With just thirty days left in their final year of high school, Wen Qiao was moved to the seat beside Lu Xu. She was the worst student in the grade, drawing cats in class and folding her test papers into paper airplanes. He was the top student, whose mother had been laid off and whose father drove a night-shift taxi. Getting into a good university was his only way forward. On the first day at their new seats, he shifted his exam paper half an inch toward himself. The gap between their desks became a boundary no one was supposed to cross. But an orange candy still rolled across it. She had left it on the gap, and he slipped it into his drawer. The evening breeze on the rooftop, crooked stars on scrap paper, and songs in his headphones that she couldn't understand gradually drew two people from different worlds across that divide. Fourteen days before the college entrance exam, he confessed his feelings on the rooftop. But from the beginning, they had known he was headed far away while she would stay behind. Exam scores, university applications, admission results: reality's divide silently tore apart all their unspoken understanding. On the rooftop, one said, “Take care,” and the other replied, “You too.” He went to a prestigious university a thousand miles away. She stayed in their hometown. The orange candy wrapper was torn in two, one half kept in a wallet, the other beside a pillow. What defeated them wasn't distance, but lives that had been destined to diverge from the moment they met. No one was at fault. They simply weren't right for each other. This was the gentlest of regrets from their youth.
