Cui Qijin nodded. “Then I’ll look forward to your surprise.”
The nearby elementary school had let out long ago. Parents strolled by hand-in-hand with their kids, the little ones chattering noisily. Their shadows stretched long in the fading sunset, hands laden with snacks.
The two of them stood there like a pair of schoolgirls, huddled by the egg waffle stall, watching Auntie squeeze golden batter onto the little griddle. Their own shadows stretched long too, rolling with the evening glow.
Midway through, Auntie took a phone call, tucking it under her chin as she piped cream onto the cakes and bellowed into it, “Stop rushing me! There are still two little dolls waiting patiently here. I’ll head back once theirs are done!”
She hung up.
Then she deftly packed three steaming egg waffle cakes into bags, slapped SpongeBob SquarePants stickers on the brown paper, and handed them over with a beaming smile.
“Come back to Auntie’s next time, okay?”
Chi Buyu took one, cream smearing onto her upper lip. She nodded solemnly.
“Definitely!”
Cui Qijin slung her bag over her elbow, holding Chi Buyu’s pork floss red bean egg waffle in her left hand and the seaweed crispy floss one in her right.
She glanced down at her shadow. Her limbs looked so awkward—like Chaplin in a comedy sketch.
Their shadows overlapped a bit too closely, stretched impossibly long by the Love Adrift Street sunset.
Cui Qijin suddenly wanted to snap a photo, to capture those two elongated shadows. But her hands were full. Awkwardly stepping on the dark smudge of her shadow, she thought—never mind, there’d be a next time.
Click—
The sound seemed to pop right out of her head.
Cui Qijin looked up, puzzled. Chi Buyu was just as busy: one hand clutching a half-eaten egg waffle, the other wielding her phone.
She twisted and jumped, snapping photos of their shadows, hunting for the perfect angle.
Not quite satisfied, she finally looked up at Cui Qijin and nudged her gently with an elbow.
“Get a little closer! We look like total strangers like this!”
Cui Qijin noticed the white cream still smeared on Chi Buyu’s mouth.
She wanted to wipe it off for her.
—But why the sudden urge? Wiping someone else’s mouth? That’d be unhygienic.
“Come on!”
Chi Buyu was urging her now, her voice drawling in that Taiwanese lilt—like she’d been bingeing Taiwanese dramas lately.
Cui Qijin looked up. Chi Buyu was still just Chi Buyu.
She looked down at their shadows—black, gray, low saturation, devoid of color.
The next second, Chi Buyu hopped closer. Their shadows merged. She crammed half her egg waffle into the hand holding the phone, strained to hoist it high overhead, and flashed a peace sign above Cui Qijin’s head.
Click—
May 11, 2024, 7:25 p.m…. plus or minus a few seconds. The photo froze their shadows, smudged together into one inky blob.
In the very next second, the shadow changed.
The peace sign hovering over Cui Qijin’s head was gone.
Chi Buyu seemed pleased. She swiped twice on her phone and held it out proudly. “How’s this? Super cute, right?”
“Average.”
Cui Qijin was always saying the opposite of what she felt. Sometimes she hated that about herself.
Chi Buyu let out a “Tch,” then switched the half-eaten egg waffle to her other hand.
Watching her awkward maneuver, Cui Qijin wondered why she didn’t just devour it whole, like before.
“I’m stuffed!”
Chi Buyu announced suddenly. She squeezed the half egg waffle in her hand, glanced at Cui Qijin, then looked away evasively.
“You haven’t eaten dinner. Aren’t you gonna eat?”
“I don’t like sweets,” Cui Qijin said.
“Oh!”
Chi Buyu could put an exclamation point into even a simple “oh.”
“But this cream is sooo good, y’know.”
She leaned in close to Cui Qijin’s ear, whispering like a little devil. Cui Qijin caught the creamy scent wafting off her—like the cake from her twenty-sixth birthday.
“I hate cream.”
Cui Qijin didn’t know why she said that. She didn’t hate it that much.
Chi Buyu let out a disappointed “Oh.”
She went quiet.
Cui Qijin swallowed. “But…”
Lately, her words kept slipping out before her brain could catch them.
“But what?” Chi Buyu perked up eagerly. She was the type to pounce on any opening.
“But…” Cui Qijin clenched her jaw.
She didn’t get the rest out.
Chi Buyu was already thrusting the half-bitten cream egg waffle toward her throat.
Hyperbole, sure.
But Chi Buyu looked dead serious.
Cui Qijin had no escape—her hands were occupied with two egg waffles for defense.
The wind picked up.
She coughed.
Then, leaning into that half cream egg waffle, she took a reluctant bite from the unbitten side. The cream was still cloyingly rich.
But…
Chi Buyu gazed at her expectantly. “Well? Isn’t the cream delicious?”
Cui Qijin politely chewed and swallowed everything in her mouth before replying.
“It’s okay.”
She wasn’t lying. Right now, it really was okay. No need to apologize to the egg waffle.
Chi Buyu beamed, utterly content. “If your ‘okay’ means it’s great.”
Cui Qijin regretted not saying “average.” She dreaded another feeding attempt.
Luckily,
Chi Buyu didn’t push it.
She’d just claimed to be full, yet now she took another bite, lapping up cream like a smug kitten proud of her latest conquest.
The sun dipped lower, summer night settling in with warm breezes. Chi Buyu finished the cream one, then wheedled the pork floss red bean from Cui Qijin’s hand—chomp, half gone—shoved the remainder back, then did the same with the seaweed crispy floss. Half for her, half left for Cui Qijin.
Chi Buyu had this quirk about sharing food, determined to make her try the good stuff.
Cui Qijin asked, “Didn’t you just say you were full?”
Chi Buyu whipped around like always, her white hem fluttering like a butterfly about to take flight. She grinned, eyes crinkling.
“Because I’ve got four stomachs!”
Cui Qijin trailed behind, half a pork floss red bean in one hand, half a seaweed crispy floss in the other.
Love Adrift was still filming. Crowds jostled like paper cutouts. But tonight, the movie had nothing to do with them.
Passing the set again, Cui Qijin glanced around. No one was watching her.
Only then did she hesitantly nibble the pork floss red bean, then the seaweed crispy floss, back and forth, over and over. The egg waffles had gone cold.
Chi Buyu blinked up at her with sparkling eyes. “Which flavor do you like more?”
Cui Qijin pondered. “The cream one, I guess.”
The next second, she realized she’d bitten right where Chi Buyu had.
The realization hit her like a jolt. She flinched, shoveled down the rest in hasty bites.
But just as she swallowed,
Chi Buyu scampered over in three quick steps, grabbed her arm, and hollered in that bright, vibrant voice full of worry,
“Cui Muhuo, your whole neck is red!”
Cui Qijin ignored her. Expressionless, she clamped both hands over her neck and marched on.
One hand pork floss red bean flavor, the other seaweed crispy floss—both hands burning hot.
Chi Buyu skipped after her like a cheeky little bird intent on devouring her prey, giggling mischievously and chanting over and over,
“Cui Muhuo, Cui Muhuo, Cui Muhuo~~~”
Cui Qijin got fed up with the chanting. She had to stop and wait. “Hurry up.”
Chi Buyu dashed up, carrying the scent of summer night air, and tugged amiably at her elbow.
“Lemme see~”
“No.”
“Aww, just a peek~”
“No.”
“Pleeease.”
“…No.”
“Aww, I’m just worried you’re allergic or something! It’s so red!”
“I’m allergic to you.”
“What!”
“Dummy.”
…
Chi Buyu trailed after Cui Qijin, relentless. “What do you mean, dummy!”
At that moment, Cui Qijin clutched her increasingly burning neck, struck by the thought that it seemed everyone on Love Adrift Street had seen it all, had heard it all—
Two idiots chattering foolish nonsense on the roadside.
–
By the time she got home, the rain had started falling in Chengdu again.
Cui Qijin emerged from the shower, threw open the window in her room, clasped her hands together, and lay back on the bed, breathing in the scent of the rain with serene contentment. Chen Wenran had once remarked that she looked like an artificial intelligence unit plugged in for a charge when she slept that way.
In truth, artificial intelligence never hesitated about anything. It was supposed to make decisions in mere milliseconds.
Cui Qijin pulled out two phones.
She frowned as she stared at them—one old, one new. Logically speaking, SpongeBob Afraid of Water belonged to the past; she ought to reach out using the new one.
But how was she supposed to reply to that ridiculous dare? And why had Chi Buyu sought her out today without so much as mentioning it? Given Chi Buyu’s personality, she should have come right out and said whatever was on her mind.
In a moment of pure idiocy, Cui Qijin found herself swiping back and forth between the two phones, wondering if she really had to mimic Chi Buyu and play a game of eeny-meeny-miney-moe.
It was utterly unscientific.
No matter which one she pointed to first, it still boiled down to making a choice.
For the first time, Cui Qijin truly despised having to choose.
In her hesitation, she even considered covering her eyes, shuffling the phones around, and letting fate decide with a blind point—surely that would feel a bit more scientific, at least.
But before she could.
She accidentally tapped into Chi Buyu’s Moments and noticed an update to her profile background.
It was an ordinary stretch of black asphalt road, captured at sunset perhaps, with shadows stretched out long and distorted, as if the two figures had always been linked together. That was the original image.
But Chi Buyu’s Moments background was different—
She had added simple strokes of colored doodles atop the original. On the two murky, low-saturation shadows, she drew eyebrows and a mouth with black lines, two straight trails of tears in blue, and cheeks flushed with red.
Cui Qijin’s first thought upon seeing it was that it was just a hair’s breadth away from a full face of makeup.
Then she realized—shadows really could have color after all.
And finally—sure enough, only Chi Buyu would bother with something so utterly pointless.
Outside, the rain pattered down like fireworks exploding. In that instant, Cui Qijin made up her mind.
She grabbed the 2024 phone and typed a message into Chi Buyu’s WeChat:
【It’s raining. Remember to bring an umbrella tomorrow.】
Then she picked up the 2014 phone and typed into SpongeBob Afraid of Water’s QQ chat window:
【Good evening. It’s nice to meet you, Chi Buyu.】
In a fit of neurosis, she even checked the network signal obsessively and ran practice sends to the File Transfer Assistant and Cui Qijin’s Main Account before finally hitting send on both messages at exactly the same time.
Swish—
Both messages went through, lingering innocently on the chat screens as if nothing had happened at all. The rain continued to fall unabated; it wouldn’t suddenly erupt into fireworks just because she’d sent them off, nor would there be any celebratory special effects.
And then? What was the point of it all?
Cui Qijin slowly curled up under the covers, kicking herself for abruptly turning so foolish—like a snail waiting to be swept up in the arms of love.
Ding-ding—
A sound rang out abruptly from beyond the blankets. Irritated and flustered, she flung them aside and fumbled for the phone on the outside, only to find a thin sheen of sweat beading on the tip of her nose—
Which phone had chimed first?
