The Seventh Solution to the Function

When sophomore year began, Lin Ran and Li Xiao became deskmates.

One was a stubborn girl with a gift for geography but only middling ability in physics;

the other was a genius who breezed through math and physics and could always come up with a third way to solve a problem.

They were supposed to be nothing more than study partners: he taught her force analysis, and she taught him about monsoon circulation.

Until one autumn evening, Lin Ran wrote a poem about rain on the back of her scratch paper,

and Li Xiao pulled a dark teal fountain pen from his pencil case.

“I write poetry too,” he said, the tips of his ears turning red.

And so, between function graphs and contour lines,

between the New Year's chimes at the library and the first snow of winter,

with a ginger-colored kitten that appeared every Friday right on time as their witness,

two souls began speaking in a third language:

He wrote love poems with the laws of physics; she hid her feelings in climate maps.

He calculated the ideal balance point on the back of a bicycle; she recorded the coordinates of every sunset.

They drew coordinate systems on fogged-up windows, marking the day they met at the origin.

But youth is a proof with no standard answer.

When emotions become variables that exceed the domain of every formula,

when the set called “deskmates” begins to collapse into “us,”

they finally realize:

Some functions have a seventh solution.

Some poems don't need a final line.

And the kitten named Cookie

is waiting for a home where it can stay forever.