Valentine’s Day

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The tenth day of the first lunar month was Valentine’s Day. On my way to math competition class, I saw the flower shop nearby displaying buckets and buckets of red and pink roses. The supermarket by the school entrance had also placed heart-shaped chocolates on its most prominent shelves. Who were all these people buying them for…? A festival like this seemed to have nothing to do with students like us who devoted ourselves to competitions—probably.

Still, the roses were beautiful. I wanted one too.

Zero Aldehyde would surely look beautiful holding a rose: a pink rose, pink braids, and her cheeks. I could not help imagining it, like the line in our Chinese textbook about a flower’s blush reflected in a maiden’s face.

But—giving such a special gift on such a special day would be going a little too far between friends. Besides, Zero Aldehyde would certainly be more interested in books and things of that sort than in flowers. So I walked past the flower shop and supermarket at a brisk pace, expressionless, and headed straight for Lecture Room Two. As usual, I sat down beside Zero Aldehyde and began noisily flipping through my handouts and notebook.

And yet I still could not stop imagining her holding a flower.

At noon, as we passed the flower shop, Zero Aldehyde glanced curiously toward the entrance, then nodded thoughtfully.

“Oh, right. Today is Valentine’s Day…”

“Yes! Do you want to take a look?”

“In other words, human beings use the reproductive organs of plants as signals to request mating. How fitting.”

Zero Aldehyde muttered to herself.

I looked around the street. Young couples passed us, each carrying a bundle of plant reproductive organs.

The romantic custom of giving flowers, originally born as a secret way to convey affection, had become… another kind of romance in Zero Aldehyde’s mouth, perhaps.

“That isn’t exactly wrong,” I explained, “but when ordinary people give flowers, they usually mean the conventional meanings assigned to them by our culture. Apparently, sometime around the nineteenth century, a few literary poets and writers compiled dictionaries of flower symbolism so that people—especially lovers—could send secret messages through flowers. And the tradition was passed down. Red roses mean ‘passionate love,’ for example, while pink roses seem to mean ‘admiration, emotion, and first love’…”

“I could look up the flower dictionary, choose a flower for you, and then you could consult the same dictionary to guess what I mean…” Zero Aldehyde grew excited. “It’s like a code! How fun!”

“True, but I think they only need to look pretty. Those meanings were probably invented off the cuff, anyway, and have no scientific basis. I used to be the sort of pretentious young man who wanted to become a poet, so I memorized a whole bunch of useless things like that.”

Zero Aldehyde suddenly began giggling.

“What is it? Don’t laugh at me…”

“No, I just kind of want to stick a huge red flower on Poet Gu’s head.” She rose onto her toes and touched my short hair.

“What? No! Don’t!”

To my surprise—my complete surprise—when she came to class that afternoon, she really did pull a red rose from beneath her desk. Without a word, she tucked it beside my ear—fortunately, she had already removed the thorns—then whipped out her red button phone and snapped several pictures before I could react.

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“Hahahahahaha! This is so much fun! Gu Heqing looks like a shy young female artist! I’m going to treasure this forever!”

“It’s horrifying, okay! Aahhh, delete it!” I snatched the phone away and tried to take control of the pictures, only to see the words “Wallpaper set successfully” displayed on the home screen.

…Fine.

I took the rose home in the end.

“Little Gu, you’ve grown up! You even know to bring your mother flowers for Valentine’s Day.” That was the first thing Mom said when she opened the door.

On the way home, I had rehearsed a whole explanation for why I was bringing a rose home on Valentine’s Day. As it turned out, I did not need any of it.

“That’s right, that’s right. May you remain as beautiful as a flower forever.” I handed it to her.

“Tch. See? Daughters are still the best. Big Gu, learn from this!” Mom tapped Dad on the head while he was playing a video game.

She put the flower in the most conspicuous place in the living room. As a result, every time I saw it, I was reminded of that photograph: the rose tucked beside my ear, my face flushed, my expression startled—and the whole thing set as her wallpaper.

Damn it. Zero Aldehyde was far too good at teasing people.

And yet, somehow, I was a little happy.

The days of attending math competition classes in the daytime, grinding through winter-break homework at night, and gnawing my way through assigned classics after midnight had finally come to an end.

School had started.

Thank goodness it started early. Otherwise, I might have died of exhaustion at my desk before the holiday was over.

Handing in homework, collecting textbooks, sitting the examinations that came after every vacation, designing a new class bulletin board… And while I was not paying attention, spring quietly arrived.

We could no longer bear our down jackets, and soon we had taken off our coats as well. The vending machines’ ice-cold cola was once again sold out after every physical-education class.

The cherry trees in the flower beds blossomed, their branches heavy with spring snow and rosy clouds. After several fine March rains, the pink and white petals trembled loose and carpeted the ground, only to be crushed into mud beneath passing feet. The sky stayed bright later into the evening, and on the way to the cafeteria for dinner, we could see the sunset lingering on the old water tower and between the fingers of the trees.

Catkins swirled through the sky, gathering on the ground in furry, translucent balls. Whenever we went outside, we had no choice but to wear masks.

That was spring at Jianglin Middle School.

Perhaps because the seasons affected our emotions, strange restlessness, love, and resentment kept surfacing between classes, problem sets, and school activities. Xin Yi, the girl in front of me, had recently become as puffed up as a pufferfish. Since the two of us were at least friends who sat near each other, I was unwillingly appointed her confidant.

“I’ve been rejected! That bastard Sun!”

Sun? She seemed to mean one of the physics competition prodigies from Class Four. Xin Yi had often spent every break mooning over him.

“That’s right, him! I looked forward to every physics competition class. I always sat beside him. I kept going to ask him questions… I tried so hard, but he’s still so cold and heartless! Waaaah!”

Had she confessed and been rejected? Xin Yi refused to say anything more.

“Does he have a girlfriend?”

Xin Yi shook her head.

All right, then… I guessed that, in Sun’s eyes, the girl sitting in front of me was nowhere near as important as the Cheng Jiafu book in his hands.

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“If I can’t forget him within a week, I’ll jump out of this window!” she declared, pointing toward it.

I had no idea how to respond, so I silently pulled out my high-school problem workbook. Xin Yi seemed to have vented enough and turned around to open her Cheng Jiafu book again.

Wait…

“Looking forward to going to competition class, sitting beside him, and constantly asking him questions…”

That sounded like me too.

And lately, my own feelings had been twisted into an utter mess by Zero Aldehyde. She no longer went home with me after school, and I had no idea why.

When had it started? I could not remember. I only recalled that one day, after staying in the classroom to work on problems for fifteen minutes, I packed my schoolbag and went to the study room—only to find that she was not there.

I went on to Class Three. The student on duty had already left, leaving her alone in the front row. She sat with her head lowered, gripping her pen, her back hunched. Yet she did not look as though she were solving problems. She looked more as if she were wrestling with something.

I knocked on the glass window. She kept her head down and did not move. Only after I had knocked many times did she sway to her feet.

“Let’s go together…”

“You go first. I haven’t finished yet.” She cut me off in a hoarse voice, as though she were desperately holding back tears.

“Zero Aldehyde!”

She sat down again, sinking into the space between the dictionary at her left, the handouts and test papers at her right, the candy jar half emptied atop the stack of books, and the textbooks and autonomous automaton beneath her feet.

She did not look at me once.

Before school ended, our homeroom teacher announced important news: the following Friday, March 29, the first-year students would be taking part in the Youth Journey. We would first visit the Martyrs’ Cemetery to sweep the graves, then take a bus out for a spring excursion.

“Remember this! Assemble at the stadium entrance at six fifteen in the morning for the flag ceremony. At seven, we’ll set out from University South Road and walk to Pingshan Hall… Wear your athletic school jacket. Eat a good breakfast—don’t collapse halfway there! Bring a backpack with some daily necessities, because we’ll be staying one night near Fantawild… Oh, and bring in five hundred yuan tomorrow for the social-practice fee.”

“I don’t want to go,” Xin Yi muttered from below.

“Neither do I.”

Unless there were some way to stop thinking about Zero Aldehyde, alone in an empty classroom at night, refusing to speak to me.

“If you can’t go out with the person you like, then it hardly counts as going out at all.” Xin Yi lay sprawled across her desk, staring at the Cheng Jiafu book in front of her. “I might as well stay home and solve a few more problems.”

“Exactly.”

For once, the girl in front of me and I reached a rare agreement.