She has been single for twenty-eight years and has never encountered a blatant preference. Until this lingering summer night, I dug out an old high school exercise book that had been dusty for many years. The pages are yellowed and curled, bearing traces of the unique youthfulness of boyhood. The cover is neatly signed: To my friend. This is a secret "exercise book" that belongs to me and him.
When we were in high school, we didn't chat on WeChat. We relied on this book that we passed back and forth to exchange our little thoughts. I wrote about the mountain of academic pressure, the boring daily classroom life, and my random thoughts. As a dazzling new star of the school football team, he would write down his responses seriously after training, each word being gentle and clumsy. The whole book is densely packed, hiding the intersection of our entire youth. I always thought that from beginning to end, we were just best friends of the opposite sex. He was the most compatible pen pal and the most tacit deskmate during my ordinary childhood.
Ten years after graduating from high school, I was cleaning my bookcases at home during the summer weekend. I turned on the fan and slowly turned it on. The evening breeze stirred up pages of old paper. When I turned to the last few blank pages, a line of shallow handwriting suddenly hit my eyes. The ink is so light that it is about to fade, but it is clear enough to shatter my ten years of knowledge:
"I like you."
It turns out it's not an ambiguity above AUO, or a casual joke among teenagers. It turns out that beside the desk where I laid it out wantonly and wrote all the trivial things, that boy from the school team who was running and shining on the court with high spirits had hidden the clumsiest and most cautious secret love of his entire youth. This confession, which was ten years late, was finally revealed by my dull hands many years later.
Concept: Youthful and clumsy crush in high school campus