Jiang Tang
They called me the school's most cunning "airhead"—a humanities prodigy who daydreamed through calculus but could dissect a poem's soul in three sentences. He was the most emotionally inept "monster"—a science genius who solved quantum equations for fun but couldn't hold a normal conversation if his life depended on it.
On stage, we clashed. Off stage, we tested waters I didn't know existed.
Two secret identities. Two unspoken crushes. One invisible game of tug-of-war.
I thought I'd hidden myself perfectly. Little did I know, he was the one holding the other end of the rope.
---
The lively classroom buzzed with pre-lunch chatter, and I—Jiang Tang—was gossiping with my friends near the window.
"Not to stereotype," I grumbled, pulling a face, "but most science geniuses either never speak or never shut up. There's no in-between."
Lies. I was absolutely obsessed with one particular science genius's silence.
I've never been one for noise—or for wasting energy guessing whether someone likes me. A colossal waste of time, don't you think?
Yet despite myself, my gaze kept drifting toward the lab door across the courtyard. It was slightly ajar, swaying in the autumn breeze. I was just passing by—absolutely, definitely not there to ogle some brainy heartthrob.
Through the gap, I caught a glimpse of a figure bent over equations: Lu Huai, brows furrowed in concentration, tapping his pen against his temple like he was trying to physically knock the solution loose.
A thought flickered through my mind: If only novel protagonists could frown like that.
Full disclosure: I'm a wildly successful romance novelist. Though no one's ever seen my face. My pseudonym "Tang-Tang" has three bestsellers, and my current campus serial has half the student body shipping the emotionally constipated male lead with the secretly sharp-tongued heroine.
Sound familiar? It should. I was writing us—except we weren't "us." Not anymore.
Focus! I was here to submit literature club budgets, not to watch Lu Huai disassemble math problems like a puzzle and slot them back together with inhuman precision.
That guy's name? Lu Huai. Top of our year. Physics monster. Serial competition champion. My childhood best friend.
Correction: Former childhood best friend.
From orientation till now, the only words we'd exchanged were:
"Excuse me, let me through."
He'd stepped aside, but not even a grunt in reply. Rude. Or maybe exactly what I deserved.
---
Lu Huai
She moved past the doorway fast, but that silhouette was unmistakable.
I'm Lu Huai, and that was Jiang Tang—the girl who used to chase me around the compound with a bamboo sword, declaring herself my protector. The eternal second-place finisher in every writing competition I secretly entered just to see her name beside mine. A novelist who naively thinks she's hidden her identity well.
True, no one else knows Tang-Tang is her. But I uncovered her secret two years ago, during a sleepless night before finals.
I was scrolling through a writing forum when her campus novel caught my eye. At first, I didn't care—romance isn't my genre. Then I saw the comments section erupting:
"Are you writing about Lu Huai in this story?!" "This ML is 100% the physics monster from Class 3!"
Honestly, I didn't react much. Not until Chapter Two: the protagonist barely spoke, struggled with emotions, excelled in STEM, and got lost in his own world. A dead ringer. Hm. Now I understand the fuss.
But here's what the readers don't know: Chapter Three's heroine, the one who "hates noise" and "writes faster than she speaks"? That's Jiang Tang's autobiography. The way she bites her pen when thinking, how she drinks lemon tea when stumped, even the specific shade of blue her notebook is—the details only someone who'd memorized her for seventeen years would recognize.
I didn't comment or like the post. Just quietly bookmarked it and created an alt account: [lii].
From that day on, I refreshed her updates religiously, occasionally dropping brief remarks:
[lii]: "The male lead's dialogue is too stiff today. He wouldn't say 'interesting.' He'd just raise an eyebrow."
Or
[lii]: "Guilty conscience? You're over-explaining his silence."
Then I'd wait for her edits. She never replied, but within hours, she'd modify the scene—delete an overly bold narration, or patch in an explanatory line that made the character more human.
Honestly? Just knowing she read my comments, that somewhere in her writing process she paused and thought of me, satisfied something I didn't know was starving.
At school, we acted like strangers, our eyes barely meeting. But through words, it felt like we'd never stopped talking.
---
Jiang Tang
That night at 10:30 PM, I updated as scheduled—a dialogue scene where the male lead walks the heroine home, says nothing, but stands outside her building all night in the rain.
The way I wrote the female lead was restrained: no melodrama, clean and precise, just a single line: "She knew he was still there. She didn't check."
Three minutes after posting, I habitually refreshed the comments. There it was—that familiar username.
[lii]: "You wrote this one with a guilty conscience."
My fingers paused. I clicked his profile page: empty bio, zero posts, following list cleared out. A ghost account.
I was about to turn off my phone when my fingers, as if possessed, tapped the "reply" button. The blinking text input box stood stark against the dim room, the phone's glow illuminating my face. From certain angles, I must have looked quite lonely.
Outside, autumn wind stirred the loose strands of hair behind my ears.
I typed: —Guilty?
Then deleted it. Posted nothing.
Perhaps. Perhaps I was guilty.
I've been writing fiction for years, never caring about particular commenters. But this person... somehow feels familiar, like I've met them in a past life I can't quite recall.