The summer after the middle school entrance exams, there was little rain. The sky was a kind of quiet, white heat, burning without flames.

That summer, Jiang Du ended up at the police station. At the time, she was a month shy of her fifteenth birthday.

The cause was simple. At the time, she was taking a shortcut home on her bicycle when she saw a group of boys fighting in a small alley. To be precise, a tall boy was being ganged up on.

Jiang Du immediately recalled something she had seen when she was very young at her grandfather's old home: a pack of stray dogs viciously attacking a single one.

The boy sent a vicious kick flying. Someone behind him tried a sneak attack but was sent back with a heavy blow from his elbow, groaning on the ground.

However, the group gradually gained the upper hand. Jiang Du, her face pale, watched as one of them picked up half a brick and smashed it toward his head. He tilted his head, and the brick grazed his forehead. The blood was so red. Jiang Du didn't know where she found the courage, but she shouted, "The police are here!"

If a story must have a beginning, then it wasn't the blooming cloud in the sky, nor was it the electric fan whirring loudly in someone's home. On the street, every car had its own destination. The beginning of everything was simply this sentence: "The police are here!"

The problem was, this lie only made the fighting boys pause for a moment. Jiang Du didn't know how they found out she was lying. This stupid mess ended up dragging her into it. Her hairband was knocked off, the front basket of her bike was dented, and she was so scared that even her crying sounded different from usual.

Later, the police really did come, and everyone was taken away.

Inside the police station, the boys were giving their statements. The stern voice of a police officer scolding someone could be heard from time to time. The boy who had been beaten still had dried blood on his face. He held his head up, his voice floating in the summer heatwave, devoid of any emotion.

"You're just a little girl. Doing the right thing is good, but you have to know your own limits, right?" The police officer's tone became one of resignation as he looked at Jiang Du's quiet, gentle, and particularly delicate appearance.

She was too embarrassed to cry anymore. Biting her lip with tears in her eyes, a sideways glance caught a pair of completely ungrateful eyes.

The boys who did the beating were vocational high school students, suspected of extortion.

After that, they had to call their parents.

When asked about her parents, Jiang Du shyly and quietly begged the officer, saying she could go home by herself and that he absolutely must not call her grandparents over.

Outside the window, a kind officer was already helping her fix her broken bicycle.

By the water basin in the courtyard, the boy was washing the wound on his forehead with tap water. He was bent over, forming a thin, slight curve.

Jiang Du watched him through the glass, as if looking at another, clearer world. When the boy looked up, he saw her too. Not a word was exchanged between them. Jiang Du immediately averted her gaze. Her palms stung; the scrape on them hurt a lot too.

She took a pack of facial tissues out of her dress pocket.

The paper was slightly damp from being squeezed. As Jiang Du walked over, the boy happened to straighten up. He was very tall, his hair dotted with wet beads of water. Below that was a face with well-defined features.

Their eyes met unexpectedly. A heart-scorching summer day.

"Here, for you." She handed him the tissues, her voice soft, like a handful of tender spring grass.

The boy didn't take them. He lifted the corner of his shirt and roughly wiped his face. His gaze went straight past her to a figure walking in through the doorway.

Water trickled down his throat, glinting faintly in the sunlight. The boy's expression was restrained as he stood motionless. A bead of water he hadn't wiped away still clung to his dark eyebrow.

Jiang Du pressed her lips together tightly, her ears burning as she took the tissues back and stepped to the side. Only after the equally tall man entered the police office with the boy did she slowly lift her face and sneak a few glances.

What happened next was completely beyond Jiang Du's expectations.

Outside the police station doors, she squatted down. As she slowly turned the pedals, she felt that the bike chain wasn't quite right.

It was during this brief stop that she saw the man who had come to pick up the boy. He turned his head and his expression changed in an instant, losing all the politeness he had shown the police. A slap landed, and the boy staggered from the force. Jiang Du froze.

The assault didn't stop with that one slap. The man's violence came down like a sudden storm. In the end, the boy was shoved into a black car, his mouth full of blood as he clutched his stomach. It looked far more serious than the group fight just now.

Jiang Du was rendered speechless, her face a mask of indescribable shock and fear.

But before getting into the car, the boy had clearly glanced in her direction. Just one glance, it was hard to say if it was intentional or not.

"

In the instant their eyes met, the boy's gaze was indifferent and clear. He was a mess, but he seemed not to care, as if being beaten was perfectly natural. There was no resistance, no pain—it was as natural as breathing.

Later that summer, she often thought of that pair of eyes.

Her best friend, Wang Jingjing, would come over to sleep with Jiang Du when her parents were away on business. Wang Jingjing leaned close to her ear, her breath warm as she spoke. "My mom bought me a bra, did you know? I don't wear undershirts anymore. It's the kind adults wear. Do you have a bra?"

Jiang Du's face grew hot in the darkness. Wang Jingjing took her hand, carefully, tentatively, and rested it on something soft. Her heart was pounding.

Wang Jingjing added, "My mom said that once a girl develops to a certain point, she should wear one. Feel it, right? I'm not you, the flat-chested princess Jiang Du."

As she spoke, she covered her mouth, half stifling a laugh and half mocking. Jiang Du's face turned even redder.

"Let me feel yours too, okay?" Wang Jingjing asked, and without waiting for an answer, she sneakily groped Jiang Du. Then she let out a gasp, covering her mouth with her eyes wide. "When did you start developing too?"

Jiang Du pulled the silk quilt her grandma had made in the countryside over her mouth, her voice muffled. "I don't know."

Wang Jingjing kept laughing. Because she was trying to laugh secretly, afraid of alerting the adults next door, her voice was very low, like a little hen struggling to breathe. Wang Jingjing was incredible, unbelievably feisty. She bossed the boys in her class around so much they didn't dare make a peep, especially her deskmate, a boy named Tan Kai. She would pull his ear and demand to copy his math homework, completely unreasonable. And yet, after three years of raising hell, Wang Jingjing somehow performed exceptionally well on the middle school entrance exams and got into the best high school, Mei Zhong, along with Jiang Du.

Tan Kai didn't even score as well as she did. It was truly strange—she copied his homework every day, yet she scored better than he did.

Some things in the world just don't make sense.

For example, Wang Jingjing had started using sanitary pads in the seventh grade. Jiang Du's birthday was even a few days earlier than hers, yet here she was, about to start high school, and had never used such a thing.

But, thank heavens, a few nights after Wang Jingjing had slept over and they had whispered to each other, Jiang Du woke up one morning just before school started to find a red stain on her bedsheet.

Wang Jingjing immediately educated her, took her to pick out sanitary pads, taught her how to use them, and reminded her not to get cold or eat ice cream... nagging like a mother hen.

The bathroom held the faint smell of her first period, along with a girl's overflowing, nameless sorrow. It was a little embarrassing, like a fine-grained piece of jade being turned over and rubbed in one's palm.

At that moment, it began to rain in the city, and it kept raining. Grandma looked at the wastebasket and asked Jiang Du if she'd gotten her first period. Jiang Du felt an inexplicable sense of shame. Outside the window, raindrops fell on the leaves and branches. The days were like a bronze mirror covered in green rust, damp and hazy, a stark contrast to the blazing sun of the first half of summer.

Jiang Du tried hard to wash the bloodstain she had accidentally gotten on her underwear. She was easily embarrassed, and the faint stain on her white cotton underwear that wouldn't wash out was the very shape of her shyness at that moment.

At the end of that summer, the young Jiang Du truly began her long and chaotic adolescence.