That Rainy Day When I Was Seventeen

[Youth / School Life / Unrequited Love / Love at First Sight / Top Student / Mutual Firsts / HE]

At seventeen, Xu Zhi was most afraid of people finding out what her family did for a living.

Her mother was blind and ran a massage parlor for the visually impaired on the old street. She had never asked who her father was.

Until her senior year, when the words “She’s the daughter of a massage girl” spread throughout the school.

As rumors, mockery, and secretly filmed videos came crashing down on her, Jiang Xu stood by her side.

He was a top student from a well-off family, and so aloof he seemed not to care about anything.

Yet he was the one who stayed with her in the rain when she was at her most miserable, shielded her from the crowd, and made her feel for the first time that being seventeen might not be so hard to bear.

They got together, then broke up.

She finally learned that Jiang Xu’s father had known her biological father, who had disappeared years ago, for a long time.

The secrets their parents’ generation had left untold began to unravel, bit by bit.

Only then did she realize that some people hadn’t left because they didn’t know she existed.

They knew, and chose to leave anyway.

After the college entrance exams, they went to different cities.

She began studying journalism, going out to interview people, writing stories that missed the mark, and learning, time and again, how to tell other people’s lives clearly.

He went to Beijing, then Hong Kong.

They moved forward, separated by high-speed trains, flights, internships, and one missed chance after another.

The rain that fell when they were seventeen had long since stopped.

But many years later, Xu Zhi still remembered the day Jiang Xu stood in the rain and reached out to her.