Mo Mo had a secret.
He remembered a scent: iodine antiseptic mixed with the lingering warmth of sunset. It belonged to a little girl with bruises on her arm. That memory was ten years old, so distant it felt like a dream.
The old neighborhood had long since been demolished, and the plane trees were gone, too. He thought the girl had disappeared in the dust of the bulldozers long ago.
Until the first day of his second year of high school, when he caught that scent at the end of the shelves in the library corner.
Zhang Mengyao had a secret, too.
She had been searching for a boy: clumsy and awkward, making her grimace in pain when he applied medicine, but the first person in her life to treat her gently.
They hadn't seen each other in ten years. She didn't even know his name.
Then, in the sunset by the library corner, she saw a boy with his head down, too afraid to look at her.
His eyes were as dark and bright as they had been ten years ago.
And everyone around them had their own story:
The otaku who kept complaining that “Thursday is tyranny,” the handsome boy who hid a pink skirt, the short rich kid who had asked a girl out forty-seven times and still hadn't won her over, the athletes and classical dancers caught in a quiet undercurrent between the dance studio and the basketball court, and the gaming-addicted English teacher whose lessons sounded like weather reports.
Everyone has cracks.
But that's where the light gets in.
The brushstrokes are incredibly delicate, without a system or soul-piercing rebirth. It gives people a clean and agile feeling, which can be regarded as a breath of fresh air in the online literary world.