How else do you explain someone voluntarily choosing to sit in a classroom full of girls every day, reciting history and dissecting poetry while the rest of the world worried about physics? She stared at the empty seat next to her and felt the particular injustice of it. Someone, somewhere, had decided that exam seating should mix science and liberal arts students. That someone had never had to take a physics exam next to a person who didn't know what a formula was.
The exam bell hadn't rung yet. Yan Dan was still clutching her textbook, running her eyes over equations she already knew she wouldn't remember. Around her, everyone was doing the same — faces nearly pressed to paper, absorbing knowledge through proximity. She looked up.
A boy walked in.
Tall. Unhurried. He checked the seating chart at the front with the calm confidence of someone who had nowhere better to be, found his seat, and walked the length of the aisle toward it — toward her, as it turned out — without glancing left or right.
He sat down next to her.
Yan Dan's immediate, unreasonable, and completely unprompted thought: only a pervert would be this good-looking and choose liberal arts.
Her best friend Zhixi called this divine logic. Yan Dan preferred to think of it as pattern recognition.
The exam was brutal. Yan Dan worked through the first page with the grim determination of someone bailing water out of a sinking boat. The boy next to her wrote like he was racing a clock only he could see — pen moving fast, no hesitation, no crossing out. She began to worry she might fail. She began to lose hair. She looked at the last question, worth fifteen points, and didn't know where to start.
Then the writing beside her stopped.
He flipped the paper over, folded it, and lay his head down to sleep.
Yan Dan wanted to scream.
The invigilator made it to him first. "Who told you to sleep? Are you done? What kind of attitude is this — do you think being handsome means the world owes you something?"
The boy corrected himself. He sat up, opened his paper, and began writing something. She couldn't tell what.
When she finally reached the last question with no draft paper left — she was certain she'd been given three sheets, not two — a piece of scratch paper slid across the desk.
She picked it up.
The handwriting was neat. The solution to the last question was laid out in clear, careful steps, every line exactly right.
Yan Dan's hands were shaking. Two thoughts arrived at once: first, the world is terrifying, because liberal arts students apparently know more physics than I do. Second, this person's name must literally be Lei Feng.
"You're so lucky," Zhixi said.
"You can't call something luck when it hits you in the head," said Yan Dan.
"I don't want that kind of luck."
"That's only because it hasn't found you yet."
She had barely finished the sentence when something hit her in the back. A football, parabolic, launched from the far end of the field, struck her between the shoulder blades, ricocheted off the back of her head, and landed in the grass in front of her.
A boy with broad shoulders sprinted toward her from across the field, waving. "We all shouted for you to dodge — why didn't you dodge?!"
"Why are you complaining when you're the one who hit me?!" she shouted back.
Then another boy jogged up. White shirt. School uniform pants. The kind of face that looks like it was designed to make people forget what they were saying — long lashes, dark eyes, a nose bridge that had no business being that elegant on a person who played football.
"I kicked it," he said. "So — I'm the one who should apologize."
Yan Dan stared at him.
He reached toward her shoulder to dust off the ball print on her uniform, then thought better of it and pulled his hand back. He unzipped his jacket, took his phone from the pocket, and held it out to her. "Your uniform is dirty. Take this for now." He unlocked the screen. "What's your number? I'll pay for the dry cleaning."
She had only just started processing the jacket situation when the other boy jogged up: "Yu Mo, I think you knocked her stupid."
You're stupid, thought Yan Dan. Your whole family is stupid. Liberal arts boys are definitely perverts.
What she said out loud: "I want medical fees, nutrition expenses, and compensation for my IQ losses. If I'm actually stupid now, you're wiring me a living allowance every month."
Yu Mo nodded. "Okay. Your number?"
They exchanged numbers. She kept his jacket in her drawer and kept forgetting to return it. He never asked.
In the bicycle shed after evening self-study, a message from an unknown number appeared on her phone: Wait for me after class.
Zhixi peered at the screen. "You actually have a crush on someone. I have hope for this world again."
"Why can't I have a crush on someone?"
"I just compared you to Sister Rong Yu and I think God was a little cruel to you."
"She's barely better looking."
"Her presence is about a hundred times stronger than yours. You're basically a blade of grass."
Yan Dan spat at her retreating back.
She stood in the bicycle shed fiddling with her lock — opening it, locking it, opening it again — until Yu Mo arrived, schoolbag slung diagonally, steps unhurried.
"I'm sorry about that day," he said.
"You've apologized about a hundred times now. Your attitude is genuinely good." She hesitated, then: "Your coat — I washed it. It's clean, I promise."
He looked at her for a moment, like he couldn't quite calibrate her. Then he reached out and took the jacket. "Thank you."
He handed her the shopping bag he'd been carrying. Inside was a new school uniform top — same size, same style, hers.
"See you tomorrow," he said, and walked past her.
Yan Dan had a very sweet dream that night. She woke up feeling like something was missing, and the feeling stuck with her all day.
She placed into the experimental class. Third year arrived with the weight of an avalanche — exams, exercises, the faint background noise of someone always asking to use the toilet. She checked her phone more than she should have. Zhixi sent bad jokes. Nothing else moved.
Before the college entrance exam, the school brought in Xuan Xiang — top student, three-year valedictorian, dethroned exactly once by Rong Yu in the final semester — to give a motivational talk. Every girl in the auditorium listened to every word. Yan Dan was fairly sure this had nothing to do with his exam techniques.
At the end of the lecture, she spotted Yu Mo across the crowd. He was sliding a vocabulary book into his bag. He looked up, saw her, and gave a small nod — a greeting, maybe, or maybe not. She couldn't tell.
The exams passed. The sky turned gray. When Yan Dan went back to school to sign her student transfer form, she saw his name at the top of the sheet — Yu Mo — in two clean characters. He'd already been and gone. No last goodbye. Passing the liberal arts building, she saw a list on the wall, his name at the top of that too.
She called Zhixi. "Which school did you pick?"
"I go where Senior Sister Rong Yu goes."
How embarrassing to be this devoted, Yan Dan thought. Out loud: "Then we'll still be classmates. Twelve years, and then four more. If we were one of each, we'd just get married."
"I don't want that," said Zhixi.
University.
The campus was still in the same city — same summer heat, same blue sky. Zhixi chose Chinese literature. Yan Dan chose management, which she described, with complete sincerity, as the art of handling people.
One noon, Zhixi said she was treating, which meant Yan Dan was there before the table was even set. The international students' restaurant had air conditioning, Western food, and a self-serve station that felt vaguely luxurious. They ordered drinks and were about to settle in when Rong Yu appeared — one hand holding a heavy textbook, the other gripping a laundry bag with a white coat corner poking out, fresh from a lab that ran long.
She pulled out a campus card. "I'll cover it. Order what you want."
"We've already paid," said Zhixi.
Rong Yu smiled, looked at Yan Dan, and said, "Then I'll go order. If you don't get something now, you're eating what I pick." She was already walking toward the counter.
They ordered steak. The food came fast. Then Rong Yu looked up and said, casually: "You're late."
A man stood at the entrance to the restaurant, looking slightly uncertain, as if he'd walked into the wrong room. White shirt, jeans, the particular combination of high nose bridge and long lashes that had once made Yan Dan forget what she was saying in a bicycle shed.
Yu Mo.
She bit her straw and stared at him. How does every road lead to the same people?
Rong Yu pointed to the seat across from Yan Dan. "Sit down."
He sat. He moved his chair slightly further from Rong Yu. He glanced up and said, in a tone that was almost aggressively steady: "I'm in history."
"Small world," Yan Dan offered, and then the atmosphere dropped to freezing and she stopped talking.
The steak was good. The silence was awkward. The restaurant filled up around them.
Then Lin Weiyang appeared — a girl who recognized Rong Yu with the enthusiasm of someone who had been waiting for this exact moment — and a few beats behind her, of course, was Xuan Xiang, who took one look at the table and produced an expression of profound suffering.
Yan Dan's gossip instincts caught fire.
In the middle of everything — Lin Weiyang chattering, Xuan Xiang pointedly redirecting beverages — she felt something move near her plate. Yu Mo's fork reached across, lifted a piece of lettuce off her plate, transferred a better piece of steak onto it.
She stared at him.
"I know you don't like lettuce," he said.
She kicked his chair lightly with her foot and said, in her best impression of someone being coy: "I don't really like beef either..."
He looked at her. His expression twitched, almost imperceptibly, at the edge. "What snack do you want? I'll get it later."
She fought very hard not to laugh. He fought equally hard not to smile. Lin Weiyang, nearby, whispered "they're so corny" to someone. Rong Yu said, with the faintest possible amusement: "The best jokes are always told with a straight face."
After lunch, at the fork in the road:
"Do you have afternoon classes?" Yan Dan asked.
"No," said Yu Mo.
"Then you—"
"Library."
She had been about to say she'd go back to her room to sleep. She rerouted. "The library... I'll go there too."
She lasted about forty minutes before her face was on the textbook. When she woke up, shivering from the air conditioning, Yu Mo was still reading — somewhere in the S section of what appeared to be a very long book. She had never finished the A pages.
She went to buy coffee. In the hallway, a tall boy nearly walked into her — lanky, a stack of photocopied materials in one hand, phone to his ear. They both stopped. Both looked. Both turned away, then turned back.
She found out soon enough that his name was Tang Zhou, and that he was in her drama club, and that he had the kind of easy, grounded energy that made stepping into a scene feel less like performing and more like remembering.
The drama club was staging Madame Butterfly. Yan Dan expected to play a maid, a cousin, a woman in the background with a fan. Instead she read two paragraphs aloud during auditions and was told she had the lead.
Zhixi sent her a video for reference — Rong Yu performing the same story for a film class the year before. She played the American officer. Every line was precise, every expression controlled, every movement exact. The girl playing Madame Butterfly looked almost dull by comparison. Rong Yu was technically flawless and obviously, visibly performing.
Yan Dan watched it three times, then tried to forget it.
Tang Zhou told her: "You saw someone else do it. That was them, not you. You can't break free and rebuild while you're still standing in someone else's shape."
On opening night, Yan Dan stood in the wings and looked out at the dark audience. Someone had once told her that an audience is just a sea of green radishes, and there's nothing scary about green radishes.
She walked out. She played Qiao Qiao San — innocent, delighted, showing off her little fan and mirror and rouge box to a man who would one day leave without looking back. She played Madame Butterfly — a woman who trusted foreign gods, was cursed by her own family, and still waited. She knew she was in a play, but somewhere in the third act it stopped feeling like one.
At the final line — I would rather die with honor than live in humiliation — she felt the weight of the whole story settle, and she let it. She reached for her child. She couldn't reach. She collapsed.
Afterward, Zhixi said: "I didn't know you had that in you."
Rong Yu, watching herself on that video, had always looked like a person acting. Yan Dan, Zhixi said, looked like a person living.
Yan Dan posted a photo of the stage dagger on social media with the caption: "Nearly performed an accidental surgery. Please pray for me."
That winter, Rong Yu sent a group message: she was about to start her clinical rotation, and Liu Weiyang's father had extra spots on a group trip, and they were going. Yan Dan and Zhixi were invited. Mr. Liu was covering costs.
Mr. Liu — Liu Weiyang — was a math prodigy with the build and budget of someone who could go anywhere, and the inclination to stay in the library. He and Rong Yu had met in a calculus class where he had asked her, entirely without warning, what she thought was truly infinite, and she had written him the symbol, then decided that was insufficient and wrote him instead about Taoist philosophy and how all things return to all things. He had stared at this for a long time and then nodded, satisfied.
They met at the airport. Yan Dan was telling Zhixi, in a low voice, that "in front of Liu Weiyang all other men are short, poor, and ugly—" when she saw Yu Mo leaning against a row of chairs with his eyes closed.
She lost the last word.
Tang Zhou, passing by, said pleasantly: "I won't argue about the first part. The last two still need work."
Xuan Xiang arrived through security looking like someone who had just seen the seating chart for his own funeral.
On the plane, Yan Dan was flanked by Yu Mo and Tang Zhou. Yu Mo read. Tang Zhou watched the screen. She sat between them and was unable to be cheerful about it. From the seat ahead, she heard Zhixi's voice drift back: "Four men with enormous airs, all totally boring."
Rong Yu: "Agreed."
The town was small and beautiful, nested against snow-capped mountains wrapped in low clouds. They skipped the official tour group sights. They rested in the afternoon, went to the mountain in the evening, and planned to soak in hot springs after.
At the cable car queue, Tang Zhou pulled them forward through the crowd with a running stream of apologies — "evening flight, so sorry, really sorry" — that were completely sincere and entirely shameless. Yan Dan hissed at him to stop. He didn't stop.
Inside the cable car, the mountain disappeared into mist. She thought about Madame Butterfly, about smoke and slow grief and love that outlasts what caused it. She looked at Tang Zhou's profile in the fading light and felt something clarify, quietly, the way fog sometimes lifts without announcing itself.
It was a dream. The play was a play. The character was a character. That's all.
He let out a slow breath. So did she.
The hot springs trip produced a game: two-person three-legged race from the bottom pool to the top. The losers owed snacks for three days.
Yan Dan drew Tang Zhou. They won. Rong Yu drew Liu Weiyang. They lost with dignity. Zhixi and Yu Mo placed second.
On the way down, the lots were drawn again. Yan Dan got Yu Mo.
He ran like someone used to running. She kept pace, more competitive than she expected herself to be. "Catch up with them — Senior Brother runs like a monkey, don't let him—"
Yu Mo caught up.
On the bus back to town, Yan Dan was still running on the residual high of winning, slightly damp, thoroughly happy, watching stars that couldn't be seen in the city scroll past the window. She turned to look at Yu Mo.
"You were actually having fun today," she said. "I could tell."
He turned his head. His expression, for once, did not quite hold its shape.
"I have a theory," she said.
"...About what?" He remembered other conversations that had started this way — love letters handed to him by girls who had somehow found the nerve, courage he had always envied without being able to explain why. He couldn't even remember most of their faces.
She lifted her phone. The screen showed a text in the process of being sent. His phone buzzed.
He read it: Give you a chance to admit it. Say nothing and I'll let it go.
The second message arrived before he'd finished: If you don't, I'll move on.
He put the phone in his pocket and reached over, without a word, and took her hand. His palm was sweating. He was fairly sure this was the most stressed he'd been in his entire life.
Behind them, Rong Yu was calculating her losses. "What do you want for midnight snacks? I'll buy."
Tang Zhou said: "Yak beef. Authentic."
Liu Weiyang had his hat pulled down as if asleep.
Xuan Xiang was considering yogurt.
Yu Mo looked at their faces reflected in the dark window glass — bright, young, unguarded. He kept his hand where it was.
Later, much later, he told her things.
The clothes had been picked by Rong Yu, who had better taste. (Yan Dan: "No wonder — wait, how did you know my size?")
He had written the physics solution on purpose, before the exam. ("You made those questions for me to copy?")
The football had been intentional too. Practice, dozens of times, until he could land it exactly where he needed it to land. Then approach on the pretext of checking she was okay. Ask for a number on the pretext of paying for dry cleaning.
"There were ten steps between us," he didn't say. "I took the first one and couldn't stop. But at the ninth step, I still hesitated. Then you took the last one for me."
He named his dog Yan Dan.
It was a stray — scruffy, almond-eyed, with a look of absolute guileless devotion that reminded him of someone he knew. He fed it a single piece of ham sausage and it followed him home. He took it to the groomer and discovered it was male. He kept the name anyway.
Yan Dan threatened him with a full accounting of all withheld information. He gave it.
She stopped counting after the football.
This is a little thing about a secret love.
He took nine steps, and she walked the last one.
Postscript
In a scenic area somewhere, wearing matching tour group hats in cowboy blue, Yan Dan was explaining her theory of management to Zhixi: "It's really about controlling talent — or people who might be talent — or really just anyone who needs managing—"
"That's garbage," said Zhixi.
Zhixi had just posted something on social media. It had been shared dozens of times in minutes: Senior Brother Xuan Xiang is incredible. He visited every single restroom in this scenic area. A complete tour.
Yan Dan didn't read the comments.
The yogurt sold near the hotel turned out to be made from yak milk. She took one sip and put it down. Xuan Xiang had eaten a full serving. Liu Weiyang, who never posted anything, quietly retweeted Zhixi's post with the comment: Years of digestive trouble, finally resolved.
Yan Dan tilted her head back.
The sky was very blue.
She wondered, not for the first time, if somewhere in another world the sky was exactly the same color — and whether in that world, a story like this one would still find its way to the same ending.