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Li Kuiyi turned around and found herself looking into a pair of eyes glinting with lazy amusement. A rush of questions flooded her mind at once, and for a moment she could only stare. The person before her, seeing her reaction, could not help pulling at the corner of his mouth. “That surprised?”
She gathered her thoughts and said, baffled: “What are you doing here? Aren’t you studying fine arts?”
“Fine arts students still have to take academic subjects, you know.” He glanced at her, apparently finding her question rather funny.
Li Kuiyi knew he had misunderstood her. She clarified: “I know fine arts students take academic subjects. What I meant was — does our school not have an arts class?”
He Youyuan gave a short, dismissive sound. “They don’t even take humanities students seriously — let alone arts students.” He paused, then added, “Arts students at our school are placed together into the humanities classes.” With that, he returned to the seat Li Kuiyi had wanted, dropped into it, and tilted his chin at her with a look of clear provocation.
Please. So childish.
Li Kuiyi ignored the provocation and ventured a guess: “So you were studying hard recently because you wanted to get into the humanities experimental class?”
“What else would it be for?” He crossed his hands behind his head and watched her at his leisure.
Fair enough — he had always looked so aimless, but apparently he was not entirely without a plan, Li Kuiyi thought. Thinking it over more carefully, she guessed it was probably because his maths, politics, and history scores had all taken a hit at the mid-term exam, which was why he had thrown himself into catching up. After all, to get into the humanities experimental class, you needed your combined six-subject scores — Chinese, maths, English, politics, history, and geography — to rank in the top thirty among all students who had chosen humanities.
Still, there was one thing that did not add up: “If you already knew you were going the humanities route, why did you buy my physics and chemistry notes?”
“Got them for Zhang Chuang.” He answered, then shifted tone, saying slowly and leisurely, “Finished with your questions, my lady?”
Who is your lady!
Li Kuiyi shot him a fierce glare, then turned indignantly and walked to the other window. Outside, the trunk of the dawn redwood cut straight through the view, dividing the window in two. In winter the sight was still relatively open, but when spring and summer came and the tree leafed out, there would probably be nothing to see at all.
There was nothing to be done — it was her own fault for not arriving earlier.
Li Kuiyi stood there hesitating for a while, then finally decided to accept the inferior option and take this seat.
At that moment, the teasing voice with its thread of delight sounded again: “You want my seat, don’t you?”
He had noticed after all. Li Kuiyi turned back, drew a measured breath, walked to stand before him, and steadied her voice: “Yes.” Since it was not right to take someone’s things without giving anything in return, she looked at him sincerely and said, “If you’re willing, you can name a condition. We can swap.”
“A condition?” He Youyuan did not even think about it — he simply tilted his chin at her. “Beg me.”
Not in her lifetime.
Li Kuiyi decided this person was truly insufferable. She was trying to have a proper, serious conversation with him, and all he could do was play these ridiculous games. She made a dismissive sound and turned to leave.
But before she had taken a step, he grabbed her backpack strap and pulled her back.
He Youyuan stood up from the seat, yanked his own bag out of the desk shelf, jerked his chin toward the seat, and said: “Sit.”
What was he playing at now?
She could not read him — she never could. Li Kuiyi clenched both hands into fists and tried to be calm: “I said — you can name a condition.”
“Owe me for now,” he said.
“That won’t do. What if you come up with some ridiculous condition later —” Li Kuiyi refused outright. But she never got to finish — He Youyuan simply reached out and pressed her down into the seat. He stood over her, looking down, “You owe it regardless.”
Then he threw his bag onto the desk behind hers and sat down there.
This person was absolutely shameless.
The only way to deal with shamelessness was to out-shameless it. Li Kuiyi swiveled to face him, assuming an air of perfect righteous indignation, and declared: “Since you forced the seat on me, I don’t owe you anything. If you ever try to claim some promise from me, don’t even think about it.”
She owes me.
He Youyuan leaned over his desk and thought, mulishly.
Actually, she owes him twice.
The other time: she never replied to his New Year’s greeting.
Li Kuiyi, seeing he was not speaking, was still prepared to argue the point further. She was just drawing breath to start when a new classmate stepped into the room, and she had to snap her mouth shut, turn around, take out the textbooks for the new semester, and begin previewing.
With only thirty seats, the room was comfortably full before six thirty.
Li Kuiyi looked around. True to the nature of a humanities class, almost everyone in sight was female; only a small scattering of boys were mixed in among them — she counted no more than five.
She had no idea who the homeroom teacher would be. She hoped it was Liu Xinzhao, though she suspected the chances were slim, as Liu Xinzhao would most likely be assigned to the sciences experimental class. Even if Liu Xinzhao was not the homeroom teacher, Li Kuiyi hoped she would still teach them Chinese. She loved listening to her lectures — last semester, when Liu Xinzhao taught “Encountering Sorrow,” Li Kuiyi had nearly wept, and had gone to find the complete text of the poem, memorizing every line of it.
Liu Xinzhao was not a particularly strict teacher, but the students respected her because she taught so well.
While she was thinking about all this, a male teacher walked into the classroom — short, round-faced, with a perpetual smile. Li Kuiyi recognized him: he had been the politics teacher for Class One. He appeared completely easygoing, but when he lost his temper, his outbursts were formidable. Behind his back, the students in Class One called him “the Smiling Tiger.”
The Smiling Tiger walked up to the podium. The students all looked up at him. He announced that he was the homeroom teacher of this class, and that his name was Jiang Jianbin.
“Jiang Jianbin?” came He Youyuan’s low, amused murmur from behind. “GG Bond?”
Li Kuiyi absolutely could not work out what connection there was between Jiang Jianbin and GG Bond — was it because they were both short and round? Then she sounded the homeroom teacher’s name silently in her head again — Jiang Jianbin. Initials: J-J-B.
Oh. This person was really something.
Should she call it quick thinking, or a head full of nonsense?
GG Bond — that is, Jiang Jianbin — skipped the formalities, gave a brief self-introduction, said a couple of words of welcome, and went straight into the regulations for the new semester.
This semester, the school was making adjustments to both academic study and physical exercise. First: the four-period evening study sessions would no longer be entirely for independent study; they were being restructured on a “two plus two” model — the first two periods for self-study, and the last two for classes. When this announcement was made, the students let out a collective groan of protest — if regular class time was eating into the evening study sessions, there would be barely any time to get through all the homework. Yi High School’s teachers had always been prolific homework-setters. In the old arrangement, even students as fast as Li Kuiyi — finishing their work and then going through the day’s material in review — would only just make it to lights-out.
Second: the school was abolishing the large-period running exercise and replacing it with standard morning calisthenics. This produced mixed reactions — those who cheered were mostly people who disliked running; those who groaned felt that doing calisthenics was embarrassing, the kind of thing you did in primary school, flapping your arms around. What kind of face was that?
Once all this had been announced, Jiang Jianbin picked up the class roster and said it was time to appoint class officers and subject representatives. It had to be said that this new homeroom teacher ran things with a certain personal authority — instead of an election, he simply made appointments by decree. He glanced at Li Kuiyi’s name at the top of the list: “Li Kuiyi — you’ll be class monitor.”
“Oh?” Li Kuiyi had been caught off guard, but she accepted the appointment. “Sure.”
“The second-ranked student is Zhang Yun. You’ll be the academic affairs representative.” Jiang Jianbin moved through the list with swift efficiency. “Who’s the tallest person in the class? Oh — what’s your name? He Youyuan, is it? Then you’re the sports representative…”
The rest of the class: “…”
Class officers assigned, groups divided, new timetables posted — while other classes were still doing introductions, this class had formally been established.
Jiang Jianbin then produced a stack of index cards and distributed one to each student. On the card were fields for name, student number, and dream university. Once filled in, the cards were to be stuck to the upper right corner of each desk as a constant source of motivation.
Li Kuiyi held the card without rushing to fill it in. Something had just occurred to her.
She thought of what Su Jianlin had mentioned — wanting to come to the school to give a talk. Could this be a chance to reach out to more alumni, invite them to the school, and organize a sharing event? It was genuinely difficult for high school students to clarify their future directions. Those universities, those departments — they were little more than names, unfamiliar and remote. Even if you wrote a “goal” on the card, it might not carry any real motivating power. And in principle, such an event was entirely feasible: the new year had just passed, and most university students were still at home.
With that in mind, as soon as she got home after school that evening, she messaged Su Jianlin and asked whether any more of his classmates would be interested in doing something like this.
Su Jianlin: I’ll need to ask my teammates.
Li Kuiyi: Sure.
A long time passed before Su Jianlin replied again: “They said they’d be willing to make it something bigger and more formal. They can help reach out to their own high school classmates. The one thing that needs to be confirmed is — can you persuade your teachers?”
Li Kuiyi: There’s probably about an 80% chance. I’ll talk to the year-level head about it tomorrow. If he agrees, we keep going; if not, we cut our losses.
Su Jianlin: Alright.
To be on the safe side, Li Kuiyi spent that night writing a full event proposal.
Event theme. Background. Objectives. Guiding principles. Since this was going to be placed in front of Chen Guoming, she wrote it in formal terms, piling in every impressive-sounding phrase she could think of, making every effort to convey the importance and necessity of the event. For the logistics — timing, venue, audience, host, equipment, detailed schedule, risk management, backup plans — she offered suggestions, though she noted that all final decisions would rest with the school.
To keep corrections to a minimum, she wrote with great care. By the time the full proposal was finished, it was past three in the morning.
Early the next morning, Li Kuiyi brought the proposal with her and knocked on Chen Guoming’s office door.
Chen Guoming: “…”
Right then — let us see what sort of trouble our year’s top student has cooked up for us this time.