I am not a literary giant

As the preparatory bell rang, three or five boys crowded together at the door, like red blood cells congested in a vein, and with a shout, they all rushed inside.

"Tian Zijun, your school uniform!" "Throw it over here!" The red scarf fluttered in the air, then slumped down helplessly; the tall boy jumped to the front of the podium, grabbed the blackboard eraser, and waved it wildly in front of the blackboard like a Guan Yu halberd.

"Are you trying to kill me! Can't you just wipe it gently?" A girl at the table in front of him pinched her nose and complained coquettishly. The boy walked up to the girl expressionlessly and slapped his hands together like a weightlifter applying talcum powder. The girl looked down and sneezed, then turned around and hit the boy.

A boy and a girl at the table in front of me were moving a stack of books. The left one was moved one centimeter to the right, and the right one was moved two centimeters to the left. In the end, the girl got impatient, grabbed the boy's clothes, and moved him back and forth.

Bright sunlight streamed into the classroom, a gentle breeze lifted the curtains, and the ceiling fan above seemed to spin tirelessly and monotonously, just as youth seemed to last forever.

Wang Zixu rested his forehead on the edge of the table, looking down at the floor. His desk was crammed full of books, the top shelf containing "Ordinary World," open and set to the part where Sun Shao-ping borrows the book from Hao Hongmei. He would sneak a peek during class.

He time-traveled. He traveled back to when he was seventeen. He was still in high school then. But he couldn't control his body to move even a centimeter, nor could he make a sound. He couldn't change anything he saw, just as youth cannot be changed.

"Feed." A melodious voice sounded in his ear, and the prince felt a poke below his left rib. "Let go."

He looked up, his forehead creased by the edge of the table. The bright sunlight bathed the girl in a halo, and her silhouette, backlit, was breathtakingly beautiful in every turn, though her face remained obscured.

"Beg me," Prince Xu heard his own voice say.

"Are you going to let me pass or not?" The girl tried to make her voice sound cold, but her natural vocal quality made it sound like she was pleading. No matter what she said, her doll-like voice made it impossible for anyone to take it seriously.

"If you answer my question correctly, I'll let you have it," Prince Xu heard himself say.

"ask."

Name three French writers.

Wang Zixu listened with great interest to his conversation with her. At that time, he was young, naive, and competitive, and completely unaware of girls' feelings.

"Proust, Camus, Marguerite Duras."

Wang Zixu saw himself waving his hand: "It doesn't count! You did it on purpose, didn't you? You deliberately mentioned authors I haven't read."

The girl said, "You haven't even finished reading 'In Search of Lost Time,' yet you have the nerve to think about me?"

"What book? Remembrance of Things Past, right? I'll finish reading it tomorrow and tell you."

The girl waved gently: "Go ahead, go ahead, good luck!"

The prince was deeply ashamed. He was 30 years old and still hadn't finished reading the book.

He remembered. The girl back then possessed a reading volume that he could only dream of. Even now, he could only gaze at her from afar, like a dog on the ground looking at the moon in the sky.

Prince Xu stood up. The girl he had just looked up at was now a head shorter than him. The girl, who only reached Prince Xu's chest, didn't even raise her head, staring at his chest as she said, "Move aside."

The prince spread his arms wide: "Pass."

Wang Zixu was deeply ashamed once again. He didn't know how he could have done such a scoundrel.

The girl wasn't angry. Instead, she looked at his chest earnestly and asked, "How am I supposed to live like this?"

"Why not?" Prince Xu felt a youthful spirit rising on his face.

"I'm not a four-dimensional worm," the girl said.

How did you manage to climb into my heart?

Wang Zixu recalled that he almost blurted out those words at the time.

Years later, Wang Zixu, now 30 and having written hundreds of thousands of words of flirtatious scripts, will only think that the flirtatious line he once took pride in was just a low-brow, cheesy pickup line. 10% is the fake cleverness of an immature boy, the remaining 90% is just hormones.

But at that age, those words choked him, making his throat ache, and he almost blurted them out. If he had, they would have caused a huge uproar, ruining his life. Seventeen is such a precarious age.

He saw that as he stepped aside, the girl looked up at him with a puzzled expression, as if wondering why he had let her off so easily today, without saying anything flirtatious as usual. Her dark eyelashes fluttered like butterfly wings.

She entered sideways, getting no more than a centimeter closer to Wang Zixu's body—a position close to an embrace—but the two never made any physical contact. At most, their clothes brushed against each other.

Throughout his entire history since he met her, he had never physically touched her. At that time, she was almost his goddess, untouchable, inviolable, and indecent, just as the Yangshao people carefully protected their pottery.

Seventeen-year-old Prince Xu sat down, remaining silent. He felt a little deflated and secretly chuckled at the naive young man.

Not long after the girl sat down, she was called out again: "Chen Qingluo, the teacher wants to see you."

"oh."

This time, Prince Xu did not make things difficult for her and quietly let her leave.

But at this moment, how much the 30-year-old Prince Xu, hidden inside his body, desperately wanted to stop her!

That day, the teacher talked to Chen Qingluo about participating in the "New Sprout" literary competition, and then she won an award. After that, her parents arranged for her to transfer to a more prestigious high school, and then she was recommended to Yenching University.

He knew that from this moment on, their lives would take different paths, like two straight lines that would never intersect, each heading in its own direction.

Some of life's most important junctures and choices, when they occur, often seem like just another ordinary day. The naive prince, oblivious to the pain of parting, didn't even properly say goodbye. Years later, this love only became a memory, but at the time, he was still bewildered.

Yes. Wang Zixu and Chen Qingluo didn't actually have much interaction; they were classmates for a year and sat next to each other for half a month. Wang Zixu was just a passerby in her life, while she left an indelible mark on him.

After she left, he frantically searched for books by various authors in the library, seemingly trying to follow in Chen Qingluo's footsteps. He read voraciously and soon took over the throne of first place in Chinese language and literature that she had left behind.

He read through all the books mentioned by the young girl: Proust's "In Search of Lost Time," Marguerite Duras's "The Lover" translated by Wang Daoqian, and Camus's "The Stranger."

These writers will bring him even more writers. Proust brought him James Joyce, Wang Daoqian brought him Mu Dan, Camus brought him Sartre…

And more writers brought him even more writers: Tolstoy brought him Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Faulkner, Hemingway, and then he had Neruda, Márquez, Borges, and Vargas Llosa.

Lu Xun brought him Osamu Dazai, then Kenzaburo Oe and Yasunari Kawabata, and then Haruki Murakami, who in turn brought him F. Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Chandler…

The books he read spread, grew, and intertwined like branches, gradually becoming lush, leafy, and fruitful.

But that last glance that summer afternoon was the last time he saw Chen Qingluo. She left Xihe, and he never saw her again.

"Hey, Lao Wang, what's wrong?" Xie Cong shoved Wang Zixu, bringing him back to the present moment.

"Ah, no." Wang Zixu shook his head. "Why would I have her contact information?"

Xie Cong said, "Weren't you two getting along really well back then? Everyone in the class was saying you two were dating."

Prince Xu shook his head: "Nonsense."

Lin Feng leaned over and asked, "Which Chen Qingluo are you talking about? It's not the one from the Twin Jades of Xihe, is it?"

Xie Cong laughed: "Yes, Ning Chunyan and Chen Qingluo are both talented women from Xihe, but only people from Xihe call them the Twin Beauties of Xihe. I guess very few people know that they are from the same place."

Lin Feng turned his head and asked in surprise, "You two went to school together?"

Wang Zixu nodded simply: "Yes."

"They were even deskmates!" Xie Cong said with a laugh. "Chen Qingluo was originally my deskmate, but then we changed seats and she ended up sitting next to him. I was furious at the time."

Prince Xu drank water without saying a word.

He had no recollection of what Xie Cong had mentioned.

Compared to Chen Qingluo, everything else about him at age 17 seemed so unimportant.

Some names are truly magical. No one else will ever know that a single name could transport him back to an afternoon 13 years ago.

"Is Chen Qingluo as pretty as she looks in the photos?" someone asked.

"It's even prettier than that," Xie Cong said.