The sun was good that day. Good to the point of glare.
I stood at the back door of the classroom and watched Lotus tuck her fringe behind her ear and touch up her make-up in the screen of her phone. She was always like that—as serious about it as if she were writing a poem. The photographer’s voice came up from the floor below, cutting through the June cicadas, carrying with it that particular clamour of graduation season. The corridors were full of people taking pictures. Youth, at that moment, looked disorderly and fierce.
She turned round and asked me, smiling, whether I wanted to be in a photo with her. Sunlight jumped along the ends of her hair like a string of wind chimes coming loose. There was a great deal I wanted to say. In the end I only nodded. That is how youth works: it hides the words that matter most inside silence.
“You’ve been carrying a torch for her for three years, and now you’re playing it deep?” Dragon had appeared beside me from somewhere and was murmuring in my ear. He still had a packet of dried plums in his hand—the last one from the shop by the gate. The sourness spread across my tongue, exactly as it had the first time, three years earlier, when we had just been assigned to dorm 306 and he had cheerfully scattered his snacks all over a bed.
Four of us in that room. Volcano and Homeless slept on the far side and used to argue about games until the small hours. Dragon and I slept by the door and were the two earliest risers. Looking back now, the nights we were woken by someone’s guitar, the days we stayed up to finish homework, the reckless business of boiling instant noodles after lights-out—all of it feels like one bright dream.
“How did the assessment go?” someone asked Vega, across the room. She was a regular at the top of the year, and all she did was shrug. “All right, I suppose. We’ll see.” The sunlight came slanting into the classroom like a golden ruler, measuring the depth of the hours.
Nobody asked about the gaokao. As if, so long as it went unsaid, all that nervousness and hope could hang in the June air forever, like a crowd of butterflies refusing to land.
The canteen food was as bad as ever—the warmest curse of our three years in 306. We sat on the second floor of the junior-school canteen and ordered four plates of braised pork rice. The salt of the soy sauce could not cover the cook’s signature scorched note, and we ate every bite with relish. Homeless said he would remember that taste for the rest of his life, the way he would remember the nights spent wearing down the dorm supervisor over a few tubs of instant noodles. This time nobody told him he was being sentimental.
When Lotus came over, I was listening to Homeless tell the story of the last time he was caught. She asked whether we could take a photo. I stood up too fast and nearly knocked over a plate. In the instant the shutter went, I stole a look at her—and found that she was looking at me. There was something hidden in that look, like a book I never got to finish.
We drifted round the campus, the way we did on any ordinary day. Past the sapling planted the year before, which had witnessed I don’t know how many desperate sprints to make it to evening study on time. Past the water cooler we walked by every day, which knew exactly who would fill a cup of cold water in the break and carry it upstairs. Everything was so ordinary that it seemed we would still be scrambling into our clothes at the wake-up bell tomorrow.
It was only much later, on a night in an unfamiliar city, listening to unfamiliar cicadas outside the window, that I suddenly understood: the ordinariness of that day was the deepest wound the parting left.
Towards evening a fine rain drifted in. The threads of it came down at an angle, like a phrase of music from a broken string. Under the plane trees at the school gate we said “see you tomorrow,” the way we had on more than a thousand days before. Dragon started humming that song he had spent three years failing to learn, “The Brightest Star in the Night Sky.” This time nobody told him to shut up.
Lotus left early. I stood where I was and watched her go, and thought about running after her. In the end all I did was send a message: Are you home? She replied with a single syllable and a smiley face. That is how youth works: it writes its most moving declarations as the most ordinary concern.
The moon was bright that night, exactly as it had been in our second year when we came down from evening study and went up to the roof. Except that back then we thought youth was long and parting was far off.
Volcano posted a blurred group photo in the chat, followed by a pile of complaints about his photography. We laughed and squabbled, the way we had on countless nights of dorm-room talk. Nobody mentioned tomorrow. Nobody said goodbye. Laughter is as salty as tears, and youth is as long as leaving.
Some months later, waking one morning in a university dormitory and listening to the even breathing of a stranger, it came to me all at once: so that was it. That was the end of my time at school.
It ended on that ordinary afternoon. It ended in the last bad canteen meal. It ended in the moment Lotus turned away. It ended inside every “see you tomorrow” we assumed would keep on coming. It ended behind the door of 306 that we would never kick open again, and in every night we were sure we would never grow out of.
The photo of the two of us is still there in my phone, still sharp. I am standing bolt upright, as though trying to hide everything I felt inside that stiff posture. What moves me now, looking back, is not confession or refusal, but the things that never got said in time.
They lie quietly in memory along with that afternoon in June, like a seed buried deep. Now and then it germinates in a dream and puts out a patch of afternoon light, enough to illuminate the secrets a group of teenagers never dared speak. And we all know that by the time we finally find the courage to say them, youth has already become somebody else’s story.