“What do you mean?” I had not expected a philosophical question.

“I just mean, we already feel the writer’s words when we Reforge the pencil. So why do we bleed out the story too?”

“Maybe because it’s not ours,” I said. It was nice, to speak this way with you again. “Because it doesn’t belong in our body, as part of us?”

“It seems like things might be easier, safer, if we could only Reforge, and not bleed it back out.”

“But then we wouldn’t be nearly as useful to Mr. Gao,” I said. “The company would’ve fallen during the war. And we have to bleed it out, there’s no way around it.”

“There is,” you said eventually. “You can lose a Reforging.”

You had discovered the secret our mothers had alluded to.

“How?” I asked. “How can you lose a Reforging?”

“It’s not that you lose it,” you said. “It’s that the world loses it.”

The words made me shiver, even under my blanket.

“But how does that happen?” I asked.

“It’s—” You stopped. I watched your unmoving shadow. Finally, you said, “I can’t say.”

I tore my eyes away from you. In that moment, I was thrust back to those nagging feelings I had experienced when we first met, begrudging the elegance of your clothes, your pretty face, but most of all how you knew something that our mothers knew and only I didn’t, and nobody would say why. When I was welcomed into that circle, I thought we were equals. I thought nothing could separate us after that, not after we had lived through a war, cut our arms over and over, bled out onto the page together. Now it was as if the war was the reason for our closeness—the only reason you came to Shanghai, the only reason we found anything in common, both our fathers off fighting, and now that it was over, our natural differences reemerged and the resentment that came so easily to me blossomed once again.

“Why not?” I asked, not daring to raise my voice for fear of what it might betray.

You took another long pause before replying.

“Because it’s something—it’s something between me and him.”

I flipped over in bed, turning away from you. I closed my eyes, willed myself to sleep. You called my name. I ignored you. I slept fitfully, waking every few hours, convinced you were no longer in the room, that I was alone.

In the morning, we ate breakfast together while our mothers chatted. We had a rare day off. Mother was heading out to buy supplies in preparation for my father’s return. And your mother was going to the department store with Mr. Gao. They asked about our plans.

“We are going to a movie,” you said, picking at your congee grain by grain.