◎Fruit Hard Candy◎

The monthly exam followed closely after National Day. So during the latter half of the holiday, Chun Zao stayed home focusing on review, occasionally taking breaks to chat with Tong Yue or Yuan Ye. During this time, the boy shared several photos with her—those outdoor study locations he had mentioned, like the settings of coffee shops he’d visited, single-person study rooms like company cubicles, and the desks, chairs, and bookshelves of the city library—he seemed to particularly favor window-side spots that let every book cover and page soak in sunlight.

Chun Zao would save each one, then look through them alone before bed, as if experiencing them firsthand.

On the day of returning to school, because there was evening self-study, Chun Zao returned to the rental house around 2 PM. While her mother packed things outside, she organized her holiday homework and review materials, and notes inside.

Walking back to class through the usual corridor, Class 1 became her daily invisible check-in point. At this time, students were basically all present, and the boys’ class was especially noisy and chaotic, with basketballs arcing through the air followed by roars of laughter.

Unfortunately, she didn’t catch sight of Yuan Ye.

Today’s oxygen-gathering energy replenishment ended in defeat. Chun Zao returned to her seat feeling somewhat dejected.

After sitting down, she felt selfish and self-centered. What right did she have? Was he supposed to exist for her sake? Couldn’t he have his affairs?

What right did she have to expect him to materialize before her eyes the second she looked for him? He wasn’t some TV program she could control with a remote.

Carrying these self-accusations, even her force in taking out textbooks increased.

Lu Xinyue saw her absent-mindedly tossing books around: “What’s wrong? Our Zao doesn’t seem very happy today.”

Chun Zao snapped back: “No, no.”

Then, gently handling things: “Just post-holiday syndrome.”

“True.” Lu Xinyue copied her, dropping her handouts with a thud: “Eight days seemed pretty long, but in the blink of an eye, they were gone! And tomorrow’s the monthly exam—the school is inhumane.”

The two girls looked at each other with bitter smiles.

Because the monthly seat rotation needed to be organized, their homeroom teacher arrived fifteen minutes early.

For a moment, the classroom filled with the collision and friction sounds of desk legs and chair backs. Chun Zao sat in the third row, originally in the fourth group by the window, but this time was moved to the first group right by the corridor. Lu Xinyue always avoided the crisis-ridden window spot when possible, and after some coaxing and pleading, good-natured Chun Zao took over this “throne.”

Moreover…

She had ulterior motives.

Sitting this close to the window, if Yuan Ye happened to pass by their classroom, she should be able to see him first, right?

Thinking of this, she couldn’t help but cup her face and smile.

After all groups finished switching seats and the classroom commotion gradually settled, Chun Zao swallowed all her effervescent pink romantic thoughts and focused intently on her books.

For the next two days, Chun Zao concentrated wholeheartedly on preparing for the monthly exam. Unlike Tong Yue’s specialty of last-minute cramming and not shedding tears until seeing the coffin, she never burned the midnight oil during exam periods.

For a liberal arts student at her level and degree, score differences were extremely hard to widen. Each exam was competing with her previous self—winning meant progress, losing meant stopping for self-examination and reflection.

Chun Zao’s final exam last semester ranked fourth in the liberal arts class.

This result, especially at the province’s top high school, would be worthy of bragging about at any family gathering dinner table. Unfortunately, Chun Chuzhen’s attitude toward her scores was always “nothing special”—top five, top three, and first place were, in her eyes, as different as clouds and mud, heaven and earth, separated by the hierarchical gap between Mount Everest and the Tarim Basin.

Three days later, Chun Zao received her monthly exam ranking, identical to last semester’s final exam—fourth in class, also fourth in grade.

She had tied with her previous self.

Tong Yue exclaimed as usual: “Chun Zao, how did you do so well again! You’re so amazing!”

But Chun Zao couldn’t smile. She silently flipped through the deducted points on each subject’s test paper, her nasal passages congested, forcibly holding back tears. This physiological soreness seemed to have become a conditioned reflex after every exam. She could already imagine how Chun Chuzhen would conduct her inhumane judgment and commentary on each subject’s score after returning home, forever so pretentiously knowledgeable, selectively filtering out the arduous process, with eyes and heart full of only results she deemed unsatisfactory.

Chun Zao clipped all test papers together with a long-tail clip and brought them home, convenient for Judge Chun to review her “case files.”

Unsurprisingly, Chun Chuzhen closed the door and began her regular performance, coldly sarcastic: “How can your grades be so stable?”

“I don’t even know how to begin.”

“If I criticize, I don’t know how to criticize. If I praise, do you think I can praise? Tell me, is it so hard to get into the top three?”

“Especially this math,” she pulled out one test paper: “The same score as last semester’s final. If you got two more points on the big problems, wouldn’t your ranking go up?”

She muttered, “Always just a few points short of 140, I don’t know what’s wrong with you.”

Chun Zao sat there, swallowing deeply, not looking at her or the test paper: “Big problems aren’t that easy to solve.”

“Then how can others solve them correctly? How can others get full marks? Aren’t they students too?”

“I’m not as good as them, okay?” Isn’t this what she wanted to hear? Along with her share, she conducted a double negation on herself. Chun Zao sniffled, already feeling the urge to grab tissues.

But her hands remained stubbornly clenched under the desk, desperately suppressing tears that threatened to fall.

Chun Chuzhen was blocked by her self-defeating statement for a few seconds: “If you know you’re not as good as others, you should find the root of your problems. Aren’t you worried seeing grades that never change?”

“I’m worried for you.”

“You’re in your second year, almost third year. I was hoping you could get a ranking in the city or province to bring glory to our Chun family, but this… mediocre performance doesn’t give anyone confidence.”

Chun Zao sighed deeply, relieving her high concentration of indignation: “Did I do poorly?”

Chun Chuzhen stood beside her, her figure like an oppressive mountain: “Compared to those with worse grades than you, like that friend of yours—certainly not poorly, but water flows upward, people can’t go downward either. How else would there be progress?”

Chun Zao laughed coldly in her heart.

She always had something to say anyway, her grandiose statements sounding so reasonable.

Always so frivolous.

Seeing her daughter sitting there like a puppet doll, thin upper body with only her slightly heavy breathing remaining in the room, Chun Chuzhen felt pity and said no more. She clipped the test papers back together, dropped a line about “come out for a late-night snack,” and left.

Chun Zao glanced at her with red-rimmed eyes, took a deep breath and exhaled, then smoothed out the wrinkles on the math test paper her mother had specifically pulled out, flipped it back to the first page, paused briefly on the bright red 137 in the score column, then clipped it back with the others, all corners perfectly aligned.

While eating milk and cereal in the living room, Chun Zao felt defeated and empty inside, her eyes unconsciously unfocused.

Chun Chuzhen played with her phone silently beside her, also saying nothing.

Breaking the silence was the soft sound of Yuan Ye turning the door lock. The boy changed his shoes and nodded slightly to Chun Zao’s mother.

His gaze lingered two extra seconds on the girl who was looking down and eating before he returned to his room.

Chun Zao naturally knew he had returned.

But at this moment, she had absolutely no extra mood to steal a glance at him.

Chun Chuzhen had this ability to freeze and destroy all the rose gardens and glass cathedrals she had carefully constructed in a matter of seconds.

Like a hurricane passing through, all the brilliant scenery was razed to the ground.

The boy closed his door.

Chun Chuzhen looked back and lowered her voice: “Do you know what he scored? Didn’t you say his grades were very good?”

Chun Zao felt irritated and replied coolly: “I don’t know. I only know he’s always been first in the science class.”

Chun Chuzhen’s eyes widened: “So his grades are that good?”

Chun Zao: “Yes.”

As expected.

“Why can’t you test into first place in liberal arts?” Chun Chuzhen sighed while touching her head.

Chun Zao: “…”

The woman digested the gap, looking around their small room: “If word gets out, this house’s rent would double.”

“Is this house yours?” Chun Zao accelerated her cereal scooping.

Chun Chuzhen began feeling psychologically unbalanced: “I don’t see him studying either… Sigh, maybe some kids are naturally smart.”

“How do you know he doesn’t study?” Chun Zao drained the milk and residue at the bottom of her bowl, looking back: “Why don’t you adopt him as your son?”

Chun Chuzhen hissed with displeasure: “Why can’t you take criticism?”

Chun Zao was too lazy to argue further.

Chun Chuzhen continued nagging endlessly: “There’s no talking to you. Others don’t even have mothers accompanying them for study. Sigh, I can’t figure it out…”

Chun Zao slammed down her spoon with a thud and returned to her room.

She was already feeling terrible, and now could be said to be completely miserable. She should have had a good cry, but though her eye sockets burned repeatedly, they couldn’t produce enough liquid. Perhaps she had already “adapted”—adapted to endless comparisons, adapted to this environment of being denied and oppressed. Chun Zao had once thought of herself while pressing a wet sponge while washing dishes, clearly working so hard to absorb more water, yet the burden brought by expansion only became heavier; once the degree of usefulness didn’t meet expectations, she would be wrung out completely by external force.

This night, Chun Zao lay flat on her bed, air pressure so low that even her interest in secretly playing with her phone disappeared entirely.

She stared blankly at the gray ceiling, beginning the spiritual chicken soup baptism after each exam.

You are for yourself.

Chun Zao, just for yourself, consider it for yourself. You don’t need anyone’s approval, especially not Chun Chuzhen’s. Don’t mind how she sees you.

Study, study with all your might, study wholeheartedly, study without hitting walls. Studying is the only path for you to leap over the fortress walls and fly to the sky.

Constantly reciting silently, constantly self-healing, the boiling emotions finally calmed.

—

The next evening was math self-study. The first period was for reviewing test papers, and the second period was left for students to independently review and complete homework.

The classroom was dead silent.

Chun Zao copied the deducted problems into her error notebook, then found similar problem types from past handouts or exercise books, copying them onto later pages. After comparing and analyzing where she went wrong on this exam and identifying the problems, she closed all books, closed her eyes, and prepared to redo all the big problems in her notebook.

Working through calculations in one breath until the second-to-last problem, suddenly something flashed by and dropped with a soft thud onto the scratch paper in front of her.

The sound wasn’t loud, but enough to make her entire body tense.

Chun Zao stopped writing to look and discovered it was a pink and blue fruit hard candy wrapped in transparent candy paper, casting small patches of colorful light and shadow on the white paper.

She glanced toward the podium, moved her five fingers forward, and quietly pulled the candy into her hand…

Who threw it over?

She looked at her desk mate, puzzledly, but the other was buried in studying and hadn’t noticed anything here at all. The front and back desk students were even more impossible. The next moment, as if by telepathy, she looked up toward the window.

Yuan Ye’s back appeared in the previously empty corridor. The uniformed boy walked like the wind, didn’t turn back to signal, and made no reminding gestures. As if appearing from thin air, or perhaps just passing by.

Was it him?

It seemed like it was him.

Though somewhat unclear about the meaning, it was mysteriously half-understood. Sweet feelings began spreading across Chun Zao’s face. She pressed her lips together and tucked that unknown candy into her backpack’s inner pocket, taking it home.

Besides her mood turning from cloudy to sunny, she also wanted to ask about the reason for this gesture and express her gratitude.

Opening QQ before bed, she discovered the boy had sent a long message after 11 PM last night:

“There’s a person who likes eating candy, but he doesn’t dare eat much, afraid of getting cavities.

There’s also a little bird who likes eating candy. This person fiercely educates her: You can’t eat too much candy, or you’ll get cavities.

But the little bird laughs: We little birds don’t have teeth anyway, I don’t care!”

What a strange, quirky cold joke.

Yet it made her instantly laugh out loud, and the tears accumulated until tonight burst forth in that moment.

Chun Zao covered her head with the quilt, releasing all her grievances completely, then pulled out tissues from the bedside table to dry her entire face before reading that message again.

This time, only laughter remained.

She typed back: Who said I don’t have teeth?

Yuan Ye’s reply came quickly: Then you must have discovered you have teeth when you just smiled.

Chun Zao immediately clenched her teeth tightly, looking around suspiciously.

Did he have some kind of spatial vision superpower, able to predict her current state and reactions?

But the corners of her mouth still couldn’t be controlled.

She felt under her pillow for the candy she had hidden until now, unwrapped it, and put it in her mouth. The clear, sweet fruit fragrance quickly melted in her mouth. Although she had already brushed her teeth, although she had been strictly forbidden since childhood, although it would increase the possibility of cavity-causing bacteria by 0.01%, just for this evening, this night with bitterness dissolved by candy, she would be a little bird without teeth. As long as she didn’t care, the entire universe could try to disturb her.