Text | Silence Official account: Silence Bookhouse (silence-dyz)** Image | Nipic.com This article is authorized for first publication. ▼ 【1】 In 1991, I was born in a county town in Zhejiang. That year, Watermelon was three years old, sporting a watermelon-head hairstyle, and was the most popular kid among the neighbors. I've always thought heaven is fair: Watermelon had a big head, not very good-looking, but big enough that you could tell at a glance he was smart. In elementary school, while others were still naively cheating by passing notes and scratching their heads when caught by the teacher, Watermelon had already invented a code to cheat with his best friend: starting 20 minutes after the exam began, dropping the pencil case as a signal, using head scratches to indicate question numbers, and arranging pencils and erasers as answers. This cheating method worked flawlessly until the end of elementary school, and no one ever discovered it. Except me. Not because I was smart, but because Watermelon loved showing off in front of me. 【2】 In 1998, I was 8 and Watermelon was 11. I was still at home watching the World Cup cluelessly, only knowing Argentina and England, and among players, only Owen and Maradona—the latter only because my dad kept saying, "If Argentina still had Maradona..." That year, Watermelon had already stolen 1,000 yuan from home to quietly stock up on goods—all jerseys—selling each for 40 yuan. In the county town, which had no sports stores at the time, they sold out quickly. Marx said that with 20% profit, capital becomes restless; with 50% profit, capital takes risks; with 100% profit, capital dares to risk hanging. For 100% profit, Watermelon dared to risk a beating, and the risk indeed came: he was beaten black and blue for three days. After the beating, Watermelon never sold clothes again. He switched to selling stamps. In middle school, the school's nutritious lunch was so bad it angered both gods and men, yet the school still didn't allow takeout or leaving campus. To leave, you needed a teacher's stamp. Watermelon took advantage of being sick to get a stamp once, used the sick leave note to leave campus, and his first stop wasn't the hospital—it was a seal engraving shop, where he had a stamp made for himself. Then he bought a stack of blank paper and stamped each sheet. Someone wanted to go out for lunch—bought a stamp from Watermelon. Someone wanted to see a doctor—bought a stamp from Watermelon. Someone wanted to go out to surf the internet or play games—bought a stamp from Watermelon. Someone wanted to go out on a date with their girlfriend—still bought a stamp from Watermelon. One stamp cost 5 mao, no bargaining, fair to all, quality guaranteed, no refunds after sale. It wasn't until two months later that the security guard noticed why so many people were leaving campus, and an investigation revealed Watermelon as the culprit. For that, Watermelon had to hand over 300 yuan of "illegal fundraising" and received a school-wide criticism. Then he took the few thousand yuan he had secretly kept and treated me to a meal. Later, my parents started instilling in me the idea: "Look at how smart Watermelon is, learn from him, but don't do the bad things he did." To this day, I still don't understand whether they wanted me to learn from him or not... 【3】 Watermelon is the smartest and most imaginative person I've ever met. He's also a philosopher. "Zhouzhou, do you have a dream?" "Zhouzhou, do you like the stars in the sky?" "Zhouzhou, do you know that one day you can step on those stars and see this vast universe?" My heart surged, and I blurted out, "Don't call me Zhouzhou!" 【4】 Watermelon once told me his dream: to become an astronomer. That later became my dream too, probably because only under the boundless starry sky did I feel that Watermelon and I were equally small. As expected, Watermelon got into the best high school in the city, always leading in math and physics. I chose liberal arts and never again encountered the physics I loved. After college, Watermelon and I gradually lost contact, only chatting occasionally on WeChat and meeting briefly during Chinese New Year. Watermelon went to the United States; I heard he visited McDonald Observatory, but that wasn't his ultimate goal—Greenwich was. Meanwhile, I started a life of extravagance in college. My university had many sports fields, and I lay on each one to look at the stars. Chongqing is a city particularly unsuitable for stargazing—the stars are dim and distant. Just a few days ago, on June 23, I was woken by a phone call in the middle of the night—an international call from the US. It was Watermelon, the first person to tell me that NASA had discovered a new Earth. I feigned surprise on the phone, exchanged pleasantries, and hung up. I could hear his excitement and enthusiasm, and I could also hear my own affectation and pretense. I had even forgotten when I started treating dreams as a word often on my lips but ethereal and unreal. 【5】 When I was seven, Watermelon dismantled his telescope. I took a piece of cardboard, rolled it into a cone shape, put one lens (half ground) in front and another in the back, and that made a simple telescope. We fought every day over who got to look through it, but I was always the one who got hit. What can you see with a small telescope lens? It seems the stars were just a bit bigger, the moon a bit rounder, and the distance between two stars in the sky a bit farther. We would also point at the stars in the sky and compare them with pictures in books, saying that one is Orion, this one is Leo, that one is Polaris, and this one is Venus. That year, I kept arguing with others that there are actually 88 constellations in the sky, not the 12 that Saint Seiya told me about. When I was nine, I bought my first astronomical telescope, together with Watermelon. There was no online shopping or TV shopping then; we saw an ad for a telescope in the "Elementary School Students' World" magazine. It cost 400 yuan—in 1999, that was a huge sum for us. Watermelon and I saved for a year, plus our secretly hoarded New Year's money, and bought that telescope. We both wanted it at our own homes, so we had a fierce battle of wits. That was the first and only time I beat Watermelon: he played rock, I played paper. Too much time has passed; I can't remember the magnification of that telescope, but I vaguely recall it could show the moon—not the moon as in the poetic image, but the lunar surface. Although we couldn't see craters or lunar seas clearly, it became our best toy. We looked at the moon every day to see how it differed from yesterday. We even took it to class to show off, talking about the moon's silver glow. We would stand up and argue with the teacher who told us the story of Chang'e flying to the moon, saying he didn't understand at all, making his beard twitch in anger. Later, our simple telescope disappeared, and the astronomical telescope was put in storage, eventually abandoned during a move. I never found it again. 【6】 By 2015, Watermelon was 28, no longer had a watermelon head, and no longer did speculative deals. He was studying for his PhD in the US, specializing in astronomy, with strong physics skills, good at calculations, and wearing thick glasses. He would occasionally express indignation that Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet, because the nine planets had long been part of our lives. He would occasionally say that the Purple Mountain Observatory in China is actually good and suggested I go see it. He even sent me photos of constellations, very brilliant, but I could no longer recognize which constellation they were. From childhood to now, Watermelon has always been the person I admire most—smart, clever, articulate, with dreams, and truly working toward them. I used to think that only under the vast sky were we equal, both equally small. Later I realized that even under the vast sky, I am still small, and he is still taller than me. 【7】 No one will pay for my dreams. I can only rely on myself. Unfortunately, that year I was too thin and couldn't lean on myself. I fell and never got up. And the quiet starry sky still watches everything silently. There is nothing it doesn't know. 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