In the summer of his sophomore year in high school, Shen Zhixia discovered a person on the rooftop of the Nankai Art Building.
The man huddled in the gap between the abandoned desk and the wall, with his laptop on his knees, saying that the WiFi signal here was the best. Shen Zhixia knew him. Lu Chanming, who is in the same class, sits in the last row against the wall and has not spoken more than three sentences to anyone in the first two weeks of school.
Shen Zhixia was not much better either. For those who study vocal music, they are king when they sing, bronze when they speak, and they stutter when they are nervous. Two people squatted on the same rooftop, four meters apart, each doing his own thing, and no one had to pay attention to the other. One practiced singing, the other wrote code, and they nodded to each other as they left. Perfect.
Later, Shen Zhixia met someone online. The moderator of a certain game development community, whose ID is "Xia Chan", is very technical but very bad at speaking. I could chat with him in the middle of the night until three in the morning. Shen Zhixia smiled at the screen many times, thinking that this person was really interesting.
He didn't know that "Xia Chan" squatted three meters away from him at noon every day.
Lu Chanming also didn't know that the netizen he had a lively chat with on the Internet was the art student who sang off-key on the rooftop but sounded very good even when off-key.
The cicadas on the rooftop chirped all summer long. Until that day, Lu Chanming turned his laptop around. On the screen was a pixelated cicada with a four-word title: "Knowing the Summer Cicada".
"I did this with you," he said.
"Singing_cicada, it's you, right."
Shen Zhixia was stunned for three seconds. Then he took out the old MP3 player with the paint peeled off from his pocket, unplugged the headphones, and turned to the third song on the playlist. Song title: "Summer Cicada". Author ID: LC cicada.
"I have been chasing you for three years," Shen Zhixia said, "since junior high school."
The chirping of cicadas suddenly became very loud.
Concept: There is always someone who has secretly liked you somewhere you can't see for many years.
