Dusk spread over the brick walls of the Yu family's old house, and seventeen-year-old Yu Fanxing squatted on the patio to wash the last piece of school uniform. The well water reflects the night sky between the cornices. Her father named her after he was drunk. He said that the girl is like the stars in the sky, one more is not too many, and one less is not enough. The moss gasps in the cracks of the bricks, just like her youth stuck between her brother's college entrance banquet and her mother's medicine bill.
In the midsummer of that year, she clutched the admission notice from a private university and ran out of the alley. The gilded school badge of the Royal Imperial College in S City was burned on her palms. She knocked over a stack of piano scores in the European-style corridor shaded by sycamores, and looked up to see the hanging cuffs of Yang Yuan's white shirt—the hands that should be resting on the piano keys were picking up the old clothes scattered in the cheap suitcase for her.
"Jade classmate, your eyes seem to be waiting for a rainstorm." The French professor said as he adjusted his silver-rimmed glasses. He took her to read Baudelaire's "Flowers of Evil," gave her out-of-print poetry collections wrapped in mint candies, and taught her to name bones in Latin in the anatomy room. It wasn't until the news of the laboratory explosion on Christmas Eve was overwhelming that she read the prophecy on the last page of his research notes in the charred ruins: "True immortality is when a certain soul becomes your reflection."
Fifteen years later, Yu Fanxing stood on his former podium and adjusted his silver-rimmed glasses. Ginkgo trees rustled with gold leaves outside the window, and I vaguely heard Chopin's nocturne playing from the French gramophone. She finally finished the article "On the Ethical Boundaries of Memory Transplantation", and the girl in the audience who raised her hand to ask a question had a mint candy wrapper in her hair that had been stained by the sycamore rain.
