You Ning's seventeenth year began in a convenience store.
On that rainy day, she pushed open the door and came face-to-face with a girl reading Neruda. Three silver studs, a black umbrella, and one line: "You look so well-behaved."
She said she wasn't, and the girl laughed. "Then I'll take it back."
Only later did You Ning learn that Lin Yu was the girl from Class Seven who painted, as free as the wind and so beautiful it was impossible to look away. They should have been two parallel lines that would never meet. Lin Yu lived in Maple Grove Gardens and was going to study art in England. You Ning was trapped in an old house, facing empty winters after her mother remarried.
Yet she couldn't help remembering those moments: the chill of Lin Yu's fingertips as she handed her oden over, the brush of their clothes as they walked together in the rain, and the words written on the first page of that poetry collection: May your winter always have frost.
You Ning hid these moments in her diary, like collecting fragments of shattered moonlight. She told herself they were a secret, one she could never speak aloud.
Until the night of their graduation dinner, when Lin Yu got drunk and cornered her in the fire exit.
"You Ning," she said, her voice trembling and her eyes red. "Your diary... I saw it."
"Let me warm your winter, okay?"
Theme: Love.
