Beifan High School held its class placement exams once per semester, with mock exams occurring monthly. Long Qi returned to school just as the second monthly exam was approaching.

As she walked up the stairs, few people passed by, but nearly every single one stared at her. She climbed the steps with a lazy, self-possessed air, just as she always did.

When she entered the classroom, the class representative, rushing to submit assignments to the office before morning self-study, hurried out and collided right into Long Qi’s right shoulder. Long Qi had her arms crossed, and the strap of her right-shoulder bag slid halfway down to her elbow from the impact. The class representative had no time to apologize, but couldn’t help stealing a glance to see who she’d bumped into. That one look left her stunned, her mouth reflexively forming the word: “Ho…”

She didn’t dare finish with “ly shit.”

This was Long Qi, yet somehow not Long Qi.

Long Qi’s hair had once been ash gray (to meet magazine shoot requirements), a color that was extremely selective about who could pull it off—one wrong move and it would look garish. Fortunately, she had well-defined features, a slim face, and snow-white skin, plus that arrogant-to-death expression management and aura, which gave her a uniquely handsome and captivating feminine charm.

But now that hair color had changed—to black, proper black. A pair of black-framed glasses now perched on her high-bridged nose. Most eye-catching of all, her signature eyebrows had also been normalized, looking far more pleasing than before. Though it was still the same face, the class representative was dumbstruck.

Long Qi’s former beauty had carried a certain vicious edge. Now that edge had been completely dissolved by her hair color and black-framed glasses, replaced by an air of scholarly refinement and a cold elegance that wouldn’t hurt anyone. Her eyes still held arrogance, but filtered through a layer of glass, it was softened into a kind of languid indifference. Remarkably, she now carried an air of composure, like how she merely lifted her bag back onto her shoulder in an unhurried manner when the class representative knocked it down to her elbow, not even glancing at the person who’d bumped her, as if too lazy to waste her gaze on such a trivial matter.

Good heavens, in the past she would have grabbed someone by their collar and slammed them against the wall.

After taking her seat, Long Qi followed her usual habit of pulling out her “five desk essentials” from her bag—book, pen, phone, water bottle, tissues. She opened the book, put the phone in her pocket, placed the water bottle in the upper left corner of her desk, set the tissues by her right hand, then pulled out a hair tie from her bag. She reached back to gather her hair at the back of her head, wound it three times, pulled it tight, then ran her fingers from her forehead back, tucking several strands of bangs behind her ears until everything was clean and neat.

When she finished, she swept her gaze across the classroom. Everyone in the classroom was watching her quietly, but her eyes remained like still water, forming a stark contrast with the jarring class bell that rang at that very moment.

“Shit!” The class representative finally bellowed out the second half of the word, clutching her assignment book as she scurried toward the office like a monkey.

The scattered souls in the classroom gradually returned to their bodies. One by one, people withdrew their gazes, and the rustling sound of conversations rose and fell, resuming the previous level of liveliness.

Dong Xi had also looked at Long Qi.

But unlike the others in class who kept their gazes thunderously fixed on her before withdrawing them like a receding tide, Dong Xi had watched for a moment when Long Qi first entered the classroom, then buried herself in her own materials. Only after everyone else had stopped watching Long Qi did she turn back from the crowd and quietly took a second look at Long Qi.

……

Long Qi’s change of course stirred up quite a splash across the grade level. During every break, the number of people intentionally or unintentionally passing by the classroom windows doubled. This classroom was already located at the westernmost end of the corridor, yet even students from the easternmost classroom wandered over for a few passes—quite an exaggeration. But for once, Long Qi turned a deaf ear to it all.

It wasn’t until after the three morning classes that she didn’t continue sitting. Instead, she took a stack of exam papers and textbooks and voluntarily left the classroom, heading to the senior year teachers’ office.

The homeroom teacher happened to have no classes and was quite free. He unscrewed his thermos to drink tea, looking at the stack of exam papers and textbooks on his desk, then lifted his eyelids to look at Long Qi. Before he could speak, Long Qi, still seated, spoke first: “These are the coursework and assignments I’ve missed over the past few weeks.”

“Mm.” The homeroom teacher set the thermos back on the desk. “So what?”

“I want to make them up, teacher.”

The homeroom teacher looked at her hair and eyebrows again, perhaps finding her quite sincere, and said: “Senior year already—finally thinking about studying a bit?”

Long Qi answered yes.

Then she placed her elbow on the edge of the homeroom teacher’s desk, propping up her cheek: “I want Dong Xi to tutor me, teacher.”

“You’re quite good at picking people,” the homeroom teacher said.

The homeroom teacher was past middle age, approaching retirement, but the old man was quite interesting. Although he taught the weakest class, he never treated any poor student differently, nor would he refuse to give them a chance to turn over a new leaf. So if Long Qi wanted to study, he’d let her study. If Long Qi wanted tutoring, he’d give her tutoring. If Long Qi wanted Dong Xi, he’d give her Dong Xi. He was quite easy to talk to.

After leaving the office, Long Qi ran into some girls.

Every school had various cliques of delinquent girls. Actually, Long Qi was just solitary and ill-tempered—she wouldn’t deliberately hurt people for no reason. In her view, Bai Aiting’s girl groups were more like the school’s delinquent girls. But there were also some girls who existed in the gray area between the top and bottom classes, the most easily overlooked by management. They had decent learning abilities and faced a moderate learning intensity—just manageable—so their pressure wasn’t too great. Naturally, they had more free time than the other two classes, making them the backbone of the school’s gossip party. Among them, one called Yu Jingli was the leader of this backbone force. She was a repeater from the previous year, and because she was already thoroughly familiar with all the coursework and only waiting for college entrance exams, she was even more idle than the others. As Long Qi passed by, Yu Jingli called out to her.

“Hey, Qiqi,” she and a group of girls stood at the classroom door sunbathing, speaking in a lazy drawl, “you’ve had a makeover?”

Yu Jingli wasn’t particularly good-looking, but she had a nice figure. She especially loved to flirt with prominent figures and especially loved making friends with handsome guys and beautiful girls. When Long Qi first entered high school, Yu Jingli had actively approached her, even urging Long Qi to recognize her as an older sister. At the time, Long Qi found her pretentious and ignored her, but this Yu Jingli loved to act familiar with her, especially when there were more people around. Later, after Long Qi was ostracized by Bai Aiting, Yu Jingli stopped bothering with her much, and even spread some gossip behind her back about Long Qi being falsely aloof.

But these weren’t the main reasons Long Qi found Yu Jingli disgusting.

This Yu Jingli had a boyfriend outside school, but she had long coveted Jin Yiken. She had secretly sent Jin Yiken several anonymous text messages full of ambiguity and sexual innuendo. Jin Yiken had never saved her phone number and didn’t know who it was. Long Qi had saved it though. When she found this number in her phone’s blacklist, she sprayed a mouthful of lemonade onto Jin Yiken’s T-shirt.

So Long Qi glanced back, her mind flashing through the explicit love talk Yu Jingli had sent to Jin Yiken, and continued walking, unable to bear looking. Yu Jingli laughed behind her and said: “What have you been doing these past few weeks? Don’t tell me it’s like they’re saying on the forum—someone died in your belly.”

Long Qi had thought about what her bottom line was before.

Growing up with that scumbag Long Xinyi, her bottom line was refreshed every few days. After meeting Jin Yiken, her bottom line fell even further below the moral plane. Being exploited by the magazine company, being attacked by netizens, being gossiped about by classmates on the forum—she had thought she had no bottom line left long ago. But this statement from Yu Jingli made her drag those two words “bottom line” back from the depths of her mind.

She turned around, and at that exact moment, Jin Yiken walked out from the back door of the eastern classroom. He was closing the door with one hand while sending a message on his phone with the other. When he entered the balcony corridor, he lifted his head and saw her there, but he acted as if he hadn’t seen anything, just continued turning into the stairwell and left.

Long Qi ignored him and looked toward Yu Jingli and the group of girls beside her.

“Someone in my family died,” she said word by word, finally fixing her gaze on Yu Jingli’s face, “Evelyn.”

The others didn’t know what Evelyn meant, but Yu Jingli knew. Her face turned white in an instant.

Evelyn was the fake name Yu Jingli had signed when sending anonymous texts to Jin Yiken. She didn’t choose this name randomly either. Jin Yiken used to be particularly interested in an American architect—not in his architectural style, of course, but in his “romantic affairs.”

This architect had kept many mistresses. Among them, a sixteen-year-old mistress named Evelyn ultimately captured his wandering heart. He disbanded his mighty “wives’ regiment” for her and specially installed a red velvet swing on the second floor of Madison Square Garden in his Stanford mansion for her. But ultimately, Evelyn, unable to endure the architect’s nearly suffocating love, accepted another millionaire’s marriage proposal. This architect eventually died at the hands of his romantic rival, dying in a building he had designed himself in Madison Square Garden.

Jin Yiken thought this man was incredibly cool—the kind of cool where you die under peonies.

Yu Jingli had probably somehow heard about Jin Yiken’s interest in this scandalous story, which was why she used Evelyn as her alias when sending him texts. Now hearing this name spoken from Long Qi’s mouth, she was too scared to say a word, her face turning alternately green and red.