My Heart and She Are Both Lost

Jiang Mingyu was always teasing her, saying her “reaction time could circle the classroom three times.” The parabola problems she couldn’t solve became mazes in her notebook, and her team-fight blunders in the Dragon Pit became jokes he made while twirling his pen.

But the glint of the silver chain as he spun his pen, the neat auxiliary lines on his rough paper, bright as moonlight, and his quiet explanations tinged with mint all held a tenderness even he hadn’t noticed.

The feelings neither of them had put into words had not yet had a chance to unfold in the morning light when another presence disrupted their rhythm.

Lin Ze, a younger student in ninth grade, arrived with the ID “Zeye.” He was a jungler who carried games in King’s Canyon, and a boy who used simple Han Xin doodles to ask her out.

He got the sweetness of her strawberry milk just right, made a bouquet from colorful straws, and even the bandages he handed her came with the candid warmth of a teenage boy.

The parabola continued across the coordinate plane, while the jungler’s routes quietly began to overlap with her path home from school.

Her heart, always a beat behind, was finally about to find its own rhythm of response amid the very different tenderness of two boys, as morning light gave way to starlight.

This story of delayed feelings and earnest pursuit has only just begun…