TF4: The Teenage Years 2: Bingyan's Wish for a Long Life

My name is Cheng Shuqian. In eighth grade, a lawsuit between my mother, Cheng Yening, and Fu Binyan's mother, Fu Yuqing, brought me to know Fu Binyan. He was dazzling: the top student in his grade at Yibei Middle School, vice president of the student council, and MVP of the basketball team. Standing beside him, I always felt like an insignificant shadow.

Before an important game in our first year of high school, he came down with a serious cold. I was by his side that night. Later, the cold triggered immune-mediated heart disease, and he could never return to the court. My mother became his attending physician, and he received everything from medication to cardiopulmonary rehabilitation. But I knew that the Fu Binyan who had shone on the court was someone I had lost with my own hands.

I always thought that if it weren't for me, he wouldn't have fallen ill. The guilt left me suffocating. At the end of our first year of high school, I did the only thing I could think of: I transferred to Yibei Middle School to be by his side.

I wanted to make it up to him, to accompany him along this road where he could no longer run. But when I stood before Fu Binyan again, I realized that the way he looked at me had changed. Some debts may never be repaid, even in a lifetime; some feelings, too, had quietly changed into something else amid the guilt.