Starlight Descends - 7
Summer
In that instant, a flood of memories surged through Qi Yao. The world around her went still, leaving only her recollections flickering and playing on like a blurry, worn-out film.
One summer, he had sat beside her just like this.
August in C City was brutal. The midday temperature could hit forty degrees. A single minute under that sun and you'd wilt, ready to melt.
As the best school in the C City, No. 1 High naturally had mandatory summer classes.
The new high schoolers, fresh off a brief month of vacation, were forcibly dragged from their late mornings and lazy days into the sweltering summer heat for an early start on their first-year curriculum. The campus was filled with groans of misery.
This, of course, did not include Qi Yao.
She'd applied for boarding as soon as she received her admission letter. Upon learning of her situation, the school allowed her to stay on campus even during the break.
The girl, so quiet she barely spoke two sentences a day, was exceptionally diligent, arriving at the classroom every morning to study. Summer classes or not, the only difference for her was whether there were people around her or not.
All classrooms at No. 1 High had air conditioning, which pacified the seething public outcry to a certain extent. That is, until the power suddenly went out.
The heat sapped the students of all energy. Sweat beaded at their temples and dripped. Their palms were slick, smearing the ink of their pens into illegible messes, turning notebooks into chaotic scratch paper.
Qi Yao sat in the last row, lips pressed together, working through high school transition assignments. Her head, resolutely bowed, was strikingly conspicuous amid a roomful of students rubbernecking.
Her deskmate asked if she wasn't hot. Qi Yao paused for a moment, then shook her head. "Used to it," she said, offering nothing more.
And so her deskmate stopped trying to talk to her, turning instead to gossip animatedly with the two girls from this school's own middle school division in the row ahead.
They chatted about unfamiliar names and unfamiliar events, excitedly warming up to each other in no time. Qi Yao straightened her lips and shrank a little further to the side.
The Dean of Students, Old Deng, was patrolling the hallway with his hands behind his back. A huge sweat stain had bloomed across the back of his checked shirt, nearly soaking it through. Finally, with a broad sweep of his hand, he ordered the logistics department to bring out the generators, and sent the entire grade to the auditorium to escape the heat.
Qi Yao stopped by the restroom first. By the time she made it to the auditorium, books in her arms, almost everyone was already seated.
Sixteen and seventeen. An age where a scrap of gossip could fuel a whole day's conversation and a power outage could ignite everyone's excitement. Not yet officially under any strict rules, all the new students were chattering away.
Most were students who had advanced directly from No. 1 middle school division. They clearly had a big friend circle, greeting people left and right. Perhaps unintentionally, they always hinted, however subtly, at a certain superiority that came from a sense of belonging.
Qi Yao stood in the auditorium's aisle, looking around. She couldn't find her class and felt too shy to squeeze through the narrow rows of seats. So she simply sat down in the very back row, took out a math test paper, and started working.
"Power's out! The homeroom teacher's off today, Old Deng won't know if we came or not. Let's hop the wall and go out?"
"Yeah, Shu! Who cares about self study? Damn, so many people here, it's giving me a headache. Let's go!"
A few impatient male voices came from the back door. Then, the sound of footsteps. Light, unhurried, drawing closer, drifting from the back door to Qi Yao's ear.
"Not going."
The boy's voice was clear and cool, nonchalant.
His movements were unhurried, radiating a lazy sort of carelessness. He reached for the fabric seat of the folding chair, his long, lean fingers gripping it with a slight effort as he settled his body down in a relaxed slouch.
"Hot."
The boys at the back door seemed a bit irritated. They walked over and crowded around him. "Hot my ass! The AC's been off forever, and you don't even have a drop of sweat."
"Yeah, man, I'm fucking dying here. My underwear is soaked."
The words hit Qi Yao without warning, she choked on her own spit. Her black pen skidded, scratching a dark line across her neat handwriting.
Yu Jiashu glanced at her bowed head, then looked away, leaning back in his chair lazily. "Watch your language."
"Sorry, sorry!" The boy immediately realized, scratching his head in embarrassment and quickly changed the subject. "You coming or not? Dude, if you don't come, who's gonna carry us?!"
"Shu... no! Bro! You're my bro! Please, help us rank up, okay? Before Old Deng shows up," another boy pleaded, hands clasped in prayer.
Yu Jiashu caught a figure approaching in his peripheral vision. He reached forward to pull down the small wooden desk attached to the back of the seat in front of him, settling himself comfortably, then rapped his knuckles on its surface.
"Nope. I need to study."
The two in front of him were incensed. "Study, my foot! Don't you even pretend..."
"And just where do you think you're going?"
Old Deng stood behind them, hands behind his back, smiling genially.
Without a second thought, the two blurted, "Going to the internet ca..." then, with a panic-stricken swerve in tone, "...study! Going to study."
The final syllable looped around like a mountain road, their terrified expressions snapping into place.
Old Deng's face hardened into a fierce scowl. He grabbed each of them by the back collar of their school uniforms and deposited them in the front row, right under his watchful eye.
Before leaving, he glanced back at the one still seated. "You. Behave yourself, too!"
“Yes, sir.” Faced with three grim faces staring at him, a grin tugged at Yu Jiashu's lips as he nodded in agreement.
Qi Yao glanced from the corner of her eye. The second Old Deng was gone, the boy had his phone out and was deep into a game.
His elbow rested loosely on his thigh, the screen concealed beneath the little wooden desk. It was clearly a sneaky posture, yet on him, it looked supremely nonchalant. His features were cool, exuding a careless kind of charm.
He didn't seem like the studious type.
Qi Yao paused, pulled her gaze back, pursed her lips, and went back to her problems.
But she got stuck halfway through the paper.
There was a clear gap between the teaching quality at Community Middle and No. 1 High. While she'd managed to earn an admission spot, her grades were only average here.
Qi Yao frowned, working through the sequence problem. The scratch paper was filled with neat, tidy writing, but she just couldn't solve it.
She'd been stuck for a good while when a clear, cool voice drawled beside her:
"You used the wrong summation formula."
Qi Yao froze and turned to look at him.
The boy was leaning back in his chair. Behind him was the auditorium's grand dome and a red velvet curtain. His features were striking, a high nose bridge, a sharp jawline, his expression indifferent. And yet, there was a vibrant energy in the way he held himself. His dark pupils were fixed on her.
"What, don't believe me?" Yu Jiashu arched an eyebrow.
He'd just finished a game round. While waiting for the next to start, he'd noticed this girl staring blankly at the same problem, and now she was doing the same to him, she looked a bit silly.
The next game was about to launch. Yu Jiashu glanced at the somewhat familiar handwriting on her scratch paper, and on a sudden impulse, reached for a pen from his own case.
Extending his arm, the pen tip landed precisely where she'd made her mistake, crossing it out with a single, decisive stroke.
Qi Yao was too startled to move. She sat rigid, not sure whether to pull away or freeze, staring at the hand that was marking up her scratch paper.
He had fair skin, long fingers with distinct knuckles, holding the pen with a standard, practiced grip. As he wrote, a pale mole at the base of his finger appeared and vanished.
That mole was like a sign, a marker. It struck her like a bolt, cracking her dazed skull open, and a memory flashed through with absolute clarity.
The summation formula for an arithmetic progression surfaced on her scratch paper. The handwriting was sloppy but sharp, the strokes free and controlled, with a dashing, penetrating force.
It was so deeply, deeply familiar.
Qi Yao's mind went completely blank. A chaotic slideshow of images flickered before her eyes. She thought, suddenly, of the signatures on countless letters, of countless postage stamps, of the boy's brief but incisive analyses...
She thought of all the emotional solace she had ever clung to during all those bewildered, lost late nights.
A roaring filled her ears. It felt like her soul was leaving her body.
After a long moment, her lashes trembled. She didn't look at the corrected formula on the scratch paper. Instead, she turned her head, fixed her gaze on the boy's cool, clear features, and asked, her voice strained to near breaking:
"Have you read Ode to the Orange Tree?"
The boy froze.
'A tree of grace, the orange, comes to rest.'
'Heeding Heaven's charge, it thrives in the South.'
Old Deng's voice crackled through the microphone, droning out the announcement that power to the teaching building had been restored. All students, please return to your respective classrooms to continue with lessons.
Qi Yao sat alone in the bustling, noisy auditorium. Her eyes fixed on a forgotten, unopened bottle of orange soda, lost in a daze.
Even now, she didn't know if that sudden power outage in the sweltering summer had been fate's doing or not.
Perhaps its only purpose was to let her recognize him, before he stepped onto the stage as a top-ranked recommended student. To make her fall for him before any other outsider at No. 1 High.
To let her secretly touch that unopened bottle of orange soda. To let a breeze, carrying the scent of cicadas, mint, and citrus, blow into her grey, pencil-smudge dreariness of a girlhood.
And then, nothing more.
In all three years of high school, that was the entirety of what lay between them.
Their one and only intersection.
From that day forward, she remained quietly, distantly tucked away in the corner of the classroom next door. She'd watched him climb the honor roll and the awards podium, time after time. Watched him turn down confession after confession. Then, as the third season of cicadas came, they graduated, went their separate ways, and were apart until now.
Years later, when Qi Yao thought back to that version of herself, she couldn't help but shake her head. If she was a little braver back then, would it have been different? Would she at least have a single photograph with him?
But these were nothing more than impossible daydreams.
Never had she imagined he would one day sit beside her again. And that, on the surface, she could carry herself with enough grace to greet him with composure.
Yu Jiashu had crossed the span of nearly a decade and was sitting beside her again.
Da Bai and Zhou Qi were still bickering. Fang Qian was asking when her new drama would air. The cheerful noise around her, a warmth she rarely experienced, filled her ears, but she could only stare at the ring of light reflected on the dining table, lost in thought.
Yu Jiashu's brow arched slightly. As if a thought had occurred to him, he tilted his head just slightly and looked at her.
All the sounds around them seemed to drift far away. That single glance of his felt like a glass dome had been placed around them, shutting out the irrelevant world.
Qi Yao had to draw upon an entire decade's worth of growth just to hold back the surge of emotion, to meet his eyes with a semblance of calm.
And then she saw him. His brows, almost unchanged from his teenage years, lifted lightly. His pupils were black as obsidian. And out of nowhere, he said, abruptly, contextlessly:
"Have you read Ode to the Orange Tree?"
← Previous | Table of Contents | Next →
Comments
Post a Comment