In Yuncheng No. 1 Middle School that year, ivy climbers grew mottled on the red brick walls, and the chirping of cicadas hid the unspoken thoughts of young people.
Jiang Zhou's school uniform cuffs were always stained with blue ink, as if a small patch of sky had been knocked over. Transfer student Shen Xi huddled in the corner of the classroom holding her sketchbook. The rustling of her pen tip was lighter than the sound of her morning reading. They were supposed to be two parallel lines - until the class pranked them and pushed them onto the art festival stage. He was holding a broken guitar he picked up from a repair shop, the strings were as rusty as an old man sighing; her hand holding the microphone was trembling, and her singing voice was tinier than the camphor leaves falling outside the window.
But when the stage lights came on, the rusty strings shed moonlight, and the cowardly voice shocked the stars.
From each other's clumsy disguises, they glimpsed the most precious truths: the guitar music he practiced on the attic late at night, the singing certificate she locked deep in the drawer, the sparkling light of the bucket overturning when on duty at dusk, and the beating hearts that dare not be named in the youth entangled with blue threads.
The formulas in the scratches on the old desk, the blue whale on the edge of the sketchbook, the old film on the second floor of the repair shop, the Spongebob socks on the dean's trousers... All the tiny pieces of light will eventually merge into the gentlest annotation of youth.
This is a story about "pretending not to know"——
The boy who pretended not to play the piano, and the girl who pretended not to sing, composed the clearest music of youth in countless clumsy moments.
Intention: He (she) does not have a peerless appearance, nor is he (she) amazingly talented, but he (she) has impressed me for thousands of years...