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He had only reached out with two fingers to lightly pinch her cheek. Li Kuiyi gave her head a small shake and slipped free from his hold. Swallowing down the embarrassment on her face, she lowered her schoolbag from her back, opened it, pulled out the large box of Sakura erasers, and pressed it into his arms. Her eyes didn’t look at him, and she said quietly but matter-of-factly: “I was passing the stationery shop and saw these on discount, so I picked them up on a whim.”

He Youyuan lowered his head to look.

He had been noticing something in her arms the whole time, but she was holding it close to her chest, and coupled with the fact that his own emotions had been off, he hadn’t been able to see what it was. Then she had gone to the convenience store, and when she came back, all she had in her hands were the milk-brick ice cream and the face mask, so he hadn’t given it much thought.

So she had bought erasers for him.

She was so silly, wasn’t she? He had only mentioned offhandedly that the art studio floor had been eating through his erasers and he barely had two left — and she had gone and bought him an entire box. Did she not think — he was a fine arts student; would he really let himself run out of erasers? And they weren’t exactly cheap, either. A whole box like this must have cost over a hundred yuan.

He Youyuan looked up and studied her for a long moment: “Funny how I didn’t know erasers ever went on discount.”

Li Kuiyi felt that this person was truly too particular. Some things were understood between two people without spelling them out — and yet he was clearly playing dumb, deliberately digging for the bottom of it. She knew exactly what he wanted: he simply wanted to hear her say she liked him.

She shrugged: “Then maybe you just haven’t been lucky enough. Never happened to catch erasers on discount.”

He Youyuan’s eyes held the image of her calm, breezy, and stubbornly unbending expression, and it was so endearingly obstinate that his heart went entirely soft. He stopped pushing her. He rose from in front of her, sat down beside her, and began to inch gradually in her direction. His arm pressed flush against hers; his school uniform trousers pressed flush against hers.

But he still didn’t stop, and kept squeezing in. Li Kuiyi, pushed until her upper body had tilted slightly by him, didn’t know what he was up to this time: “If you keep pushing over… you’re going to end up sitting in my lap.”

Even though she felt she was making an objective description, the moment she said it, she felt something was wrong with that sentence, and her face went a little warm.

He Youyuan finally stopped pressing, but he didn’t pull away either, and remained tightly alongside her, his body steadily radiating warmth. Li Kuiyi was made to heat up by him too. The music in the square had changed to something rousing and lively; her heartbeat involuntarily fell in with the rhythm, thudding away.

She wanted to turn her head and tell him “don’t press so close,” but the moment she turned her face, he leaned his own head toward her. His eyes, damp and bright, looked straight at her — and then, gently, he rested his chin on her shoulder. His voice carried a plaintive, aggrieved note.

“Li Kuiyi, this time I won’t hold it against you.”

His soft, fluffy hair brushed against her cheek. His boyish voice was so close it seemed to be right at her ear, his breath landing on the curve of her neck and the lobe of her ear. Li Kuiyi’s eyes opened wide all at once, and her body went rigid. Faced with this unfamiliar intrusion of breath — unfamiliar and unmistakably that of a boy — she didn’t know what to do. But strangely, she didn’t feel any particularly powerful urge to push him away.

Fortunately, his chin had only rested on her shoulder for a moment before he lifted it himself. His body also finally drew back from her, leaning against the back of the bench. He raised the back of his hand and pressed it against his own left cheek, then suddenly asked with a hint of anxiety: “Do I still look handsome?”

Li Kuiyi: “…”

She leaned in to look, borrowing the light of a street lamp not far away, and noticed that his left cheek was slightly red and swollen. She wasn’t particularly concerned with whether the swelling had affected his looks; she immediately wanted to ask him whether they should go to a nearby pharmacy and buy a tube of ointment to apply.

Before the words left her mouth, the square-dance music stopped, and the elderly men and women dispersed. The elderly couple who had been stepping on each other’s feet during the social dance walked past them. Perhaps noticing that the two of them were still in their school uniforms, they couldn’t help taking a second glance.

The old man frowned and muttered under his breath: “Young people these days — going astray. Starting to date like adults at such an age. If it were my daughter, I’d break that boy’s legs.”

The old woman clicked her tongue: “It’s because I didn’t date enough when I was young that I wasted my good years on you. Look at how handsome that young man is — can you compare?”

He Youyuan watched them walk away, thoroughly pleased with himself, and said with a smug tilt of his chin: “See — still handsome, clearly.”

Li Kuiyi pointedly ignored his self-adoring behavior and took him to a nearby pharmacy, where she bought a tube of ointment for pain relief and promoting blood circulation, along with a pack of cotton swabs. She helped him apply the ointment to the bruised area of his face, and as she was dabbing, her hand paused and she asked anxiously: “What are you going to tell your family when you get home?”

He said carelessly: “Just tell them directly.”

Li Kuiyi was momentarily taken aback, then understood. Of course — he was different from her; he could go straight home and tell his family he’d been hurt. And it was only then that she realized how deeply certain things had left their mark on her, far more deeply than she had imagined.

Once she was done, she pressed the ointment and the cotton swabs into He Youyuan’s hands and reminded him not to forget to apply it every day. He turned the items over in his hands, then suddenly looked up with a smile and said: “When I get home and tell my grandma and my little aunt that my dad hit me — you watch — they’ll definitely give him a thorough telling-off, and then give me a lot of pocket money. And I’ll give my mum a call, put on a bit of a pitiful performance, and she’ll give me money too. Do you think that counts as profiting from my face?”

Li Kuiyi: “…”

He always gave her the feeling that worrying about him was entirely unnecessary.

After a day of rest at home over the weekend, by the time He Youyuan returned to school, there was no trace of anything on his face. The semester was already short to begin with, and once midterms were past, the days seemed as if someone had hit the fast-forward button. Test papers flipped down and flew up from the desk, and the morning scenes outside the window gave way to the darkened night sky. In June, the sky bleached white from the heat and seldom brought rain. Another college entrance exam — one that had nothing to do with them — arrived once more.

But by now they were already second-years in high school, and their state of mind compared to the previous year had changed considerably. On the third of June, the third-year students left the school for their exams, and it was finally their turn to sing the farewell songs. That evening, the final night-study session for the graduating class came to an end. They packed up their towering stacks of books, and walked that familiar path they had walked for three years — threading through the sea of glowing light sticks being waved by their younger schoolmates — one step at a time, out of that grand and weighty, blazing and clinging stretch of youth.

“Students of No. 1 High — unmatched in all directions! Ride the winds, break the waves, and inscribe your names in gold!”

The second-year students shouted the unified chant with all they had, swept up in a shared restlessness and excitement. In just one more year — only one — it would be their turn to walk this very path. This scene before them was like a magnificent, thunderous trailer for what was to come.

The school’s broadcast system looped graduation songs on repeat. Whether they knew the words or not, everyone sang along without restraint. There were some songs Li Kuiyi wasn’t very familiar with, and she just swayed along with the rest of the crowd — but perhaps because a scene this intensely fervent was so capable of stirring one’s emotions, certain lines that struck a chord made her eyes grow unexpectedly damp.

Have the things you’ve done in these ten years / left you with no regrets, no shame? And the things you believed in then — / have they remained unshaken?

She had barely sniffled twice when, in the cover of the darkness, someone reached from behind and pressed something into her palm — a paper tissue, arriving on a breeze carrying the familiar scent of lily of the valley.

But when the broadcast played Auld Lang Syne, she still couldn’t hold herself together, and went off sniffling to find Fang Zhixiao in the class next door. Fang Zhixiao was in an equally emotional state, crying as she dug into her school uniform pocket and produced an iris flower, saying she had found it today when she was on cleaning duty in her class’s assigned area, and gave it to Li Kuiyi. Li Kuiyi sniffled and asked whether she had truly found it or had picked it herself. Fang Zhixiao sobbed that she had picked it, and please don’t tell anyone.

They cried their fill, and in the moment itself it felt cathartic and moving — but when Li Kuiyi came back to school the next day, the embarrassment set in.

Goodness. What had she even been crying about? It wasn’t like she was the one graduating.

On the day of the college entrance exam, Li Kuiyi woke up very early, lying in bed and repeatedly checking her watch. It was only 7:15 — still ages before the exam started. Eat breakfast, check the ID card and exam admission ticket one more time; 8 o’clock, still enough time to go over a few classical Chinese passages outside the exam hall; 9 o’clock — ah, the papers would be handed out now…

An inexplicable excitement seized her. She took out her phone and started chatting with Fang Zhixiao, who said she felt exactly the same way — unusually sensitive to the time, as though she were sitting the exam alongside the graduating students.

Two days later, back at school, Jiang Jianbin once again assumed that air of inscrutable mystery on his face and said with slow deliberateness: “Now it’s your turn.”

With that, he picked up the chalk and wrote a few neat, bold characters in the upper right corner of the blackboard:

“364 days until the 2016 College Entrance Exam.”

The students below couldn’t help swallowing nervously. Jiang Jianbin seized the moment and handed out that year’s freshly printed exam papers for everyone to try their hand at.

Perhaps because this was the last year the province would set its own exam papers, the humanities mathematics paper was remarkably easy — easy enough that when these students who had yet to go through round after round of revisions attempted it, seven or eight students in a single class scored full marks. Everyone lamented their ill luck at being born a year too late — wouldn’t they have sailed past 600 points with ease?

Sailing past 600 points might not have been enough, Li Kuiyi thought. With a paper that easy, the first-tier university cut-off score this year would definitely not be low — pushing up to 600 was entirely possible.

Sure enough, ten-odd days later, the cut-off scores were released: the first-tier line had been drawn at 597.

Everyone cursed the heavens and lamented all over again. And with that, the impact of the college entrance exam on the second-year students came to an end. What awaited them next was the Academic Proficiency Test — though this exam was exceedingly straightforward, and no one was particularly worried. As some of the students in the advanced classes put it, you could close your eyes and still come out with an A in every subject.

The Academic Proficiency Test wrapped up, and on the other side of things, He Youyuan was already packing his bags, preparing to head to Beijing for his intensive art training.

Li Kuiyi had originally assumed she would accept this with complete composure — she wasn’t the type who liked to cling to a loved one, and she genuinely believed that being apart had its benefits: at the very least, it wouldn’t let feelings cloud their heads, which was good for their studies. But when the day before He Youyuan’s departure arrived, she only then — belatedly — felt something lift from the surface of her heart, like a thin gauze being drawn away, leaving a light, lingering sense of loss.

He had been by her side for nearly half a year. She had grown used to it long ago.

And breaking a habit was, without question, a painful thing.

On the evening of the twenty-eighth of June, after the night study session ended, he walked her home for the last time. Both of them fell into silence without any prior arrangement, walking along the pedestrian path by the road, over the arched bridge spanning the ring canal, past the colorful shop signs, past a long stretch of old residential complex walls.

Tree shadows swayed and drifted, scattering the faint yellow moonlight in fragments across the ground.

They came to a standstill beneath those worn, peeling walls. Li Kuiyi suppressed the inexplicable wave of anxiety rising within her, opened her schoolbag, and — as if from a magic bag — drew out a succession of items: several boxes of medicated plasters, a neck support brace and a lumbar support belt, and a small cat plushie. She piled everything into He Youyuan’s arms and mumbled: “I heard you all have to sit for long stretches of time, and hold your arms up to paint, so your back and neck and shoulders get sore a lot… I don’t know if any of this will help, but hopefully a little. As for the small cat plushie — it’s just, you know, for company. If it doesn’t fit in your suitcase, you don’t have to take it…”

He Youyuan kept squeezing the small cat plushie’s paws and said: “I’ll take it. Everything you give me, I’ll take.”

Around the small cat’s neck hung a tag. He Youyuan had assumed she had just forgotten to remove it, but on closer inspection he found it was the cat’s identity card — with the cat’s name and a mock identification number written on it.

“Li Ao Miao…” he read aloud, and suddenly laughed. “It’s a cat — how does it have a full name like that?”

“This little cat was made by me at a toy workshop — I chose its fabric and I stuffed the cotton in myself, so it has the same surname as me, Li. And ‘Ao Miao’ sounds like its meow in reverse — you read it backwards and…” She explained in a small voice, and as she spoke, she began to feel her face going red, thinking herself a bit silly for doing something like this.

“Alright then, Li Ao Miao.” He gathered the small cat into his arms.

Li Kuiyi didn’t want to look at him anymore.

“I have something for you too.” He Youyuan said.

He reached over to her side and scooped up her hand, placing a set of keys in her palm. “These are the keys to my mountain bike. You can ride my bike to and from school from now on. I’d worry about you walking alone at night. I’ve adjusted the seat height — it should be right for you.”

With that, he produced a small box from his pocket and opened it on the spot.

Li Kuiyi went still.

That was… an Apple Watch?

He had taken the watch from the box and was already moving to fasten it onto her wrist. Li Kuiyi quickly tried to pull her hand away, but he caught it, and fastened it on her without giving her any say.

“The school doesn’t allow phones, so you can wear this instead. I’ve set everything up already — look, there’s ‘Emergency Call’ here, and it can also sound an alarm.” He demonstrated the functions on the screen for her, then said again: “Wear it. Otherwise I’ll be worried about you walking alone at night.”

Li Kuiyi understood what he meant by it, but — this was far too valuable a gift.

She tried to reason with him: “Before you started walking me home, I always walked by myself, and it was fine. They’re all main roads, and there are street lamps…”

“No.” He interrupted her. “You’re wearing it. Do you want me sitting in Beijing worrying about you every day?”

Li Kuiyi considered it, then settled on a compromise: “Then… I’ll wear it for now. When you come back from training, I’ll return it to you — is that alright?”

He Youyuan was noncommittal: “We’ll see.”

Li Kuiyi lowered her head and looked at the two watches on her wrist — one black, one white. She couldn’t find the words to describe how strange it looked.

As she was looking, she suddenly realized that her hand was still in He Youyuan’s.

She glanced quickly at He Youyuan, wanting to discreetly take her hand back, but the moment she stirred, he closed his fingers around it. His body was held stiffly, and he gazed with studied nonchalance into the depths of the night: “Let me hold it for a bit.”

Li Kuiyi wanted to say no, but then it occurred to her that he was leaving tomorrow. So she said nothing, pressing her lips together, standing there without moving, letting him hold it. After a little while, he suddenly opened his fingers and shifted to interlacing their fingers together.

A seventeen-year-old boy, all reckless momentum — when he held hands, it was simply holding hands. Guileless with a whole heart.

But he didn’t know his own strength, and his grip was growing tighter and tighter. Li Kuiyi felt her fingers ache.

“He Youyuan, a little looser.”

“Oh.” He hastily loosened his hold, then took it up again, squeezing her fingers gently.

Both of their palms began to sweat, damp and warm.

Li Kuiyi sensed something slightly off and tested the waters: “Should we… walk around a bit?”

Standing right here holding hands — wasn’t that a bit strange?

“Oh, sure.”

He Youyuan shuffled his feet forward, his legs moving on autopilot, all awareness gathered in the hand that held hers.

They walked a short distance, neither of them saying a word, only the evening breeze blowing gently, rustling the leaves overhead with a soft, rustling sound.

Then, all at once, two crisp little beeps rang out, breaking the long silence.

Both of them were startled, and — as if they had just been caught by a teacher — hastily let go of each other and looked around for the source of the sound.

Only to see the screen on Li Kuiyi’s wrist light up, displaying a message:

“You appear to have been inactive, but your heart rate has been above 120 bpm for the 10 minutes since 10:47 PM.”

Li Kuiyi: “…”

He Youyuan, you troublemaker — what on earth possessed you to turn on the heart rate monitor on the watch?!