A misspelled name is the clumsiest confession of youth
In the height of summer, with cicadas roaring, the workbook of Jiang Yubai, a transfer student in Class 3 of Grade 11, always seemed to contain a name that did not exist: “Lin Chan.” Everyone knew the girl sitting by the window, who never took off her headphones, was named Lin Chan. But no one noticed the ink bleeding beside the insect radical as the boy marked her test papers in red pen.
He remembered that afternoon when the sun seemed to wrinkle the sky. Lin Chan had risen onto her tiptoes to take the highest-volume copy of The Insect Guide from the library shelf, and the cicada-shaped birthmark hidden among the wisps of hair at the nape of her neck had flashed into view. She would never know that inside the iron box Jiang Yubai kept hidden deep in his desk, the backs of the wings of seventeen cicada-shell specimens bore words written in a hand so tiny they could only be read through a microscope: “At the seventh second, I forgot to breathe again.”
The instant a rainstorm cut off the cicadas’ cries, he finally stopped her in the corridor. “For Lin Chan’s ‘Chan’... does it have the insect radical, or the ‘show’ radical?” She pulled off her dripping headphones and heard her own heartbeat thundering in her ears. It turned out that some misalignments had long ago been distilled by time into romance with the precision of a perfect shot.
