Starlight Descends - 20

The Envelope

---

If you really dug down to the roots of it, Qi Yao and Yu Jiashu were connected by more than just the label of "high school classmates." 

But neither of them had ever spoken of it. One assumed he'd long since forgotten. The other assumed she didn't want to talk about it.

Time rolls backward. The plane trees outside the window cycled from green to gold and gold to green, through dozens of springs and autumns, returning back to the very beginning.

Community Middle School was chaotic, a relentless assault of noise.

Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet: every eye-searing hair color eventually faded into the same dull, brassy yellow, mixed with dry, brittle texture, it looked like they were wearing a haystack on their head. 

Qi Yao sat in the third row by the window. Nearly everyone behind her was sporting a haystack.

Some smoked. Some played on their phones. Others clustered together for cards, curses flying out of their mouths with such violence you'd think each one was their dying roar before shuffling off this mortal coil.

Qi Yao sat quietly in her seat, doing her homework without moving. 

Her deskmate, finding the classroom too noisy, had gone to the bathroom to paint her nails, and only drifted back after the bell, trailing a cheap, acrid chemical smell. 

She carefully extended her five fingers, the brilliant red nails practically waving under the teacher's nose, but no one paid her any attention.

"Hey, what are you gonna do after graduation?" Her deskmate leaned over to watch her working on her test papers, curiosity piqued.

Qi Yao hadn't planned to answer. The aging teacher at the front was lecturing to himself, his voice barely audible to begin with. Drowned out by the girl, it was now almost impossible to hear.

Qi Yao yanked her test paper back, just in time to save the corner from a smear of still-wet crimson nail polish. She pulled it to safety and replied flatly, "Study."

She's going to high school.

Her deskmate let out a scoff. Something flickered in her eyes—a hint of disdain, mixed with a vague, unspoken envy. She shifted back to her own seat. "So your grades are good enough for No. 1 High. Big deal." She blew on her nails, dismissive or perhaps just bitter. "You'll still be out looking for a job after high school anyway."

The truth was, she wanted to go to high school too. But her grades weren't good enough, her family couldn't afford the school choice fee, and there was a younger brother to support. Her only option was to start working after middle school.

Qi Yao looked down and said nothing, just kept taking notes in her textbook. 

When class ended, she handed her deskmate a sheet of paper. "I went to ask the teacher a question just now. The Chinese teacher asked me to give this to you.” 

“She said your essays have real spirit." Qi Yao paused. "That if she had the chance, she'd like to keep teaching you in high school."

The deskmate's hand, still posed over her nails, went rigid. A long, long moment passed. Her eyes reddened at the rims. She took the paper, left a hasty "thank you," and walked quickly out the back door.

She didn't come back for the rest of the class. But the next class was just self-study, it wouldn't have mattered much anyway.

Qi Yao finished two math papers. Through the window, she caught the muffled, suppressed sound of crying. Her pen tip skidded across the paper. By the time she forced herself to focus again, the problems in front of her had dissolved into a blur she could no longer make sense of. 

She paused, put the papers away and took out the letter paper tucked inside her Chinese textbook. 

The girl's profile was calm and composed, her lips pressed into a thin line, her expression unusually serious.

Slowly, stroke by stroke, she wrote: "Say, are some people just born destined to be ants crawling in the mud?"

The stationery was white, half-filled with writing.

Tiny pink flowers decorated the margins. The paper itself was soft, smooth, and fine to the touch, nothing like the coarse, cheap copy paper used at Community Middle.

The difference was like heaven and earth.

She hadn't bought this, of course. It was from her pen pal, S.

It had been over a decade since the turn of the millennium. Did pen pals even exist anymore?

The answer was yes.

Back in her first year of middle school, a municipal education bureau initiative paired several suburban schools with top-tier city schools in a one-to-one assistance program. Each year, the participating schools reserved a handful of spots for high-achieving students from their less-advantaged counterparts. Community Middle was paired with C City No. 1 Middle School, the city's most prestigious public school.

At the time, this initiative had been publicized everywhere: photos of principals shaking hands made the morning paper, banners were hung. With the higher-ups paying such close attention, the people on the ground naturally couldn't afford to slack off.

The teachers in the student affairs offices put their heads together and launched a "Warmth Through Letters" campaign. Students from the two schools were randomly paired up as pen pals and encouraged to correspond regularly. Participation, of course, was mandatory.

The classroom had erupted into chatter. Qi Yao, who had been reviewing classical Chinese at the time, had no idea what to write. In the end, she simply copied down a poem.

To make it look like she'd put in a bit more effort, she deliberately chose the longest one in the textbook; Song of White Snow: Farewell to Secretary Wu Returning to the Capital.

"The mountain road twists and turns, and I can see you no more; only your horse's tracks remain in the snow."

It was an astonishingly, profoundly, almost impressively lazy submission. 

In response, a single question mark stretched across two entire lines. Beneath it was one sentence, carrying an unmistakable tone even through the page:

“You think this is your dictation notebook?”

Beyond that, the entire sheet of paper was completely blank. Nothing else.

Qi Yao: "..."

She stole a glance at her deskmate's letter.

The girl's outgoing message had been little more than an illegible scrawl, complete with a smear of still-wet nail polish. Yet the reply she received was a meticulously written, two-page self-introduction.

Name, class, grade, last semester's rank, hobbies, favorite color, nickname, favorite books: it covered everything, like one of those primary school graduation keepsake books.

Her favorite book, apparently, was The Future of Physics.

Her deskmate had snorted at that. "Her nickname is 'Bookworm.' Sounds about right.”

Then she casually tossed the letter into her desk drawer. The next time it surfaced, it had been crumpled into trash.

Qi Yao turned back to her own reply.

The handwriting was a little rough around the edges, but there was a sharpness to it. The strokes were bold and assured, the horizontal and vertical lines clean and forceful, each character pressed deep into the paper. It was a rare hand—lean, vigorous, and strikingly beautiful.

The words were brief, but at least it looked like the person on the other end was a normal person capable of communication.

The exchange took place once a week. On Mondays, the student affairs teacher delivered the incoming letters and collected the outgoing ones on Friday. The correspondence moved back and forth in a staggered relay.

Qi Yao had always been a girl of very few words; her deskmate was practically the only person she talked with. 

Later, her deskmate stopped studying altogether and started skipping class to run off with the haystack crew in the back. And Qi Yao didn't even have that one person to talk to. 

Gradually, more and more words began to fill her letters. One sentence became two. Two became three. Before long, a week's worth of small happenings could spill across an entire page. 

Perhaps it was precisely because the person on the other end seemed so distant, so indifferent, that she dared to pour out her thoughts so freely. She treated him like a diary. Or like someone whose life would never, ever intersect with hers.

[The osmanthus at school has bloomed. The little tree-lined path by the flower beds is my favorite place. Do you like osmanthus?]

[My grandma is sick. I'm so worried, being stuck at school. My grandma is the person who loves me the absolute most, most, most in this world. I hope she gets better soon.]

[We had to run the 800-meter in PE class today. The boy who sits behind me, the one who's always cutting people's hair, he fell. Sprawled out on the ground, looked exactly like a monkey. It was so funny, but I didn't dare laugh.]

[Today's math test was so hard. P.S. Grandma is better now. Happy.] 

Yu Jiashu received an ever-growing torrent of rambling, disjointed musings. Each time he opened a letter and skimmed through it, he found himself at a loss for words.

So this girl was using him as a memo pad and a diary? 

Line after line, none of it requiring any response. The occasional question she threw his way was probably just a polite afterthought, asking for the sake of asking.

He tore a sheet from his math scratch pad. His eyes swept quickly over the full page of her neat, delicate handwriting. He replied, succinctly and to the point: "No, I don't."

And somehow, despite talking completely past each other, the two of them kept the correspondence going for an entire year.

Most of the time, it was Qi Yao talking. About life, about school, even about the weather, she could always find a couple of lines to comment on. Yu Jiashu would read them casually and reply even more casually. Until one day.

The letter that arrived was smeared with large, blurred patches of ink. The paper was rough, warped and uneven, clearly having been soaked through then dried again.

Yu Jiashu paused when he pulled it out, his eyes tracing the water-stained ink.

"Shu, still writing to that little pen pal of yours?" The guy in the seat in front of him let out an amused sound and leaned over for a look.

"The one I got matched with was a guy. We stopped talking ages ago. Now we just play tic-tac-toe on the same piece of paper. One game takes a month."

Yu Jiashu laughed. "What's wrong with you people."

"Seriously, though, I feel like that school, they don't even really study. The whole atmosphere is just rotten," the guy muttered, fiddling with his pen cap. "Don't even know what the point of this whole activity is."

"No." Yu Jiashu said. 

He raised an eyebrow, recalling how this girl had once listed the math problems she'd gotten wrong, lamented that she couldn't make sense of them, and then copied the entire question into her letter for him to solve.

He'd expected a real challenge, but one glance told him it would take less than a minute to solve. In her next letter, she'd drawn an furious-looking, puffball of a rabbit. 

The boy looked down, a smile tugging at his eyes. "She's pretty cute."

His friend just rolled his eyes and turned back around.

Yu Jiashu lowered his gaze to the new letter. The handwriting was as graceful as ever, every stroke distinct and deliberate, never slurred or rushed, written with absolute clarity. 

The first line read: “Since you go to No. 1 High, have you ever been to the city center?”

I haven't just been to the city center, Yu Jiashu thought. I live in the city center.

As he kept reading, the trace of amusement slowly faded from his face.

She said, “What's the city center like? Is it pretty?”

“What about No. 1 High?”

“Are there kids with bleached-blonde hair who cause trouble in class? The kind who spit gum at the teachers or secretly cut off girls' hair?”

“Our school uniforms are so ugly. They're orange-red, and the fabric is terrible. Last time, I saw someone walking by the roadside wearing the Affiliated School uniform. A black blazer and a pleated skirt. So pretty.”

“I heard other schools have auditoriums, multimedia classrooms, and a real gymnasium. Does No. 1 High have those too?”

The girl was piecing together an image of a good school bit by bit, like a child learning about the world for the first time, she gathered fragments of information, filled in the gaps with her imagination, and slowly painted a picture that was almost dreamlike in its beauty.

It was clumsy. So clumsy it became endearing.

There was a certain slowness to her, a rhythm that seemed out of step with the rest of the world. No flattery. No desperation. Just an extraordinary gentleness, and a quiet resilience beneath it.

Reading line by line, Yu Jiashu found himself thinking that he'd never really appreciated just how good No. 1 High had it.

Nice uniforms. Decent cafeteria food. Bright classrooms. A grand auditorium. A huge sports field. Teachers from top universities who genuinely cared about their students. Classmates who were polite and well-mannered, who wouldn't randomly dye their hair or make a habit of bullying girls.

He read further down, and finally found the starting point of her sudden daydream: 

“The teacher said that every year, they give three graduating students from our middle school a spot at No. 1 High School. But you have to pay fifty thousand yuan, and I think I'll just forget it.”

“My deskmate says she's going to open a nail salon after graduation. I could go work for her. It wouldn't be so bad. At least I'd be able to earn my own money.”

Not so bad, my ass.

Yu Jiashu's brow furrowed coldly, a flash of something harsh and fierce sparking in the depths of his eyes. And then he saw the last line, the one blurred and smeared by water stains, and that cold, simmering fury was abruptly extinguished. 

At first, he thought it was just a spilled water. Now, he knew. It was tears.

Just how much did this girl cry?

He looked down, his long fingers folding the letter neatly back into its envelope exactly as it had come, and tucked it into his drawer. Then he straightened, his long legs unfolding as he rose to his feet. Without hesitation, he walked out of the classroom. A moment later, his knuckles rapped sharply against the principal’s office door.

Another Monday came, and Qi Yao was still stuck on the math problem.

A teacher from Student Affairs hurried into the classroom, then just as quickly hurried out again, as though he were handling something urgent.

When she received her letter that day, she paused in surprise.

The envelope was bulging at the seams. Its corners were sharp and strained, the edges worn pale and frayed, as if it could barely contain its contents. 

Had he finally gotten so annoyed with her that he'd mailed a bomb?

Baffled and cautious, she opened it.

The envelope was crammed full of photos. A thick, heavy stack.

From the front gate of No. 1 Middle, right up to the main entrance of the teaching building.

The school gate was magnificent. The gold lettering of the school's name gleamed, catching the sunlight of that day, flashing bright. The green ivy was lush, hanging in a dense, vibrant curtain overhead.

Past the gate was a wide avenue lined with towering plane trees. Neat flower beds planted with small, unknown blossoms, orderly and beautiful. 

The teaching building's walls were white, accented with red brick. The windows were bright and clean, reflecting the dazzling midday sun under the clear sky.

The teacher's podium and the desks were all brand new. The desktops were piled with books of every kind, from astronomy to geography. In one corner, a romance novel peeked out from beneath a girl's math textbook.

A flag-raising ceremony. The entire student body stood at attention on the sports field. Their blue-and-white short-sleeved summer uniforms were overwhelmingly youthful, so much nicer than Community Middle’s ugly orange and black.

Qi Yao looked through the photos one by one. They almost perfectly matched everything she had imagined. 

A bright classrooms. A wide, open sports field. A place truly suited for serious study.

It was just… when she looked at the final photo, the group shot of students in uniform, her gaze landed on the slightly dark, chubby boy standing right in the middle of the crowd.

This pen pal isn’t exactly what I imagined, she thought.

Didn't they say you could see a person in their handwriting?

If so, his handwriting shouldn't be this sharp, this handsome, with this much force to it. It should be a bit... rounder.

Never mind. 

Her gaze shifted back onto the other, brightly colored images. Everything looked so vibrant, so pure and lovely. A completely different world from her own.

It was clearly a wonderful place. 

But it cost fifty thousand yuan. 

Her grandmother pinched every coin twice before spending it, stretching a single yuan into five. Whatever little she managed to save went straight to buying supplies for the children at the welfare home.

How could Qi Yao possibly bring herself to ask? Raising her was already hard enough.

A faint, self-deprecating smile touched her lips. Her fingertip brushed lightly over the glossy surface of the photos.

After a long, quiet moment, she put the photos back into the envelope.

"—Qi Yao?"

The male teacher who had spoken with her before was suddenly standing at the front door. She didn't know how long he'd been there. He called her name with a strained, awkward laugh and said he wanted to have a talk. 

"Teacher was just joking, you see. The one-to-one assistance program is a government-mandated initiative, specifically to help disadvantaged students like you. How could there possibly be a fee? Isn’t that right?”

"..."

The abrupt reversal was too sudden, too forceful. Qi Yao said nothing. She just pressed her lips together and looked past him, at the people standing behind him.

The old school principal was there, his face contorted in fury. Beside him stood a few others in suits, their expressions stern. The badges on their chests read: "C City Education Bureau."

The teacher in front of her was visibly panicked. With his back to the principal, he frantically signaled at her with his eyes. 

Qi Yao was silent for a moment, then gave a quiet "Mm." 

The teacher exhaled in relief. But then he heard her voice continue. 

"But last time you told me it was precisely because it was government-mandated that we had to pay the fee, to smooth things over and buy the enrollment slot."

The atmosphere in the hallway plummeted. The old principal was so furious his beard seemed to bristle. He waved her back into the classroom. 

A few days later, their class had a new teacher. The one who had tried to line his own pockets was never seen again.

The wind rushing through the corridor was fierce, carrying with it the roar of rough, raucous play. It made the girl's silhouette look incredibly thin and solitary.

Qi Yao stood in the hallway for a quiet moment, then slowly returned to her seat.

She still remembered it. Even now. 

The sunlight that day had been exceptionally bright. The sweet osmanthus was nearly past its bloom, petals scattered across the ground by the wind. Fragrance and sunlight drifted together through the half-open window, spilling over the photographs laid out on her desk.

Every single one of them was so beautiful, like hazy dreams, floating softly in the air, drifting to her from somewhere far, far away.

 

What had once been out of reach, something she could only look up at from afar, now felt like a star she might one day reach out and touch.

A single sheet of paper slipped from the envelope, caught by the faint breeze, it fluttered and spun right before her eyes.

That person's handwriting was still as bold and forceful as ever. Each stroke sharp, cutting deep into the page.

He'd written:

"The auditorium is too far. Too lazy to walk.

Come see for yourself next year."

---

← Previous | Table of Contents | Next →

0