… doing problems.”

Li Kuiyi paused mid-reach and went silent.

So she was supposed to give him a copy of the Five-Year Exam, Three-Year Practice collection? And have Zhou Fanghua give him a set of Golden Exam Papers?

“Aside from that?”

“Nothing else.”

“……Didn’t you say you play basketball with He Youyuan and the others?”

“I do, but I don’t particularly like it.”

That’s normal — you have to allow that some people’s hobbies really are just doing problems, Li Kuiyi thought.

Qi Yu studied her and asked: “Is that very dull?”

Li Kuiyi shook her head and said, with mild dishonesty: “Not at all.”

“What about you? What do you like to do?” Qi Yu asked in return.

“Reading.”

Qi Yu smiled. “So we’re alike.”

Li Kuiyi couldn’t help but object: “We’re not.”

“How so?”

She lowered her lashes and thought, but couldn’t find a proper answer. She didn’t know how to explain to Qi Yu that books, for her, were something that filled the empty spaces of her life — things she’d never been able to have, she would obtain through imagination, and books were the tool she used to imagine.

“I read to relax,” she said, improvising a reason.

“I do problems to relax too.”

Li Kuiyi smiled lightly and let it go. It wasn’t that she couldn’t understand Qi Yu at all — sometimes when she felt restless, she too would work through a few problems to settle her thoughts. She just couldn’t quite fathom how doing problems could be someone’s only hobby.

The topic had nowhere further to go. Li Kuiyi wasn’t sure whether it was the spice or Qi Yu’s words that had done it, but a thin layer of sweat was forming at her temple. Feeling warm, she pulled off her school jacket and draped it over the back of the chair.

Underneath she wore a round-neck thin knit sweater — brick red, with a small elephant knitted in dark gold.

Qi Yu glanced up and asked: “Do you like elephants?”

He remembered that on the day she enrolled, she’d been wearing a ginger-yellow T-shirt with a small rust-red elephant embroidered on the chest.

Li Kuiyi looked down at her sweater and gave a calm “mm.”

But she was lying.

She didn’t like elephants at all. The reason she had several items of clothing featuring elephant motifs was that in middle school she had read a book called The Catcher in the Rye, in which the protagonist Holden, while wandering, missed his younger sister so much that he secretly went home to see her. His sister was wearing blue pajamas, with a small red elephant embroidered on the collar.

For reasons she couldn’t quite explain, Li Kuiyi had never been able to stop thinking about that scene. The blue pajamas and the small red elephant on the collar were etched into her memory.

Perhaps she had been trying to imagine something with it.

But she couldn’t explain that to Qi Yu. It would take too long to unpack, and it would make her seem strange — stranger, even, than having doing-problems as a hobby. So she chose to give him a vague answer.

“There are elephants at the zoo,” Qi Yu said. “But I haven’t been in a long time — I think the last time was in primary school.”

“I haven’t been in a long time either,” said Li Kuiyi.

They lapsed into silence for a moment. Li Kuiyi felt, without knowing quite why, that the atmosphere between them in that small shared space was gently descending.

She thought it was because she and Qi Yu were too similar. Neither of them was especially warm, nor especially withdrawn. Two people like that, sitting together, created something that never quite rose above lukewarm.

After a moment, Qi Yu said: “Maybe we could all go together during the winter break.” He paused. “With a few classmates.”

Li Kuiyi didn’t particularly like zoos. Perhaps because the one in their city wasn’t done very well — the animals all looked listless and deflated, which made the whole place feel less like protection and more like a cage. It had made her feel vaguely sad after her one visit, and she’d never gone back.

But she nodded. “Sure.”

She knew that casual invitations like this didn’t really count for anything. By the time winter break actually arrived, they’d have both long forgotten the conversation — just like the “let’s get together soon” adults were always saying, with no particular day ever in mind.

Lunch finished, Li Kuiyi let out a quiet breath. Her mouth was probably just very spicy.

Every topic had been exhausted before and during the meal, so on the walk back, the two of them fell quiet again.

The sky had already darkened. The streetlamps along the school road cast a warm amber glow, and the night wind slipped through the holes in her knit sweater and pressed steadily into her skin. At moments like this, Li Kuiyi always had the strange, slightly irrational feeling: Ah, I am full of gaps.

After the thought passed, she reached for her school jacket and began zipping it up.

And then, just as she was looking down at the zipper, someone flicked her on the back of the head.

Not hard. Not painful.

But irritating.

She looked up to see who it was, but spotted no one nearby. Just as she was about to wonder if it could possibly have been Qi Yu, Qi Yu himself gave a startled jump, then exhaled with relief and complained: “You scared me half to death.”

Li Kuiyi leaned to look past him — and there was He Youyuan, who had appeared at some point on Qi Yu’s other side, one arm slung casually over his shoulder.

Sensing her gaze, He Youyuan glanced back at her too. His eyes were cool and unreadable.

Right. He was here to provoke her again.

The quiet that had just settled inside Li Kuiyi instantly began to stir.