I've Always Been Here, Chasing the Light

Autumn, 2008. Linjiang No. 7 Middle School. To save a couple hundred meters, Xia Xiaoyu, a first-year high school student, takes a shortcut. At the end of the path are a basketball court and a boy who is always shooting hoops: Jiang Liang, a second-year student. They've never spoken. Neither of them has. She remembers his jersey number, "13." She remembers his ritual of buying a bottle of water for fifty cents every day. She remembers, on the seventeenth time she messed up her jump, a voice drifting in from outside the window: "On the seventh section, turn three times, then give her a hand." That year, she fell for someone. Slowly and quietly, like a glass of cool water that never turns cloudy, no matter how long it sits. In their senior year, he graduated and left. No phone number, no address. She kept a box of things: a dented water bottle, a school uniform jacket, a black hair tie, a note, and a photo-booth picture. Years later, they lived in the same provincial capital, just four subway stops apart, but neither of them found the other. Then, fifteen years later, at their school reunion, they each came carrying their own box and met again at the same intersection. This isn't a grand, sweeping love story. It's about how a girl who never said a word spent fifteen years chasing a ray of light.