Sixteen-year-old Lin Wantang is the quietest footnote in Yuming Middle School. She sits in the last row of the classroom, and her sketchbook contains the only secret in the school—Jiang Yanchi, who is in the piano room of her senior year.
No one knew that she would sharpen the pencils in his piano room into pointed cones every morning and pile the pen scraps into small towers; on rainy days, she would always leave a black umbrella in Wutong Lane, and the handle of the umbrella would gradually become the decoration of his piano case; no one knew that she painted the sound of his piano as "The Shape of Rain" and hid it in the old piano in the attic, but one day she discovered a Chopin commemorative coin under the piano bench, with "To the Unsigned Composer" engraved on the coin.
The intersection between them is the pencil in the keyhole of the piano room, the illustrations in the wrong question book, and the gentle sound of the wind chimes on the parallel bars. She used the veins of sycamore leaves to copy his practice timetable, hid the "come on" stems in the dead leaves he crushed, and watched him tie the mint bracelet he gave her to the music stand, but there were always three rows of desks apart.
Until the rainy night before the college entrance examination, her sketchbook spread across the side of his face, and his keychain fell into her palm. She left a piece of sycamore leaf in the piano room filled with her thoughts, but he said to her back at the graduation ceremony: "Actually, I can't bear to use the pencil every morning."
Three years later at the Paris Art Exhibition, half a dead leaf fell out of the piano score manuscript in the anonymous package, and her unfinished "In fact, every morning -" could be faintly seen between the veins of the leaves. Next to the star track on the third page of the manuscript was his newly added annotation: "It turns out that you played the silent canon of a whole youth in a corner that I couldn't see."
Intention: Use sycamore leaves as paper to write the unspoken heartbeat and growth of youth.
