A seventeen-year-old's heart is split in two by mathematical formulas. On the left is the cicada molt specimen Su Xiaoman hides beneath her scratch paper; on the right are the ink stains blooming from Chen Shuyu's pencil tip. Two souls forced onto the same track by fate cast tangled shadows beneath the fluorescent lights in the third row of the classroom.
When Lin Yue's canvas shoes crushed the sunset at the end of the hallway, Su Xiaoman finally saw the tear stains bleeding through the back of her exam paper.
It turned out that the names repeatedly crossing over on the classroom duty roster, the mints smuggled into evening study, and the coordinates carved into the gaps in their desks with compass points had long ago planted the fuse between trigonometric functions and benzene rings.
Cracks in their families of origin seeped dark-red rust, while the countdown to the college entrance exam hung over them like a scalpel. They used correction tape to cover the unfinished lines in their love letters, yet discovered, while receiving IVs in the infirmary, that the sweetness of the iced milk tea flowing through their veins was perfectly in sync.
Until the night a torrential downpour washed away their secret hideout, Chen Shuyu clutched a moldy paper crane and suddenly understood: youth is a scale destined to tilt. Some people hide their heartbeat in a book of mistakes, while others freeze their tears into the ice in their milk tea.
When the blackboard eraser wiped away the final coordinate plane, a butterfly came to rest at the full stop of midsummer. But the answer waiting in the same place, could it still piece together the original rhythm of their heartbeats when the cicadas began singing again?
[The chill of iced milk tea and the burn of a racing heart will find a dangerous balance in the folds of youth]
