More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“What’s going on?” I ask, sticking my head out. “They gave us the honeymoon suite,” Oliver bursts out, his handsome features twisting in horror while I fight back the overwhelming urge to laugh. “It looks like Cupid hosted a massive party, got drunk, and threw up in there. Everything is all romantic and sensual. Sensual,”
and how he can’t stop talking about you—” Cyrus cuts him a look I’m unable to decipher, and Oliver goes quiet. I sober up at once, leaning forward with a kind of morbid curiosity, my heart beating oddly in my chest. “He talks about me?” I ask.
“Like what?” I ask. Oliver’s gaze flickers to Cyrus as well, then back to me. “Yeah, uh, he’d kill me if I told you.”
“You should see my designated ugly pajamas—and by that, I mean, if you ever actually saw me in them, I’d have to bury you.” “Well, now I’m really curious. Though I doubt it’s possible for anything to look ugly on you,”
“Do you even hate watermelon?” “Okay, that part’s true.” But I refuse to tell him why. Refuse to mention that it was the only thing I let myself eat when I was starving.
He pushed me to safety. He shielded me, even though he had only half a second to react.
“Are you okay?” he asks, his face bent toward me, his expression shrouded by shadows. “Am I okay?” I echo, feeling as if part of me is stuck in another timeline, one that made infinitely more sense than this. “Yeah, I’m completely fine— But you—” “Good,” he says, his relief audible.
His hands are still braced around me like he’s scared I’ll slip out of reach, and he leans closer, burying his head against the crook of my neck. His scent is stronger than the pine leaves hanging around us, or maybe I’m just more sensitive to it; all I can breathe in is the fragrance of sage.
“I really …” He doesn’t say more than that. It’s as though he won’t allow himself to, as though he’s warring with himself on something, and to lose would cost him everything. He just repeats the words over and over, murmuring them until they’re almost incomprehensible, a half-feverish jumble.
Did someone hurt you? But back then, there were dozens of students gathered around us on the staircase at our old school, watching with uniform expressions of shock and horror and outrage as Cyrus replied: She did. Two words, and I was deemed guilty. No matter how much I had protested—no matter how many times I tried to tell them the truth.
“Are you serious? Now you’re putting trash in my things for fun? Don’t you have anything better to do?” “The word trash is really subjective,” he began, but I was sick of it already, sick of him. Everywhere I turned, he was there, ready to laugh at me, to pull another prank, to make my life unbearable.
There was no other logical explanation for why Cyrus Sui had stumbled on those steps. He was one of the best students in our gym class. He never faltered, never lost his balance to something as silly as gravity; he couldn’t have just tripped without some kind of trigger.
You saying you hate him waz the trigger
There are always mountains beyond mountains, people above people,
I feel a spasm of self-consciousness, certain that I’m doing it wrong, that I look stupid, that I’m about to be made fun of. Sometimes it feels like there’s an invisible comment section floating around in my brain, and with every mistake I make, every wrong thing I say, these imaginary spectators who vaguely resemble my classmates from my old schools flock forward to pass judgment …
Your voice is so soothing—like, this is going to sound super weird, but I’d listen to an audiobook narrated by you.
The fact ive been told this multiple times
Leah. You remind me of the greatest sculptors, who can turn marble into the impression of billowing silk, the coldest stone into something soft. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that everything you touch turns beautiful. The world becomes beautiful, as long as there’s you.
Everything you touch turns beautiful.
“But I look so ugly right now,” I whisper, my skin burning. “Impossible,” he says firmly.
Cyrus grins all of a sudden, like he can’t help himself. “Hey, my sunglasses look good on you.”
“We’ll take one,” Cyrus says, passing her the money. I turn to him in surprise. “I was just looking.” “I know,” he tells me, and takes his time choosing the crown with the brightest, fullest flowers, before setting it down gently on my head like this is my coronation.
His smile feels like a warning, but it’s not the kind that precedes a prank. It’s too sincere, his voice dropping low as he says, “I’ll keep being your enemy, if that’s what you’d prefer.” His eyes drop down too, drifting to my lips with such weight and intent that I can almost feel the ghost brush of his gaze. “I can be whatever you want me to be.”
“What are you smiling at?” Cyrus asks me. Nothing, I want to say. Everything.
I’m here, I think to myself again, yet what I really mean is: I’m home.
I mean, I’m hot, you’re hot. Can you think of a single reason why we shouldn’t—” He cuts himself off, his eyes widening at something behind me. I whirl around, but all I see is Cyrus, whose expression is perfectly neutral. “Just kidding,” Oliver says in a rush, backing up so fast he almost crashes into one of the bamboos.
And while I doubt Oliver’s selfies could ever pass for art, it doesn’t seem so ridiculous at all to call the photo of Cyrus exactly that. Art.
Then I notice the missed calls. Seventeen of them, all from Cyrus.
“Describe the rock?” My brows furrow as I turn toward it. If the situation weren’t so dire, I’d think he was playing a prank on me. “It’s pretty square, as far as rocks go. About the size of Prada’s straw tote bag from last season. When you stare at it from a certain angle, the surface looks shockingly like the face of a sloth.” It’s hard to tell if the heavy static crackling through the phone is from the patchy reception, or just from him sighing. “Please never—get lost again.”
I’ll come find you. It shouldn’t bring me much comfort at all, given his record of getting me in trouble versus getting me out of it. But somehow, he sounded like he meant what he said. Like he was prepared to crawl from one end of the forest to the other if he had to, and if I were stranded in the ocean, he would swim through the icy depths just to search for me and carry me back to shore by himself.
He stiffens when I go to join him, then his eyes soften when he realizes it’s me—
“Leah?” Cyrus says, raising the flashlight. “Leah, are you—” I don’t let him finish the sentence; I rush up to him and wrap my arms tight around his body, one step short of crashing straight into him.
He’s found me. He promised he’d find me and he did.
“It’s okay,” he tells me, his voice low in my ear. “You’re safe.” And despite reason, despite our history, I believe it. If someone were to ask, I wouldn’t be able to name anywhere safer than the arms of my childhood nemesis, in a remote bamboo forest far away from everything I’ve known.
“I think Cyrus was more worried than any of us,” Daisy says, drawing her knees to her chest on the couch. “He was the first person to notice you were gone.”
“Honestly, he looked like he was about to lose his mind if anything happened to you.”
“You should—we should throw them away.” “Why?” I cock my head. Grin up at him, taunting. “What if you end up needing them? Better safe than sorry, right?”
But with Cyrus, it’s different. I might have felt tempted on numerous occasions to shove him or slam a door in his face, yet I’ve never felt unsafe.
“Maybe that’s your problem.” “You’re a problem,” I say automatically. “Sorry. Reflex. Do go on.”
Xindong. Another new word I’ve picked up on the trip. It means, literally, that the heart is moved by something—or more often, someone. A sensation firmer than butterflies in your stomach but more fleeting than love. Throughout the trip, I’ve felt my heart move multiple times, and they were all because of Cyrus.
Yet now, watching him in the soft orange light, his head bowed as he turns the page, the shift inside my chest feels permanent. It’s a movement so deep it sends shock waves through my system, making my very bones ache. I’m gripped by the overpowering urge to do something reckless, to reach across the space and run my fingers through his hair.
“You have a nice voice.” He pauses. “You must be tired.” “What?” “When you’re tired,” he says, “you forget to hate me.” “I forget to hate you a lot of the time,”
“I should give it a try sometime, then,” he says. “You should. Or, if that fails, you can call me,” I say before I can stop myself. God help me. The desire to comfort him is so much stronger than the desire to destroy him now.
That was actually why I started to get into reading. Whenever I heard their voices rise, I’d quickly grab a book and go to my room and it would help me escape into this other world where I could pretend to be someone else.
asked my dad about it once, and he said that my mom was only angry at him because she loved him. Because it meant that she cared. He said that was the secret to a relationship: You had to keep things interesting, even if that meant getting on their nerves.
“They were happy, before they had me. Sometimes,” he says, very quiet, “I think I ruin everything I touch.”
“I should head back to my room—” “Wait,” he says, a hitch in his voice. “Don’t go.”
I pretend to think it over, pretend I’m not giddy as I hop back onto the bed, drawing the covers up to my chest. But I can no longer pretend that I don’t have any feelings for Cyrus Sui.
“But they never loved me back, and you kind of get sick of the whole unrequited love thing after a while, you feel me? There are only so many angsty, depressing love songs you can listen to before you start feeling a bit pathetic. So I got my shit together and stopped falling so deep that I can’t help myself up when I need to. I still have my little crushes because it keeps things interesting, but I don’t actually, like, like anyone until I’m certain they’ll like me too.
when the teacher asked if someone had hurt me, my first instinct was to say that you did, because I was hurt, but it had nothing to do with the fall itself. I just— It’s so mortifying, but when you told me you never wanted to see me again, I was at a complete loss. I’d never experienced such pain before in my life. And I knew I had screwed up, and I was the only person to blame for the whole mess.”
“I never wanted you to hate me,” he whispers. “I never wanted you to leave. I only meant to tease you until you truly noticed me. I would wait every day for the moment you walked into class with your polka-dot socks and your cute sweaters and pigtails—it was like my day didn’t even begin until I saw you. I loved the games you invented and the stories you came up with and your laugh, how it bubbled out of you and you could hear it from down the corridor. All I could think about was you, all the time, and how funny and sweet and beautiful you were—”
“I thought you were the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen,” he says, somehow without an ounce of sarcasm. “You’ve always been beautiful—beautiful like the stars are, like Shanghai is. I could never get sick of looking at you. But back then I just … I didn’t know what I could possibly do to make you so much as look my way, and again, it’s awful, but I thought—I thought that was simply how it worked.
