Teacher Yu’s words left a deep impression on everyone present. The invisible pressure that had settled over them since entering Senior Year Three — though unseen and intangible — was no less real for it.
One or two girls in the front row couldn’t hold back any longer and began to cry softly. The mood in the classroom grew slightly heavy.
“Teacher Yu, it would be so much better if all parents could see things the way you do,” a boy in the back row said with a self-deprecating laugh. “Unfortunately, in the eyes of most adults, grades are the only thing that matters.”
“For people like us with poor grades, in the eyes of other parents — and even our own — we might as well have come to school just to coast through the days.”
“But we have things we want to do too. It’s just that what we want to do has never managed to earn the approval of these adults who claim everything they do is for our own good.”
In every class throughout history, there have always been a few students who struggle academically. Poor grades mean less attention from teachers, less warmth from parents. What they get instead is a daily barrage of scolding. In their longing to be noticed, some of these students turn to acting out — doing things out of the ordinary to attract others’ attention and prove they have value.
More acting out only brings more scolding and more incomprehension.
“We want to do well too, but we genuinely don’t have a gift for academics, and there’s no way to produce good grades by sheer will.” A boy who often skipped class to go online spoke up: “Sure, in a lot of people’s eyes, I’m probably just some kid with an internet addiction. But who knows — over the holidays, I actually earned my own tuition money from playing games.”
He shook his head and smiled, his voice tinged with loneliness. “Nobody knows that. Adults only see me doing nothing but going online all day.”
The boy’s name was Xu Cheng. He was a regular at the “Cultivating Virtue” internet café, and Lin Tao had run into him there on occasion, though they’d never spoken. She’d only heard Hu Hanghang and the others mention him — a boy who was exceptionally good at games; even Jiang Yan had once lost a one-on-one match against him.
The comment sparked a small wave of grievances against parents rippling through the class.
Someone said, “My parents want me to go to the Finance University and study economics, but I have zero interest in finance. I love literature — I want to go to Zhongda’s Chinese Department.”
Someone else said, “My mom checks my phone every time I come home these days, terrified I’m secretly dating someone at school. It’s so suffocating.”
“I never wanted to study the science track, but my parents said the arts track leads to bad job prospects and forced me into it. Now my grades aren’t good, and they blame me for not studying hard enough at school.”
“Sometimes I genuinely want them to come to school for a day, sit through a class, and take a test — just so they can experience what it’s like to have weekly and monthly exams.”
……
Although parents often said they were doing everything for their children’s good, the pressure that weighed most heavily on many people came from the very people closest to them.
Because they were close, certain things could not be said.
Because they were doing it for your good, certain things could only be quietly swallowed and processed alone.
Because they were your parents, many people had no way to refuse — and could only accept whatever ideas were imposed upon them.
Thinking of this, Lin Tao couldn’t help but feel fortunate.
Fang Yisong and Lin Yongcheng had always given her absolute freedom to choose her own path, and had never used grades to judge a person’s worth. Growing up, as long as it wasn’t a matter of principle, they never said much to Lin Tao.
As one person after another in the class spoke their minds about their families, the expression on Teacher Yu’s face grew increasingly grave. Finally, as if he had come to some kind of decision, he let out a long sigh.
The birthday celebration had turned into a full-blown reckoning.
Before the self-study session ended, Jiang Yan, as class president of Class 18, presented the gift on everyone’s behalf.
“Teacher Yu, happy birthday.” Jiang Yan held out the wishing bottle covered in everyone’s written blessings. “In these fifty-eight wishing stars are the words each of us wanted to say to you.”
Yu Bingshan took the wishing bottle, his eyes brimming with tears.
He had been teaching for over a decade and had guided class after class of students. Every cohort, to him, was the best one yet.
Du Wenbo carried forward the wishing bottle holding five thousand stars. “Teacher Yu, here are five thousand wishing stars — the collective blessing from every one of us.”
“Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.” Yu Bingshan’s eyes overflowed with warmth. For a moment, he had no more words.
“Come on, let’s take a photo together!” Liu Sheng produced a camera and equipment he had brought from home, set it up at the back of the classroom, and called out, “Hurry, squeeze in tight — otherwise everyone won’t fit in the frame!”
Students stood up and quickly shoved the desks and chairs in the middle aside. Fifty-odd people crammed together in a cheerful tangle.
Liu Sheng stood behind the camera, eyeing everyone’s positions to make sure they could all be captured in the shot. No matter how the arrangement shifted, Teacher Yu remained at the very center of the group.
“Wu Wang, you tall lad — get to the back row, you’re blocking all the girls.” Liu Sheng directed with calm efficiency. Throughout it all, Teacher Yu stayed in the middle of the crowd.
……
“Alright!” Liu Sheng adjusted the camera. “When I count three-two-one, everyone get ready.”
Hearing those familiar countdown words brought to mind the ultimate scare at the haunted house during their outing — the memory still vivid and unsettling. Lin Tao looked up at Jiang Yan.
Jiang Yan happened to be looking back at her at the same moment.
Across the short distance between them, their eyes met. Without a word, they both smiled.
In the press and jostle of the crowd, shoulders and elbows brushed.
Jiang Yan raised his hand lightly, hooked his fingers around Lin Tao’s, then let his palm slide against hers — fingers threading into the spaces between her fingers, palms pressed together, ten fingers interlocked.
Liu Sheng set the camera to delayed self-timer mode.
When the countdown started, he sprinted over, dropped to a crouch in the front row, and shouted at the top of his lungs: “Three! Two! One!”
The echo of the final number faded.
Everyone called out together: “Teacher Yu! Happy! Birthday!”
With the click of the shutter, this single moment was preserved forever.
Outside the windows, dense fog hung in the air; the winter night wind was biting cold.
Inside, the classroom lights glowed warm and bright. Every face was smiling. The light fell over each of them and became a different kind of radiance in each pair of eyes.
It was the light of their hopes for what lay ahead.
After that brief moment of joy came another stretch of long, monotonous days.
Everyone slipped back into the cycle of weekly quizzes and monthly exams, as if everything before had only been a brief, beautiful dream.
When the dream ends, you have to return to reality.
One week remained until the final exams.
The entire Senior Year Three teaching building seemed to have been sealed under a glass dome. No voices could be heard; no figures could be seen moving around. The only evidence of life was the classroom lights — burning later and later each night.
This was a battle without gunpowder.
And it was only now that Lin Tao truly understood the state of mind she had glimpsed in those Senior Year Three students bent over their work — the ones she had seen when Class 18 came for a hygiene inspection back in sophomore year.
It wasn’t that they didn’t want to play, or that they didn’t want to give up. It was that they couldn’t afford to play, and couldn’t afford to give up.
The closer to the finals, the heavier the atmosphere in Class 18 became. Even Lin Tao, who was normally unaffected by exams of any kind, found herself caught up in it and growing nervous.
She had been lying awake for several nights in a row, the dark circles under her eyes deepening day by day. Unable to sleep at night, she could only catch up during spare moments in the classroom.
After a few days of this, Jiang Yan could tell something was off.
Friday, during the main break — the night before, Xicheng had received snowfall, and the sports field was blanketed in patches of snow, so the running drill was canceled and replaced with English listening practice in the classroom.
Listening was optional; some students participated and some didn’t.
Lin Tao had barely managed to hold on through two periods by sheer force of will. By now she was utterly exhausted. She collapsed face-down on her desk and was asleep within seconds.
She was so visibly worn out that even Song Yuan, sitting behind the two of them, noticed something was wrong.
“Hey, have you been putting too much pressure on Lin Tao lately?” Song Yuan said offhandedly as he and Jiang Yan slipped out together to use the restroom. “I’ve been noticing her falling asleep in the classroom a lot recently. Sometimes when you’re not here, she sleeps through two whole periods.”
Jiang Yan’s eyes dropped slightly as he shook his head. “No. I paused all the extra sessions these past few days.”
Song Yuan clicked his tongue softly. “Is she putting pressure on herself, then? Now that you’ve already been guaranteed a spot at Qing’an University, maybe she’s worried she won’t get into the same school as you?”
Jiang Yan shook his head again. “I don’t know.”
“Alright.” Seeing that, Song Yuan didn’t ask any further. “Let’s head back.”
Jiang Yan turned off the faucet after washing his hands. “Let’s go.”
By the time they returned to the classroom, the English listening broadcast had ended. Lin Tao was still asleep at her desk. Hu Hanghang and a few other boys were playing a game in the back.
“Keep it down, everyone put your earphones in,” Hu Hanghang said in a lowered voice. “Lin Tao’s sleeping — don’t wake her up.”
“Yeah, yeah, we know.”
Jiang Yan heard this and laughed softly. He said nothing, returned to his seat, and glanced sideways at Lin Tao, pressing his lips together slightly.
……
Lin Tao didn’t wake until the class bell rang — a full half hour of sleep, enough to help her recover. She surfaced from her desk and rummaged through her bag for a few completed exam papers.
“Jiang Yan, these are the papers Guan Che brought over for me last time.” Lin Tao flipped open her notebook. “There are a few questions I couldn’t figure out. Can you take a look?”
Jiang Yan glanced at her notebook, filled from top to bottom with notes, and said mildly, “Let me see.”
“Sure.” Lin Tao handed him the notebook, and while he was looking at the questions, she muttered, “The difficulty on the papers Guan Che bought is genuinely outrageous. A few of them, I didn’t even break eighty.”
Jiang Yan had done thousands of papers for competitions. Practice had made perfect; a glance at the question was often enough for him to recognize the approach.
“These are competition papers,” Jiang Yan said, picking up his pen to circle the errors in her answers. “Of course they’re hard.”
“……” Lin Tao rested her chin on her desk. “Does Guan Che have some kind of misunderstanding about me?”
Jiang Yan smiled. “He probably just didn’t notice when he bought them.”
“Fair enough.”
The questions Lin Tao had mentioned were practically standard fare for Jiang Yan. He had the solution strategies worked out in short order.
After a few minutes of walking her through the problems and closing the notebook, Jiang Yan asked casually, “Have you been sleeping poorly lately?”
“Hm?” Lin Tao was still turning the questions over in her mind and didn’t register it at first.
Jiang Yan reached out, pressing the pad of his finger gently against the skin below her eye. “Dark circles. Pretty pronounced.”
“Are they that bad?” Lin Tao instinctively raised her hand to touch the spot, murmuring, “I don’t feel like I’ve been sleeping that poorly.”
Jiang Yan looked at her sideways and said nothing.
Lin Tao puffed out her cheeks, and with a resigned sigh, came clean: “Alright. I have been sleeping a bit poorly lately.”
“But I want to make something clear — it’s not because of pressure.” Lin Tao wrapped her fingers around his wrist, her fingertips finding the thin cord tied there. “I think I’ve just been influenced by the atmosphere in the class. I’m still quite confident in myself, so you don’t need to worry too much.”
“I’m not worried.” Jiang Yan’s expression was composed but his tone didn’t quite match. “Do you think that’s possible?”
“……”
Lin Tao pressed her lips together. Perhaps because she’d just napped, she felt slightly drowsy still, as though still half-immersed in sleep. “I’m only having a bit of insomnia. There’s nothing else wrong with me. It’ll probably clear up once the final exams are over.”
Hearing that, Jiang Yan didn’t press further. He glanced toward the classroom door and said quietly, “Class is about to start.”
As he spoke, the biology teacher had already walked in with his cup. “No exam this period. Revise on your own.”
The sound of pages turning filled the room in response.
With finals so close, the classroom was unusually quiet. Beyond the turning of pages and the scratch of pen on paper, there was no other sound.
Lin Tao took out her unfinished biology paper and had just turned to the first page when Jiang Yan slipped a note over from beside her:
Give me your phone.
“What do you want my phone for?” Lin Tao asked him in a low voice.
“You’ll find out soon enough.”
“Oh.” Lin Tao dug her phone out of her bag and handed it over. “It might be almost out of battery though. I forgot to charge it last night.”
“That’s fine.” Jiang Yan pulled a power bank with a charging cable from his drawer and set it beside him.
“……”
Lin Tao asked nothing more and picked up a black pen from her desk to start on the paper.
By this point, of her six subjects, the only one that wasn’t outstanding was physics. The other five were all consistently in a strong range.
Biology wasn’t a weak point either, so she moved through it quickly.
By the time Jiang Yan handed back her phone, Lin Tao had already reached the final analytical question. She said to him quietly, “Give me three minutes. Almost done.”
“No rush.”
Jiang Yan propped the phone upright at a tilt, holding one corner with his fingertip to keep it angled, and slowly moved his thumb in soft circles against the back of it.
Lin Tao said three minutes, but only needed ninety seconds. When she set down her pen, Jiang Yan handed her the phone and said softly, “Play a game.”
“?” Lin Tao reached up to feel his forehead. “No fever.”
Jiang Yan smiled, opened the chess app he had just downloaded to her phone’s home screen, and said, “Do you know how to play Chinese chess?”
“Of course I do.” Lin Tao answered without thinking, then quickly caught herself. “Wait — is this really the time to be playing chess?”
“Is there a specific time you have to play chess?” Jiang Yan pushed the phone into her hands and opened his own phone to enter the game. “Come on then. Let’s see if you can beat me.”
Lin Tao’s competitive spirit ignited at the challenge. “Excuse me, I, Lin, have roamed the chess world for many years and have yet to meet my match.”
Jiang Yan clicked his tongue. “Funny, neither have I.”
“……”
To say that Lin Tao had never met her match wasn’t entirely a lie. Up to this point, the total number of people she had played chess against was fewer than five.