Gu Yichen and Chen Shaoxue of No. 1 High School are the two top students who have “cemented” their places at the top of the grade rankings. On his cream-yellow draft paper, a pink highlighter strawberry is tucked into the corner, half used up, from the one that’s always slipping out of her pencil case. Between the sheets, three faintly written lines say “Chen Shaoxue.” Her milky-white workbook of mistakes has a lemon candy tucked into every volume, its wrapper folded into a soft-edged star. Last week, in the hallway, his fingertips touched her knuckles as he showed her how.
Their story begins with an explosion in chemistry class. Chen Shaoxue rises onto her toes to reach for a reagent and knocks over a bottle of phenolphthalein. Red stains spread faster than her heartbeat, covering the draft paper where he’d written his name. The ink bleeds into a soft red, like the faint color blooming across his ears when his fingers come to a stop. Rivals in the competition circuit, they become partners with matching red stains on their cuffs.
When someone confesses to her, he steps in front of her with a workbook that holds her strawberry bookmark, carried in his pocket for three days until its knot has begun to fray. When he’s racing to finish his competition paper, she sets warm milk by the corner of his desk, with a note saying “Don’t stay up too late” written in a hand that imitates his.
When the cicadas sing and the air smells of gardenias, a stem appears on the strawberry beside “Chen Shaoxue” on his draft paper, and the corners of the stars folded from her candy wrappers bear more traces of his pencil. The frayed edges of draft paper and the creases in candy wrappers mark every step of these top students working out the math of falling in love. It’s sweet as a lemon candy at summer’s end, crisp yet wrapped in softness.
