Must be it, indeed—if the subject of the photographs wasn’t someone Liu Xiaokai was unfortunately already familiar with, he wouldn’t have been able to pick it out at all from the crowd of mediocrity, but there was Xingyu blown up to show every detail and every pore, over and over, covering an entire wall. Just like everything else in this gallery, it was clumsy work. The framing was rudimentary, the angles were rather abysmal, and even the posing left something to be desired; Liu Xiaokai stood in front of it trying his best to keep a straight face while Xingyu made impressed sounds next to him.

“What do you think? He’s pretty good, right?”

Xiaokai opened his mouth—

“Xingyu!” Zhang Weiran bounded over from where he’d been conversing with who Liu Xiaokai imagined must be the other artists. He had changed clothes since they last met; gone was the casual hooded sweatshirt and denim pants, and he’d even forgone the baseball cap and let down his hair. He had the same hair as Xingyu: coal-black, stick-straight, full of volume that bounced when he moved, and that in combination with the suit he wore—as long as one didn’t look too closely at the suit—almost gave him an impression of respectability. “And Xiao-Xiao! You made it!”

Liu Xiaokai gritted his teeth and held back on correcting him. He gave a slight bow. “Zhang Weiran.”

Zhang Weiran looked a little embarrassed. “No need to be formal. I’m glad you two could make it—was it hard getting here?”

He and Xingyu lapsed into some meaningless conversation about the weather or traffic and Xiaokai just moved his attention back to the photographs in front of him. They were bad photographs without a doubt, but they were also uncomfortably honest. Xiaokai had never had to look at his brother through the eyes of someone who loved him. He’d suspected as much when they first met—Zhang Weiran’s eyes flitting constantly to Xingyu as if checking his reactions, his expressions, the way he looked between them when they first arrived as if comparing their faces and body types—but now that he was looking at these photographs he felt that he was…intruding somehow. These were private moments: Xingyu curled up in a chair studying, Xingyu with his arm propped up against the windowsill drifting off to sleep, Xingyu mid-laugh across a table. Moments that Xingyu revealed to Weiran because he trusted him—moments that Weiran captured because he loved him.

“You’re familiar with art, right?”

It took a moment for Liu Xiaokai to realize that Zhang Weiran was speaking to him, and another to fully process what he asked. He covered all of this smoothly by pretending to examine the photographs a little more closely, even if there was nothing to see. “Yes,” he said at last.

“What do you think?”