The summer night was cool as mint, a gentle breeze drifting through. Leaves swayed in the shadows of the trees lining the road. He Youyuan pushed his bicycle along, wandering unhurriedly behind Li Kuiyi, passing beneath one streetlamp after another in a slow, leisurely drift, the two shadows on the ground below them weaving and overlapping, over and over again.

He deliberately kept his pace slow. But she didn’t read his intention and had walked on ahead.

He had waited from last night all the way until this evening’s dusk, nearly convinced she wasn’t going to invite him to the film — the same way he had once waited and never heard her say she would come to his birthday gathering. So, these few short hours tonight had felt, to him, like a gift.

People are always greedy. Even with a gift, they want more. He wanted to spend a little longer with her.

But the route was too short. No matter how much he dawdled, he walked it to the end all too quickly. At the entrance to the residential complex, he stopped and let his gaze linger on her face, reluctant. Logically speaking, he shouldn’t have been this reluctant to part — tomorrow they had school, they would see each other again, and she sat directly in front of him, so he could look at her whenever he pleased.

But he was never satisfied. His moments with her at school were always too brief, and always surrounded by too many people. He wanted a proper, uninterrupted stretch of time alone with her — even twenty minutes would do.

“From now on, when school lets out, can I walk you home?” He looked into her eyes and asked quietly.

Li Kuiyi hadn’t expected him to make such a request. She paused for a moment, then shook her head. “No.”

“Why not?”

“We’re already out late when school ends. If you walk me home on top of that, it’ll be a forty-minute round trip for you — when are you supposed to do your homework and sleep?”

He Youyuan wanted to say he didn’t much care for homework, but he knew Li Kuiyi would be annoyed if he did, so instead he said, “What if I finish my homework during self-study period? Would that be all right?”

“If I can’t finish mine, how would you finish yours?” Li Kuiyi countered.

“I’ll try to do as much as possible. Would that be all right?”

Li Kuiyi was about to refuse again. She had just opened her mouth when she caught sight of a pair of dark, bright eyes — an expression in them that was damp with quiet longing. A slender, handsome boy, his silhouette drowning in the dark surge of the summer night, watching her just like that — eager, direct, wholeheartedly.

Her throat moved. She thought to herself: being handsome really does have its advantages. She wasn’t Tang Sanzang — how was she supposed to resist this kind of test?

“We’ll see,” Li Kuiyi said, dropped those words, turned around, and hurried away without looking back.

She had no space on the whole walk home to examine why she hadn’t refused him outright. It wasn’t until she got back to her room, tossed her backpack carelessly onto the chair, and threw herself onto the bed that she began to puzzle over why she had left him room.

Good heavens. Did she like him?

Actually, she couldn’t quite describe what He Youyuan made her feel. It wasn’t something concrete. If she absolutely had to put it into words, it was like the clear, crystalline sound of a mountain spring tumbling from a height into a pool on a spring night.

A strange comparison, wasn’t it? But when she had looked into his eyes just now, the commotion that stirred inside her was exactly that.

Li Kuiyi irritably scratched at her hair, got up, rummaged through her wardrobe for a clean change of clothes, and went to shower. When she came back, she burrowed under her thin blanket, wrapped herself up, rolled around the bed a couple of times, and then — still wanting to sort out her own feelings — called Fang Zhixiao.

“Why are you calling me? Isn’t there enough to chat about on QQ?”

Li Kuiyi came up with a random excuse: “Too lazy to type.” She paused, then shifted topics with slightly unnatural casualness: “Do you still like Su Jianlin?”

“Who wants to like that deadpan face.” Fang Zhixiao snorted.

“…When you liked him you called him your untouchable ideal. The moment he turned you down he became ‘that deadpan face.'”

“Of course — that’s how principled I am,” Fang Zhixiao said with complete conviction. Then she grew curious. “Why are you suddenly asking about this? Did Su Jianlin have a change of heart about me?”

Li Kuiyi couldn’t follow the leap. “Didn’t you just say you were very principled? If he had a change of heart, would you just start liking him again?”

“Obviously, because he’s my ideal type. You know what an ideal type is, right? Something you encounter once in a century.”

Hearing the phrase “ideal type,” Li Kuiyi seized the moment and pressed forward: “But you’ve never been in a relationship — how can you be sure your ideal type is like that? Or rather, how do you know whether you like someone?”

An odd silence fell on the other end of the line for a few seconds.

Li Kuiyi’s heart immediately began to pound. She was sure she had asked too clumsily and that Fang Zhixiao had noticed something.

After a moment, Fang Zhixiao’s voice came through in a thoughtful tone: “Knowing whether you like someone, hmm…”

Li Kuiyi quietly let out a breath.

But the very next second, Fang Zhixiao’s tone surged with sudden excitement. “Actually there’s a really great method: imagine that person kissing you. If you’d be willing to let them kiss you — then you like them!”

What?!

Li Kuiyi’s eyes went wide under the blanket.

At the same moment, unbidden, the image of He Youyuan leaning down to kiss her surfaced in her mind. She had no experience in this area, and even her imagination was lacking — she couldn’t even picture a definitive kissing pose. Would he cup the back of her head? Would she squeeze her eyes shut from nerves?

The kiss never completed itself; her own flustered mind interrupted it. The image left her entire face and neck tingling and warm, as though a strange, gentle heat were pressing close to her skin.

If she was being honest, that kind of closeness was too near. Her instinct was to pull back. She didn’t think she was ready for that degree of physical contact with someone of the opposite sex.

Just as she was quietly flushing in secret, Fang Zhixiao declared with absolute certainty from the other end of the line: “Li Kui! You’re imagining He Youyuan kissing you right now, aren’t you?”

Li Kuiyi’s heart lurched, leaping straight up into her throat. She immediately denied it. “I wasn’t!”

“So then — can you accept He Youyuan kissing you?” Fang Zhixiao followed up at once.

Li Kuiyi, her voice going soft with mortification: “No.”

Fang Zhixiao burst out laughing. “You just said you weren’t imagining He Youyuan kissing you — so how do you know the answer is no?”

Successfully baited into revealing herself, Li Kuiyi erupted in embarrassed fury and hung up the call while Fang Zhixiao’s laughter was still ringing. She yanked the blanket up over her mouth and nose and fumed: no is no, and she was never going to let He Youyuan kiss her for as long as she lived.

She couldn’t breathe anymore and finally threw the blanket off. Her phone was buzzing with messages — she picked it up to find Fang Zhixiao bombarding her relentlessly.

Fang Zhixiao: hahahahahahahahahaha! Fang Zhixiao: why did you hang up??? Fang Zhixiao: did I hit the mark? Fang Zhixiao: come clean!! did the handsome guy make your heart flutter??

Li Kuiyi: I. Did. NOT. Li Kuiyi: This topic ends here. Bring it up again and we’re done.

Fang Zhixiao: ooooh, someone’s getting worked up~

Li Kuiyi sent a furiously punching emoji and refused to say another word. She backed out of the chat with Fang Zhixiao to find that He Youyuan had also sent her two messages.

He Youyuan: Why did you run off? He Youyuan: What does “we’ll see” mean?

Li Kuiyi, her face still tomato-red, told herself she didn’t like him at all and calmly replied: “‘We’ll see’ means no.”

He Youyuan’s side went quiet for a long time. Li Kuiyi thought he must have gotten angry at being rejected — but just two seconds later, he sent her a screenshot: a dictionary entry for “we’ll see.”

He Youyuan: [image] He Youyuan: I don’t see the meaning you’re talking about anywhere in here?

Li Kuiyi hadn’t expected him to take it so seriously. Not wanting to argue, she just replied: “I’m tired. Going to sleep.”

He Youyuan: that’s cheating.

A while passed.

He Youyuan: ignoring me again. He Youyuan: fine. sleep then. He Youyuan: goodnight.

Li Kuiyi knew this person was extraordinarily petty. No matter how sweetly he was wishing her goodnight right now, the moment he saw her tomorrow he would absolutely find a way to pay it back — and in the most childish way imaginable, like bumping her shoulder or something.

Contrary to her expectations, the following day he was perfectly well-behaved from morning to night.

Li Kuiyi had thought he’d turned over a new leaf — but then, after evening self-study let out and she’d said goodbye to Fang Zhixiao and walked a few steps away from school, she spotted him not far off, waiting with the patient confidence of a hunter, standing there with a loose, vivid ease, school bag slung over his shoulder, one finger looped through a strap.

The moment she started walking, he followed.

At first Li Kuiyi ignored him. But they passed the Zhuangyuan Fu complex and he showed no sign of stopping, so she turned back to remind him: “I didn’t agree to let you walk me home.”

“I’m walking you home anyway,” he said, light as air, entirely unreasonable.

“How can you be so shameless?”

“Learned it from you.”

Li Kuiyi was struck speechless. After thinking for a long moment, all she could manage was: “Did you finish your homework?”

Without a word, He Youyuan dropped his school bag on the ground, crouched down, and began pulling things out: math workbook, English practice exercises, geography test paper, history study guide… a pile of white papers grew on the ground. He looked up. “Check them.”

Li Kuiyi actually bent down and flipped through them, and found that although he hadn’t finished every single assignment, he had gotten through most of them — he really had made a genuine effort during self-study.

Fair enough.

But Li Kuiyi didn’t want to give in, so she hunted through his English homework until she found a mistake, then said accusingly, “This question is wrong!”

He glanced at it, considered for a moment, took out a pen, crossed out “A,” and re-selected “D.” “Is it right now?”

“Yes.”

He tossed the pen back into his bag, stuffed everything back in piece by piece, muttering as he did, “All you know how to do is find fault with me. Would it kill you to give me one compliment?”

Someone this age, needing praise for finishing their homework.

Li Kuiyi absolutely refused.

He seemed to be sulking quietly — he didn’t say much the whole way. It was only when they reached the entrance of Yujing Garden that he finally spoke: “Once proper school starts, I won’t be doing evening self-study at school anymore — I’ll go to the art studio to paint. I’ll get out a little earlier than you, so… I’ll wait for you at the gate of Zhuangyuan Fu.”

With that, and without waiting for her to agree or refuse, he turned and ran.

Come September, having spent the summer taking extra classes, no one had much sense of school starting. For Li Kuiyi, the only real change was that during evening self-study, the seat behind her was empty.

After evening self-study, she would find He Youyuan at the gate of Zhuangyuan Fu. He no longer looked as polished as he once had — his T-shirts were usually streaked with vivid colors. Sometimes the studio ran late and he didn’t have time to wash up before coming; even his hands and face would be smudged with dark charcoal powder, like someone fresh from a coal mine.

He still walked her home. He would tell her things that happened at the studio — how some classmate had committed an unforgivable act and stolen his white paint; how some teacher was absolutely merciless and had assigned fifty sketches…

Li Kuiyi would grow curious: “Why did you start studying art in the first place?”

He Youyuan would raise an eyebrow with great self-importance and say, “Obviously because I displayed an astonishing gift for drawing from an early age.”

Li Kuiyi knew the moment she heard this that he was spinning a tale and gave him a sideways look, ignoring him.

Only then would he tell the truth: “All right, because I was too disruptive as a child, and my family wanted some peace and quiet.”

Now that sounded about right — consistent with the impression she had of him.

More than half a month slipped by, and Li Kuiyi gradually began to grow accustomed to He Youyuan walking her home. She even began to feel as though he would simply keep doing it — indefinitely. Until when, she wondered? Perhaps until the college entrance examinations.

And after the exams? What then — what about her and him? She couldn’t figure it out.

But the exams weren’t coming anytime soon. Before all that, one day in mid-September, she was suddenly called to Chen Guoming’s office.

Inside the office, it wasn’t only Chen Guoming. Jiang Jianbin was there, Liu Xinzhao was there, and so was Qi Yu — along with his mother.