That night, Zhang Qinglan suffered from insomnia.
It was not because of the trending search topics. She hadn’t looked at the trending topics, as her phone had already been confiscated by Junling. “We still have to record the show tomorrow. Go to sleep.” When she said this, Yi Junling had already finished washing up. The scent of white tea blended with the warm fragrance of body wash as she wrapped herself entirely in the blanket, leaving only a pair of eyes visible as she looked at Zhang Qinglan. “Put it down.”
She obediently put it down.
At one o’clock in the morning, the breathing of the person beside her was deep and even. Zhang Qinglan stared wide-eyed at the ceiling for a while before getting up on tiptoes, sneaking into the study, and stealing her own phone back from Junling’s nightstand.
She didn’t turn on the light. Sitting at the desk by the moonlight coming through the window, she tapped open her photo album.
There weren’t many photos in the album, just over four thousand. The majority were of Jianwei, while the rest were of Junling, their home, and occasional decent shots of the clouds. Her thumb pressed against the screen, sliding down stroke by stroke, passing the cherry blossoms of this year, Jianwei’s fourth birthday, last year, the year before that, and the year before that. She slid past the seas of their honeymoon and the red-background photo from the day they registered their marriage, all the way to the very bottom.
The very last photo at the bottom had very low resolution and darkened edges.
November 2022, Xiangcheng County Middle School, the alumni hall.
At that time, the alumni hall had just been renovated. A top scholars record book with a gilded cover had been added to the glass display case. The very first page when opened was that person from 2018, the first municipal top scholar the county had produced in decades.
A photograph was pasted on the upper-left corner of the record book. It was a frontal ID photo with a blue background, featuring an eighteen-year-old Yi Junling with her hair tied in a ponytail. Her face still carried a trace of lingering baby fat, and her smile was somewhat tender and green, yet her eyes were startlingly bright. Her chin was lifted slightly, confident beyond belief, that kind of unwavering certainty that grew from the very marrow of her bones, defenseless against the world.
A fifteen-year-old Zhang Qinglan stood in front of the display case for a very, very long time, long enough for the administrator to throw her a couple of extra glances. Taking advantage of the quiet lunch break, she stood on tiptoe and used that old phone she had saved half a year’s allowance to buy, taking a picture of this photograph through the glass.
The reflection was severe. She took over a dozen shots and picked the clearest one to save.
Actually, she had already looked at this photograph for a full year prior to that.
In the summer of 2018, a red-background, gold-lettered announcement banner was hung at the entrance of the county middle school: Yi Junling, total score 682, first place in the entire city, admitted to the Life Sciences major at Jiangwan University. The two-inch ID photo on the banner was the exact same one she later stealthily photographed on her tiptoes in the alumni hall. Even though the path home after school in the fifth grade clearly didn’t pass by the county middle school, an eleven-year-old Zhang Qinglan would take a detour there every day, her pace slowing down each time. At that time, she couldn’t articulate what she was looking at; she only felt that the older sister in the photo was truly amazing and genuinely pretty, so pretty that even a sheet of red paper appeared solemn.
The announcement banner hung for a full year, and she looked at it for a full year, watching the edges become frayed by rainwater and the color fade under the sun, until it was replaced by a new banner the following summer.
She remained dejected and gloomy over this for several days.
Later, she changed her phone three times and transferred the photographs three times. For twenty-one years, it had stayed at the very bottom of the album, like a secret kept in safe custody.
Zhang Qinglan sat in the moonlight, looking at the eighteen-year-old Yi Junling in the photo for a very long time.
Opposite the study, a sliver of warm nightlight shone through the crack of the master bedroom door. Her current lover was sleeping right behind that door: forty-three years old, with very faint fine lines at the corners of her eyes, and still smiling by first curving her eyes and then her lips. On the skin of the back of her neck where her hair was pinned up, there was an old scar that Zhang Qinglan had kissed many times.
She reached out a finger and, through the screen, gently touched the young face in the photo.
“Senior,” she moved her lips silently, “we’re leaving tomorrow.”
Naturally, the person in the photograph could not reply. In the photographic paper, the eighteen-year-old Yi Junling forever lifted her chin, gazing toward a distant horizon that a fifteen-year-old Zhang Qinglan could never reach on tiptoe.
Having looked her fill, Zhang Qinglan turned off the screen and gently placed the phone back onto Junling’s nightstand, her movements lighter than conducting an experiment. When she slid back into bed, the person beside her turned over in her sleep, her arm habitually reaching out to drape across Zhang Qinglan’s waist.
The base note of white tea lingered warmly in the dark.
She closed her eyes and quietly nudged that hint of citrus sweetness a little closer toward the other side.
The viewer comments for the prologue were still churning away on servers miles away. No one knew that the woman whom the entire internet called the puppy-eyed Alpha harbored a twenty-five-year-old secret at the bottom of her photo album, dating all the way back to when she was eleven years old.
Even less did anyone know that behind the answer glossed over with a single phrase in the prologue, which was a blind date, stood someone who had spent half an hour blowing in the cold wind downstairs at Teacher Meng’s place.
That was the Spring Festival of 2036.
The story must begin from there.