Under Old Yu’s chaotic arrangement, Lin Tao and Jiang Yan became officially legitimate seatmates — though the two of them barely exchanged a word.
Especially after the incident that afternoon: during the evening self-study session, Jiang Yan said nothing more and simply lay face-down on his desk watching videos.
Lin Tao buried herself in catching up on sleep, dozing through two straight class periods.
When she finally woke up, Jiang Yan’s seat was empty, but the phone he’d left on his desk hadn’t been paused — the video was still playing.
She glanced at the screen without much thought and caught a title flashing across it.
— “Legal Report Today” —
“……”
Did this guy’s taste in TV shows have to be this unique too?
Lin Tao’s eyes were still fixed on his phone screen when, with a sudden crash, the window beside her was shoved open.
She turned to look.
Jiang Yan was standing at the window, one hand braced on the sill. Before she could even register what was happening, he bent his arm, planted his weight on it, and swung himself in through the window from outside.
“……”
That kind of fluid, practiced agility. He had clearly scaled more than a few walls in his time.
Once Jiang Yan sat down, he noticed the slightly stunned and bewildered expression from his new seatmate. He’d been about to explain himself, but thought it over and stayed quiet. He put his earphones back in and went back to his video.
Lin Tao didn’t give it much thought either. She raised her hand to scratch her hair and realized she was thirsty. She reached into her desk and rummaged around, pulling out a half-empty bottle of mineral water.
Unfortunately, she hadn’t yet figured out how to twist open a bottle cap with one hand. She fumbled with it for a long time and still couldn’t get the mineral water bottle open.
Jiang Yan, watching videos beside her, caught the corner of Lin Tao’s struggle, flicked his gaze over, and saw the bottle in her hand.
He raised an eyebrow but said nothing, looking back at his phone screen.
A few minutes later, Lin Tao gave up and set the bottle on her desk. She took out her phone and sent Meng Xin a message: “Tragic beyond all description! A new Senior Year 2 student dies of thirst in the classroom on the second day of school!”
The message had barely been sent.
When suddenly a hand reached over from the side, picked up the bottle from her desk, and — before she could react — placed it back down.
Only now, the cap was unscrewed.
Lin Tao turned to look at Jiang Yan. He was still in exactly the same position he’d been in before — eyes fixed on his phone, not even a sliver of attention spared for her.
As though the person who’d just opened the bottle cap with one hand hadn’t been him at all.
Maybe because she’d been staring too openly, Jiang Yan slipped one earphone out, turned his head, and met her eyes. “Didn’t you want water?”
“Um……” Lin Tao nodded. When she looked away, she said a quiet thank you — though a certain someone apparently didn’t hear it.
Neither of them paid the small moment any mind.
The last period of evening self-study passed without incident.
When school let out, Jiang Yan left early with his three friends. He took nothing with him — just walked out in his short-sleeved shirt.
It was only when Lin Tao saw him in those short sleeves that she remembered: his jacket was still in her bag.
When the seats had been rearranged that afternoon, she’d stuffed the jacket into her bag without thinking. Then, between the freshness of the new seating arrangement and the general disorientation of it all, she’d never thought about it again.
Now Lin Tao took Jiang Yan’s uniform jacket out of her bag. She’d originally thought to just leave it on his desk, but then it occurred to her that he might be particular about cleanliness. She decided to take it home, wash it, and put it in the dryer.
The next morning when she arrived at school, Lin Tao handed the clean jacket back to Jiang Yan. He caught a whiff of the smell and asked, “You took it home and washed it?”
“Yeah.” Lin Tao nodded. “Washed it.”
Jiang Yan said nothing else. He stuffed the jacket into his desk, then reached back in and pulled out a small bag of bread rolls, setting it on her desk. “For thanks.”
Lin Tao accepted it.
All things considered, this counted as a fairly normal exchange between the two of them — which, rounded off, meant they were well on their way to becoming harmonious seatmates.
In the days that followed, Lin Tao and Jiang Yan fell into a comfortable routine. Each day they had roughly the same handful of exchanges.
“What class is this?”
“Let me out — I need to get by.”
“Let me in — I need to get through.”
“Is class over?”
“When does class end?”
……
Jiang Yan made routine small talk out of precisely this kind of mundane filler. And Lin Tao noticed that this person spent class time either playing games or watching TV shows, and occasionally face-planting on his desk asleep.
The dramas he followed, aside from legal affairs shows like Legal Report Today, were all Chinese domestic family melodramas of the grandest variety.
Lin Tao even caught him in the middle of watching The Temptation of Going Home once.
“……”
His taste in entertainment was truly beyond redemption.
Friday’s last period was P.E. class. Since Senior Year 2 had a particularly large number of science classes, it was common for two science classes to be grouped with one humanities class for P.E.
Lin Tao’s class, along with Meng Xin’s Science Year 2, Class 14, and one Humanities Class 6, all had P.E. together.
Three classes combined to more than a hundred students, with boys outnumbering girls slightly.
The P.E. teacher was a new hire that year — surname Zhou, given name Li. He’d graduated from the Physical Education University less than a year ago. He had a clean, pleasant face, and quite a few girls across the whole school counted themselves fans of his looks.
When he walked over with his attendance roster, Lin Tao noticed that a good number of the girls in the adjacent humanities class had already pulled out their phones.
By comparison, the girls in the science classes…
Lin Tao looked around. Same situation.
Girls everywhere: united as one.
The P.E. teacher walked over and blew his whistle. “Line up!”
The three classes split apart, each one arranging itself in order of height.
Among the girls, Lin Tao was on the taller side, so she ended up at the very back of Class 18’s line, right next to Jiang Yan and his three friends.
She wasn’t sure what they’d been talking about, but when she walked over she only caught the tail end of Hu Hanghang saying, “……damn it all, if I ever catch him slipping up, I’ll——” He hadn’t even finished before Jiang Yan kicked him.
“Can you keep it down for once, Hu Fatty?” Jiang Yan had one earphone looped over one ear. He glanced at Lin Tao, then looked away.
Hu Hanghang turned, saw Lin Tao, and broke into a grin. “Lin classmate, what a coincidence.”
“……”
Lin Tao figured they’d been discussing something not meant for a fifth pair of ears. In the interest of her own personal safety, she wisely turned her head the other way.
Before long, Meng Xin slipped away from the front of her class’s line and came over to stand beside her. Looking around at the legs and heights surrounding her, she muttered, “I feel like I’ve walked into a land of giants.”
Lin Tao played along. “How’s the air down there?”
“Go to hell.” Meng Xin swatted her cast. “When do you get this thing off, anyway?”
“About a month. Maybe earlier if it heals well.”
“So tragic.” Meng Xin shook her head, then noticed Jiang Yan standing beside her. She gave Lin Tao a meaningful look. “So? How’s it going?”
“How’s what going?”
Meng Xin lowered her voice. “Being seatmates with the great man.”
“Successfully transitioned from head-to-head conflict to peaceful coexistence.”
“I didn’t ask about your dynamic — I asked about your feelings! Feelings! Do you know what feelings are? Feel!” Meng Xin looked ready to press herself against Lin Tao’s ear and shout.
Lin Tao laughed and pushed her away. “Nothing — genuinely nothing. We barely even talk. At most I ask him the time.”
Meng Xin looked at her. “Clearly your personal charm isn’t up to scratch.” As she said it, her gaze flicked briefly to Lin Tao’s chest, her expression something between awkward and speechless.
Lin Tao caught where she was looking and understood immediately. She raised her cast arm in warning. “Want to bet? The day this thing comes off is the day you’re finished.”
Meng Xin dodged sideways and kept laughing, the sound carrying all the way to the front of the line. The P.E. teacher heard it and called out, “Who’s laughing that loudly in the back? You — yes, you — congratulations, you’re now the P.E. representative for all three classes.”
“……”
Lin Tao almost lost it.
And so it was that Meng Xin became the P.E. representative for all three classes without any reasonable explanation. The P.E. teacher also selected two boys as her assistants.
About halfway through P.E. class, Jiang Yan and his three friends disappeared. Apparently being class president hadn’t given Jiang Yan even a trace of any sense of responsibility.
Lin Tao and Meng Xin sat out the rest of class under the shade of the trees beside the field.
When the bell rang, Meng Xin — in her new capacity as P.E. representative — was called to the teacher’s office. Lin Tao was dragged along with her.
The P.E. teachers’ offices were all in the old ideology building, which was rarely trafficked at any other time.
Zhou Li’s office was on the third floor. When the door pushed open, a wave of cigarette smell hit them. He walked quickly across the room and threw open the window against the far wall.
As the air began to circulate, Lin Tao and Meng Xin stepped inside one after the other.
Zhou Li stood at the window and picked up the small water-mist spray bottle he used to water his potted plants. He sprayed a few puffs into the air, then let his gaze sweep across the neglected, overgrown old garden behind the building — and his expression changed. He bellowed down at it: “What do you think you’re doing down there?!”
Lin Tao and Meng Xin looked at each other, then rushed to the other window.
Down below, on the open ground, several boys lay sprawled across the ground at various angles. Three boys stood over them, feet planted on their chests.
And behind them, one boy was crouched by the garden planter. He looked up toward them now.
Both the standing ones and the crouching one were familiar faces.
The former: Hu Hanghang, Song Yuan, Xu Yichuan. The latter: Jiang Yan.
Perhaps startled by the sudden bellow, everyone had frozen in exactly the position they’d been in, and the scene had grown momentarily, awkwardly still.
Zhou Li leaned out the window and continued shouting down. “Hu Hanghang, Song Yuan, Xu Yichuan — get your feet off those people right now!”
Lin Tao found herself bizarrely impressed that the teacher had already memorized all three of their names in just half a class period.
Whether someone had tipped him off from below or not, at the exact moment Zhou Li finished shouting, Dean of Discipline Li Kun came charging out of the building with several other teachers behind him.
Li Kun pointed at all of them. “Group brawl! Are you all out of your minds?! Every one of you — stand there and don’t move!”
The five boys who’d been on the ground were helped up and lined up in a row. Jiang Yan and his four stood on the other side. Li Kun looked furious. They were in for a round of disciplinary lecturing, and after that: serious demerits, five-thousand-character written self-criticism, and so on.
With the situation apparently under control, Zhou Li pulled his head back in and was just about to say something when a roar erupted from below: “Jiang Yan!”
He stuck his head back out. One of the boys who’d just been standing was now flat on the ground again, and Jiang Yan was standing beside him.
“Now what’s happened?”
Lin Tao, who’d been standing at the window the whole time, hadn’t thought to respond. Her mind was entirely replaying the image of Jiang Yan pressing his hand against someone’s head and slamming it into the ground. And all she could think was:
How on earth had she ever been brave enough to butt heads with someone like this?