The ivy at Qing Teng High School climbed over the windowsills of the senior year classrooms, wrapping itself around the worries of seventeen-year-olds.
The girl always sat by the window, sketching the light and shadows in the classroom and the breeze across the court on the backs of her scrap paper. Like a quiet leaf hidden among the ivy, she was too afraid to let anyone know her heart was stirring. Until a bottle of yellow paint splashed across the boy's white T-shirt. Her flustered, blushing face met his smiling eyes.
He was the wind shining across the court, the furrow in his brow as he worked through a problem, and the warmth of him bending down to pick up her paintbrush. Drafts for group projects, streetlights after evening study, and songs shared through one pair of earphones slowly stitched their worlds together. During break, the girl's best friend poked her arm. "The way he looks at you is even more accurate than a three-pointer." The boy's friend clapped him on the shoulder and laughed. "You have more patience explaining problems to her than you do practicing your shots."
But the countdown to the college entrance exams always made their hearts pound: red crosses on mock exams, their parents' sighs, and barely audible gossip in the hallway, like a fine rain falling on the ivy. Clutching her sketch paper, the girl asked herself: should she hide her paintbrush, or dare to choose a university in the same city as the boy she loved? The boy held his basketball in his arms, hesitating for the first time: should he keep running forward out of habit, or dare to slow down for her?
In the summer when the ivy spilled over the school wall, cicadas sang across the steps. Their fingertips brushed in the gaps between exam papers. They said "Let's wait a little longer" in the evening breeze. And amid the clicks of cameras taking graduation photos, they tucked the words they had never spoken into the folds of the ivy.
When the bell rang to mark the end of the college entrance exams, they stood at the school gate, overgrown with vines. Sunlight streamed
