Six people, seven years, three romances, and a lifetime of friendship. On the first day of high school, they were still strangers to one another. Shen Ruoxi raised her camera, framing a boy in a white T-shirt beneath a plane tree. She pressed the shutter, and the photograph would stay hidden away for seven years. Lin Xingran came over the wall with a bun in her mouth and hit a boy with a cold expression squarely on the head. His button popped off, her bun went flying, and he said, “Pay me for the button before we talk about fate.” Su Nian stood on the auditorium stage reading a flawless speech. Afterward, a boy sitting on the fire escape stopped her on her way down. With a lollipop in his mouth, he said, “That smile of yours just now was fake.” Xu Shen, Ji Jingchuan, and Lu Yu: the basketball captain, the physics genius, and the rebellious guitarist. On that day, three boys with very different personalities crossed paths with three girls. From standing at attention under the scorching sun during military training to five people waiting at the finish line for one of their own at sports day; from sharing their first bottle of soda on an autumn hiking trip to secretly holding hands during the New Year’s countdown; from guitars and books on the rooftop in sophomore year to tutoring and tears in the classroom in senior year, the six of them took three years to go from strangers to inseparable, only to scatter in all directions after the college entrance exam. Four years of college followed. Someone collected a thick stack of train tickets during a long-distance relationship. Someone stopped in the middle of a street late at night after hearing a familiar song. Someone cried for a long time over a chubby cat rolling its eyes in a high school textbook. Seven years later, on a summer day, all six stood beneath that plane tree once more. Every word on the six notes in the wish bottle they had buried beneath the old scholar tree was about one another. The wind came from that summer and had never left. This is a story about meeting and meeting again.
