Huai Ji
In my senior year of high school, I met a boy sitting in the rain on the rooftop. He didn't know how to be loved, and I didn't know how to love someone—but we tried anyway. At eighteen, I discovered a broken door leading to the school rooftop. It was my personal secret base, until one rainy evening when I pushed the door open and saw him. He was sitting on the edge of the rooftop, one leg dangling off, his school uniform half-soaked, looking like a stone drenched in the rain. His name was Huai Ji. He was the boy who sat in the very last row of our class, with deep eyes, and he never smiled. After that, I went to the rooftop often. He was always there. He would reach his hand out in the rain to catch water, then look down at the bruise on the back of his hand. When I asked, "Are you cold?" he would say, "Are you annoying?" but then stare at my back for a long time after I walked away. In the middle of the night, he would send a message saying, "Are you there?" and then immediately follow it up with, "Never mind"—he actually had something to say, but he was afraid I would find him annoying. Later, I found out that the beer bottles in his home were piled under his bed, the bruises on his mother never faded, and his father was a staggering man. He knew how to keep his eyes open when a fist fell, but he didn't know how to accept a simple, "Are you okay?" The rooftop was ours. The rain was ours. The silence was ours. I wanted to pull him up. But he refused to reach out his hand. Not because he didn't want to, but because he didn't dare—what if he reached out, and no one caught it?