Zoe Young didn’t tell Claire Daniels. From then on, they never mentioned Scott Zack’s name again. However, one evening, when a girl was on the same cleaning team as Zoe Young, as they were locking the door, she suddenly blurted out, “Zoe, does Claire Daniels still like Scott Zack?” Zoe Young looked up, and a faint smile slowly appeared on her icy face: “You’re the one who likes Scott Zack, your whole family likes Scott Zack!” At that time, she didn’t know that this line would become popular years later. The pain and hurt of youth really aren’t so easy to get over. But they still had plenty of time.

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6. The story of Snow White and Zachary Lewis

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“Wait a second!” Fiona James called out to Zachary Lewis, who was bending over to push a desk, but didn’t look at him, frowning slightly as she surveyed the messy classroom.

The provincial Young Pioneers squad meeting was going to watch their performance. Class 7, Grade 4 had been preparing for a long time, finally passed the preliminary round, and then, under the judges’ guidance, revised the program and schedule again, followed by endless rehearsals. More than twenty boys, including Zachary Lewis, were moving desks and chairs under Fiona James’s direction—first lining them up tightly against the wall to make space, then spreading them out in a circle. The whole room was filled with the sound of desk and chair legs scraping against the concrete floor, making everyone’s skin crawl.

“What now?” Daniel Hughes couldn’t help but mutter, “Is this ever going to end? This is torture!” Zachary Lewis calmly stopped, wiped his sweat, leaned against a desk, and looked at Fiona James, waiting for new instructions, without a hint of impatience. “Let’s just move them out,” Fiona James rolled up the cue cards in her hand, drew a circle in the air, and pointed outside the door, “Move all the desks into the hallway, just leave the chairs, arrange them in a semicircle around the classroom.” Everyone froze for a moment. Daniel Hughes seemed annoyed and opened his mouth to say something, but then the sharp scraping sound rang out—

Zachary Lewis had already lowered his head and started pushing his desk out the door. The boys looked at each other, then all lowered their heads and pushed their desks toward the door, and the room was instantly filled with noise again.

Zoe Young, who was squatting in front of the podium rewinding the background music for the poetry recitation, looked up and watched Zachary Lewis’s thin back, feeling a mix of emotions she couldn’t name.

Standing under the stage lights, they did the final dress rehearsal. As squad leader, Fiona James announced the start of the meeting, everyone stood up, the four groups counted off together, then the group leaders jogged up to Fiona James in the standard post-exercise run, stopped, saluted, and loudly said, “Reporting to the squad leader, the Xth group has XX Young Pioneers, XX present today, all present, report complete!” Fiona James returned the salute, then the group leader turned around and jogged back to their seat. Such a simple process was rehearsed five times in a row. Zoe Young watched Zachary Lewis get scolded harshly by Teacher Yu, gripping her script tightly. “You can’t even memorize these two lines? How many times are you going to stutter? You’ve wasted five minutes of everyone’s time. There are fifty-seven students in the class, five minutes each—do the math and see how much time you’ve wasted!” Teacher Yu had been saying things like this since first grade. Everyone sat in silence; if one kid moved, the time was extended by ten minutes—plus another line: “You’re wasting everyone’s time, ten minutes per person, XX people in the class, do the math yourself…” And then the whole class would glare at the culprit. Time is fair: five minutes for ten thousand people is still five minutes. Zoe Young lowered her head, partly to hide the slight disdain at the corner of her mouth, partly because she didn’t want to see Zachary Lewis’s shiny, sweat-covered forehead under the hot stage lights. When she and Fiona James stood at the front, reciting the fancy cue lines and introducing one program after another, she always had the urge to look back. Among the classmates sitting neatly in their uniforms, there was always one face that seemed especially blurry.

Sometimes, during afternoon self-study, after finishing her homework, Zoe Young would lie on her desk, bored, and look out the window at the sky. The windows of their classroom faced a direction where you could always see the afternoon moon.

“See, it really is a ‘smudge,’ right? Like a brush accidentally left a mark.” She whispered to Zachary Lewis—the “smudge of moonlight” that the teacher had corrected as a mistake back in third grade had always bothered Zoe Young.

Zachary Lewis looked in the direction she pointed, first smiling in surprise, then collecting himself and thinking seriously, “Better not write it like that on the test… the teacher says it’s wrong.”

Zoe Young was stunned for a moment, then smiled, “Don’t worry, I won’t.” It was strange—since second grade, Zachary Lewis had never gotten a perfect score again. He always made some harmless little mistakes: carelessness, formatting errors… but never enough to make the teacher single him out for a scolding or reminder.

During big cleanups or winter snow shoveling, he worked hard, but never showed off—at least he didn’t kneel on the ground scooping snow into the trash bag with his hands like some students did to look extra diligent, nor did he deliberately take out the trash in front of the supervising teacher or principal. So every time during the summary, the praise he got was always the same: “Other students worked hard too, everyone did a good job.”

Zoe Young didn’t like to talk, and neither did Zachary Lewis. But when it came time to express themselves—Zoe Young could speak up, but Zachary Lewis always stayed silent. In fact, Zoe Young didn’t know when Zachary Lewis ever wanted to argue, or to speak up loudly to get attention like she did.

Maybe not everyone dreams of becoming a magical girl. She only knew that Zachary Lewis loved collecting the Three Kingdoms hero cards from Little Raccoon crispy noodles, but could never get Zhao Zilong—one noon, after she and Claire Daniels wandered outside the school gate and lost their appetite from hearing people shouting “Scott Zack” and “Crystal Hughes”, they hurried back to class and saw Zachary Lewis lying on his desk playing with his collection.

“I saw a stall selling Zhao Zilong cards, not sure how much they cost. Do you want to go buy one? I’m afraid they’ll be gone soon. It’s the stall across from the grocery store, the owner is an old lady.”

Zachary Lewis looked up at her voice and smiled shyly, “No, I like collecting them myself.” “It’s really slow. You might never get one even if you eat crispy noodles until you burst.” Zachary Lewis looked up and smiled.

“But I like it.” That was the first and only time Zoe Young heard Zachary Lewis speak with such persistence and self-assurance. But he liked it.

In the second semester of sixth grade, in April, the willows in the north turned green for the first time. The hearts of the young boys also turned green for the first time. No one knew who was the first to shout, “I only watch the transformation scenes in Sailor Moon”—then a group of boys would gather and snicker. No one knew who first started acting like a little delinquent, wearing flashy clothes under their uniforms, taking off their jackets and wandering the halls whenever they could. No one knew who first started spreading rumors that so-and-so liked so-and-so. Of course, not all of them were rumors. The “gossip girls” and “gossip boys” alliances in Class 7 insisted that everyone had to have a crush on someone—so lots of people were asked: Who do you like in our class? As if it was a kind of ID. Dodging, telling the truth, or throwing out a smokescreen—one way or another, you had to answer. Some people were troubled by the rumors, like Zoe Young. Yet, when Zoe Young was secretly carving lines into her desk with a knife, cursing who knows who, she didn’t notice the envious look in Zachary Lewis’s eyes. A kind of uncertain envy.

Zoe Young lay helplessly on her desk, listening to the old and new gossip being discussed over and over in class. During PE, the girls no longer played jump rope. As everyone started developing, they didn’t like running around the playground anymore. Whether it was jump rope or double dutch, the burden on their chests was both painful and embarrassing, so they sat in groups by the flowerbeds or under the wisteria trellis, chatting away, occasionally bursting into screams that were either excited or shy.

Even the boys started getting distracted. They still played soccer—but their aim was worse than before, as if the goal was among the girls, and kicking the ball into the crowd of girls, their screams and curses were more satisfying than scoring a goal. Sometimes, they would play pranks by pushing a boy toward his rumored girlfriend, never getting tired of it.

As the sun set, the gentle light bathed Zoe Young, and only Zachary Lewis and she sat at their desks daydreaming. Zoe Young suddenly felt lazy and didn’t want to move, and she didn’t know why Zachary Lewis hadn’t left either.

“Today, Snow White came to school to see me.” Zachary Lewis’s voice was very soft, extremely shy, even a little hesitant. In the empty classroom, this sentence made the absent-minded Zoe Young think she was hearing things.

“Huh?” “It’s nothing.” He didn’t say more, stood up, and hurried out. Snow White? Zoe Young tilted her head and stared at his back. Still so thin and small.