Highly Flammable and Explosive [County Town]

I know you are foolish, frivolous, and empty-headed, and yet I love you. I know your schemes and your ambitions, how materialistic and vulgar you are, and yet I love you. I know you're second-rate, and yet I love you. - The Painted Veil

[Rebellious and starved for affection X sharp-tongued but soft-hearted] [Living in a rented room] [Bittersweet romance] [Reconciliation after a breakup]

Dai Zhihua and Zhou Liaoting were known to be at odds.

She called him a self-righteous hypocrite, polite to everyone but so conceited at heart that he made her sick.

He thought she was going nowhere, spending all day in internet cafes and pool halls, hanging around with all kinds of shady people and ruining herself.

They thought they would never cross paths again, but family upheavals forced them to squeeze into a rented room measuring less than ten square meters.

At school, they ignored each other all day. At night, back in the room, they fought until the world nearly fell apart over whether to turn out the lights at ten or midnight.

"The moon's so bright outside. We'll still see it with the lights off!"

The moon was full.

Yet it shone mercilessly on two people who had no home to return to. They were both lonely, with nowhere to go and no one to rely on.

They had a minor fight every three days and a major one every five. Out of habit, they carried a day's worth of anger back to the rented room and took it out on each other.

Their pent-up resentment and frustration surged like floodwaters through a broken dam, trapping two people with nowhere to escape. They tore at each other, cursed, choked, and struggled, until they could only cling ever more tightly to each other in the darkness, each the other's only lifeline.

It was a warped attachment: relying on the only warmth in a suffocating life.

They had imagined their separation countless times, always thinking it would mean heartbreak and a huge fight.

But when she really left, all she did was push her suitcase and stand at the train station, tossing out one line:

"Forget it. I'll never hear you say one nice thing about me in this lifetime."

* SC/HE

* There are misunderstandings

* The protagonists are both flawed

* The characters' values do not represent the author's values

Theme: Flowers bloom beautifully wherever seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds find themselves