Alan Carter did indeed stop and walked over to her. “Zoe?”

“Here you go!” Zoe Young quickly handed over the glass jar. Inside were many paper cranes, colorful and shimmering gently in the sunlight.

Zoe Young wasn’t very good at crafts; most of her projects in craft class only scored “good.” While many girls were obsessed with weaving lucky stars from colorful plastic tubes or folding paper cranes and wind chimes from colored paper, she could only watch from the sidelines, longing to join in. Before graduation, Claire Daniels spent a long time teaching her, and only then did she barely manage to learn how to fold paper cranes.

But the cranes she folded weren’t as nimble as everyone else’s. Real paper cranes, when you gently pull the head and tail in different directions, their wings will flap slightly, as if they’re really flying. But all the ones Zoe Young made were stiff, lifeless birds that wouldn’t move at all.

And they were very ugly. So she folded a lot of them and put them in the jar to hide their ugliness, even sealing the lid to prevent anyone from finding out. But Alan Carter still calmly unscrewed the lid, pointed at the double-sided tape sealing inside, and said, “This is…” Zoe Young was extremely embarrassed, lowered her head, and stammered, “Se-sealed it up, so… so they won’t run away…” Alan Carter burst out laughing. “That’s right, so they won’t fly away.” Then he looked down, his eyes full of laughter as he gazed at her. “Zoe, thank you.” Zoe Young softly asked the question she most wanted to ask.

“Can I write to you?” Alan Carter looked surprised, his mouth slightly open, then quickly smiled. “Of course, of course, Zoe…” His eyes were fixed on the floor tiles. Zoe Young let out a long breath.

“But I don’t think I’ll write back,” he added.

Zoe Young’s expression froze for a moment, and the word “why” instinctively slipped to her lips, but she forced it back.

She could almost feel the stares of the clueless people behind her, burning the back of her neck. Alan Carter didn’t smile; there was a trace of reluctance in his eyes, but he still didn’t give in, looking at Zoe Young quietly and resolutely. Zoe Young lowered her head, and after a few seconds of daze, quickly looked up and smiled.

“It’s okay.” Zoe Young didn’t know why Alan Carter so firmly said he wouldn’t reply. She liked to observe adults’ behavior and secretly guess at their motives, like a lonely game. But she had never tried to figure out the person in front of her—maybe she instinctively knew she wouldn’t understand him, or maybe it was out of respect or fear.

Zoe Young had always been sensible, never causing trouble for others, and rarely insisting on anything. But this time, she stubbornly folded her new home’s phone number into a square card and stuffed it into his hand.

“You don’t have to write back, but when you get there, you must tell me your address.” Alan Carter looked a bit exasperated, as if facing a stubborn child. That look made Zoe Young a little disappointed, even a bit dissatisfied for a moment, but she forced down her swirling emotions and encouraged herself to make her point clear.

“You… you… you’ll definitely… I hope you’ll have a great life over there, meet lots of new people, try things you never dared to try before. You don’t have to remember me. I just want to write to you. If you don’t write back, that’s perfect, so I don’t have to wait for your reply before writing a new letter, and you’d definitely reply really slowly, which would delay my letter writing.”

This reasoning finally softened Alan Carter’s expression a little, and his gaze became gentle again as he stared at the floor tiles.

“So… so just don’t write back. I can write whenever I want, write as many as I want, and you can read them or not!” The last sentence was really just to make sure Alan Carter wouldn’t see her as a burden, but when she said it, she was so nervous and anxious that it sounded a bit like she was sulking. Zoe Young realized this herself and awkwardly wanted to make up for it, but then she heard Alan Carter’s soft laughter. He held the little card in his palm, then took out his wallet from his pocket and tucked it inside. “Okay.”

No extra explanations, just a short, firm answer, leaving Zoe Young a bit at a loss after her long speech. He nodded, picked up his luggage from the ground, said a few words to his classmates, and turned to get on the bus. Only then did Zoe Young notice that Alan Carter’s parents had been standing on the edge the whole time, and when Alan Carter got on the bus, he barely looked at them, let alone said goodbye. His father was a handsome middle-aged man, slightly overweight, very fair-skinned, with a serious expression. His mother, on the other hand, always looked utterly indifferent, as if nothing concerned her.

She stood on the platform for a while, the train whistled and slowly started moving. It was actually Zoe Young’s first time at a train station; she’d only seen them on TV before. This huge thing gradually picked up speed, dragging its long tail, and slowly disappeared at the end of her sight.

She didn’t feel sad at all. It was completely unexpected. For the first time, Zoe Young realized that in hot weather, with sticky sweat, and little details at the corners of eyes and brows—like Alan Carter’s slightly furrowed, half-smiling expression—all of these could slowly dissolve emotions and unrealistic fantasies, bringing everything back to its most ordinary state.

Still, she felt a bit of longing and excitement. One day, Zoe Young thought, I’ll also ride this long-tailed thing to somewhere far away.

“Alan Carter:” Zoe Young sat at a brand new, light beige desk, smoothed out the pale red grid manuscript paper, took off the cap of her Hero fountain pen, wrote these two characters and a colon, then let the pen hover for a long time. It wasn’t that she didn’t know what to write, she was just stuck on a trivial problem. She remembered that on TV, when people wrote home, they always seemed to say something like “I hope this letter finds you well” or “seeing these words is like seeing me in person.”

But she wasn’t sure if she understood those Chinese characters correctly, so she hesitated to write. In the end, she gritted her teeth and wrote, “Hello.”

So silly. She rubbed her nose and decided not to get hung up on these details, and kept writing.

“Today is the day to register for junior high. I’ve started at Beijiang District No. 13 Middle School. I was busy all day, and the school said that to be fair, each class would draw lots to assign homeroom teachers. I heard our homeroom teacher is a recent graduate from a teacher’s college. I stood in the line and watched her walk over from afar, and you know what? She was wearing clothes in seven different colors—I thought someone had broken up a rainbow and brought it over. Actually, I think for the colorblindness test at the elementary school graduation physical, they should have her help.”

Zoe Young paused, realizing she’d started writing all the random thoughts in her head. She froze for a moment, quickly tore out that page, but after holding it for a while, she put it back on the desk.

Zoe Young wanted to write to Alan Carter, though she couldn’t even explain why herself, like a fledgling bird instinctively seeking warmth and security. But she never expected any praise or reward from these letters, not even a word of encouragement like “Zoe is the best, Zoe can definitely achieve her dreams.”

Confiding is something that can become addictive. The moment she told him “I really only have my mom” at the pizza shop, the floodgates in Zoe Young’s heart opened, and years of pent-up emotions found a river to rush to the sea.

Alan Carter was that sea. She couldn’t close the gates, nor could she redirect the river. Zoe Young kept writing those unreliable things—no matter how awkward, they were still the truth.

She smiled calmly. “This school is much better than I imagined. The buildings are a bit old, but there’s a wall covered in ivy. When it gets cooler, it turns a bit red, and in the sunset it’s dazzlingly beautiful. I used to imagine this school as terrible, so I wouldn’t be disappointed. My mom always said things never go as you wish, and I looked it up in the Modern Chinese Dictionary to understand what that meant. So, what do you think—if you always wish for terrible things, will reality turn out to be really good?”

Off topic again. Zoe Young’s index finger accidentally touched the pen tip, staining it blue. She quickly stood up to look for a tissue, and when she lowered her head, she saw the book on her desk, called “Seventeen Without Tears.”

The cover was a bit creased and stained. Zoe Young had first squeezed through the crowd to check the class assignments posted on the wall, then waited around, bored, for the long drawing of lots to end. Wandering into a corner, she saw a girl sitting on the edge of a flower bed, head down, back hunched, like a big, plump shrimp.

It wasn’t a kind comparison, but it was accurate. She was tall, a bit chubby, and her slightly tight pink T-shirt made the “tire” rings on her belly more obvious when she bent over. There were scabs from old falls on her bare calves under her black shorts, the sandal straps were broken and tied together with plastic string, and—her toes were very dirty.

Zoe Young couldn’t help but stare at her, suddenly feeling moved. On a restless, gloomy afternoon, the noisy crowd around her seemed to go silent, and the girl was completely absorbed in the book on her lap, almost greedily so.