The Day We Met
For all three years of high school, I sat diagonally behind Lin Wei, but all I dared to do was count how many hair ties she used for her ponytail.
On graduation day, I tore up the love letters I'd written for three years, thinking our paths would never cross again.
That is, until I saw her standing in the Economics Department line at the university orientation, holding an admission letter just like mine.
"Chen Mo?" she said, calling me by name for the first time. "What a coincidence."
Later, she would always tease me: "You couldn't get a single word out during three years of secret pining, but now you've learned to secretly keep my hair ties?"
On the seventh day of our cold war after an argument about our child, she found a photocopy of the love letter I never gave her back then.
"You idiot," she said, eyes red. "I saw you years ago, when I was secretly taking pictures of your back."
