Bench ends
On the first day of his second year of high school, Jiang Nian found a note in his physics textbook.
Not a love letter. It is a simple solution to a problem.
She recognized the handwriting. In the back row of the classroom, Chen Yu—good grades but not arrogant. He is familiar with everyone but no one understands him well. After evening self-study, she memorized words on the bench behind the teaching building, and he sat at the other end holding a water glass. There is a whole person's distance between them.
The two of them shared this bench tacitly, communicating for half an hour every day and occasionally at no time during the week.
Every day when Jiang Nian comes home, he has to take three deep breaths before opening the door - his father has been closed off for many years after his business failed, and his mother works in a supermarket. She is the only "normal person" in the family. She must be excellent, but not too excellent, and must be sensible, but not pitiful.
Chen Yu carries a small notebook with him to record other people's preferences and important words they have said. He was not born gentle, he just spent many years learning how to be nice to others like a "normal person". After his parents divorced, they reorganized their families. He lived on both sides and was a guest on both sides.
They went from opposite ends of the bench to occasionally borrowing a book, to being trapped in the teaching building during a typhoon and chatting for three hours——
"I go home and act every day."
"Me too, I've been acting for more than ten years."
"Aren't you tired?"
"Tired. But later I discovered that some people are worth my tiredness."
It's not who saves whom. It's just that during each of their most difficult days, there happened to be a person sitting at the other end of the bench, not far or near to accompany them.
Don't cross the line, don't intrude, but you know he's there.
On the last night before the college entrance examination, they sat side by side for the first time
