Our Hearts Beat in Sync

Synopsis

Zhao Haoze, a science prodigy, and Gao Yixi, a humanities star, are like parallel lines on campus that will never meet.

He is the student council vice president who always ranks first in his year: calm and disciplined, with his headphones as a barrier between himself and the world. She is the bright-smiling “little sun” of the campus radio station, warming the whole school with her voice. No one knows that Zhao Haoze has been saving three years’ worth of Gao Yixi’s broadcasts in an encrypted folder, organized by date. And no one has noticed that Gao Yixi’s “Astronomy Observation Journal” is filled with star-chart ciphers recording every time she and Zhao Haoze have crossed paths.

At the school’s second-year anniversary celebration, an accident traps them in the equipment room late at night. As rain patters against the windows, they share their first real conversation and discover that they are the only two readers of the same obscure science-fiction book. But anonymous acts of help and care passed along through intermediaries, awkwardly concealed by the clumsiness of youth, only lead to deeper misunderstandings. Each thinks the other has someone else in their heart.

Then, when a meteor shower that comes once in a century arrives, they both sneak out of evening study and meet at the school observatory. The instant the meteors streak across the sky, their three years of secret longing, collected photographs, encrypted recordings, and messages hidden in star charts all come to light at once.

It turns out that the longest mutual crush is when we orbit on separate paths for three years, while our hearts have already been beating at the same frequency. When the headphones come off and the star-shaped hair clip is found again, they finally hear what they had thought no one knew: the feelings they’d kept secret as teenagers had been treasured by the other for an entire youth.