Don't Eavesdrop on Rainy Days

Seventeen-year-old Lin Xiaoman thought that her senior year of high school would end in disgrace amid piles of test papers and countdowns—until the transfer student Jiang Yubai, who always wore a whitewashed blue uniform with paint on his cuffs, crashed into her draft book like a gust of wind smelling of turpentine. In math class, he would secretly draw the sycamore trees outside the window, and he would fold unsolved physics problems into paper airplanes and throw them to her, but he never said why he suddenly changed schools or why his left wrist was always wrapped with gauze to cover the scar. Lin Xiaoman hides an even more ridiculous secret: she can hear the unspoken words of others on rainy days. Only when she is around Jiang Yubai, the world will become a quiet silent movie. When the numbers on the countdown card became smaller and smaller, when the familiar ponytail suddenly appeared in the sketch in the studio, when he held her wrist and said "don't listen" on a rainy day, the two people with secrets finally broke through each other's panic amidst the chirping of cicadas. It turns out that youth is never a one-way street. Those unspoken words have long been hidden in the wrong erasers, shared headphones, and long shadows in the sunset.