Xu Tangcheng gave Yi Zhe a warning but Yi Zhe still stubbornly refused to change his ways. A grown boy not yet twenty years of age in a romantic relationship with the person he had liked since young—naturally, he wanted nothing more than to give him everything that was good. Yi Zhe purposely bought a bicycle, just like he had back in the small city. Because they were on campus, Xu Tangcheng refused to sit on the crossbar, so Yi Zhe cycled every day from the south gate to the east gate and parked his bike at the entrance to Xu Tangcheng's dorm building. Under the large tree, he listened to the birds sing, then went for breakfast with the person who came out rubbing his eyes.

His life turned rich and lively, and it all began by accumulating the minute details one by one.

The second cafeteria had fried eggs during breakfast. If they reached before 7.20 a.m., they could usually get the ones with nice shapes. And, Xu Tangcheng liked to eat the ones that were nearly a perfect circle.

Xu Tangcheng smoked a lot less frequently but he still always had a pack of cigarettes on him out of habit.

Xu Tangcheng usually left the lab after ten at night. If he didn't have anything he needed to rush and burn the midnight oil for, he wouldn't stay past 10.30. He would message Yi Zhe ten minutes in advance, asking where he was, whether or not he was still in the self-study classroom. Sometimes, Yi Zhe would tell him that he was waiting downstairs for him. While Xu Tangcheng waited for the elevator and chatted idly with the others, his phone screen would lit up and he would receive another message, reporting the situation downstairs to him: There's a pair of lovers on the other side, they're kissing. If it happened to be a special period of time and Yi Zhe was still in the self-study classroom, Xu Tangcheng would tidy up the experiment for the day, cut down the simulation time to five minutes, then use the remaining five minutes to walk over to a certain classroom in a certain teaching building.

When they walk together, Yi Zhe would sometimes lift his head to look at the moon. Slowly, unconsciously, there was a tally in his heart—most of the time, what they noticed suspended over their heads was yet another new moon.

Twice Xu Tangcheng had praised the beauty of the curving crescent.

Yi Zhe had never purposely seeked any kind of sweetness but whenever he looked back suddenly after a period of time, he could gather countless sweet scenes. They were the kind that, if he told them to someone else, that someone else wouldn't understand, but when the two of them talked about them, they would steal looks at each other and laugh.

When his second year at university began, Yi Zhe was constantly working as a home tutor. The reason for working while studying was very simple: for the future.

It seemed that it was after he got together with Xu Tangcheng that Yi Zhe started to think more and more about questions concerning the "future."

Their future.

Just one extra word, yet it was a completely different life.

After making the decision to earn money, Yi Zhe said softly to Xu Tangcheng while studying one night, "Are you free tomorrow morning? I want to get a bank card."

Xiang Xiyi had always just thrown the money to him. Despite his age, Yi Zhe only had the bank card that the university issued en masse to everyone.

Xu Tangcheng asked curiously, "One card is not enough?"

"I don't want to use that one," Yi Zhe said briefly without explaining.

This was something he was preparing for their future, that was why he wanted to get a new one. The money in it would be entirely money that he had earned himself.

Xu Tangcheng looked at him for a few seconds. He didn't ask anything, and just said, "I'm free. Then let's do it tomorrow."

He read two pages, then nudged Yi Zhe and asked softly, "Which bank do you want to use?"

Yi Zhe was rather confused by this question and nearly asked him back, What do you mean which bank?

Seeing the look on his face, Xu Tangcheng guessed that he probably didn't have a clue about the different banks and that all he knew was that he wanted a bank card.

"I mean…"

The two of them sat in the last row in the classroom, studying. Someone had pushed the window until it was half open. Xu Tangcheng had just said those two words when the cold wind blew in and made him sneeze. It had been raining non-stop for the past two days and the temperature had dropped. It was the height of summer, yet the wind at night chilled to the bone.

Xu Tangcheng sniffed and withdrew his hands into his sleeves. Halfway through answering a question, Yi Zhe stood up and closed the window that was not far away.

Xu Tangcheng watched him lift his hand, pulling his shirt up. The soft fabric clung to his body, faintly outlining the muscles on his waist.

An affection that was precious and hard to come by could make a person turn over a new leaf. The young man that had not cared at all whether it was warm or cold in the past was now starting to notice these tiny details.

On the way back that day, the two of them spent the whole time discussing the matter of getting the bank card.

"Firstly, the amount of branches, the area they cover and the regions they operate in is not quite the same for each bank. For example, Bank of Communications. I have a BoCom bank card. While this bank can be seen everywhere in Beijing and a lot of people use them, they don't even have a branch near our home." Xu Tangcheng listed out the pros and cons, then pursed his lips and added one more line. "But I think that BoCom's cards look the nicest."

"Other than that, the annual fee. Even though it's not much, the amount every bank charges is not quite the same."

Yi Zhe never thought that there would be so many things to consider when getting a bank card. He had never thought about these things before and listening to Xu Tangcheng now, he was paying more attention than he did in class.

After Xu Tangcheng's comprehensive analysis, the next day, the two of them went to ICBC which was the nearest to the campus and also had the most branches. As he accompanied Yi Zhe to apply for the bank card and wait for his turn, Xu Tangcheng thought for a while and said, "I think I'll get a card too."

He happened to have some new investment plans and was thinking that if he had one more bank card, it might make things more clear-cut and convenient.

"Sure," Yi Zhe immediately said. "Let's do it together."

Yi Zhe wasn't very concerned about the reason but to be able to do anything together with Xu Tangcheng was more than he could ask for. In his heart, he was making some shrewd calculations. He was suddenly thinking that if they did it together, then wouldn't the numbers on their bank cards be consecutive numbers, just like a couple's set?

Unfortunately, when the cards were ready, his hopes were disappointed.

Their numbers were not consecutive. It was too much of a stretch to call them a couple's set. Yi Zhe didn't understand. Xu Tangcheng tapped on the card with a finger and explained, "It's all online. When they do mine after doing yours, there would already be so many new cards made in the whole country. Of course they wouldn't be consecutive."

Yi Zhe frowned in thought. He was still doubtful. "Is that so?"

Xu Tangcheng was afraid that he would lose the card on the way before they even got back, so he put both cards in his own pocket and said, "It should be. I'm just guessing."

How could he not be aware of those little things Yi Zhe was thinking of? Sometimes, Xu Tangcheng felt it was funny. This guy was half a head taller than him, yet he had a bellyful of sentimental thoughts befitting a young girl.

"All right." Seeing the dissatisfaction on his face, Xu Tangcheng consoled him. "It's just a few numbers apart. We got them together, so they're considered a couple's set."

Yi Zhe pouted and reluctantly accepted this version of events. Whether or not the numbers were consecutive, at the very least, they were an official and genuine pair of cards that the persons involved had acknowledged.

They went to a nearby restaurant for a meal. When it was time to go their separate ways, it was already night again and everything was in darkness. The trees rustled in the wind. Standing on the brick pavement beside the road, Xu Tangcheng asked Yi Zhe, "Don't you feel like you've forgotten something?"

Yi Zhe stared blankly. Then, he glanced to the side a couple of times.

The light was dim on the little street where they were and the street was narrow. At this hour, no one was passing by.

Xu Tangcheng had his back to a small grove. Yi Zhe quickly looked around them. Feeling that there was no danger, he lowered his head, his burning gaze falling on Xu Tangcheng's eyes. He asked softly, "A kiss?"

Xu Tangcheng gripped the two cards in his pocket. All of a sudden, he looked forward to witnessing just how scatterbrained this person could be in the days ahead of them.

He waved Yi Zhe off, a little like he was giving up on him for not meeting his expectations. "Hurry up and go."

But the long shadow on the ground still shifted a little. The young man bent his body and curved his arm, his neck stretching out in a sensual movement. His jaw lifted slightly and he kissed the side of a face.

Two shadows touched swiftly and immediately broke apart.

And then, one shadow was in high spirits all the way back.

Yi Zhe practically bounced on his heels as he ran back to his dorm. Taking the steps three at a time, he leaped up and charged to the room of his dorm, nearly knocking his roommate's water tumbler out of his hands.

His roommate looked at him with some trepidation and asked, "What have you been doing? You're so excited."

What had he been doing?

His thoughts that had drifted high and far the entire way back were pulled back to the ground. Yi Zhe looked out the window for a while and started giggling.

The stolen kiss and the forgotten bank card folded over each other, stacking up to become the indelible marks of midsummer.

The bank card that was returned the next day was a tiny bit different—it had a Miffy the Bunny sticker on it, in the same style as the Powerpuff Girl keychain that Yi Zhe kept in his drawer.

Sitting in the cafeteria and holding it up, Yi Zhe couldn't stop laughing. He asked Xu Tangcheng where the sticker came from.

"Cheng Xu got it for free when he bought stationeries."

When he said this, Xu Tangcheng was completely nonchalant from his tone down to his expression. But when they were walking on the bustling campus streets after their meal, the juniors handing out fliers everywhere around them seemed to invoke a childish and impudent feeling in him.

Unable to hold himself back, Xu Tangcheng took both their bank cards and when he spoke, it was with a smug and boastful tone that he didn't even notice himself.

"Did you notice? Yours is on the upper right corner, mine is on the upper left corner."

After saying that, he put both cards side by side.

Sunlight filtered through the thick leaf cover on the trees. As though it was affixing a seal of approval, it shone on the two bunnies.

One had a red dress, the other a yellow dress.

The two bunnies seemed to be holding hands. Just like that, the indelible marks of midsummer gained colour.

At the very start, Yi Zhe thought of many ways to earn money. He even considered the method Xu Tangcheng had chosen before which was by speculating in the stock market. With Xu Tangcheng's suggestion, he used 1,000 yuan to test the waters but unexpectedly, he lost everything. His rationality took control and he had to give up this method.

The home tutoring job was actually thanks to Zheng Yikun. Yi Zhe was usually not very close to his other coursemates and at the start, even though he felt that being a home tutor was a more reliable way to earn money, he had not been able to find an opportunity all this while. Zheng Yikun came to look for him for drinks and brought this up, and only then did Yi Zhe find out that the other guy was working with another school senior to set up an operation for university students to work as home tutors. They were similar to an agency, the business model was basically: they contacted a batch of university students who met the qualifications and some families who needed home tutors, assigned them in a reasonable way, then let them try it out.

The family where Yi Zhe worked as a tutor was personally selected by Zheng Yikun. The address was very near campus and the tutoring fee was very high. There was a lot of freedom when arranging the tutoring sessions. In Zheng Yikun's words, this was a tutoring opportunity with the highest cost-benefit ratio.

Yi Zhe clapped him on his shoulder and said that he would definitely treat him to a meal.

That family had a boy in junior high. Yi Zhe was responsible for tutoring him in maths and physics. The first time he went over, Yi Zhe tried giving him a maths class. The boy's mother listened from the side and was very satisfied after that, and immediately fixed the weekly class times with him.

However, after that class, Yi Zhe was a little curious. He could clearly tell that the boy had a strong foundation, to the point that he felt that the boy should be at an outstanding level in school. But when he communicated with the mother before going there, for some reason, her tone had been totally full of dissatisfaction, as though her son was really so unbearably terrible and was thousands of miles away from her expectations.

The answer to his doubts came after the boy's end-of-term exams, during their last tutoring session before the Spring Festival. Yi Zhe held the boy's school report that could be said to be outstanding and listened to the mother say that since Teacher Yi would be studying at University A for a few years, she hoped that Teacher Yi could tutor him for the long term and teach him the senior high curriculum before he graduated junior high.

At the start of 2010, tutoring classes weren't as widespread as they are now. The most common criteria for determining a child's excellence was still their ranking in school exams and how many subjects they achieved a perfect score in, and not whether or not they had learned calculus in junior high and what stage they had progressed to in the programs for gifted students^[1]. The idea of advanced learning was, at that time, even incomprehensible to Yi Zhe. He opened his mouth to confirm cautiously, "The curriculum for senior high?"

The mother nodded, confirming that he had not misheard.

"But… he's still in Year 1 of junior high, and he already needs to learn the senior high subjects?"

The boy sat at the side the whole time, listening to the two of them talk without saying anything himself. But Yi Zhe saw him raising his hand to touch the action figure displayed on the desk a few times. The figure was of a character from an animation series holding a basketball.

From Yi Zhe's viewpoint, he could see clearly the thickness of the lenses on the boy's glasses, full of circular marks, so heavy that they didn't seem to suit his age.

"He needs to."

Perhaps looking at those lenses was really making his head spin; for once, Yi Zhe interfered in someone else's business. "But it might be rather difficult."

He wasn't very clear whether it was right or wrong, but he was indeed a little impulsive at that time. He wanted to fight for a tiny bit of space to be free for this boy who was a few years younger than him—the space to be free that was in accordance with the boy's age.

But the boy's mother said something that rendered Yi Zhe immediately dumbstruck.

"As long as he wants to learn, there's nothing that he can't learn."

It snowed that day. When Yi Zhe left, the boy was still sitting before his desk, completing the last set of mock exams that the mother had stipulated. A rich savoury smell of food came from the kitchen. Yi Zhe's stomach was rumbling from smelling it yet the boy showed no reaction at all, like his senses had stopped working.

In a soft voice, Yi Zhe said that he was leaving. The boy did not respond to this either.

But when Yi Zhe picked up his jacket, the boy suddenly turned his head to look out the window and said, "It's snowing."

Yi Zhe looked towards the window. Indeed, a large expanse of snowflakes filled the view from the set of windows.

He looked at the back profile of the person at the desk, then at the scene outside the window that was completely different from the warmth inside the room. Yi Zhe's lips twitched but he could not say anything.

It was only when he left treading on the snow that all of a sudden, he felt a vexed regret and dejection.

He thought that if the one who came to tutor today was Xu Tangcheng, that one line from the mother wouldn't corner Xu Tangcheng until he could not say anything. As long as he was not drinking, Xu Tangcheng had always been rational and looked at an issue from all angles. He could definitely list out the pros and cons to the mother, just like how he had analysed which bank Yi Zhe should get his bank card from. That way, perhaps the child wouldn't only be able to look out the window and say, "It's snowing."

His mood was not very good. On the bus back, his mind kept looping that line that seemed to insinuate that he was as ignorant as a frog at the bottom of the well. It was also because of that line that, after not thinking of it for a long time, Yi Zhe recalled the only time when he had worked desperately and unflaggingly for his studies.

His high school years.

At that time, he didn't know anything. He hadn't thought of achieving success, nor had he thought of becoming an outstanding person. All he wanted was to get into the same university as Xu Tangcheng and that was why he had done revision questions like his life depended on it. In Year 1 of senior high, the chemistry teacher spoke with a very heavy accent and Yi Zhe sometimes couldn't quite understand what was said. Hence, he just gave up on listening, which directly resulted in him being extremely terrible in inorganic chemistry. And when he knew that his academic results were totally not good enough to enter University A, there was a period of time when other than completing the necessary schoolwork, he had also brought home his inorganic chemistry textbook and the old practice questions every day.

For a month, between eleven to twelve at night, he studied the Year 1 material from beginning to end. After that, whether in major or minor exams, he had never lost more than five marks in the inorganic chemistry section.

At that time, he didn't have a school bag. He had rolled the textbook and the practice questions together into a tube and held them in his hand. The tube rested on the handlebar of his bike, the hollow center recording the minute details of life in the city.

Those were probably the only days when his life had been consistent with what the boy's mother had said. He wanted to learn; he had even—madly, like his life depended on it—wanted to learn well.

The bus reached his stop. When Yi Zhe got down, he was still lost in his thoughts.

Xu Tangcheng was waiting for him right at the bus stop. The two of them had made plans beforehand to have hotpot at the shopping center next to it.

Practically right after they met, Xu Tangcheng sensed that Yi Zhe's mood today was a little off. Under his questioning, Yi Zhe told him the events of the day. Xu Tangcheng passed the sesame sauce that he had mixed over to Yi Zhe, thought for a while, then said, "How do I put this, if we're solely talking about advanced learning, I actually think that this thing is getting more and more common. Just like my academic advisor's child who attended those programs for gifted students, entered university before the age of fourteen and is currently studying at the neighbouring university. This kind of thing needs to be looked at specifically. Some children are suited to this method but the boy you talked about today might not be very suited to it and is being forced. I feel that we should respect the children's wishes but some parents might feel that their children are still young and don't understand things, and that only the decisions made by the parents themselves are good for the children and are correct."

Yi Zhe's unique family relationship resulted in him not having experienced anything related to his parents' considerations for him. He shook his head and said, "I don't understand."

The hotpot was boiling. Their conversation came to an hasty end.

Xu Tangcheng made a final conclusion. "It's okay. In the future, you'll realise that there are more and more things that you can't understand."

He scooped up a few pieces of yellow throat^[2] with a perforated ladle and reached over to Yi Zhe. "Let's not think about that now. Have some yellow throat, it won't taste good if it's overcooked."

With Xu Tangcheng changing the subject, Yi Zhe's crestfallen mood also recovered a little. He wouldn't see the boy again for some time and also did not think about those matters again.

But unexpectedly, Xu Tangcheng's half-real and half-false conclusion that day was very quickly proven by something else. On a very ordinary evening, news of Zheng Yikun withdrawing from the university suddenly broke in the class.

He wasn't taking a sabbatical nor was he being persuaded to withdraw due to an insufficient score from failing too many subjects. The withdrawal was completely on his own volition.

The dreariness of exam week was completely blown up by the impact of this piece of gossip, setting many tongues wagging with questions and guesses.

When Yi Zhe got wind of this news, he was sitting cross-legged on his bed in the dorm, texting Xu Tangcheng about going to the supermarket tomorrow to buy stuff. Two of his roommates were discussing at the side and the guy who had always been petty interjected, "It must be because he's too dumb and can't keep up."

Yi Zhe's brows furrowed slightly. He glanced at that person.

Because of those words, the atmosphere in the dorm room suddenly became rather awkward. The other two people exchanged a look and came to a silent agreement not to continue talking. They took their toothbrushes and cups, and went to wash up.

That guy wanted to say something more but the room door was suddenly pushed open. On a cold winter's day, Zheng Yikun was wearing only a black long-sleeved shirt and there was also a heavy tobacco smell on him.

He walked directly to Yi Zhe's bedside and tossed the student card he was holding onto Yi Zhe's desk. Resting his hand on the side of the bed, he spoke to the person on it, "They insist that I have to return the card before I can go. I don't have time during the day, do it for me when you have time?"

Perhaps he was frightened by Zheng Yikun's increasingly gangster-ish air; before Yi Zhe could nod in agreement, the guy who had just called Zheng Yikun dumb quietly took a book and slipped out the door.

When the room door was closed and there was no one else, Yi Zhe finally climbed down from the bed while asking, "Why did you withdraw?"

"I don't like studying these things." Zheng Yikun looked at his watch. "There's someone waiting for me outside, I'm in a hurry so I can't chat with you now. Are you free this weekend? I'll treat you to a meal. I'll probably be busy in the future and we won't see each other frequently. If you don't mind, bring your partner along too this time."

Yi Zhe had not made any close friends. When he thought about it, excluding Xu Tangcheng, Zheng Yikun was actually the closest to him out of all his coursemates.

Hence, he nodded and agreed.

Zheng Yikun seemed to be really rushing for time. He hastily said that he would be in touch and then began to walk out. But when he was nearly at the door, he suddenly stopped and turned around. "By the way, why don't you ask your partner to invite my little senior along too?"

"Little senior?" Yi Zhe thought for a while before he got it. "Cheng Xu?"

"Yeah, who else?" Zheng Yikun let out a laugh. "I can ask him myself but…"

Zheng Yikun's words trailed off halfway, hiding, covering up.

"Anyway, just get him to ask him."

T/N:

[1] Programs for gifted students specifically refers to 少年班 (shao nian ban).

[2] "Yellow throat" is the literal translation of 黄喉 (huang hou) and is a common Sichuan hotpot ingredient. It is the aorta from ox or pigs.