I called you my brother,
not because we lived in the same home,
or ate at the same table—

but because once we were punished together,
hands struck by the same ruler,
because we fought in the same classroom.

Or once we saw our names on the same exam ranking list,
marked by the same cold numbers,
though sometimes you were higher,
or I was.

Or we waited for the release of high school cutoff scores,
hated the same P.E. full-score requirement,
and quietly cursed the same headmaster.

In this way,
all Chinese teens were our brothers and sisters,
before the summer we turned 15.

Suddenly,
you lost contact from Mon to Fri,
and sometimes still offline on weekends.

I knew where you were,
kept hoping you could come back,
just could not stop hating myself no longer wrote the same papers,
or lived in the same sweaty boys’ dorm.

But when we finally called,
the same curses and jokes didn’t know why,
were gone.

I excitedly talked about the new ideas I raised in the business club,
the new rap songs my new friends shared,
or, more seriously,
the breaking news between Ukraine and Russia—
you were passionate about history and politics,
right, my brother?

“Emm…”
Then a long silence.

“Damn,
how could I drop from mid-term’s 100 to final’s 150,
how could I lose 5 points in that last question on conic sections,
and how life could be so suck when I took 2 hours back on Fri and 2 hours to school again on Sun!”
Still the same angry tone you had,
I remembered, my brother.

Then you cried about your daddy,
how he blamed you for the fifty-rank drop,
and how much he paid more for your winter cram classes.

“Emm…”
I really wanted to say something.

But I hadn’t touched that hard math for a year,
you’d probably laugh—the laugh as you watched SpongeBob—if you saw my textbook now,
and I was no longer ranked in the new school.
My brother, do you remember our past trading rumors?
Now I have more of them.
But you told me your school even won’t let boys and girls holding hands…

“Are you okay bro?”
You finally broke the silence.

“I’m alright,
go on brother, still proud of you.”

It wasn’t miscommunication,
and it’ll never be,
but the silence across telephones hurts hundreds times more than the our shared foughts and hand strucks.