Thunder crashed outside, followed by the loud pitter-patter of raindrops splattering against the windows. Flashes of lightning illuminated the skies with an eerie light. It was the worst storm they’d experienced in Shanghai, and it matched Farrah’s mood to a tee.
She reached for her necklace before she remembered she didn’t have it. Hope of finding it before her flight tomorrow morning dwindled by the second.
Farrah should be looking forward to this summer. She won the design competition—the one she’d dreamed of winning since she found out about it years ago. She received the email while waiting to board her flight after FEA’s spring semester trip to Chengdu, and her resulting scream nearly got her arrested by airport security.
Yes, she was excited about potentially interning in New York with Kelly Burke (final internship placement pending). But she also mourned what had to end for the next chapter of her life to begin.
Farrah curled her hand into a fist and rested it at the base of her throat as she meandered down the fourth-floor hallway. Group photos of every class since FEA Shanghai’s inception in the 80s lined the walls. The groups started small—there’d only been a dozen students in the first class—before expanding to the current size of seventy-plus undergrads.
It was surreal, looking at the photographs and realizing how many people had walked these halls before them. Members of the first class would be in their fifties by now. Yet there they were in their photo, immortalized behind glass, forever nineteen and twenty and twenty-one. Farrah detected a shadow of her friends in all of them—a hint of Sammy’s good-natured grin, a trace of Kris’s regal haughtiness, a mischievous twinkle in the eye that would make Courtney proud.
The superficial resemblances were there, but she wondered if they laughed as hard and loved as deep, if they had their hearts broken and if they found family here, or if they were just ships passing in the night. Did they keep in touch decades later? Did Shanghai change them, or was it a mere footnote in the stories of their lives?
Inexplicably, her heart ached for these strangers. She would never know their stories and secrets, but she knew them. She was, after all, walking in their footsteps.
Farrah skimmed her hands over the glass-encased images until she reached the end of the series. This year’s class photo, taken yesterday and already mounted on the wall like the dozens before them. They’d arranged the students by height. Farrah stood in the middle row with Olivia and Nardo, while Kris and Courtney sat cross-legged in front of them. Luke, Sammy, and Leo towered in the back.
Farrah’s gaze strayed to the blond next to Luke. Blake’s dimples were out in full force, but there were shadows beneath his eyes and a furrow in his brow.
She fought the urge to over-analyze the minutiae of his expression. Instead, Farrah tore her eyes away from the photo and focused on the stretch of blank wall following it. Next year, there’d be another picture. Then another, and another, until Farrah’s class was just one of FEA’s many memories.
The sound of heels clacking against linoleum echoed in the stairwell. Only one person in FEA who wore heels that made that noise.
“Hey.” Kris stopped beside Farrah.
“Hey.”
The two friends examined the wall in silence. Kris smelled like her usual mix of Chanel perfume and expensive shampoo. Farrah breathed it in, letting the familiar scent comfort her.
“It’s crazy, isn’t it?” Kris touched their class photo before pulling back like it burned her. “This year flew by.”
“Yeah. I can’t believe it.”
“It won’t be the same.” Kris looked at Farrah. There were no tears, no overt emotion except for the wistfulness in her voice. “Even if we all come back to Shanghai, it won’t be the same.”
Farrah dropped her hand from her throat and wrapped an arm around Kris’s waist. “I know.”
Kris rested her head on Farrah’s shoulder in an uncharacteristically vulnerable gesture, but neither girl acknowledged its strangeness.
Instead, they stood there, soaking in their last moments together in this place, while the storm raged outside.
