—

Wen Fu couldn't follow Fei Bolin's question, but somewhere deep down he knew birds don't leave the sky.

Birds might land for a bit, might get caught and caged, but the second they're free, they fly back toward the sky without looking back, until they die.

He saw Fei Bolin smile, so he smiled too.

He figured it didn't matter if he didn't get it now. There was so much time ahead for him and Fei Bolin. One day he'd understand.

Right before midnight, the house called.

Fei Bolin went to the bathroom to shower, and Wen Fu insisted on squeezing in to wash up with him.

Fei Bolin: 'Can't you wait until I'm done before you come in to brush your teeth?'

Wen Fu: 'Do birds leave the sky?'

Fei Bolin: '...'

So Wen Fu got tossed out mid-brush.

He stood at the bathroom door with the full confidence of a man in the right, brushing his teeth up and down and side to side with all his might, chin up, chest out, toothpaste everywhere, eyes locked on the bathroom. The second the shower stopped, he threw open the door and charged in.

Fei Bolin had just pulled on his pants. He stared at Wen Fu with a blank expression as the kid barreled up to him, then grabbed the back of Wen Fu's neck and steered him toward the sink. 'Wash your face properly.'

Wen Fu glanced at his bare upper body, took a big gulp of water, swished and spat it out. He was about to wipe his mouth with the back of his hand when Fei Bolin cupped the back of his head, pressed a warm towel against his face, and started wiping in little circles.

Wen Fu's pale, delicate face got scrubbed bright red. Hard not to suspect Fei Bolin was using this as payback.

'Bo ge...' Wen Fu struggled until one eye peeked out from under Fei Bolin's hands. His gaze dropped to Fei Bolin's waist. His voice came out muffled under the towel. 'Bo ge, what's your favorite sport?'

Fei Bolin's build was like the reliable adult in those monster-hunting shows who always had the protagonist's back. Clothed, he just looked tall and thin. Shirtless, you could see the hard, tight line of his waist. Same as his personality — looked like he didn't care about anything, but actually handled everything down to the last detail.

But Wen Fu remembered that aside from being really good at running and volleyball, he usually didn't join the group activities in PE class.

And for the few sports he was actually good at, Fei Bolin didn't show much enthusiasm either.

Wen Fu asked the question, and Fei Bolin didn't answer. He just pulled his hands back, leaned in to check if Wen Fu's eyes and the corners of his mouth were clean, then turned to rinse the towel under the faucet and walked out with his pajamas, on his own.

Like there was an answer he couldn't say out loud, or maybe one that wasn't worth saying.

Until the moment he stepped out of the bathroom, Fei Bolin said flatly, 'Boxing.'

Boxing?

Wen Fu tilted his head at Fei Bolin's retreating back, flicked off the bathroom light, and chased him to the bedroom, where Fei Bolin had already gotten dressed.

'Come to bed.' Fei Bolin adjusted the electric fan as he spoke. 'We've got class tomorrow.'

They were going into senior year next semester. No.1 High School forced the second-years to make up classes through summer until August 10th. After a half-day break following finals, School started right back up.

Wen Fu kicked off his shoes and climbed to the inside of the bed. Fei Bolin held the fan by the bed and asked, 'Can you feel the breeze?'

Wen Fu nodded. Only then did Fei Bolin turn off the light and get in.

The room went quiet. Fei Bolin silently ran through some English vocab in his head for a bit, then fell asleep pretty fast.

Half-asleep, Wen Fu crept up to his ear. 'Bo ge?'

Fei Bolin frowned slightly and opened his eyes. 'What?'

Wen Fu asked, in a haunted little voice, 'Am I a bird?'

Fei Bolin: '...'

Wen Fu: 'Bo ge?'

Fei Bolin: '...'

Wen Fu: 'Bo...'

Fei Bolin: 'If you're not sleeping, get up and recite Chinese.'

Wen Fu immediately curled up and went to sleep.

-

The first weekend after finals, Fei Bolin stopped by a pharmacy on his way home and bought a bottle of eye drops. Every day after class, he'd put one in during evening study hall.

Xie Yining noticed and asked him, 'Group leader, what's going on with you lately? Always using eye drops. Eyes bothering you?'

'Sometimes the teacher's board writing is too small, I can't see it,' Fei Bolin said, not thinking much of it. 'Probably overworked my eyes a bit.'

'Nearsighted?' Lu Yuqiu turned around at that. 'Go get your vision tested at the hospital sometime. Get glasses early.'

Wen Fu looked up from his test paper and stared at Fei Bolin's eyes. Fei Bolin pushed his head back down with one hand. 'Focus on your work.'

Su Haoran, who had been chatting from way across the room, came zooming over. 'Glasses? I've got glasses. Who's getting fitted? Try mine!'

He actually did have a pair — pure black frames, supposedly pretty expensive, over four thousand yuan. But Su Haoran's prescription wasn't strong. He'd put them on to listen in class, then put them back in the case after.

'Yeah, right, your Harry Potter special.' Xie Yining made a face. 'So dorky — might as well give them to Duolaimi.'

'Just try them first.' Su Haoran ran back to his seat and grabbed the glasses. 'If they don't look good, remember not to get that style next time at the hospital. Who wants to try?'

'You think people don't try them on at the hospital when they get fitted?' Xie Yining took the glasses from him and put them away. 'Cut the act.'

Lu Yuqiu nodded in strong agreement beside them. 'With the group leader's vibe, he should wear gold-rimmed glasses.'

Wen Fu looked up again, like he'd just heard a new word. 'Gold-rimmed glasses?'

'Yeah,' Lu Yuqiu squinted, a knowing little smile on her face. 'That's what the domineering CEOs wear in novels.'

Wen Fu, dead serious: 'What novel?'

Lu Yuqiu: 'The 99 Escapes of the Fiancé: The Calculating CEO's Contracted Younger Brother in His Palm.'

Wen Fu: 'That's the title?'

Lu Yuqiu: 'Yep.'

Wen Fu: 'Who's the main character?'

Lu Yuqiu: 'The scheming CEO and his little brother.'

Wen Fu: 'What's it about?'

Fei Bolin suddenly spoke to Lu Yuqiu. 'You too, get back to your work.'

'...' Lu Yuqiu was about to say something else when Gu Mingchun's figure suddenly appeared in the classroom doorway.

She spun back around like a top in one second, and the whole classroom went quiet at once.

-

Summers in Rongzhou were always brutal. The ceiling of the fifth-floor classroom got baked hot every day. Six ceiling fans in one room creaked and spun from morning to night, and still couldn't stop the sweat pouring off everyone. Boarders would rush back to the dorms the second evening study hall ended to enjoy the Air Conditioner. Wen Fu, meanwhile, was looking forward to going home to the watermelon Fei Bolin would cut by hand, and the quiet night of lying in bed with the fan on after a shower.

The days of buried heads and hard studying felt long at the time, but looking back, the time just flew.

At least the School showed a shred of mercy — during the hottest stretch of the dog days, they released the pre-senior-year summer break, letting Fei Bolin spend his eighteenth birthday at home.

In the days before that, Wen Fu would crouch in front of his piggy bank every day after school, staring thoughtfully at its single coin slot.

Fei Bolin had once mentioned offhandedly in a chat that since Wen Fu didn't need to contribute to household expenses, he'd specifically bought him a piggy bank that only took in, never gave out. The day it was full and Wen Fu wanted the money, he'd just smash the thing open.

There was 4,130 yuan in the bank now. Last semester, following Fei Bolin's instructions, Wen Fu had applied for the poverty subsidy and got 1,200 yuan. Plus a 1,500-yuan scholarship, plus the thousand-plus he'd originally put in — Fei Bolin had told him to save it all. Now there was a decent little sum in there.

That night, while Fei Bolin was in the kitchen making a late-night snack, Wen Fu hugged the bank, sat cross-legged on the floor against the bed frame, and pressed one eye to the coin slot. Through a thin beam of light barely making it inside, he could just barely make out a flash of red — a banknote.

Wen Fu held the piggy bank and thought: how much for a cake, and how much to set aside for Fei Bolin's glasses?

He'd never bought glasses, didn't know how much they cost. But he had a vague sense that hospital-fitted glasses probably weren't cheap — probably a big expense, otherwise Fei Bolin wouldn't have kept putting it off.

August 19th arrived before he knew it. The night before, a downpour had come through. Waking up that morning, the weather was cool, and the trees in the Residential Complex looked a few shades greener than usual.

Around noon, a call came in asking for some betel nut and popsicles to be delivered to a mahjong parlor three streets over. Fei Bolin figured the shop would be slow at lunch, and Wen Fu hated the heat, so he'd planned to deliver it himself. But Wen Fu volunteered, sidled up next to him, listened to the call, and was already grabbing a bag and sweeping stuff off the shelves before Fei Bolin could blink.

With the betel nut and popsicles in hand, Wen Fu tore out of there like a little tornado.

Fei Bolin called after him, 'I'm heading back to make lunch anyway. Just come straight home after the delivery.'

He handed Wen Fu the key to Lin's Convenience Store as he spoke. 'Put the money you collect in the drawer when you're back.'

That suited Wen Fu just fine. He answered with a quick 'okay,' pocketed the key, and ran off to deliver without a moment's pause.

On his way back after the delivery, he walked slowly under the sun, stopping to linger at every cake shop he passed.

Wen Fu had never bought a cake. Before age four, his family didn't think his birthday was worth celebrating. After age four, with his adoptive father, it was even less of a thing.

His understanding of birthday cakes was hazy and thin. He only knew the basic fact that normal people eat cake on their birthday. Price, style, ingredients — he knew nothing about any of it.

What Wen Fu didn't know was that Fei Bolin hadn't had cake in a long time either.

Since that early summer when Lin Yuanyi's ashes drifted back from a foreign land and arrived at his hands via a minivan, Fei Bolin had never celebrated his birthday again.

Fei Bolin didn't really like summer either. The midsummer after his middle school exams had been a gray, endless sea of suffering for him. The grief of his mother's death came with the heavy seasonal rains, like dense steel needles hidden in the raindrops, piercing straight through his spine. Every storm was a struggle to stay afloat. Night after night, in the sound of the rain, he forced himself to swallow the fact of Lin Yuanyi's death like iron nails, then got drowned in the waves of sorrow.

People's self-protective way of dodging pain is to selectively forget. To forget the pain of that summer, he had to forget everything about summer — including his own birthday.

He'd rather let everything from that summer — meaningful or not — stay sealed in the past. He wouldn't lightly stir up bigger, more painful memories just to celebrate some minor anniversary.

Wen Fu didn't know, and couldn't understand. His mother had died too early, leaving him too ignorant about the weight of life and death.

Now he'd checked out every cake shop on the route like he was scouting them. He used the key to open Lin's Convenience Store, took his backpack from behind the register — the one he'd quietly packed with the piggy bank that morning — and hugged it to his chest, careful and sneaky, heading toward the cake shop he'd picked out.