(Setting: 3 Months after the Rejection. First Semester of University.)
The blue school uniform was folded at the bottom of my trunk, smelling of mothballs and the faint, lingering scent of a boba shop.
University was loud. It was crowded. And for the first time in six years, it didn't include Li Yan. The "Group of Seven" chat had gone dangerously quiet. Zhang Wei would occasionally post a photo of a burnt omelet from his dorm; Su Lan would complain about a professor. But Li Yan's name sat at the bottom of the member list, a gray icon that never turned green.
"Xiao Xing! You're spacing out again," Mei Ling's voice crackled through the phone. She was at the Arts College, miles away. "Are you still thinking about him?"
"No," I lied, looking at my laptop screen. I was staring at a C++ compiler. "I'm thinking about my logic. It's... messy."
"It's been three months. You're a silver medalist, a topper, and the fiercest girl I know. Don't let one 'robot' crash your system."
I hung up and opened my GitHub. I had uploaded a new project—a basic chess engine I'd built out of spite. Ten minutes later, a notification popped up.
User L_Y_ChessMaster has 'Starred' your repository.
My heart stopped. He wasn't calling. He wasn't texting. But he was there, a ghost in my code, watching me from 800 miles away.