On a rainy night, I bumped into Lu Shenzhou, the school sweetheart I'd had a crush on for three years, in the hospital morgue. He was soaked and kneeling in front of the body covered with white cloth, clutching a couple's bracelet of the same style as mine in his palm. Three months later, transfer student Zhou Ye blocked me in the equipment room. He hung the cross that Lu Shenzhou never left his body around his neck. His fingertips were rubbing the diagnostic report I had hidden in the middle of my school bag: Lin Chuxia, do you think who he chased out in the rain that night?
The fireworks for the seventeenth birthday went out amidst the alarm of the ICU monitor. Before her death, her mother clutched the yellowed old photo and murmured the name of a strange man. When the belt of my father's alcoholism falls on his back, it is always accompanied by a curse on some bastard. Until I found a burial monument with my parents' names engraved on it in an abandoned church in the south of the city. The date of the inscription was actually seven years before I was born. When Zhou Ye broke into my rehabilitation room with a bloody rose, when Lu Chenzhou's twin brother returned from Wall Street, and when the medical examiner handed over the tampered autopsy report, the truths buried by the years suddenly opened like Pandora's box. It turns out that in the rainstorm that ruined our entire youth when we were seventeen, we were all bloody chess pieces on someone else's chessboard.
This novel and its characters are purely fictitious. Any similarity is purely coincidental and should not be imitated.
