Meteor Garden -2001- Access

“Because you don’t own it,” she said. “You don’t own anything here.”

“I know,” she said.

He looked at her, and for a second, the mask slipped again. “They’re not wrong,” he said quietly. “The money is real. The ice is just… maintenance.” The trouble began, as it always did, with a red tag.

He was crying.

The summer of 2001 tasted like lychee popsicles and the metallic tang of first heartbreak. For Dong Shancai, it was the summer the world ended and began again, all within the overgrown, forgotten geometry of the old meteor garden.

“Why would I?” she shot back. “No one would believe me. They think you’re carved from ice and money.”

“No,” she said. “This is my place.” meteor garden -2001-

Dao Ming Feng stood up. She was taller than Shancai expected. She walked around the desk, her heels clicking like gunshots. She stopped inches from Shancai’s face.

He was sitting on the edge of the central fountain, which had been dry for years. His back was to her, but she knew that posture, that expensive haircut, the way his shoulders tensed like a drawn bowstring. Dao Ming Si. In his hands was a beat-up cello, the varnish peeling, a far cry from the carbon-fiber monstrosity she’d seen him play at the school talent show. He was playing a Bach suite, but he was mangling it. He’d stop, curse—a word so foul it made her ears burn—and start again. His fingers, which usually balled into fists to threaten underclassmen, moved with a desperate, clumsy tenderness over the strings.

“You followed me,” he said, but it wasn’t an accusation. It was a question. “Because you don’t own it,” she said

“Because she was wrong,” Shancai said, her voice breaking at last. “About you. About everything. You’re not ice. You’re just… scared.”

When they finally broke apart, the rain had stopped. A single shaft of moonlight broke through the hole in the dome, illuminating the zodiac mural above them. The archer. The scorpion. And the scales, perfectly balanced.