As the bedroom door opened, Kylie slouched in. She dumped her bag onto the chair, and the sound echoed – this time it was Kylie dumping herself on the bed. Her eyes drifted, and then turned to a book. It lay on the windowsill, basking in sunshine but facing this sullen room.

After hesitating for some time, she reached out for it. Her cold fingertips glided past its big, striking title and flipped it open. This was a new but tattered book. Its newness, indicated by its stiff and sleek cover, was in stark contrast to its ragged pages, as if a dying man’s soul mistakenly entered a young person’s body.

Slowly, as if reluctantly, Kylie tore several pages off from the book. The edges were jagged, resembling wings with feathers plucked off.

The torn pages inevitably drew Kylie’s mind to Adrian.

The Zhou family had two kids, Adrian, and his sister Kylie who was three years younger.

Adrian not only excelled in math and physics, but also played on the varsity volleyball team. He was considered to be perfect by everyone, except by his parents.

While Adrian was thrilled after successfully using Ptolemy’s theorem to simplify his solution, his parents would say, “You really need to put more effort into English in order to surpass Jason.” When he was in another world playing basketball, they would say, “Mason ranked 1st again, why are you still messing around?”

Having had many futile quarrels, Adrian spent less and less time on the volleyball court, and more and more time silently in his room, with torn and balled up pages from his book.

Yes, Adrian had a book as well. Pretty similar to the one Kylie owned. The two books used to be kept together, when the two kids were carefreely chasing each other down the lawn, or in the afternoon when Kylie burst into tears after finding out her brother went to a friend’s house without inviting her.

When Adrian’s parents were content with him, which rarely happened, they would turn to Kylie. Then Adrian became Kylie’s ‘Jason’ and ‘Mason’.

This was probably the reason for the two becoming estranged from each other. At some point, Kylie started to isolate herself just like Adrian did. She seemed to be consumed by the burning ambition of outperforming Adrian, always vigilant about what Adrian was doing, and what he had achieved. Adrian was more like a target rather than a brother, and Kylie was more like an intelligence officer than a sister.

The two books were also separated, long before Adrian’s death.

Adrian jumped out of the window after screwing up the entrance exam for the math competition team.

He never had the chance to celebrate his 18th birthday.

Not long after, the family moved to the city they now lived in, and Kylie transferred to a new school. She was seldom scolded since then, the way in which her parents cautiously treated her made her feel like she was a piece of glass, but no one saw that there were already cracks on it. She had been struggling with anxiety and depression for many years. Her parents seemed to believe that glass was either fragmentary or intact. Since Kylie didn’t break down like Adrian, whose name now had become a taboo, she must have been functioning perfectly well.

But after this change in parenting style occurred, Kylie’s tearing pages from the book became less, so it might have been helpful.

Deep in the bottom of her heart, Kylie had always had the thought that she was not qualified to study math due to Adrian, but now her doubt became stronger than ever, because of Jack, the number one student in her math class.

She stared at the handout the math teacher gave out, trying to figure out why someone, i.e. Jack, would come up with sine or cosine when seeing Jack, however, was oblivious to her struggle. He leaned back in his chair, limbs stretched, reviewing his answer at a leisurely pace. The confidence he inadvertently emanated drew Kylie’s thoughts to Adrian. By the time this differential equation reappeared in her mind and a vague thought finally popped up, the bell rang. Everyone stood up to pick up their belongings and leave.

‘Kylie, would you like to go to the concert with me?’ asked Olivia, Kylie’s seatmate. “Oh, I guess I’ll go to the library,” answered Kylie, hurrying towards the door. “Come on, you’ve got straight As in all your subjects! Are you going to spend your whole life in the library?”

“See you tomorrow” was the reply, followed by a click of the closing door.

Kylie had been dwelling in the library for weeks, the closest thing she did to entertainment was wandering in the corridor, while looking at fellow students playing volleyball and hearing cheers around the court.

To be honest, she wished to join them. But it was nothing more than a wish. They were not of the same kind of people as her.

All her life had been spent trying to be better than Adrian – her goal, her direction, her brother. She didn’t remember herself being sad at his death, just lost. She was so used to the mountain-climbing lifestyle, where there was one destination – good grades – and endless steep hills along the way. She knew how to assign her strengths to cross the peaks but knew nothing about how to blithely play in the sunshine.

She almost instinctively paid attention to Jack, maybe excessively. The desire to surpass him was the only familiar thing in this brand-new environment, and she grasped at it like a ship anchoring to the shore. She thought she had a new destination and would no longer be lost. She loathed being compared or pushed by her parents and the anxiety brought by this, but when she finally got rid of the comparison, she found it was the only thing that could brace her.

What saddened her was neither the realization that she had been divested of freedom, nor the depression from her inability to surpass Jack, but the epiphany that she had lost the ability to be free.

This time, she was constrained by herself.

Kylie became more and more irritable and frustrated. She would cut her fingers while ripping pages off from that book, she would suddenly burst into tears out of no reason. She tore more pages off each time and more frequently.

One night, Kylie picked up the book again, held the last few pages between her fingers, and slowly, as if reluctantly, tore. All of a sudden, a hand stuck out from the darkness and seized her wrist.

The owner of the hand was soaked in blood and snarled with brambles. Kylie didn’t recognize him until he uttered.

‘Don’t.’

It was Adrian.

His face was twisted out of pain, eyebrows squeezed together, two lines of shimmering streams made their way down his blood-stained face. Tears.

Kylie suddenly realized that she had never seen Adrian cry. Even before he committed suicide, he still faked a smile when facing her. But Kylie knew he was unhappy. Very unhappy. The coldness of his hollow eyes almost burned her. And the curve of his mouth was like a slanted line on a puppet’s face.

She reached out, trying to wipe away his tears.

Her arm fell back on the bed, and Kylie opened her eyes.

 No bloody hand, no Adrian. Only the tranquility and frigidity of the night.

 A dream.

One that was difficult to identify as good or bad.

Kylie was suddenly flooded by a longing for Adrian more intense than ever, as if some invisible dikes were finally breached. Having jumped out of bed, she fished a book from a box under it.

It was almost the same as hers, torn down to the last few pages, except that this one’s cover was a bit worn. Pilfered from Adrian’s room before they moved house, this was the only thing she had about Adrian.

She opened it for the first time.

The first page looked like a wish list. Her brother wrote: 1. Go to a concert with friends. 2. Play volleyball for as long as I want 3. Live on… the remaining part was blurry, in her tears.

On the day that would’ve been Adrian’s 25th birthday, Kylie went to his grave and left her book there. She had added many pages to it, including handwritten content and some illustrations. She pasted Adrian’s wish list on the first page and rewrote the blurred title of the book: Possibilities of Life.