When the class teacher's seating chart listed her and Lin Qi's names side by side in the fifth row of the third group, Xia Ruoqing thought it was candy handed to her by fate. The young man who always wore a white shirt and had chalk dust on his fingertips would quietly push the scratch paper filled with auxiliary lines in math class, stuff the eraser that he had picked up three times into the belly of her desk, and say with his mint-scented breath, "I'll teach you this question." She folded these tiny pieces of tenderness into the wrong question book and sandwiched them among the yellowing ginkgo leaves, thinking that as long as she ran a little faster - just like she did her best to finish fifth in the 800-meter test, she would be able to catch up with his shadow.
But love in youth is never a straight line. Su Ya's white dress was always swaying beside Lin Qi, and the writing in the pink envelope was more conspicuous than the "I like you" she hid on the back of the draft paper. Even the ginkgo leaves on Lin Qi's shoes seemed to be a response to another person. When Xia Ruoqing discovered those moments that made her heart beat, maybe it was just the boy's unspoken hesitation; when she tightened her grip on the leaf with the star sticker on it, she saw Lin Qi's eyes wandering between the two, and realized that some "appointments" had gaps from the beginning.
In the story, there are fluorescent tubes buzzing during night study, ginkgo leaves rustling down beside the playground, and a girl chewing the sweetness out of the word "serendipity" and then swallowing back the bitterness. Lin Qi's collection of wrong questions, Xia Ruoqing's word list, and Su Ya's milk tea cup, all sparkled under the countdown sign for the third year of high school, and were blown away by the wind of growth. This is not a perfect agreement, but it hides the shadow of everyone who secretly liked someone in their youth: We have all counted our heartbeats against a fallen leaf like Xia Ruoqing, and we have all understood at a certain moment that some names are written side by side on paper, but after all we cannot enter the same future.
When the last ginkgo leaf fell on the empty desk, Xia Ruoqing finally understood that the so-called "Lin Xia's Agreement" might just be a contract she quietly signed with her own heart in the autumn of her seventeenth year.
Concept: "Unfinished Youth" and "Growing Pains"