Xu Ye sent the message and went quiet.
He’d been teasing her on purpose. It had worked — Qingqing lay on the couch fuming, kicking her legs against the cushions, and eventually transferred all her frustration onto the Doraemon he’d won her from the claw machine.
By a little past nine, after half an hour in the bathroom, she emerged in her pajamas and went to her room. She didn’t lie down. She opened her laptop instead, imported the audio from the afternoon, and listened through it a few times.
Xu Ye’s words came back to her. She found herself weighing, for longer than she expected, whether to put the song online.
There was a whole world of independent online musicians at this point — people who never performed at events, never chased celebrity, just uploaded music and let it find its own audience. Xu Song, Wang Sulong, Xu Liang had all built their followings that way, before anyone was calling them famous.
Qingqing thought it over, then opened the NetEase Cloud Music creator portal and uploaded the file. [TL: NetEase Cloud Music (网易云音乐) is one of China’s most popular music streaming platforms, known for its strong independent artist community and emotionally engaged user base.]
She didn’t use her real name.
In the artist field, she typed three characters: Chen Zijin.
青青子衿，悠悠我心 — Green, green is your collar; deep in my heart I linger. [TL: A line from the Classic of Poetry (《诗经》), one of the oldest collections of Chinese verse, dating back over two thousand years. The poem describes longing for someone absent. Chen Qingqing’s name comes from 青青 (qīngqīng), the opening words of the poem. Her artist name 陈子衿 (Chén Zǐjīn) takes 子衿 (zǐjīn, “your collar”) from the same line — the two halves of one poem, split across her two names.]
That was where Chen Qingqing’s name came from.
Once the upload finished, she closed the laptop and went to sleep.
The light stayed on.
The wide, soft bed held only her.
Except, tonight, there was also a Doraemon — the one someone had spent a few yuan winning from a claw machine — tucked against her side.
At Encounter Music Bar, Pei Youwei heard Xu Ye’s gaokao results and immediately joked about an award.
“Cleared the top-tier cutoff? Should I give you a little something?”
“Cash is fine,” Xu Ye said immediately. “Nothing crazy — three hundred, five hundred, I’m easy.”
“Xu Ye, what is wrong with you. You’re young, what are you doing obsessing over money all the time.”
“I’m broke. Can’t help it.” He leaned against the counter mournfully. “Just now at dinner, Qingqing had to pay for everything. It was humiliating. The cashier looked at me like I was something she’d scraped off her shoe.”
Pei Youwei hadn’t expected things to have moved that far already. “How far along are you two?”
“Just friends.”
“Just friends?”
“What else?”
She smiled. “That girl runs ice-cold. The fact that you’ve gotten to ‘friends’ at all is already a step. Keep going.”
Xu Ye opened his mouth to respond — and Pei Youwei glanced toward the door.
“Customer. Go.”
He turned around.
His expression went flat.
Gu Mengyao and Liu Qian had just walked in.
Xu Ye clocked it immediately — Zhiwei had told them where he worked. Of course he had. He walked over with all the enthusiasm of someone approaching a dentist appointment.
“What are you two doing here?”
Liu Qian got there first. “We’re just here for drinks.”
Gu Mengyao nodded along. “Just drinks.”
Xu Ye wasn’t interested. He caught Zhou Ying’s eye, tilted his head toward the two of them, and made himself scarce in the direction of the bathroom. Zhou Ying took the handoff without question and went to take their order.
Back at the counter, Pei Youwei leaned in and murmured: “You know them?”
“Classmates.”
“You’re not going to say hi?”
“Don’t feel like it.”
She smiled. “Ex-girlfriend?”
“Nothing that formal. I just don’t want anything to do with her anymore. She’s not worth the trouble.”
Pei Youwei let it sit. She’d already formed her own opinion the moment Gu Mengyao walked through the door.
They said girls changed most drastically in their first year of university — high school kept everyone uniform, regulated, faces bare and hair tied back. It was in university that girls started caring about how they looked, started using makeup, started wearing what they actually wanted.
But Gu Mengyao had already done all of that. She was polished in a way that didn’t quite fit her age. Pei Youwei had been around long enough to recognize the type — grown up too fast, calculated in ways she probably didn’t fully realize. A girl like that didn’t come to a bar late at night just for a drink.
Two cocktails got ordered. Xu Ye stayed at the counter, chatting with Xiaonuan and Zhou Ying, making no move to approach them.
After a few minutes of being completely ignored, Liu Qian took matters into her own hands.
“Xu Ye — where are you thinking for university? Provincial capital, or somewhere further?”
Xu Ye knew exactly what Liu Qian was. She’d been Gu Mengyao’s self-appointed strategist since day one — full of theories about men, wrong about most of them. In his memory, she’d spent three years at university, come back to Jiangzhou and taken a job at a supermarket checkout, spent her early twenties shooting down every guy who came close, spent her mid-twenties scrambling with the sudden realization that the ground had shifted beneath her.
He’d always been careful around her before. Too careful.
Not now.
“What’s that got to do with you?”
The words landed flat and toneless, and Liu Qian went completely still.
She recovered slowly. “We’re — we’re classmates, at least. How can you talk to me like that?”
Even she didn’t sound convinced by the end of it.
Xu Ye gave her one cold smile and looked away.
Gu Mengyao had reached her limit. She turned to face him directly. “Xu Ye. You said you’d go to university in the same city as me. Don’t you remember?”
“No.”
“Why are you being like this? Is there some kind of misunderstanding between us?”
He looked at her — at the practiced expression, the performance of vulnerability — and felt nothing except a low, dull irritation. This had been going on long enough.
“No misunderstanding. I have a girlfriend now. Please keep your distance going forward — I don’t want her to get the wrong idea.”
The silence that followed had a particular texture.
“A… girlfriend?” Gu Mengyao repeated the word like she wasn’t sure she’d heard it correctly.
Liu Qian jumped in. “Come on, Xu Ye. We literally just finished the gaokao. When did you have time to find a girlfriend?”
Gu Mengyao found her voice. “I don’t believe it.”
“Then don’t.”
“You’re such a—”
Liu Qian stood up, arm around Gu Mengyao. “Mengyao, let’s go. He’s not worth talking to. Acting all smug because he cleared the top-tier cutoff — big deal—”
“Stop.”
One word. Both of them froze.
Xu Ye pointed at the table. “You haven’t paid.”
They stared at him.
Gu Mengyao’s face had gone through several things in quick succession and landed somewhere between disbelief and humiliation. Liu Qian looked like she’d stepped on something unexpected.
Gu Mengyao walked to the counter, eyes red, and settled the bill. Then she turned back to him.
“Xu Ye. You’re going to regret this.”
“I won’t. I promise.”
(End of Chapter)