Tell It to Summer

[A sly little liar × an autistic genius, from school uniforms to wedding attire]

Blurb:

The tail end of seventeen, a midsummer afternoon.

The corridors of Yuchuan No. 1 High School were buzzing as students crowded around to check their final mock-exam results before the college entrance exam.

Yu Xia was lazily sprawled over her desk when her deskmate suddenly told her that the citywide first place she'd held for three years had been taken by a new transfer student.

He'd scored just one point higher.

Later, the school administrators called her in to talk. Because of the results, they said, the university recommendation they'd previously promised her might now have to be discussed with the new transfer student.

And so, rumors that the two top students at Yuchuan No. 1 High School were at odds spread like wildfire.

Yu Xia herself, however, didn't care in the slightest.

The school had promised to recommend her to Tsinghua University, and she'd only accepted because she wanted an easy ride.

Now that a "spoilsport" had come along, she couldn't be bothered to discuss it. She simply gave up the recommendation.

With her grades, she could easily get into Peking University, which she liked more anyway.

On the day the college entrance exam results were released, the school celebrated its top scorer with gongs and drums.

Yu Xia checked the list but couldn't find the name Bu Anxun, the transfer student who had once scored one point higher than her.

She was still the top scorer.

Yu Xia assumed Bu Anxun had gotten the recommendation, skipped the exam, and gone on to Tsinghua.

She herself happily went to enroll at Peking University.

But she never expected...

On the first day of term, Bu Anxun cornered Yu Xia in an empty nook in the corridor of a Peking University teaching building.

The boy in front of her was so angry that the corners of his eyes were red. After a long while, he managed to force out just two words:

"Liar."

*

Bu Anxun's parents were highly educated PhDs who had graduated from Ivy League universities and were executives at multinational corporations.

Yet their only son still couldn't speak at the age of three.

After consulting doctors far and wide, Bu Anxun received a preliminary diagnosis of "Savant syndrome," a type of autism, when he was five.

But that same year, his parents discovered that Bu Anxun could talk to a little girl outside their villa, through the iron fence surrounding the yard.

It turned out Bu Anxun could speak. He simply chose not to.

He always remembered how sweetly the little girl in the red dress had smiled that day as she licked the ice cream he'd given her and promised to marry him when they grew up.

But the next day, that sly little "liar" was gone.

It wasn't until their final year of high school that Bu Anxun finally found Yu Xia. There was no way he would let that little "liar" run off again.

"You promised you'd marry me," he said, holding Yu Xia's hand on their graduation day.

[The day I saw you, I finally found the midsummer of that year. So, in all the days we've been apart, I've had to tell my heart's secrets to summer.]

P.S.:

1. One-on-one romance, happy ending, both leads are each other's first love and have only been with each other.

2. The story runs from high school through university and includes a little of what happens after graduation.

3. The male lead really is a genius, but he doesn't have autism in a clinical sense. He's simply very bad at socializing, and it doesn't interfere with his daily life.

4. The childhood scenes between the leads are like playing house as parents. There is no romance or physical intimacy before adulthood.

Theme: Saving each other