Little Garden - 1
"Ahh..."
Setting down her pen, Li Kuiyi straightened, and her spine shrieked. She sucked in a breath through her teeth, glanced at the clock on the shop wall, and realized it was already quarter to seven. Which meant she had been hunched over her math problems for nearly two hours without moving an inch.
Fifteen more minutes. If no one came into the optical shop by then, she could close up and go home.
She gathered her scratch paper, slipped it into her schoolbag along with the Timed Mathematics Competition Drills, then stood and stretched her arms until something in her shoulders popped. At the doorway she paused, looking out at the street.
Across the road stood a row of old apartment blocks, their pale yellow walls peeling in places, their security grilles furred with rust. On one windowsill hung a faded red lace bra beside a pair of oversized cotton shorts bleached nearly white from washing. Farther away, a few weary sparrows perched on the telephone wires, like plump little punctuation marks too stupid to fly south.
The sky seemed to hang suspended between day and night. There was no sunset in sight, only a few threads of crimson cloud leaking through the gaps between buildings. Not blazing, but there was something strangely tender about them, the peculiar softness of evening.
Fifteen minutes were easy enough to kill. She watched as the hour and minute hands of the wall clock ticked and tocked their way into a 150-degree obtuse angle. Without hesitation, Li Kuiyi switched off the air conditioner. She was just about to turn off the lights when a drawn-out "Hey..." reached her ears.
"You're closing just when we got here?"
Li Kuiyi turned around.
Three boys stood in the doorway, sixteen or seventeen by the look of them. One stood alone with a brooding expression, while the other two had their arms slung around each other's shoulders, grinning like troublemakers. The left one of the grinning pair was tall and strongly built, intimidating at first glance. The other had a Band-Aid above his brow and another over his left cheekbone. His eyes were narrowed slightly as he looked over, his thin lips curved in a lazy, careless smile.
She immediately grew wary. Boys that age could get into a fight anywhere, anytime, and one of them already appeared to be injured.
"Are you here to get glasses?" Her voice came out colder than she intended.
The boys didn't seem to notice the sudden tension in her face. They hadn't even heard the question. They simply strolled in on their long legs. The brooding one, tall and gaunt, scanned the shop once and settled his gaze on her. "You the owner?"
Li Kuiyi edged discreetly toward the door. "If you're here to get glasses, you can pick out some frames you like first. My dad's next door. I'll call him over to do your eye exam."
In truth, her parents had taken her younger brother, who'd suddenly developed a high fever and broken out in a rash, to the hospital. They'd gone through the emergency department. Still, she wasn't exactly lying. Liuyuan Children's Hospital was only a few hundred meters from their optical shop.
The boys turned out to be easygoing. "Oh. Sure." They dispersed among the display racks, browsing the frames. Only the one with the bandages casually found a chair and dropped into it like he owned the place.
Li Kuiyi cast him a cautious glance, then used the shop's landline to call her father, Li Jianye, and ask him to come over.
Li Jianye said he'd be there in five minutes.
The optical shop wasn't big. With three extra boys inside, it suddenly felt packed. The tall, strongly built boy wandered around with his hands behind his back, occasionally bumping into the glass display cases.
Then, as though he'd just discovered a new continent, he excitedly pulled a pair of leopard-print frames from the display on the wall and waved them around. "Qi Yu! Get over here, look at this. Is this flashy enough? Would they suit our Prince?"
Prince... Now that was quite a flashy title. The corner of Li Kuiyi's eye twitched as she silently thought about it.
Sure enough, the brooding skinny boy went over to look. The gloom fell off his face, and the two of them burst out laughing.
"Zhang Chuang, go to hell." The target of their teasing was still slouched lazily against the back of his chair. At that, he raised an eyebrow and cursed.
The unusual form of address made Li Kuiyi turn her head and take another look at the boy curled into the chair. His shoulders and back were slender, his white T-shirt hanging loose on him, though the clean lines of his shoulder bones showed through beneath the fabric. He wore black athletic shorts, his long legs stretched out carelessly. His calves were lean and firmly muscled, pale and long, with not a hair in sight.
...Why am I checking whether he has leg hair? Li Kuiyi shook her head and was about to look away when he seemed to sense her gaze. He suddenly lifted his eyes and met hers directly.
Only then did she get a proper look at his eyes. Long, narrow double-lidded eyes with fine, slightly lifted outer corners. His irises were black as lacquer as he regarded her with an expression neither cold nor warm, like a bottle of beer chilled on a summer day, coolness beading quietly beneath the surface.
Unfortunately, he narrowed his eyes a moment later and said to Li Kuiyi, "Little Boss, can you turn the air conditioner back on? It's hot."
Ah. He was nearsighted.
Li Kuiyi calmly looked away, picked up the remote, and switched the air conditioner back on.
Zhang Chuang turned around and cursed without the slightest restraint. "We call you prince and you actually start acting delicate? The air conditioner was off for what, two minutes? You're already dying of heat? What are you, the Pea Prince?"
He Youyuan swung his legs lazily, the last word trailing off with an almost careless drawl. "The Little Boss doesn't mind. What business is it of yours?"
The Pea Prince.
Li Kuiyi paused before belatedly understanding what the nickname meant. That's actually kind of funny. The corners of her lips curved, and she let out the faintest little laugh.
It was barely a sound, no more than a thin current of air passing by.
Perhaps when your eyesight wasn't good, your hearing became unusually sharp. Somehow, he caught that tiny sound. He looked at her again, his face wearing an expression that was somehow both innocent and insufferable. "What are you laughing at?"
What a strange person.
What business is it of yours whether I laugh or not?
The smile had been so faint it had vanished almost instantly. Li Kuiyi had already smoothed her expression back into blankness, her voice turning equally cool as she asked, "Did I laugh?"
Apparently, he hadn't expected her to deny it. The corner of his mouth twitched. "I heard you laugh."
His tone was certain.
"Then you heard wrong," Li Kuiyi said with equal certainty.
He Youyuan was left speechless.
What a strange person.
If she laughed, she laughed. Why deny it?
His gaze darkened slightly as it settled on her face, like he was searching for evidence of her lie. But he couldn't make out her expression clearly. All he knew was that she wore a yellow-and-white striped sleeveless top and stood behind the glass display counter, bright and vivid like some tropical fruit.
A pineapple, maybe. Or a durian. Either way, prickly.
"She laughs or she doesn't, what's it to you?" Someone finally stepped in to restore justice. Qi Yu, who'd been slumped over the glass case for ages, couldn't hold it in anymore. "Can you just hurry up and pick your glasses? I'm still waiting to go home for dinner."
That finally pulled He Youyuan's attention away. "What's the rush? If you had even a little accuracy when you throw a ball, I wouldn't have ended up with smashed glasses and a bruised face. Do you have any idea how many girls are going to have their hearts broken when they see this face?"
...
The tiny shop fell audibly silent for three full seconds.
Zhang Chuang was the first to start cursing again. "Would it kill you to stop being narcissistic for one day?"
He Youyuan ignored the charge entirely. Instead, he suddenly asked, "Where's my old pair? Who has it? Just pick something that looks like it, close enough that Little Madam He won't notice."
"Zhang Chuang has it," Qi Yu said.
Zhang Chuang dug in his trouser pocket, pulled out the remains of a pair of glasses, and walked over to hand them to Li Kuiyi. "Do you guys have anything similar?"
Li Kuiyi took it. It looked like someone had stepped directly on them. The bridge had snapped in half, and the lenses were long gone. It wasn't a special style, just a common pair of black, thin-rimmed half-frame glasses. But Li Kuiyi recognized the brand logo engraved on the temple. It was a Japanese brand.
She walked over to the left side of the glass counter, searched through the frames with practiced ease, then took one out and handed it to He Youyuan. "See if this is the same."
He didn't take it. "Not this brand. It can't survive being stepped on."
Li Kuiyi: "..."
What brand of glasses survives being stepped on?
She knew it was an excuse. If Qi Yu had thrown a ball and broken his glasses, then Qi Yu should be the one paying. That Japanese brand was expensive. They were students, all of them. They probably didn't have that kind of money on them.
Still, it was a terrible excuse.
She thought for a moment, then swapped it for another similar frame. "This one is better suited for sports, but..." She paused. "You'd still better not step on it."
Zhang Chuang immediately snorted with laughter. He Youyuan gave her a wounded look through those beautiful but nearsighted eyes, taking the frame from her and holding it up for a closer inspection. "How much is this one?"
"Three seventy."
He put the frames on and tried them. Sure enough, he turned to Qi Yu. "How is it? Does it look like my old pair?"
Qi Yu was the only one of the three who seemed remotely reliable. He nodded. "Not bad."
He Youyuan himself was perfectly casual about it. He stood up. "All right. I'll take these."
"Oh. Then please sit down and wait. My dad will be here in a minute to test your eyesight," Li Kuiyi answered automatically.
He Youyuan: "..."
Seriously? He'd only just stood up!
Fortunately, less than half a minute later, a middle-aged man hurried into the shop. "Sorry. Have you been waiting long?"
"Not at all," He Youyuan said, slumped back in the chair like a dried-out sponge that had been waiting half a century.
Li Jianye went straight to the sink to wash his hands, working the soap into a thick lather as he glanced over his shoulder. "You're the one getting the glasses?"
"Yes."
"Then come with me."
He Youyuan followed Li Jianye into the examination room. Qi Yu and Zhang Chuang each found a chair and sat down, lowering their heads to play with their phones.
The shop fell quiet again. Li Kuiyi slipped behind the counter, took out her paper and pen, and continued working through the Timed Mathematics Competition Drills. The summer after the high school entrance examination was unbearably long and boring; she'd bought the workbook to get a head start on the material.
It wasn’t a proper competition math book, just a collection of harder-than-usual problems. Li Kuiyi only did them because of what had happened in the 2013 college entrance exams, a disaster people were still talking about. A certain infamous teacher named Ge had written the math paper, and it was so brutal it dragged the entire province's science-track average down to fifty-five points.
How terrifying. She wouldn't start high school until September, but there was no harm in preparing for trouble before it arrived.
Li Kuiyi clicked the lead of her mechanical pencil forward and began working through the calculations on her scratch paper. Before long, the only sound in the shop was the soft rasp of the pencil against the page, like silkworms chewing through mulberry leaves.
She didn't know how long she'd been at it when someone tapped the counter. "Can I borrow your book? My friend needs something to test his glasses with."
Li Kuiyi looked up and found Qi Yu standing there. Beside him, the Pea Prince had already put on the trial frames. They sat around his eyes like two sunflowers blooming on his eyes, bright and ridiculous, swaying as he turned his head.
Zhang Chuang had crowded up beside him, doubled over with laughter as he held up his phone and snapped picture after picture.
"Sure." Li Kuiyi handed over the workbook.
Qi Yu seemed genuinely interested. Instead of passing it along immediately, he flipped through it first. Then he asked, "You're starting high school?"
"Yes."
"That's a coincidence. So are we." As he spoke, Qi Yu read one of the problems aloud. "Given that in triangle ABC, √2a, b, and c form an arithmetic sequence, find the minimum value of 3/sin A + √2/sin C..."
Li Kuiyi had left that problem blank.
Boys going through puberty never passed up a chance to show off in front of a girl.
Qi Yu pressed his lips together and pointed at the problem. "For this one, 2b equals √2a plus c, so cos B equals..." He simply picked up the mechanical pencil beside Li Kuiyi and began working through the calculations on her scratch paper. "That gives us 0 < B ≤ 75°, and since..."
A long string of equations gradually spread across the page beneath his pen.
"Hm. The answer is 2√3 + 2."
The problem was fairly difficult and required careful calculation. And he was, after all, only a middle-school graduate. Solving a difficult high-school problem with such effortless ease was a perfect opportunity to demonstrate his mathematical ability.
But the girl across from him showed no trace of either admiration or gratitude. She merely lowered her eyes and listened with an almost indifferent calm. Still, in the end, the corner of her mouth moved slightly. "Thanks."
Qi Yu rubbed his nose and said awkwardly, "No problem. This is from Mathematics Compulsory Four and Compulsory Five. You'll learn it eventually. No rush."
Hearing the two of them talking, He Youyuan reached over to take the workbook, flipping through a couple of pages. Some problems were covered with dense rows of solution steps, the handwriting neat but slightly hurried, while others sat there completely untouched.
Zhang Chuang, meanwhile, was having a fit in the background. "What do you mean, Mathematics Compulsory Four and Five? You two actually studied ahead at home?"
The panic was painfully real. Not studying yourself was bad enough, but discovering that your friend had been studying was worse.
Fortunately, someone was in the same boat. That was at least some comfort. He Youyuan tossed the workbook back to Li Kuiyi, shoved his hands into his pockets with an air of cool disdain, and said, "What good person studies ahead?"
Qi Yu: "..."
Li Kuiyi: "..."
Only Zhang Chuang silently gave him a thumbs-up.
Li Jianye noticed the commotion and came over with a smile. "How is it? Can you see clearly? Any dizziness when you put them on?"
He Youyuan said he wasn't dizzy, then took off the trial frames and handed them back to Li Jianye. Li Jianye used the prescription to make the lenses for him.
Once the new glasses were ready, Li Kuiyi handed them to He Youyuan along with the case and receipt, throwing in two bottles of cleaning solution as freebies.
He Youyuan put the glasses on, and for the first time the girl's face came into complete, clear focus. Her hair brushed her shoulders, framing a fair, translucent face. Her eyes were dark and bright, but strangely, there was nothing cute about her. She just looked distant.
Perhaps because there was no emotion in her eyes.
Hmph. She puts on an even better act than I do.
He Youyuan looked away, signed the receipt with a quick, practiced stroke, then hooked an arm around Zhang Chuang's shoulder just as he had when he'd arrived, and called out to Qi Yu, "We're leaving."
Like a gust of wind, they were gone as quickly as they'd come.
Li Kuiyi watched them disappear, then set the receipt on the glass counter and pushed it toward Li Jianye.
And, quite by chance, her eyes fell on the signature. Quick strokes, elegant, unrestrained.
Her brow furrowed, just slightly. A flicker of confusion crossed her eyes.
She knew that name.
But the face was completely unfamiliar.
Li Kuiyi turned abruptly, her gaze landing on the boy's retreating back. His shoulders were narrow and his spine slender, like a young bamboo shoot bursting recklessly through the earth, rustling and swaying in the breeze. Soon, he broke into a run with his friends, the light and shadow falling across him in shifting patterns, flickering, changing, until at last he disappeared into the deepening night.
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