“It was as if, before I fell for the young man, I first fell for his name.”
— Sherry’s Lab, The Ninth Year Through the Dream
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Xia Li’s two closest friends had personalities that were almost perfectly opposite.
Xu Ning was a seasoned devotee of the two-dimensional world — a homebody, lazy, averse to hassle, preferring the company of illustrated characters over any kind of socialising.
Lin Qingxiao, by contrast, had a natural gift for winning people over and could easily fall into easy friendship with anyone she met.
Xia Li seemed to sit exactly in the middle of their personality spectrum: warm, slow to open up, relatively introverted. She could strike up a superficial acquaintance with anyone, but the people she would truly call close friends were just these two.
When Xia Li walked in, Lin Qingxiao was singing Guo Jing’s “The Next Daybreak,” and Xu Ning was slumped against the sofa watching anime on her MP4.
Xia Li said, “You keep singing — I’ll grab something to eat first before I pick a song.”
She hadn’t eaten lunch. Before coming to the KTV, she had bought a meal set at the KFC next door.
Her parents gave her enough pocket money to manage comfortably, but she had always been frugal. Under normal circumstances she ate all three meals in the canteen, and only allowed herself a small indulgence on special occasions — a KFC meal was not exactly cheap by her standards at the time.
She spread out her food on the coffee table and invited everyone over to share.
Lin Qingxiao finished the song, switched back to the original recording, set down the microphone, and came to sit beside Xia Li. She handed Xia Li her birthday present.
Dipping a chip in ketchup, Lin Qingxiao said, “Did you all hear? The school is opening an international class next semester.”
“Some outstanding alumnus donated a large sum to fund a pilot international programme at Mingzhong,” she said.
“It’s small-class teaching in the international class, with the best foreign teachers hired specifically for it. On top of tuition, you have to pay a school-building fee.” Lin Qingxiao shrugged. “My family can’t afford that.”
Xu Ning agreed. “And the tuition and living costs if you go abroad for your bachelor’s degree — that’s where the real money is.”
Lin Qingxiao came from a dual-income household, and Xu Ning’s mother was a civil servant while her father ran his own business.
Neither of them had the means to afford the international class — let alone Xia Li, whose family background was even more modest.
Studying abroad was something she didn’t even dare to dream about.
“I think Tao Shiyue will definitely go,” Lin Qingxiao said.
“Isn’t her father working for the municipal committee?” Xia Li said.
Lin Qingxiao nodded. “And not a junior position, either. Her mother is the chief of surgery at the First Municipal Hospital — the one who arranged the surgery for Lao Zhuang’s father back then.”
Lao Zhuang was their form teacher.
Lin Qingxiao knew all of this so clearly because she and Tao Shiyue had been in the same class in middle school, and they’d gotten along quite well back then.
Later, a string of small incidents had soured things between them, and it had all ended rather unpleasantly, so Lin Qingxiao had never much liked Tao Shiyue since.
A few classmates in their class didn’t particularly like Tao Shiyue either, because the way she treated people often carried a subtle air of superiority that was hard to pin down but easy to feel.
“Speaking of which, didn’t the school heartthrob used to pursue Tao Shiyue?” Lin Qingxiao went on. “Though I heard he might be with Zhong Qianqian now.”
They were in the arts stream experimental class.
Mingzhang Middle School had only one experimental class in the arts stream. Places were allocated at the end of the first year of senior high, selected on merit — only the top fifty students in the arts stream year-group were eligible.
Their form teacher Lao Zhuang was strict and reserved, and he ran the class rigorously. Early romances were almost unheard of in their class; the most anyone dared was a furtive exchange of glances in private.
Other classes were quite different, especially the arts elective class.
Lin Qingxiao had a close friend in the arts elective class — they’d grown up in the same building — and through her she had wholesale access to the freshest gossip: who was seeing whom, who had cheated on whom, who was rumoured to have already gone “all the way”…
Xu Ning asked, “Is this the same Zhong Qianqian who performed the jazz dance at the New Year’s Eve show?”
Lin Qingxiao nodded.
Xia Li then asked, “Do we have an officially recognised school heartthrob?”
“Chen Yu, of course.”
Xu Ning said, “…I thought you meant Shen Yang. I was sitting here wondering when Shen Yang had ever pursued Tao Shiyue. How is Chen Yu the heartthrob? Shen Yang’s clearly better-looking.”
“What’s good-looking about Shen Yang — he’s got that shifty, street-corner look.”
“Would Nie Chuhang be okay with you calling Chen Yu handsome?”
Nie Chuhang was the boy Lin Qingxiao had a crush on.
“For someone like Nie Chuhang, who’s a top student, how can you reduce it to something as shallow as ‘handsome or not’?”
The two of them couldn’t settle the argument, so they both turned to Xia Li and asked her to cast the deciding vote.
Xia Li chewed on her straw, hesitating.
She had a sudden, clear sense of what the line “after the mountains of Wu, all other peaks pale” truly meant.
She wasn’t sure whether to mention it, but today she had run into a young man who seemed to have stepped straight out of a shoujo manga.
After him, every other boy seemed dull and unremarkable by comparison.
It really was a difficult choice. In the end Xia Li said, “Chen Yu.”
Chen Yu was, after all, in the sciences experimental class. Whereas Shen Yang was in the regular class, his grades and reputation both poor, and though plenty of people said he had a certain roguish charm, Xia Li was completely unmoved.
The type she liked was the kind who excelled academically and held themselves with an untouchable, elevated grace.