Song Zhu is recognized by the whole school as the "heartthrob" - the vice chairman of the student union. He is always smiling and always responds to requests.
His mobile phone memo records the preferences, habits and taboos of one hundred and seventy-three people, like a precision-operated social database, ensuring that he can pay just the right amount of care to everyone.
It wasn't until the second semester of his senior year that the transfer student Jiang Mo walked into the classroom and exposed his eleven-year disguise with one sentence——
"Your smile, aren't you tired?"
Jiang Mo is the opposite of Song Zhu. Aloof, taciturn, solitary, and not interested in social interactions.
He carried a sketchbook with him, not drawing but "studying" - studying the hypocrisy of human expression. And Song Zhu is the "most fake person" he has ever seen.
From that day on, the same face began to appear frequently in Jiang Mo's sketchbook.
He classified Song Zhu's smile numbers - "the thirty-seventh kind of fake smile" and "the third kind of flattering smile" - but also drew the moment when he put away his smile and shot with all his strength on the court, and quietly marked it next to it: "True joy. 0.3 Seconds."
A boy who exchanges favor for a sense of existence, a boy who thinks he is an "emotionless person".
When the disguises were peeled off layer by layer, they discovered that their loneliness was completely different from each other, but they reached the same destination by different routes.
Song Zhu began to learn to refuse, learn not to laugh, and learned to say the "no" that he had never said in eleven years; the cold numbers in Jiang Mo's sketchbook also unknowingly turned into records of increasingly hot temperatures.
"It's not research material." Jiang Mo said.
"Then what am I?"
He didn't wait for an answer. One month before the college entrance examination, Jiang Mo transferred to another school and left.
Many years later, Song Zhu, who had become a psychological counselor, hung a painting on the wall of his consulting room. In the painting was the face of a young man who was not smiling.
When someone asked, he said: "This was painted by an old friend. He taught me to see my true self, but he has never seen me."
What he didn't know was that there was a line of very small words in the corner of the painting that you couldn't even notice unless you looked carefully -
"Actually, I saw it. But I didn't dare to stay."
Intent: To be truly "seen" is not to be liked by everyone, but to have one person penetrate all your disguises and still choose to stay.
