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When they first meet in high school, Lan Zhan can’t stand him. She doesn’t like boys as a rule, and Wei Ying is the worst: loud and cocky and flirts with everyone.
Her friend Nie Huaisang goes out with him once and swears up and down that he’s pretty cool really, a perfect gentleman on their date. Lan Zhan bites her tongue and asks if he’ll be seeing him again, but Nie Huaisang shakes his head.
“There just wasn’t much of a spark there, y'know? I’d like to be friends, though, if you wouldn’t mind him hanging out with us sometime?” And Nie Huaisang has been her best friend since they were five-year-olds drug to their big brothers’ wushu competitions, so…
So that’s how Lan Zhan finds herself eating lunch every day of senior year with Nie Huaisang and Wei Ying, Most Awful Boy in School.
It’s surprisingly un-awful.
Wei Ying is still loud and cocky, but he is also kind and generous. She’d known he was smart—they’d often competed for the top spot in their classes—but she comes to realize that much of his flirting is honest curiosity about everyone and everything.
Including her.
“Lan Zhan, you should let me set you up on a date! Who do you like? There are lots of girls at this school who have a crush on Lan-jiejie, you know.”
She did not know. She tries to tell him she does not need to be set up. Nie Huaisang betrays her and sides with Wei Ying.
Here’s the other thing about Nie Huaisang and Wei Ying: they are weirdly good at matchmaking. She knows of at least four couples who started dating on their suggestion.
(They are not good at finding themselves dates, but that’s a different story.)
“Hmm… oh! Lan Zhan, do you think you might like Mianmian?”
Lan Zhan goes on the date.
(She and Luo Qingyang date for the rest of senior year and part of that next summer, then break up amicably when they start university in different cities. They remain friends and pen pals.)
Lan Zhan and Wei Ying graduate at the top of their class. She has a little snapshot of them all at graduation, she and Nie Huaisang and Mianmian and Wei Ying and even Wei Ying’s brother Jiang Cheng, all in their hats and baggy gowns, looking proud and happy and ready to take on the world.
There’s a lot of world, as it turns out.
People move, they graduate, they get jobs and fall in love and change their number and lose touch.
Sometimes they find out new things about themselves.
“Nonbinary” is a new thing.
Ge is adorkably supportive. Nie Huaisang congratulates them, and Mianmian sends a sweet message. Lan Zhan doesn’t really have a conversation about it with Uncle, but the first time they wear a binder and blazer to a family lunch, he just compliments them on their outfit and asks about the new exhibit they’ve been working on for the museum.
Wei Ying’s messages had started bouncing a few years back, and Lan Zhan mostly manages not to wonder what he’d say.
Lan Zhan cuts their hair and grows it out again, because sometimes you just have to try things to see if they’re you.
(Lan Zhan had learned that from Wei Ying.)
They date, a bit, and adopt a pair of rabbits. They find what makes them feel at home in their body.
They love their job and smile inside every time a wide-eyed kid takes in their long braided hair and earrings and makeup and the lean, crisp lines of their work outfits with awe.
They let Nie Huaisang teach them how to dance, and do brunch with Ge and his partners, and they travel, sometimes for work and sometimes for themself.
They visit Mianmian, meet her wife and baby daughter, and travel to see their mother’s family, and other times go somewhere they know no one.
It’s at a craft market in one such town, looking at handmade jewelry and homemade jams, that Lan Zhan hears a musical laugh they haven’t heard in years.
They follow it past booths of landscape photos and hand-thrown pottery and beaded necklaces until they turn a corner to see —
Long glossy hair in a high ponytail. Elegant wrists and lively hands. A flowing skirt that flutters in the spring breeze as the person at this table of what Lan Zhan belatedly realizes is small-batch fruit wines waves goodbye to a happy customer before turning and—
“Wei Ying.”
It’s undoubtedly Wei Ying’s eyes that go wide and surprised. Undoubtedly Wei Ying’s smile that spreads across this lovely face. Undoubtedly Wei Ying who responds, “Lan Zhan! Fancy meeting you here, after all this time.”
Lan Zhan can feel a smile in the corners of their own lips.
“Come here, come here, tell me what you’re up to these days. You look fantastic, Lan Zhan, have a seat, I want to hear everything that—ah, if you have time?”
Lan Zhan has time. Lan Zhan thinks they would sit at this market stall until dark to keep that smile on Wei Ying’s face.
“I do. Wei Ying, you also look—” beautiful, captivating, happy, alive “—fantastic.”
Lan Zhan does not remember Wei Ying blushing like this in school. It’s utterly charming.
Lan Zhan sits at Wei Ying’s stall for hours.
(“This is more words than you ever said to me back then!”)
They catch up. Wei Ying lives and works at a small family farm outside this town. Wei Ying declares Lan Zhan’s job as a museum curator “perfect for you!”
They do the pronoun thing.
(“It changes? But ‘she’ today.”
“'They,’ as a rule; 'she’ when it’s too…”
“Sure, I get it.”)
Eventually, Wei Ying carefully asks if Lan Zhan has kept up with anybody they’d both known.
She’s delighted by the news of Luo Qingyang’s marriage and child, and thrilled that she and Lan Zhan remain friends. (“I knew you’d like her, Lan Zhan!”)
Wei Ying’s face does something complicated when Lan Zhan asks about the Jiangs, so they let her change the subject. There’s a little boy on the farm, apparently, who Wei Ying adores.
Wei Ying does not sell very much more wine that day, but she won’t hear of Lan Zhan apologizing.
It’s not quite dark when Lan Zhan helps Wei Ying pack up the unsold jars, but it is late enough that it’s easy to ask her for a recommendation for where to eat dinner, then insist that Lan Zhan treat her to a meal.
It is dark by the time they leave the restaurant.
Lan Zhan goes to bed smiling that night, a new number in their phone under a contact they could never quite bring themself to delete.
Wei Ying has never visited the museum Lan Zhan had come here to see. Lan Zhan barely notices the art, too distracted by the light in her eyes.
The train ride between towns is not long.
Later, under cheerful lanterns strung up at the Wen farm to celebrate Wei Ying’s birthday, Lan Zhan mentions they’ve gotten a position at the museum they visited that first weekend.
Wei Ying’s kiss tastes like cherry wine and happiness.
Still later, Wei Ying’s jiejie does her hair at the wedding. Jiang Cheng cries on Nie Huaisang at the reception. Mianmian and Mian’s Ma'am and Xiao Mianmian are, of course, all in attendance as well.
Lan Zhan and Wei Ying hang a picture of all of them at the wedding in their new house, with an old, faded snapshot tucked in the corner of the frame.