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Huang Xing squinted against the afternoon sunlight, raising his right hand only to lower it again, then turned to look at the girl who had spoken to him. She gazed at him with clear, direct eyes, as though waiting for an answer, yet somehow those eyes seemed sharp and cold.

He clasped his hands behind his back and stood with his feet apart. “If she hasn’t done anything wrong, why would I punish her?”

“Then what did she do wrong?” Li Kuiyi glanced at Jiang Yilin, then quickly shifted her gaze back and pressed on.

It wasn’t that she couldn’t accept a teacher physically punishing a student. She remembered that in sixth grade, there had been a few delinquent boys in the class who stole their classmates’ registration fees and mugged younger kids from lower grades. When the homeroom teacher found out, she had taken a steel ruler to their palms until they were red and swollen — and Li Kuiyi had found it entirely satisfying.

But she couldn’t understand what wrong Jiang Yilin could possibly have committed during the brief time it took to run laps and do calisthenics that would warrant physical punishment.

Huang Xing tilted his head slightly upward, as though looking down at people through his nostrils. “And you have the nerve to ask! Look at how your class ran today! Scattered and crooked, no rows, no columns, grinning and laughing, a complete mess — absolutely unacceptable!”

Li Kuiyi did recall that the back of the formation had indeed been in chaos earlier, but what did that have to do with Jiang Yilin?

She thought it, so she asked it: “Then why not punish the students who ran poorly? Jiang Yilin was at the front of the formation — she ran very seriously.”

“Precisely because she was the lead runner, that’s why she’s being punished.” Huang Xing said it as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. “You are a collective. If the people behind her ran poorly, isn’t that the lead runner’s responsibility?”

It was the first time Li Kuiyi had ever encountered such logic, and she couldn’t help but open her eyes slightly wider. For a moment she wasn’t sure whether she was wrong or Huang Xing was wrong, so she instinctively glanced at Zhou Fanghua. When she saw that Zhou Fanghua was also looking back at her in astonishment, she felt relieved — at least someone else was on her side.

She said calmly, “Jiang Yilin is not the PE representative. She has no obligation to manage the other students.”

Huang Xing’s expression darkened with displeasure. “I know perfectly well she’s not the PE representative, but your PE representative injured her foot and didn’t come down for class, did she? You’re a collective — when the PE representative isn’t here, someone should step up of their own accord.”

You are a collective —

Li Kuiyi didn’t deny those words, nor did she deny the strength a collective could hold — after all, she herself needed the collective’s signatures for the petition she was writing. But she still felt the phrase was being used in a strangely unsettling way in this context.

When should “I” be made to defend “us”?

Zhou Fanghua tightened her grip on Li Kuiyi’s fingers and summoned the courage to speak. “Since we’re a collective, why is only Jiang Yilin being punished individually? Isn’t that deeply unfair to her?”

Huang Xing’s anger tipped into a furious laugh. “Fine! So you’re saying it’s my fault for punishing only her!” He grabbed the whistle hanging around his neck and blew the assembly signal. Students scattered across the field converged from all directions.

Li Kuiyi and Zhou Fanghua exchanged a glance. Something felt very wrong.

Jiang Yilin had been keeping her head down the whole time; the emotions she’d been suppressing finally broke free, and tears began to fall — drip, drip — one after another.

As the students gathered and took in the scene, they looked at one another in bewilderment, whispering “what happened?” while forming a loose, straggling line.

“You all ran absolutely terribly today!” Huang Xing berated them. “You’re a disgrace to the honors class — not one ounce of self-discipline! Just now I punished the lead runner, but these two girls stepped forward and said that since you’re a collective, no single person should bear the punishment alone — so today, every one of you will answer for this! Do you accept this?”

In that instant, thirty-three pairs of eyes turned in unison toward Li Kuiyi and Zhou Fanghua. The two girls stood before the crowd with downcast eyes, completely exposed, nowhere to hide.

No one answered. Even the breeze seemed too lethargic to pass through. There was nothing but silence.

How did things come to this? Zhou Fanghua felt a flood of shame and anxiety — she, too, was close to tears.

“We do not accept.” Li Kuiyi suddenly raised her eyes. “Going from Jiang Yilin bearing the punishment alone, to all of us accepting it together, is merely trading one extreme for another — from one person being held hostage by the collective, to everyone being held hostage by the collective. We don’t need this kind of unhealthy collective dynamic.”

Huang Xing’s fury reached its peak. He slammed the small board in his hand onto the ground. “Fine! Students these days have no respect for anything — do whatever you want! From now on, your class doesn’t need to come down for PE at all!”

With that, he put his hands on his hips and stormed off.

“Oh my god… is he serious…?” someone immediately began whispering.

“That can’t be right — refusing to teach a class would be an academic incident. The academic affairs office would never allow it.”

“That was so gutsy — she just talked back to the teacher like that…”

“The homeroom teacher is probably going to criticize us. Do you think she’ll make us all go and apologize to the PE teacher?”

Zhou Fanghua tugged on Li Kuiyi’s fingers and asked quietly, “What do we do now?”

This was Li Kuiyi’s first time experiencing the phenomenon of making a teacher storm off in anger. She exhaled a long breath and thought carefully. “Let’s go find the homeroom teacher first and explain the situation. If she asks us to apologize to the PE teacher, then we’ll apologize — one has to know when to stand firm and when to bend.”

Know when to stand firm and when to bend!

Zhou Fanghua smiled, but immediately fell back into worry, her faint eyebrows drawing together. “Does what we did count as talking back to a teacher? Will we be publicly criticized in a school-wide announcement?”

Li Kuiyi imagined what it would look like if a public notice about her were posted next to the one about He Youyuan — the two hanging side by side in radiant contrast. The image instantly gave rise to a deeply wicked thought: honestly, with He Youyuan’s notice already there as the shining example, hers would be entirely upstaged.

She quickly drove that thought out of her mind, tugged the corner of her mouth into a smile, and said, “Don’t overthink it. What’s done is done. Even if we really do get publicly criticized, there’s nothing to be done about it — it just means losing a little face.”

Huang Xing had walked far away. The formation dispersed where it stood.

Pan Junmeng immediately leaped over and dramatically held up a thumbs-up. “Li Kui, from now on you’re my big sister Kui. Once you’re my big sister, always my big sister — your little brother’s got your back from here on out!”

“I’m starting to actually believe you’re a Leo, haha.” Xia Leyi also came over and clapped her on the shoulder. “That was genuinely fierce.”

But when Qi Yu passed by her, he said nothing — only looked at her twice in silence, then walked straight on.

Li Kuiyi watched that lean, slight figure retreating and suddenly found him very strange. The last time she had talked with him about studying, he hadn’t been like this at all.

Perhaps his eyes were only ever for studying, and he simply couldn’t tolerate the kind of attention-drawing thing she and the others had done.

Li Kuiyi withdrew her gaze and looked toward Jiang Yilin, who was now surrounded by several girls passing her tissues and patting her back in comfort. Since there were already people consoling her, Li Kuiyi didn’t push her way over — she walked back to the school building with Zhou Fanghua and Xia Leyi instead.

They went to the office to find Liu Xinzhao, but she wasn’t in. They had no choice but to go back to the classroom first.

Zhou Ce was alone in the classroom. He had pushed several of the back-row chairs together and was lying across them playing a mobile game. When he heard someone come in, he startled and hurriedly hid his phone, relaxing with a breath of relief only when he saw who it was. “How come you’re back early?”

Xia Leyi shook her head. “It’s a long story.”

“Please, cut the mystery.” Zhou Ce lowered his head and went back to his game, but then suddenly looked up again and said to Li Kuiyi, “Class rep, when I went to the office to ask our homeroom teacher for leave, I brought your journal notebooks back with me. But my foot makes things inconvenient, so I didn’t help you hand them out.”

Li Kuiyi had already noticed the thick stack of journals sitting on her desk. “Alright, thank you,” she said.

“Heh, a verbal thank you means nothing — just give me that can of cola,” Zhou Ce sniffled and started putting on a pitiful act. “I really want to go to the school store and buy some cola, but my foot…”

Xia Leyi and Zhou Fanghua both looked simultaneously toward the can of cola sitting on the windowsill. They both knew — that can of cola had been given by He Youyuan.

They were suddenly curious whether Li Kuiyi would give it to Zhou Ce.

“Alright.” Li Kuiyi reached over and picked up the can. It had long since lost its chill. “I don’t like cola anyway.”

This also served as an explanation to Xia Leyi and Zhou Fanghua for why she had never drunk it.

But why hadn’t she drunk it, exactly? Li Kuiyi didn’t quite know herself. Perhaps because Xia Leyi had gotten the can from He Youyuan on her behalf — if she had drunk it herself, that would have felt a bit odd.

Better to give it to Zhou Ce than to let it collect dust. After all, he was He Youyuan’s good brother, so surely neither of them would mind.

She handed the cola to Zhou Ce. He took it, curious. “If you don’t like cola, why did you buy it?”

Li Kuiyi kept a perfectly straight face. “I meant to grab a can of herbal tea. Picked up the wrong one.”

Zhou Fanghua: “…”

Xia Leyi: “…”

Zhou Ce: “Wow. You are truly gifted.”

With Zhou Fanghua and Xia Leyi’s help, Li Kuiyi quickly finished handing out the journal notebooks. Back at her seat, she opened her own.

She hadn’t expected Liu Xinzhao to have written much in it — hadn’t even expected her to have read it carefully.

But Liu Xinzhao had left her nearly half a page of writing.

“You really are a child with a very clever and curious mind.

“You describe yourself as a very ‘practical’ person and go to considerable lengths throughout your writing to prove this point with examples — but then, at the very end of your essay, you slyly leave behind a small dangling tail, as though waving it about with great flourish: Look here, I am an absolute idealist through and through, but I hide it very well, and none of you should even think about finding out.

“But I found out!

“Lovely idealist, you need not conceal yourself. You are free to revel in the delight that the world of ideals brings you, and you may forever reign over your own spiritual domain. Rather than wishing you to become a better version of yourself, I would rather wish that you can more fully become yourself.

“With warm regards — to both of us.”

Li Kuiyi read at a furious pace, scanning the words in nearly a single glance, then shut the journal with a sharp snap. Her heart was pounding wildly; a wave of joy and sweetness that was difficult to put into words surged up inside her.

She stuffed the journal into her bag, intending to read it again carefully once she got home.

After PE came Chinese class. Liu Xinzhao taught “Zhu Zhi Wu Retreats the Qin Army.”

She quickly noticed that something was different about Li Kuiyi. Her class representative had always been very attentive in class, but today was different — her eyes were bright and luminous, and she was gazing at Liu Xinzhao with an almost unblinking intensity: a look that was fiercely direct and burning, the kind one might see in a small animal.

What a truly strange child.