When the Wishing Star Falls and the Wind Rises

Fifteen years ago, Shen Xingyuan met a boy by the window of her eighth-grade classroom. His name was Xu Feng. He sat by the window, sunlight falling across his textbook as he sketched little stick figures in the margins. She secretly memorized every detail: the fingers wrapped around his pen, the way the tips of his ears turned red, the sweat-damp hair at his temples after gym class. They worked through math problems together, shared a bowl of shaved ice, and stood side by side beneath the cherry trees for an entire spring. Some words hovered unspoken between two summers, then were ground to dust by the countdown to the high school entrance exams and the distance around a hallway corner.

Fifteen years later, at a class reunion, Shen Xingyuan accepts a yellowed old eraser. Xu Feng sits across from her. Fine lines have appeared at the corners of his eyes, but his gaze is just as it was back then. He asks, “Back then… did you ever like me?”

Outside the window, parasol leaves blanket the ground, like all the words they never said that spring. She lowers her head. The steam from the tea in her cup blurs her face, and suddenly she remembers a sweltering afternoon in ninth grade. He crossed half the sports field to bring her half a watermelon. His ears were burning red, but all he said was, “Here, eat this. It’ll cool you down.”

It turns out that boy once ran toward her with all his might. She just didn’t see the dust he kicked up along the way until years later.