Meteor Garden -2001- -

Now the woman looked up. Her eyes were Si’s eyes—the same deep, dark brown—but where his held a storm, hers held a frozen wasteland. “Excuse me?”

He was there.

They would lose. They would win. They would lose again. Dao Ming Feng would send assassins (metaphorical ones, mostly), Shancai’s father would open a new stall, and F4 would fracture and reform like a broken bone. But in the meteor garden, frozen in that single moment, they were two teenagers holding onto each other in the dark, defying gravity. meteor garden -2001-

He crossed the rotunda in three strides. He was so close she could smell him—rain, cheap cello rosin, and something else, something like green tea and anger.

The summer of 2001 tasted like lychee popsicles and the metallic tang of first heartbreak. For Dong Shancai, it was the summer the world ended and began again, all within the overgrown, forgotten geometry of the old meteor garden. Now the woman looked up

She didn’t mean to make a sound. But a piece of the rusted gate she’d been leaning on gave way with a screech.

It started, as these things often do, with a popsicle. They would lose

“Wild vegetables grow anywhere,” she said. “Even in meteor craters.”

He laughed. It was a rusty, unpracticed sound, like the cello’s first note. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”