[Mutual redemption | sweet and angsty campus romance | healing]
Lu Xi thought her youth had already been soaked through by her mother’s sobs
At ten, she caught her father cheating. Her once-gentle mother became a thorny rose, calling her “a little slut” and “just like your father.” At fourteen, she tore up her dance class registration form with her own hands and buried ten years of dreams spent dancing on tiptoe in the trash. By her second year of high school, her grades had plunged from the top ten to rock bottom.
She was like mist in spring, scattered by the slightest breeze: quiet and sensitive, even her smile held back with careful restraint.
Then she stumbled into Yu Zhou’s world.
To everyone else, he was a reckless troublemaker who slept through class and went wild after school. His parents were away on business all year, using pocket money as a substitute for their company. Yet when someone mocked her for “putting on airs,” he would shoot back without a care, “What’s it to you?”
He would crouch beside her and point to the clouds as they parted. “Look, the sky will clear.”
No one knew that this carefree boy could only watch the Spring Festival Gala on a takeout box during the New Year. He forced himself to go to school with a fever of 39 degrees, and after hanging up on his parents when they said they “weren’t coming home,” he would stare blankly at the screen.
She once said, “You’re like a summer wind, too fierce.”
He smiled and replied, “You’re like spring mist, too light.”
Until one day at sunset, the fierce wind swept up the thin mist and warmed it into something human
“Lu Xi, start dancing again. I’ll be with you.”
“Yu Zhou, do you want to... come over to my place for dumplings this New Year’s Eve?”
The two of them held on to their own little lights and turned “me” into “us.”
It turned out the best kind of redemption was never a god descending from the heavens. It was the day you came into my life, when my shadows began to let in the light.
