After hanging up, Claire Daniels sat there dumbly watching TV for a while. She didn’t know what was so interesting about the show, but it still seemed better than that unread message on her phone.

The show’s actors were pretending to be street cops, wearing police uniforms on top and underwear on the bottom, handing out parking tickets on the street. The reactions from the crowd varied, but everyone seemed pretty calm.

Claire Daniels still couldn’t figure out what was supposed to be funny about this foreign show.

She also didn’t understand why Daniel Hughes had been messing with her all these years. Was she really that funny?

Or was it because she laughed at him first when they were sixteen, so he’s held a grudge all these years, determined to laugh back at her over and over?

When she was sixteen, Claire Daniels finally connected the cocky, smug Daniel Hughes who’d just won a math olympiad gold medal in her mind with the ordinary name on the list.

He was so arrogant back then, but didn’t he end up failing the exams and going to an ordinary high school? Back then, under the teacher’s protection, he looked so proud, like a dusty pearl finally shining. Now that he’s lost, so what?

Claire Daniels remembered Daniel Hughes’s arrogant attitude, and always felt it was unfair to Zoe Young and the others, so now that she had the chance, it was hard to be merciful.

“What are you laughing at?”

Claire Daniels honestly couldn’t remember the embarrassment of being caught. All she remembered was that her heart really did skip a beat.

Turns out your heart really can miss a few beats, like your chest has been opened up and time is pouring in.

Daniel Hughes’s face was way too close. A little fierce, a little wounded pride, a little hostility, a little hurt...

There was still a faint trace of his elementary school self in his features, but the tall, handsome boy in front of her was unfamiliar. The sense of old grudges and satisfaction that Claire Daniels had just felt from her memories suddenly lost its footing.

In an instant, her face turned red. She didn’t know if it was from embarrassment or something else.

“I wasn’t laughing at anything. What’s there to laugh at? Is your name even on the list?”

She really wasn’t calm, and she couldn’t lie. The sharp look in the boy’s eyes exposed every bit of schadenfreude in Claire Daniels’s heart.

Daniel Hughes kept a straight face for a while before sneering.

“Stop pretending. Did you do that well? Standing under the blazing sun just to look at another school’s admission list, you must have a lot of free time.”

Claire Daniels was annoyed, but had nothing to say back. She just stood there glaring at Daniel Hughes, and Daniel Hughes glared right back, not backing down at all.

After a moment, Daniel Hughes looked away, glancing at the list behind Claire Daniels.

“It was just a slip-up. There’s no way I’m coming to this school. My dad signed me up as a special admit at the high school attached to the Normal University. You got into the Normal University High School too, right?”

What’s the connection between those two things? How do you know I got in? Have you been paying attention to me?

Claire Daniels froze for a second.

Daniel Hughes snorted, “You’ll find out someday, little upstart.”

After saying that, Daniel Hughes turned and left, leaving Claire Daniels so choked up she almost coughed up blood.

The phrase “little upstart” that had been circling in her mind for so long finally landed on her.

“Who are you calling a little upstart?!”

Claire Daniels—what will I know in the future? That’s what she really wanted to ask.

After three years apart, both of them had changed, but instead of greeting each other, they just started guessing each other’s thoughts, all fierce and prickly.

As if they’d always been this close.

Only now did Claire Daniels start to feel that the sun was too harsh—she should have felt dizzy five minutes ago.

Claire Daniels braved the sun, even harsher than that summer, and rushed from the cafeteria to the student service center. At two in the afternoon, the center had just opened. A woman with a head of curly hair lazily walked to the window and sat down, tossing a big bunch of keys aside.

Claire Daniels hurried over and pulled her meal card from her wallet, handing it over.

“Hello, teacher, I’d like to cancel my meal card.”

“Oh, little girl, how come you have two meal cards?”

She hadn’t realized she’d handed over two cards stuck together—they were so thin she hadn’t noticed.

So which card did she use to pay for lunch just now?

Daniel Hughes could never make it to the student service center’s afternoon hours, so he was always unable to recharge his meal card. Every time, he’d toss it to Claire Daniels and pick it up from her dorm at night.

Claire Daniels couldn’t even remember the last time she helped Daniel Hughes recharge. The cards had been in her wallet so long, mixed up with her own, she could barely tell them apart.

Strangers meet, strangers part.

Leaving behind a pile of unwanted habits.

“Girl, I’ve taken back both cards. The combined balance is less than ten yuan, and we don’t refund that, just so you know. The deposit is twenty yuan each, so here’s forty yuan for you...”

“Wait, teacher!”

“What is it?”

Claire Daniels stared hard at the window, her head throbbing.

“Forget the deposit, could you give me the cards back? I want to keep them as a memento.”

“Then just cancel one and keep the other as a keepsake, since you have two. No need to waste twenty yuan.”

“No, it’s fine,” Claire Daniels didn’t even know why her smile felt so sad, “really, I’ll keep both as a memento.”

Four years of memories for forty yuan—gone in a single cab ride.

Claire Daniels picked up her phone and checked the time again: 2:10 p.m.

The time was in the top left corner of the screen, right next to a little envelope, reminding her every second: you have an unread message.

What do you want to say? Claire Daniels stared blankly at the little white envelope.

In high school, Claire Daniels used a Xiaolingtong phone. Back then, as long as the family could afford it, parents would get their kids a phone for convenience, but worried it would distract them from studying, so they always chose the inconvenient Xiaolingtong. Texts had a character limit, storage was tiny, and aside from cheap calls, there really weren’t any advantages.

Even so, the lure of that little envelope icon was irresistible to the young.

Claire Daniels’s inbox could only hold less than two hundred messages. She and Daniel Hughes texted a lot every day—most of it junk, with only one or two worth saving. But as the messages piled up, her phone would fill up, and she’d have to grit her teeth and delete, constantly weeding out the old.

Still, among those two hundred, there were some of Daniel Hughes’s silly rhymes, shameless jokes—there was always something worth finding.

Like, “I think the class beauty in Class 7 with the buck teeth isn’t as pretty as you. Can I copy your answers for tomorrow’s Chinese poetry fill-in-the-blank?”

But after starting college, Claire Daniels upgraded her phone, and the storage increased dramatically.

Yet she could never find any messages worth saving anymore.

“Bring me breakfast—three veggie buns, two meat buns, not from the second cafeteria.”

“Leonard Doyle will definitely sign in today, keep an eye out. Our whole dorm, except for No. 3—his wife will sign for him. Don’t double-sign.”

Claire Daniels—“Are my clothes dry? I don’t have any clean ones left.”

Or: “What’s the homework for Chinese Art History this week? Do one for me too.”

“What are the questions for the Information Systems Overview class? Do the answers for me too.”

“Do you have any classmates taking College Physics? Do the lab report for me.”

Not “Can you do one for me too?”—just straight-up orders.

So even the first question was pointless.

On the last night before leaving, Claire Daniels downed glass after glass of Baileys. When she was tipsy, she still remembered to giggle and show her phone to Zoe Young.

“What kind of junk are you saving?” Zoe Young snatched the phone and tossed it back.

Claire Daniels kept going, digging out a message from her drafts folder that had been there who knows how long, shamelessly showing it to Zoe Young.

—Do you like me, Daniel Hughes?

“Pretty straightforward, right?” She giggled foolishly.

“It’s only straightforward if you send it.”

Zoe Young didn’t hesitate, grabbed the phone, and hit send.

2:30 a.m.

—Do you like me, Daniel Hughes?

Do you like me?

Claire Daniels put both meal cards back in her wallet, lowered her head, and dashed out into the flawless sunlight, running all the way.

There’s really no logic to a girl falling for someone. Maybe it was because he got too close when she was caught and it made her nervous, maybe because he suddenly didn’t look like he did as a kid, maybe because he said he’d go to the Normal University High School and asked if she was going too, even though she knew those two things weren’t really connected...