Yu Xiao Jiang Jinyue
“The moon sets again over the river pool, sinking westward; the slanting moon sinks deep, hidden in the sea mist.”
**, She was the moonlight he could never reach, sunk in the deep pool of seventeen.**
“My name is Jiang Jinyue, the Jinyue from ‘The moon sets again over the river pool.’”
At the start-of-term ceremony in their second year of high school, transfer student Yu Xiao noticed the girl speaking in the sunlight: Jiang Jinyue, top of the year, vice president of the student council, and the bright-smiling star of the school.
When they meet over the same obscure poetry collection in the library and connect over Chopin's “Raindrop Prelude” in the music room, Yu Xiao gradually discovers that the girl everyone calls their “little sun” has moon patterns repeatedly drawn in blue ballpoint pen on the inside of her wrist, gloomy, self-destructive sketches tucked into her drawing pad, and a poem about sinking and parting behind her name.
Bullying at school is like a silent flood, from edited recordings and dead rats in lockers to vicious graffiti on the blackboard. Jiang Jinyue always keeps her perfect smile, as if the hurt were only clouds passing over the moon. Until Yu Xiao finds fresh cuts on her arm in the music room and discovers a diary entry tucked inside her math textbook: “Everyone loves the Jiang Jinyue who shines so brightly. No one wants to embrace the broken me.”
