Youth's Thorns: Whose Bones Do They Pierce?

“In the third row by the window in Senior Class 7, a half-empty box of throat lozenges still lies in the desk's hidden compartment. Lin Shutong always used to say, ‘Gu Yanzhou, your sore throat is acting up again,’ but she never knew that inside the silver medal he won in the math competition, the words ‘sparse shadows, slanting branches’ were engraved: half a line of poetry she'd copied onto her scratch paper.

Seven years later, in the break room of a Beijing office tower, the heir to an architecture firm, Gu Yanzhou, clutches that old fountain pen. Seeing the necklace around her neck, its pendant shaped like a student ID card, though actually a keepsake from her aunt, he quietly asks, ‘Why did you run away the night before the college entrance exams?’

She doesn't know that the transfer receipt for the construction costs he paid off on his father's behalf has lain in the hidden compartment of their old desk for seven whole years. And he doesn't know that the cassette tape in her drawer recorded his trembling confession in the broadcasting room: ‘Lin Shutong, I'm not saying this because I pity you. I'm afraid I won't get another chance.’

It isn't until they're in a classroom in Yunnan, where she's volunteering as a teacher, that a student finds the wedding ring in her lesson planner. The final page is covered in the words, ‘Yanzhou, I regret it so much.’ He stands at the classroom door, holding a doctor's diagnosis that says he has ten years left to live, and says, ‘This time, let me be your light.’”