Back home, Li Kuiyi took her phone out of the drawer, intending to message He Youyuan as she’d promised. To her surprise, his message had already beaten her to it.
He Youyuan: Not home yet?
Li Kuiyi: Just got in.
He Youyuan: OK.
Li Kuiyi set the phone face-down on the desk and pulled out the textbook she hadn’t finished reviewing during evening study. She went through everything she’d learned that day, and made sure to memorise the sections that required memorisation. The new homeroom teacher placed enormous weight on how well students had their textbooks committed to memory — he liked to spring pop quizzes on unsuspecting students during morning reading, and not just for his own subject of politics. He’d pick up whatever textbook was sitting on your desk, flip to a passage marked for memorisation, and demand you recite it on the spot. If you couldn’t do it the first time, you stood through the rest of morning reading. Fail the second time, and you stood for the entire morning’s classes. A third failure meant listening from outside the classroom window. Students complained bitterly that it was cruel, yet had no choice but to study with their nerves on edge, offering fervent prayers every morning before entering the classroom that they wouldn’t be the unlucky one called on.
By the time she’d finished reviewing, it was past half past eleven. Li Kuiyi hurried to wash up, and when she came back and picked up her phone to put it away in the drawer, she found He Youyuan had sent a few more messages.
He Youyuan: The glasses look good.
A few minutes later.
He Youyuan: Was the cake good?
Another few minutes.
He Youyuan: What page are we supposed to do in the math workbook?
And finally, sounding as though he’d run out of patience:
He Youyuan: Li Kuiyi, message me back.
Not going to.
Li Kuiyi decided he was just stirring up trouble for its own sake, the same way he’d insisted her math test paper was somehow with her. She locked the phone briskly into the drawer and went to bed.
She tossed and turned for a long time, unable to sleep. A strange thread of thought wound through her mind and refused to leave.
That thing… was He Youyuan, perhaps… fond of her?
Li Kuiyi was aware that assuming someone else had feelings for you sounded rather self-absorbed. But He Youyuan’s behaviour toward her lately had been genuinely strange — strange enough to plant this suspicion.
Still — what could he possibly like about her?
It wasn’t that she thought poorly of herself. She simply felt there had never been any soil between her and He Youyuan in which feelings could take root. To develop feelings for someone, you had to at least be able to see something worthwhile in them. But she and He Youyuan were always bickering, exposing each other’s flaws rather than anything else.
If Fang Zhixiao were someone she could rely on for matters of the heart, Li Kuiyi might have turned to her — after all, everyone said that the person caught up in something is the last to see it clearly. Unfortunately, Fang Zhixiao was wildly unreliable about these things. Telling her would only lead to Fang Zhixiao behaving like an excited great ape in the jungle, beating her chest and howling: “Don’t even question it — he definitely likes you!”
Besides, Fang Zhixiao was currently nursing a bruised heart of her own. Last time she’d gone to dinner with Su Jianlin, Fang Zhixiao had worked herself up to asking, in a voice laced with nerves: “You used to study science too, right? So — if I ever have questions I can’t solve, could I come to you? Don’t worry, I wouldn’t bother you all the time — just occasionally… occasionally ask.” Su Jianlin’s response was: “Next semester my schedule is very full, and I don’t really check my messages much. You’d be better off asking your teachers or classmates.”
That was about as direct a rejection as it could get. After dinner, Fang Zhixiao had spent a long while on the phone with Li Kuiyi, crying and insisting she’d had her heartbroken.
Even if the crying involved no actual tears, Li Kuiyi thought this probably wasn’t the right moment to add to her troubles.
She pressed her hands to her head and sighed. All this thinking and she still couldn’t figure it out. If only He Youyuan were as easy to work out as a maths problem. And even if she did conclude that he liked her — what then? She didn’t like him back. There was nothing she could offer in response.
Whether or not to respond was actually the smaller concern. What Li Kuiyi really worried about was this: if He Youyuan did like her, he’d almost certainly be bothering her every single day. His seat was right behind hers — too convenient a position for making trouble.
She turned it over aimlessly for a while until drowsiness finally began to creep in. At last, drifting off, she comforted herself with the thought that one ought to look on the bright side — what if He Youyuan didn’t like her at all?
The next morning’s reading session was Chinese class. While the teacher had yet to arrive, Li Kuiyi ran back through the politics and history she’d memorised the night before to reinforce her memory. Once the teacher came in, she switched to the Chinese textbook and started reciting Pipa Xing. Mid-recitation, something hit her book from behind — a paper ball, landing squarely on its pages. Li Kuiyi glanced up at the teacher at the podium, confirmed she wasn’t looking this way, and quietly unfolded it.
He Youyuan’s handwriting. He Youyuan’s tone.
“Why didn’t you reply to me!”
Where a question mark belonged, he’d used an exclamation mark — a signal that he was expressing considerable displeasure. Seeing that, the thought surfaced in Li Kuiyi’s mind once more, but she pushed it aside with a shake of her head: even if you like me, she thought, that gives you no right to be angry. She didn’t want to get into it with him, so she picked up her pen, wrote three characters — Didn’t see it — and tossed the paper ball quietly back onto the desk behind her.
A little while later, the paper ball came flying back.
“I forgive you.”
Li Kuiyi: “……”
She could practically picture the expression on He Youyuan’s face as he wrote that — chin slightly lifted, looking both smug and insufferably pleased with himself, as though he’d bestowed some enormous favour on another person. But she hadn’t explained herself to him. She hadn’t apologised. What exactly was there for him to forgive?!
Truly beyond help. The most self-important person she’d ever encountered.
After more than two weeks together, the students in the class had gradually started to feel at home with each other. Even someone like Li Kuiyi, who didn’t go out of her way to socialise, now knew everyone’s face and name — perhaps partly because the class was so small.
A new set of unspoken understandings began to take shape. For instance, the nicknames He Youyuan had given the homeroom teacher and the Chinese teacher had somehow spread through the whole class. At first only a handful of boys used them; then everyone started privately referring to those two teachers as “GGBond” and “Xu Fuji.”
Then there was the Thursday with four consecutive maths classes — including a double period — made even more insufferable by the maths teacher’s habit of slipping in remarks that subtly looked down on arts students. The class collectively christened it “Black Thursday.”
Even though they’d chosen humanities, the sciences hadn’t entirely disappeared. To prepare for the academic proficiency exam in the second year of high school, the school still arranged one class per week each for physics, chemistry, and biology. No one paid much attention during these lessons, and the teachers themselves didn’t seem particularly invested — they’d cover roughly half the content and leave the rest of the time for students to catch up on other work.
Art and music classes were gone entirely. Only physical education remained at its full two sessions a week. Since they were still only in first year and teachers hadn’t yet started poaching each other’s time, the PE teacher essentially never called in sick.
The new PE teacher’s surname was Lin, and she was immediately popular with the class. The reason was simple enough — she was strikingly attractive, tall, with a cropped haircut that gave her an easy confidence, and she wore her athletic gear in a way that made the whole look naturally elegant. The girls in the class didn’t discriminate when it came to appreciating good looks — and while admiring handsome boys required a certain degree of discretion, appreciating a cool female teacher could be done quite openly. A few of the bolder girls even went up to chat with Teacher Lin during free activity time and came back with more details: she’d once served in the military and only become a PE teacher after leaving the forces.
Because the school had moved daily exercise to the morning break routine, PE class was now used to teach the students a routine to “Romantic Cherry Blossom” by Guo Richeng.
For many high school students, learning a dance routine was a source of mild mortification. Nobody wanted to look awkward in front of others. And there was a strange logic at play — trying hard was seen as embarrassing, while doing the moves half-heartedly, arms swinging vaguely and feet shuffling, was somehow considered cool.
Teacher Lin noticed the class’s reluctant performance and laughed openly. She said she didn’t exactly love this routine either, but the school required it, and besides, there’d be an inspection from provincial officials soon — a well-executed routine would reflect well on the school. She promised that once they’d learned it properly, she’d teach them a military combat form in future lessons.
Fifteen and sixteen-year-olds were still fairly easy to win over. The class broke into enthusiastic calls of “you’d better keep your word!” and threw themselves into the routine with considerably more energy. Teacher Lin had clearly won them over, and in tribute, they began calling her “Brother Lin.”
Half the lesson was spent on the routine; the second half was free activity.
For Li Kuiyi, the dance routine was infinitely preferable to running — still tiring, but not in the agonising way running was. And after sitting in a classroom for so long, stretching her limbs felt genuinely good. She wiped the sweat from her forehead and went to rest against the green mesh fence at the edge of the field.
She’d barely settled onto the rubberised ground when a basketball came rolling toward her feet.
Li Kuiyi looked up. He Youyuan was jogging toward her. Unlike the others, who were bundled up, he wore only a hoodie under his school jacket and didn’t seem to feel the cold at all. As he drew closer, she saw he was wearing the basketball glasses she’d given him. She wasn’t sure if it was the face behind them, but the glasses somehow looked even better on him.
He Youyuan crouched down and scooped up the ball, then rubbed the tip of his nose with his fingers, looking mildly awkward: “We’re going to play basketball.”
“Oh.”
Good for you — what did that have to do with her?
He glanced at her, and seeing she showed no particular reaction, he gave her a light, sidelong look: “Don’t you want to see how well your basketball glasses hold up under pressure?”
Was he implying…
Li Kuiyi shook her head quickly: “There’s no after-sales service on this.”
He Youyuan: “……”
Who asked for after-sales service?
He straightened up, seeming to not know what else to say, and awkwardly scratched the back of his head. At that moment, some of the boys called out from behind him: “You coming or not? Are we playing or what?”
What to do? His teammates were getting impatient.
He Youyuan gritted his teeth, bouncing the basketball from hand to hand, his gaze drifting vaguely toward the sky in an attempt at casualness. “So… do you want to come watch me play?”