Rainy Season Reunion In the rainy season in April 2025, I stood in front of the iron gate of the No. 3 Middle School. A wooden sign reading "Construction Area" hangs on the rusty door knocker. A creeper is climbing up the mottled red brick wall, casting tiny shadows in the morning mist. The MP3 player in his school uniform pocket suddenly ran out of power, and Zhou Chuanxiong's notepad was stuck on the last note before the chorus, which was like the unspoken half-goodbye when he was seventeen years old. When the man in the guard room poked his head in, I was squatting on the steps picking up a complete sycamore leaf. The lines on the leaf veins remind me of the sketches in Chen Shu's textbook. He always said that my name should match such a leaf, "The sycamore leaves in the Xiaoman season have green and tender serrations on the edges, just like you always like to bite the penholder when talking." The iron door creaked behind me, but the memory was terrifyingly clear in the humid air. Those glass jars that we secretly buried under the parallel bars, the paper planes folded from scratch paper filled with mathematical formulas, and the silver butterfly hairpin that Shen Nanzhi always pinned to her ponytail suddenly cast a double shadow on the retina. It turns out that seventeen years can really turn a book full of stories into yellowing.
This novel and its characters are purely fictitious. Any similarity is purely coincidental and should not be imitated.
