When Lin Zhexia entered the door, Lin He scolded: “Why are you back so late?”

Lin Zhexia changed her shoes at the entrance and said: “I… I went to the bookstore with Chi Yao.”

“Today, our Chinese teacher talked about essay writing and mentioned a set of very helpful books. She suggested we buy them to read, but we couldn’t find them after searching the bookstore.”

Lin He didn’t suspect anything: “Is your allowance enough? If you need to buy books and don’t have enough money, remember to tell me.”

Lin Zhexia: “It’s enough.”

When Lin Zhexia put down her backpack and sat at the dining table to eat, Lin He asked another question: “Why is your face so red?”

Lin Zhexia hadn’t noticed her blushing.

She belatedly raised her hand to touch her face, only then realizing it was indeed a bit hot.

“Maybe it’s too hot outside,” she said, “the temperature has been very high lately.”

The weather had indeed been getting hotter recently.

Lin He didn’t think much of it and put some food into her bowl with chopsticks: “That’s true, it’s been very hot lately. You should be careful not to get heatstroke.”

That night, Chen Lin sent her a message.

Chen Lin: Did you go?

Lin Zhexia replied: I went.

Chen Lin: I told you, it doesn’t hurt at all, right?

Lin Zhexia: …Mm

It didn’t hurt.

Because she wasn’t the one who got pierced.

Chen Lin enthusiastically asked again: What kind of earring did you choose?

Chen Lin: I like those dangling ones

Chen Lin: But that style is too obvious, afraid Old Xu would warn me

Lin Zhexia didn’t know how to explain to her, so she skipped the topic.

She reminded Chen Lin: Stop playing with your phone, we have a lot of homework today, hurry and do your homework.

Lin Zhexia temporarily put aside the fact that she had tricked Chi Yao into getting his ear pierced. Even while doing homework, the silver cross and Chi Yao’s face would still occasionally appear before her eyes.

Before bed, she opened her chat with Chi Yao and honestly admitted her mistake-

I’m sorry

Holding her phone, enduring her red-tipped ears, she typed letter by letter: Bro-ther.

However, after typing it, she still didn’t dare to send it.

This title seemed to have a special magic.

After all, calling someone “brother” who isn’t your brother feels very strange.

She turned over in her blanket, scratched her messy hair, and finally deleted those two characters.

In the end, she sent a term they commonly used between them-

Daddy orz-

The next day, the first thing Chen Lin did at school was to look at Lin Zhexia’s ears.

However, the girl’s earlobes were still clean, with nothing on them.

Chen Lin asked: “Where’s your ear piercing?”

Lin Zhexia: “It’s a long story…”

Chen Lin: “Then make it short.”

Lin Zhexia was silent for a few seconds: “The short version is, the piercing ended up on someone else’s ear.”

Chen Lin: “???”

Before Chen Lin could recover from this answer, Tang Shuxuan had just entered the classroom. She arrived late today, coming in right as the bell rang, and her first words were an unusual curse: “Holy shit.”

The next sentence was.

“Chi Yao is wearing an earring today.”

For high school students, getting an ear piercing was somewhat taboo. It was still acceptable for girls to secretly get piercings, as many teachers and students could understand, but boys wearing earrings, not just in their grade, but perhaps in the entire school history, you might not find a second person.

Moreover, the person wearing the earring was Chi Yao.

This person was eye-catching enough just napping on his desk during class breaks without doing anything else.

So Tang Shuxuan’s feelings when she learned about this were extremely shocking.

Lin Zhexia, on the other hand, was relatively calm. As the instigator, she asked a bit guiltily: “How do you know?”

“Not just me, the whole grade knows.”

Tang Shuxuan said, “To school, people around me were discussing this. Also, two girls in the next class have already gone crazy over this.”

Lin Zhexia: “…”

Tang Shuxuan gave her impression: “Before coming, I deliberately went by Class 1’s door to take a look. To be honest, if I didn’t consider this person’s personality issues, Chi Yao wearing an earring is at a level where I could ask for his contact information a thousand and eight hundred times, and even years after graduation, I would still feel my heart flutter when remembering it in midnight dreams.”

Chen Lin also reacted, poking Lin Zhexia with her pen: “That ear piercing of yours, could it be… It’s on Chi Yao’s ear?”

Lin Zhexia said, embarrassedly: “You guessed right.”

Because their class had unsatisfactory final exam results last semester, as soon as the eleventh grade began, Class 7 was arranged for an extra mock exam.

The homeroom teacher stayed in the classroom almost the entire day.

Lin Zhexia couldn’t spare extra time during breaks and had no way to find Chi Yao in Class 1, so she could only indirectly get updates about Class 1 from others.

She learned from others that Chi Yao seemed to have been punished to stand in the hallway by the grade director, Old Liu, because of the earring.

“Standing punishment? That seems excessive.”

“Don’t many girls in our school have ear piercings too?”

“…”

“Girls and boys are still different, right? A boy wearing an earring, the school probably can’t ignore it.”

Amid the quiet discussions.

Someone said, “That’s not punishment, it feels like a public exhibition.”

“When he stands in the corridor, four or five classes in a row are all looking at him. My friend is in Class 2 and told me that many people in their class were distracted looking out the window during class today.”

Meanwhile, downstairs at the door of Class 1 for the eleventh grade.

After the class bell rang, students quickly entered their classrooms, and the corridor was soon empty except for one conspicuous figure.

Class 1 was located at the end of the long corridor. The young man leaned against the wall, holding his phone in one hand and a textbook dangling in the other.

He lowered his head, sending someone a message.

Xu Ting was also looking at his phone in the classroom.

After Chi Yao tapped him, he immediately replied:-

What’s up?

The cat avatar sent a message: Got a pen?

Cat avatar: If you do, throw one out

Xu Ting: Coincidentally, as they say, poor students have plenty of stationery. I lack everything except pens.

Xu Ting even took a photo of his desk: [Image]

Xu Ting: Which one do you want?

Xu Ting: Do you want the simple classic Deli brand ballpoint pen, or the dignified and grand Japanese Pilot?

The cat avatar replied with two words: Idiot

Then two more words: Whatever

Xu Ting, before the teacher entered the classroom, raised his hand high, holding a pen, and threw it towards the window. The person outside casually caught it.

After throwing the pen, Xu Ting couldn’t help but message him: But what’s with the earring?

The cat avatar simply and concisely replied: Forgot to take it off

After replying, Chi Yao turned off his phone screen, then held his book in one hand and continued leaning against the wall, listening to the class.

He did forget to take it off.

After getting his ear pierced yesterday, dragged along by a certain cowardly debt-dodger, he forgot there was something extra on his ear when he woke up the next morning.

After all, in his past sixteen years, he had never worn such a thing.

It was only after entering the classroom that he realized more people were staring at him than before.

Until Xu Ting came in and shouted: “Damn, that earring looks cool.”

Right after, Old Liu was patrolling the corridor and immediately noticed the commotion on their side. He pushed through the crowd, saw where everyone’s gaze was focused, then, with an air of deep fury, his pupils trembling, “Chi Yao—come to my office!”

Thinking of this, he casually listened to the class outside while using the black pen to follow along with the teacher inside, making a few marks on the book page.

Lin Zhexia waited until evening after school to find time to look for Chi Yao.

Her class’s last period was reviewing the exam papers graded that day. The teacher kept them for nearly twenty minutes overtime. By the time she packed up her things, Chi Yao had been waiting for her at the corridor corner for a long time.

“Our class was going over test papers,” she explained.

Chi Yao had just finished a game on his phone and said, “I grew ears.”

Lin Zhexia: “Our teacher Xu does have a loud voice.”

After a while, she added: “Actually, you standing here waiting for me, could hear him explaining problems, reinforcing your knowledge, so it wasn’t a waste of time.”

Chi Yao: “More than that, I could even hear some comedy.”

As he spoke, he imitated the dialogue between her and Teacher Xu from the classroom: “‘Lin Zhexia, stand up and answer, how do you solve this problem?'”

“‘Teacher, I got this wrong.'”

“‘I know you got it wrong, that’s why I’m calling on you, come on, tell us.'”

“‘But… teacher, I got it wrong because I don’t know how to do it.'”

Finally, he commented: “Quite entertaining, definitely not a waste of time.”

Lin Zhexia: “…”

She couldn’t be bothered to argue with him about this, and almost instinctively, looked at Chi Yao’s right ear.

The earring on his ear had been removed, now there was only a slightly reddish, not fully healed piercing.

She asked: “Did Old Liu scold you?”

Chi Yao made an “ah” sound, not caring much: “He just said a few words to me.”

She had always felt that Chi Yao’s role as a top student was very unconventional.

The necessary conditions of a good student and some “bad student” characteristics had an extremely subtle fusion in him.

Lin Zhexia: “Where’s your earring?”

Chi Yao: “Took it off.”

Then he added, “Old Liu doesn’t allow wearing it.”

As expected.

She casually said as she walked down the stairs with her backpack: “It’s a bit of a shame, now we won’t be able to see it anymore. That earring looked good on you.”

Because Chi Yao was punished for wearing the earring, Lin Zhexia felt somewhat guilty, so after school, she voluntarily took some extra money from her allowance and spent a “fortune” to treat Chi Yao to an iced latte.

On the bus ride home, the two weren’t sitting together, but one in front of the other.

Lin Zhexia felt a bit bored sitting alone. Looking at the scenery outside the window, she suddenly remembered the website Chen Lin had shared with her when they first entered high school.

With a feeling she couldn’t quite explain, she dug out the forum website from her chat history.

She didn’t need to specifically search for keywords.

After opening it, the school forum homepage was full of discussion threads about Chi Yao.

Even though they had already advanced to eleventh grade, this person’s discussion level in the school only increased, never decreased.

The thread with the most replies, pushed to the top, was about the “earring.”

1L: [Is there anyone who doesn’t know? Chi Yao came to school wearing an earring today.

2L: [Probably everyone knows by now]

3L: [Just found out, thanks, rushing to pretend to go to the office to ask teachers questions after class, but passing by Class 1 to take a look]

4L: [Those who want to see, hurry up, Old Liu will be coming to inspect soon.]

…

Lin Zhexia’s finger touched the phone screen, slowly scrolling down.

The discussion content quickly changed from “hurry to see” to “standing punishment.”

Someone had even secretly taken a blurry photo of the punishment.

Lin Zhexia opened it to see the school building’s long corridor. At the end of the corridor, a tall figure could vaguely be seen. Even though it was blurred into pixels, it was still obvious that this person must be very good-looking.

Lin Zhexia looked at this photo for a while, then secretly pressed the save image option.

She operated very quickly, as if afraid someone would discover her.

After saving it, she continued browsing the forum.

The later discussion content had much less.

146L: [Let’s disperse, the earring is gone, the punishment is over, all that’s left is me, who kept getting distracted in class today]

147L: [Distracted in class +1]

The remaining content surprisingly matched her thoughts.

148L: [But I didn’t see enough, the earring appeared too briefly]

149L: [Why does Old Liu have such good eyesight? I hate it.]

150L: [Will we never see it again?]

151L: [Definitely won’t see it again, Old Liu already talked with him, he won’t wear it again]

…

After finishing browsing the forum, she lowered her head and took a sip of her milk tea-

The next day was the weekend.

Lin Zhexia slept in and only got up at noon.

When she woke up, Lin He and Wei Ping were already gone.

After a simple meal, she planned to do her homework.

But after doing just a few problems, she found this math assignment was a bit difficult.

Without thinking, she tapped Chi Yao’s profile picture on WeChat-

Are you there?

The other side replied quickly-?

Lin Zhexia typed:-

You must be lonely doing homework alone-

Professional homework companion, delivery in ten minutes, press 1 if needed.

The other side replied with a number: 2

…

Lin Zhexia didn’t care what number he replied with; she packed up her homework and rushed to Chi Yao’s house.

She boldly rang the doorbell at Chi Yao’s door, shouting through the door: “Hello—I’m the professional homework companion you ordered, please sign for delivery.”

Chi Yao opened the door a bit slowly.

At the moment the door opened, the first thing Lin Zhexia saw wasn’t anything else, but the silver cross earring on Chi Yao’s right earlobe.

After changing out of his school uniform, Chi Yao’s visual impact seemed even stronger than before.

Lin Zhexia couldn’t help but take a few extra looks before being brought back to reality by this person’s words: “How do I process a return?”

“…”

“Returns are not allowed,” Lin Zhexia said, “this is forced buying and selling.”

Chi Yao looked at her without saying more, stepping aside to let her in.

Lin Zhexia, familiar with the place, moved a chair and sat down on the other side of Chi Yao’s desk: “This problem, I don’t understand. Can you explain it?”

Chi Yao, watching her point at the problem with her pen, said: “Do you think I’m a reading machine?”

Lin Zhexia said, “Chi Yao-brand reading machine, whatever you don’t understand, point to it.”

He reached out his hand: “Pay up.”

Lin Zhexia: “Let’s negotiate, can I freeload?”

Chi Yao laughed coldly: “Dream on.”

Although Chi Yao said this, he still explained the problem to her.

He took the pen from her hand and calculated the formula on a piece of paper.

His formula derivation was concise and clear. Lin Zhexia stared at the draft paper and understood halfway through.

Chi Yao was still writing.

After understanding, Lin Zhexia shifted her gaze elsewhere.

The earring was very close to her.

She thought of those people in the forum post who, like her, lamented that it was a shame they couldn’t see it anymore.

Then she belatedly realized.

She could see it.

It seemed now she was the only one who could see it.