The students in Class 3, Grade 11 noticed that ever since the school arts festival, the uniform jacket of Lu Xingci, the stone-faced top student, always carried a faint scent of orange soda.
The source of that scent was Su Ruan, the art student in the class next door who was always carrying a sketchbook and smiling with two dimples.
When Su Ruan couldn't get the light and shadow right in her sketches, he would quietly hand her a freshly sharpened 2B pencil. When she was afraid of the dark and couldn't walk home at night, he would take a long detour to accompany her across two streets, with her favorite orange hard candies always in his uniform pocket. When she fell during the 800-meter race at sports day, he searched the entire field for the hair tie she'd dropped. As he crouched to tie her shoelaces, the tips of his ears turned red as if scorched by the sunset.
Someone asked Lu Xingci, “Why are you always with Su Ruan?”
The boy zipped his jacket all the way up, hiding his flushed ears. “Because her eraser keeps rubbing against my pants, and the marks won't wash off, so I have to take responsibility.”
At seventeen, love was the orange scent that wouldn't wash out of his uniform, and the indulgence he hid beneath his cool facade, reserved for her alone.
