The new book just came out. The rating will go up later.
During morning reading in Class 3, Senior Year, transfer student Jiang Nian's mint candy rolled onto Lin Wan's notebook of wrong answers, leaving a pale green stain, like a cherry blossom that hadn't fully opened.
Whenever her blood sugar dipped, Lin Wan would sneak a candy. Jiang Nian always kept mints in her pencil case. Lin Wan's notebook was covered in crooked cherry blossoms, while Jiang Nian's scratch paper read, "An auxiliary line should be as gentle as a cherry blossom branch." They shared sweet-and-sour ribs in the cafeteria, shared an old desk lamp in the library, and clasped hands as they raced across the finish line at the sports meet. When they were punished with cleaning duty in the lab, they found a cherry blossom specimen from Lin Wan's elementary school days tucked into Jiang Nian's father's old lesson plans.
A comic drawn by Chen Xiaoyu circulated in the class group chat: pink bubbles floated above Lin Wan's head, and cherry blossoms drifted behind Jiang Nian. Zhao Yang's basketball kept hitting Jiang Nian's desk. Jiang Nian marked Zhang Lei's competition problems in three colors. Zhou Zhou's class monitor log read, "September 3: Jiang Nian helped Lin Wan with 17 math problems."
When the thermometer in the school infirmary stopped at 37 degrees Celsius, when the label on the antidepressants was quietly torn off, and when the banner at the Hundred-Day Pledge Rally reflected their clasped hands, they finally understood: some auxiliary lines don't belong on geometry problems, some mints have to stay in your mouth until spring before they melt, and some affection hides in the throwaway words, "I'll teach you this problem." It began with plane tree leaves in early autumn and stayed sweet until cherry blossoms carpeted the schoolyard the following year.
This is a story about a notebook of wrong answers and mint candies, about two girls using mathematical formulas to prove that "1 + 1 > forever" during the 278-day countdown to the college entrance exam.
--"Look at this auxiliary line in the problem. Doesn't it look like us?"
This text is like mint soaked in honey, so sweet and refreshing, yet so cool. There is no pile of gorgeous words, but the young man's thoughts are kneaded into the texture of daily life - the cup of hot milk handed to him in the morning light, the key points circled in the wrong question book, the fingertips that accidentally touched each other in the corridor, all with a pounding heartbeat. The most touching thing about it is that the unspeakable care is hidden in every detail: the soft-boiled egg that was cooked extra, the smiling face secretly drawn on the back of the wrong math problem, and the figure that followed half a street pretending to be inadvertent. There is no earth-shattering oath, but every ordinary moment is shining with tiny light, like the light spots through the leaves in summer, so warm that people want to reach out and catch it. As I read, I felt like I was back in the summer when the cicadas were chirping. The fragrance of washing powder floated in the air. Someone called your name softly from behind, startling a series of panicked heartbeats. It turns out that the most touching thing is never the vigorousness, but the tenderness hidden in the smoke. I want to be good to you, but I am afraid that you will know.