On the first day Chen Xingwan transferred to Nancheng No. 1 High School, she locked a kraft-paper notebook deep in her desk drawer.
It held no secrets, only classroom notes she'd copied down stroke by stroke, with round little bears, buoyant rubber ducks sitting in bathtubs, and lines of rambling thoughts in the margins that no one could understand: "The braised pork in the cafeteria was too salty today, but the auntie gave me an extra piece, so I still came out ahead."
All she wanted was to quietly make it to the end of term without anyone noticing her.
But the notebook went missing.
She didn't dare make a fuss. All she could do was watch her cheerful ponytailed deskmate, Zhao Xiaotang, stroll past her desk every day; watch Zhou Yu'an, the top student in the grade, open her notebook at the hallway corner and read aloud the line, "If you really can't understand it, just memorize it for now"; and watch Lin Wei from the honors class pause at her desk for three seconds, her gaze impossible to read.
Stranger still, every day, a line of unfamiliar pencil writing appeared beside the words she'd left on the blank pages, completing the half-sentence she hadn't dared to say.
"Don't be afraid of being different from others. Sometimes, being different is a gift."
The third exam room, the last row, the third solution. The talent she'd wanted to hide was being quietly embraced by a group of people.
A solitary transfer student × a treasure of a notebook secretly passed around the class × mutual pining written between the pages
She wanted to be invisible, but became everyone's cherished first love.
