In the end, Zhu Yunque never spent that hundred yuan.

She pressed the folded note deep into the pocket of her school uniform, then went to the security guard at the gate and borrowed two yuan. She took the bus ten stops home.

By then, the evening had folded itself closed.

From somewhere deep in the old alleyway of Smoke-Willow Lane, the sounds of cooking rose right on schedule. Zhu Yunque walked through the familiar smoky scent of home-cooked food, entered the building, and knocked on the door of unit 102.

The door was opened by her grandmother.

The old woman had her arms full with the family’s toddler grandchild — less than two years old — and because she had to put him down to open the door, she immediately turned a scolding look on Zhu Yunque. “How old are you now, and still coming home without your key.”

Zhu Yunque braced her hand on the old door frame and changed her shoes, eyes lowered. “Left it at school.”

The old woman was sharp-eyed and saw the shopping bag immediately, and started fussing. “Wasting money again. What is it this time.”

She followed her down the hallway. “And where’s your school bag? Did someone eat it?”

Zhu Yunque glanced at her, about to reply, when her stepmother Deng Jiali came out carrying two dishes to the table.

Deng Jiali was, by some measure, the second kindest person in this household toward Zhu Yunque.

Seeing the old woman picking at her again, she quickly called out to Zhu Yunque and told her to wash her hands and come to eat.

Zhu Yunque looked at the old, slightly peeling round table. The spread of dishes was unusually generous.

Without thinking, she asked, “Is my dad back today?”

“Not yet, he’ll be home tomorrow,” said Deng Jiali. “It’s your uncle — today was his first day at the new job. I thought we’d make something nice to celebrate. Besides, Ye Tian’s coming for dinner tonight.”

Before the sentence was finished, the old woman turned up her nose with a disdainful sound. “Still clinging on like he hasn’t been weaned. A grown man loitering at someone else’s house.”

Not caring in the least whether Deng Jiali was embarrassed, she carried the child into another room.

Deng Jiali gave Zhu Yunque an awkward smile. “Don’t worry — he won’t be staying long. As soon as he finds a suitable place, I’ll have him move out.”

Zhu Yunque said nothing.

She quietly tucked the shopping bag into the farthest corner of her desk.

On the bus ride home, she had in fact thought about looking inside to see what was in it. But after deliberating for a long time, she dismissed the idea.

Whatever was in that bag had nothing to do with Lu Rangchen anymore.

Before long, Deng Jiaqiang and Ye Tian came home one after the other, and the three-bedroom apartment immediately felt visibly cramped.

At dinner, Ye Tian took his usual seat to her left.

Both of them were left-handed, and had always sat together at meals.

Apparently noticing she was in a low mood, Ye Tian put two extra pieces of pork ribs on her plate — which happened to draw the attention of Deng Jiaqiang.

Deng Jiaqiang glanced at Zhu Yunque, and smirked in his loose, dissolute way. “Eating that much and still not putting on any weight — that’s a waste.”

As he said it, he made a casual, jokingly intended attempt to pinch Zhu Yunque’s slender, fragile-looking wrist.

Zhu Yunque furrowed her brow. Before she could pull away, Ye Tian hurled a chopstick at him.

It cracked against the bowl with a sharp clatter, startling Deng Jiaqiang badly. The old woman let out an irritated “tsk.”

“What do you think you’re doing.”

Ye Tian stared at Deng Jiaqiang, cold and hard.

Deng Jiaqiang laughed it off sheepishly and bent over his rice.

Deng Jiali, coming out of the kitchen with another dish, looked stricken. Under the table, she kicked Deng Jiaqiang. “Behave yourself at the table!”

When she looked up again, Zhu Yunque had put down her chopsticks without any visible emotion and gone back to her room.

Ye Tian’s chewing slowed. His eyes followed her until the bedroom door clicked shut.

After dinner, Ye Tian helped Deng Jiali wash the dishes.

Her uncle Deng Jiaqiang, meanwhile, sat on the sofa in the lazy, useless way of his — cracking sunflower seeds and watching a show, the picture of idle self-indulgence.

Zhu Yunque’s door was closed, sealing herself inside.

The room was only a few square meters — a single bed, a wardrobe, and a secondhand desk. On the other side of the room was a small balcony that she used for reciting lessons aloud, her own secret refuge.

Since Deng Jiaqiang had moved in, the refuge had obviously been compromised.

Several spent cigarette butts had been left on the windowsill. Even on her desk, there was now a cheap lighter.

Zhu Yunque stared at it silently for a few seconds, then without any expression picked up the lighter and dropped it in the rubbish bin, then went and cleared the cigarette butts from the balcony.

The door latch turned, and Ye Tian came in.

Seeing it was him, Zhu Yunque’s brow softened a little.

Ye Tian asked, “What is it?”

Zhu Yunque hesitated for a moment, then held up the bin and put it in front of his eyes.

The fifteen-or-sixteen-year-old boy’s eyebrows immediately pressed together in irritation. He turned to leave, but Zhu Yunque caught him. “I’ll just lock my door from now on.”

He looked at her — calm and composed, that clear, fine face of hers — and said nothing more.

Zhu Yunque could only redirect the conversation. “Can I borrow your phone?”

Ye Tian, frowning, handed it over. “Where’s yours?”

“Left it at school,” she said.

She took it, keyed in the passcode, and added, “Sit wherever you like. I’m going to call Dad.”

As she spoke, she turned back to the balcony and slid the glass door closed.

Ye Tian had no interest in sitting down. He turned and went straight to the living room to deal with Deng Jiaqiang.

Zhu Yunque watched him for a moment from the balcony, then turned as Zhu Ping’an’s call connected.

On the other end came a noisy background, and the rhythmic clacking of a train over rails.

The train wasn’t busy at this hour. Zhu Ping’an, calm and even-voiced as always, answered, “Hello? Yunque? What’s the matter?”

Zhu Yunque pressed her lips together and told him about the teacher wanting a parent to come in.

In all her years, this was the first time a teacher had ever asked to speak with her family.

Zhu Ping’an clearly hadn’t quite processed it. “You got into trouble?”

“No.”

Zhu Yunque made an effort to let her voice sound subdued. “My exam results were very bad this time.”

Zhu Ping’an asked, “How bad?”

The last light of the setting sun was the color of rouge.

Zhu Yunque looked out the window and said, “Come tomorrow and you’ll see.”

Zhu Ping’an went quiet, and a moment later someone called for him. He said a quick “all right” and hurriedly ended the call.

He was always like this — never even enough time to listen to her.

But it didn’t matter anymore.

When she came back to the room, Ye Tian had already given Deng Jiaqiang a thorough dressing-down.

Deng Jiaqiang stormed off in a rage and went outside to cool down.

His outburst had been so loud that the baby was frightened into crying, which sent the old woman out again — she scolded Deng Jiaqiang first, then turned on Ye Tian, calling him a troublemaker, saying he never applied himself to school, carried on like a hooligan, and was a waste of Zhu Ping’an’s salary.

Deng Jiali hurried out and intervened, making every effort to mollify the old woman.

Ye Tian ignored all of it and came back to find Zhu Yunque.

Seeing his stormy expression, she reached into a drawer and placed a lychee-flavored lollipop in his hand.

Ye Tian sat down on Zhu Yunque’s bed, unwrapping the candy. “Let him come in again and I’ll break both his legs,” he said, still seething.

Zhu Yunque was eating her own lollipop. Calmly, she said, “It’s fine. I won’t be staying here much longer anyway.”

At those words, Ye Tian looked up at her — the thin, slight line of her back. “Your mom agreed to take you in?”

Zhu Yunque crunched through the candy. “Should be, this time around.”

As long as this business with her falling grades made enough noise.

Ye Tian fell quiet.

After a long moment, he asked, “And if she still won’t take you?”

The words fell into the small, silent room.

Zhu Yunque’s long, curved lashes trembled once. She spoke with the conviction of someone who had made up her mind.

“Then when I grow up, I won’t want her either.”

Ye Tian was a student at a vocational high school and stayed in the dorms. He had made plans with a few friends to play basketball that evening, so he didn’t stay with Zhu Yunque long before he left.

Thanks to him, though.

Deng Jiaqiang was much quieter when he came back inside that night.

Deng Jiali even came to check on Zhu Yunque, bringing fruit and asking about her exam results. When she heard the score and ranking, her surprise was plain.

“How could it drop so much? Did you not finish the paper? Or was there something going on that affected you?”

There was unease in Deng Jiali’s eyes as she said it.

Zhu Yunque stopped writing in her practice workbook, looked up at her sincerely, and said, “No. The questions were just hard. I simply did badly.”

Deng Jiali opened her mouth, visibly struggling to believe it.

If Zhu Yunque had been good enough to get into Nanchen Third High — a key school of that caliber — she couldn’t accept that she’d scored this poorly on a single exam.

Unless Deng Jiaqiang moving in had been affecting her, and combined with the way Ye Tian had reacted to Deng Jiaqiang… Deng Jiali didn’t dare push any further.

Zhu Yunque didn’t give her the chance to ask more. Instead, as if she had just thought of something, she asked Deng Jiali for a hundred yuan.

Zhu Ping’an’s salary was handed over to Deng Jiali every month, and Zhu Yunque’s pocket money had always come from her. In matters of money, Deng Jiali kept careful track, yet she had never been particularly stingy toward Zhu Yunque. Feeling guilty about Deng Jiaqiang’s recent behavior, she generously gave Zhu Yunque two hundred yuan.

The moment Deng Jiali left, the small room fell quiet again.

Zhu Yunque had completely lost any desire to study. As if guided by some instinct, she reached into the pocket of her uniform and drew out the hundred-yuan note that Lu Rangchen had given her — still folded into its small square.

The note was crisp and new, its creases sharp.

It was the same as any other note, and yet, because it was from Lu Rangchen, it was somehow different.

Zhu Yunque slowly opened it out, then retrieved her diary and carefully pressed it between the pages.

She smoothed it gently with her fingertips, and then, helplessly, she thought once more of Lu Rangchen’s face — the one that seemed to invade and linger, too handsome to forget.

It was just a pity: Lu Rangchen had no idea who she was.

He had never noticed her at all.

Zhu Yunque, on the other hand, had known of him since the second semester of Year One.

It was a sunny morning break. Xu Linda had been walking with her arm through hers on the way to assembly, telling her that Class A had recently gotten a newcomer — a mid-year transfer. The students in Class A had been furious. They had been ready to stage a collective protest — until they met him in person, and were all completely speechless.

Xu Linda laughed. “Well, Class A does have an unusually large number of girls prone to infatuation. Every one of them was rooted to the spot the moment they saw Lu Rangchen. And the girls from the adjacent class were all trying to squeeze in for a look too.”

Zhu Yunque squinted against the glare of the sun. “What do you mean?”

Xu Linda looked at her as if she were a hopeless case. “Obviously because this Lu Rangchen is insanely good-looking.”

“Not just good-looking — his grades are excellent too. Apparently someone in Class A competed in a math olympiad with him, and he came in first.”

“He also came first in the provincial youth division of the tennis tournament. It was in the provincial newspaper.”

“He was supposed to be with the grade above ours, but took a year off for tennis.”

“Oh, and he’s from the capital — only been in Nanchen for a couple of years.”

“I heard he and his mother came to Nanchen with his father. His dad is a professor at Nanchen University. The family’s very well-off.”

Xu Linda chattered away like a cheerful little magpie, and Zhu Yunque listened with half her attention — no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t seem to picture this person in her mind.

Until they reached the assembly and had lined up in formation, and Xu Linda, standing one row in front of her, suddenly turned and signaled to her with her eyes.

Zhu Yunque stood with both arms stretched out horizontally, expression somewhat blank. “What?”

Xu Linda immediately sent back an expression bursting with animation, and whispered, her voice lowered, “Look to your left rear — the tallest, most handsome one in Class A, that’s him.”

Zhu Yunque heard her and thought: “…”

Young girls in the throes of adolescence probably feel an especially powerful curiosity about the opposite sex.

Even someone with a temperament as reserved as Zhu Yunque was not immune to Xu Linda’s pestering. After being nagged repeatedly, she finally couldn’t stop herself — in a gap between exercise movements, she turned her head and glanced toward the left rear.

One glance was all it took. She saw Lu Rangchen.

Or rather — she didn’t need to identify him. The moment she looked, she already knew with certainty: that was him.

Tall. Standing in the back row. Not in the standard school uniform, but in a loosely worn white dress shirt over a white undershirt, with a pair of pale jeans and expensive trainers.

Broad shoulders, long legs, languid and unguarded. Standing there doing nothing at all, just casually going through the arm movements of the exercise — and already radiating a clean, untamed quality that was unmistakably his.

Like a bright, swaying light that shone straight through to the heart.

Zhu Yunque’s throat constricted, and something inside her moved with sudden intensity — the same resonance she had felt when she read about the female Fujii in the film “Love Letter,” watching the male Fujii browse the library shelves.

What she hadn’t expected was that her gaze was too conspicuous. Lu Rangchen seemed to sense it, and abruptly narrowed his eyes and glanced toward her direction.

Worse still, the homeroom teacher walking past issued a sharp warning: “How long have you been staring? Haven’t you seen enough?”

Zheng Guoxiong’s voice was deep and booming — even the music of the morning exercises couldn’t drown it out. It instantly drew the attention of everyone nearby.

The barely-not-called-out Zhu Yunque felt her heart jolt hard. She yanked her gaze back and in a flurry of panic threw herself into the next movement of the exercise.

But it was already too late. The muffled laughter had started all around her.

Like a troupe of boisterous little demons, parading past her in a line, gleefully baring their teeth, mocking her for what she had just done.

Zhu Yunque pressed her pale lips into a firm line. For the rest of assembly, her eyes didn’t stray another millimeter.

That was the most humiliating day in her memory.

The sun blazed down so fiercely it felt like it could end a person.

Even after she was back in the classroom, the flush had not fully faded from her cheeks.