At the morning assembly that day, every child in the hearing-impaired senior class received a box of La Maison chocolates.
At first, Chen Qingning thought the class had thirty or forty students, so she had prepared several portions tucked in her bag—one or two pieces per person. Now, with only this handful of students, it was just enough to go around.
The children were overjoyed, holding the boxes lovingly in their hands, then all eyes turned in unison to Yu Bei.
Only after receiving the teacher's nod of approval did they tuck the chocolate boxes into their desks or backpacks.
Chen Qingning retreated to Yu Bei's side, beaming with pride. "No one in your class has a nut allergy, right?"
Yu Bei thought briefly. "No."
Chen Qingning continued to fish for praise. "Feeling like this Chen Qingning might actually have something going on?"
Yu Bei clapped his hands, strode back to the podium, and signed, "Line up outside."
The children obeyed instantly, filing out to the corridor in perfect order within seconds, arranged from shortest to tallest. The one at the front was a boy, a head shorter than Chen Qingning, thin and small.
Chen Qingning followed out, puzzled, and asked Yu Bei, "Why can you talk to them?"
Yu Bei glanced at her. "You can too."
Chen Qingning went, "Huh?" "Why didn't you say so earlier? They can hear?"
Yu Bei said, "Mostly can't. The one at the back reads lips. The girl second in line has a hearing aid and can communicate bilingually."
Chen Qingning: "She knows English too?"
Yu Bei let out a very soft sigh and didn't answer.
During the introduction, he never turned to point at any student, yet he made no mistakes—he knew them all like the back of his hand.
Chen Qingning matched faces to names one by one.
The students who were acknowledged would shyly look away, then respond with a pursed smile.
When they reached the stairwell, Yu Bei paused to let the neighboring class go down first. That class had even fewer students, and they were noticeably shorter than Yu Bei's. The moment they spotted Chen Qingning in her outlandish outfit, their eyes went wide as saucers, and some even let out odd giggles.
Leading that class was Yu Wenlei.
Chen Qingning waved with practiced ease. "Sister Yu!"
Yu Wenlei smiled back at her.
She lingered, directing her students to go ahead. The older children followed the little munchkins down in an orderly stream.
The two "half" teachers fell in behind, with Yu Wenlei walking side by side with Chen Qingning, asking how she felt meeting the students for the first time.
Chen Qingning was all smiles. "Great! Everyone really likes me."
Yu Wenlei relaxed into a gentle smile. "That's good to hear."
Yu Bei walked behind, just two steps up, his gaze landing on the tops of the two ladies' heads—on the left, a neat low bun; on the right, hair shimmering and sparkling.
He stared. Whether she'd sprinkled glitter or something on it, it looked like dandruff that had mutated.
That morning, after tousling her curls, Chen Qingning still felt her crown was too dull, not eye-catching enough. So she simply grabbed her pearl eye shadow and patted it all over her head, swaying left and right under the light to confirm she sparkled brighter than a diamond from head to toe before sashaying out the door.
For the first time, Chen Qingning felt a school could be this small. The playground, already modest in size, left no extra room once a few dozen teachers and students spread out across it.
Everyone was in such close quarters that you couldn't avoid seeing one another. She stood in the wind, gazing off to the left, and instantly spotted her roommate Qu Xiao.
Qu Xiao was leading a group of students, looking like a completely different person from the one in the dorm.
Out in the freezing cold, her face was calm, standing straight and tall, exuding authority without a hint of anger.
The students in her vicinity showed noticeably less interest in Chen Qingning than the hearing-impaired group did.
Chen Qingning found it odd.
She glanced at Yu Bei beside her and nudged his hand in his pocket with her elbow. "Oi."
Cold, dark pupils turned toward her.
Chen Qingning asked, "What class is Xiao'er teaching?"
Yu Bei paused a beat before understanding she meant Qu Xiao. "Intellectual Disability Middle Class."
"What do they do?"
"…"
Yu Bei didn't want to be her answering machine.
She had plenty of tricks, and her questions matched them in number.
The moment the morning exercise music started, Chen Qingning was beside herself with glee.
On the lush green mat, the hearing-impaired class's movements were passable, but the other section was a whole different story—"chaos" wouldn't even begin to describe it. It was worse than she herself had been back in school.
And Qu Xiao wasn't angry in the slightest.
Chen Qingning swayed to the "1, 2, 3, 4" beat, gently rolling her hips and bobbing her head, all while watching Qu Xiao, who remained utterly composed.
In fact, every teacher overseeing the morning exercises stood unmoved by the commotion.
"You're filming a TikTok or what?" Yu Bei shot her a sidelong glance, as if she'd turned the place into a dance floor.
Chen Qingning stopped moving but kept her mouth running. "No TikTok here—my eyes only see Teacher Yu's eyes."
When a person is rendered truly speechless, they almost want to laugh.
There were two of Yu Bei's classes that morning—one Chinese, one math, each thirty-five minutes long. Chen Qingning flipped through the schedule Yu Bei had printed for her, checking it back and forth. "No English?"
Yu Bei packed up his teaching materials. "No."
"They don't have to learn it?" she said in an indignant tone, clicking her champagne-gold ballpoint pen with a series of taps. "Why do we have to learn English?"
Yu Bei's brow furrowed slightly. "Why do you get to ask questions like that?"
His tone was flat, but Chen Qingning could sense emotion beneath his words, and that emotion seemed to bite her for no reason. She lifted her face. "Did I say something wrong? Chinese people don't have to learn English, you know. Not learning English isn't against the law."
Yu Bei turned and walked off.
The Chinese language class for the advanced hearing-impaired group was simple and easy to follow. The textbook Chen Qingning had was secondhand—the pages weren't worn, but the margins were filled with notes in elegant, flowing handwriting, identical to the handwriting on the board. Yet Yu Bei rarely wrote by hand, mostly using an electronic screen instead.
Because he used both his hands and his voice, Chen Qingning had no trouble following along, and neither did the students in front of her. The man's hands were long and slender, with prominent bones, rising and falling behind the lectern like white doves gliding across a music stage. The air conditioning was on indoors, and he had taken off his windbreaker, leaving only a smoke-gray knit sweater underneath—a crew neck, revealing a sliver of white undershirt at the collar. It was clean, and all the students looked up at him.
What a plain man, yet somehow perfectly put together.
As if that face, that build, were meant to be dressed just so—proper, serious, no frills.
But beauty before her eyes, a pleasant voice in her ears, and elegant hands to admire—none of it could hold off the tide of drowsiness. Chen Qingning listened until her eyelids grew heavy, as if she were back in middle school, still the class troublemaker seated alone in the back, neighbor to the blackboard. Sometimes she'd pout and twirl a pen between her fingers, daydreaming: If only she'd been in the same grade as Shen Can.
Then she could have gone head-to-head with him on the same stage.
Her pretend note-taking was filled with not a single word—only a winding trail of bizarre "Sanskrit" squiggles. At the most hazy moment, a male voice with crisp, precise diction recited:
"A patch of earth, a tree, a field… They make my eyes comfortable, make my breathing easy, make my heart unfold."
…
The bell for the end of class didn't wake Chen Qingning. Shy kids observed her from a distance, while a few bolder ones gathered around her, quickly signing to each other and chattering in uneven syllables. Their different-colored clothes made them look like a flock of different kinds of birds.
The only girl wearing a hearing aid—in a red sweater with a single ponytail—waved at Yu Bei from behind the lectern, pointed at Chen Qingning, and signed a question: should they wake her up?
Yu Bei replied, "Let her sleep."
The kids exchanged knowing glances and quieted down.
Chen Qingning slept all the way into the middle of the second period. When she woke, the world had changed—Chinese had become math. At least it wasn't English. She patted her chest in relief, scratched her head, and was about to stretch her arms out to her heart's content when she realized she was in class. She stopped herself, ran a hand through her smooth hair, and sheepishly lowered her arms.
Her left contact lens seemed to have slipped. She pried her eyelid open to nudge it back into place, then idly spun the pen in her hand.
The deaf class wasn't as quiet as she'd imagined. Two kids were especially eager, going back and forth with Yu Bei, no less loud than the show-off classmates she'd had before—except their voices rose and fell in odd pitches, some even several keys higher.
If you didn't listen closely, you couldn't make out a word.
If you listened closely, you still couldn't.
Everything before her felt off. The speakers weren't at ease, and the listeners weren't either.
Chen Qingning rubbed her ear, forcing herself to adapt.
She didn't like these sounds.
She didn't like anything that made it hard for her to relax.
Chen Qingning stared blankly at the blackboard.
Yu Bei paid her no attention at all—aside from the one glance he'd given her when she first lifted her head, he focused entirely on the students, interacting with them warmly.
When asking questions or writing, he'd step down from the lectern and go around checking and guiding each student, patiently, without a hint of annoyance.
At that, she cast him a look of longing, practically sparking with desperation: She was a student too, wasn't she? Why didn't he come check on her?
When Yu Bei's morning classes ended, Chen Qingning found some peace, leaning against the desk behind his and scrolling through her phone.
This office was on the narrow side, with only three desks arranged front to back. On the other side of the aisle were a water dispenser and a filing cabinet.
Besides Yu Bei and Yu Wenlei, there was also a female teacher who taught rhythm and art, surnamed Yuan. She'd only exchanged a brief glance with Chen Qingning.
She fit Chen Qingning's stereotype of that kind of teacher perfectly—not one to go bare-faced, more put-together than the others. Her eyebrows were drawn thin and arched, her lips coated in a lipstick that flattered her skin tone. She wore a milky-white cropped down jacket and slim-fit flared jeans—slender, and very fresh-looking.
A hive doesn't have two queens.
Chen Qingning suddenly felt a crisis looming.
She recalled Teacher Yuan's features, then lowered her head to send Qu Xiao a WeChat message: How old is Teacher Yuan?
Her intelligence-network backbone was presumably in class, because no reply came.
The office was empty.
Sister Yu was teaching, Yuan was teaching, and Yu Bei was nowhere to be seen.
He'd just left her here alone, completely ignoring her situation.
She glanced around at the textbooks and handouts on the desk—wasn't he afraid she'd turn into a paper shredder?
A puff of air was pushed back and forth between Chen Qingning's cheeks. Bored out of her mind, she smoothed out the class schedule and circled the subjects Yu Bei was responsible for: Chinese, math, history, PE…
He was in charge of PE too?
Her pen stopped short at that. Chen Qingning pushed the door open and leaned over the railing to look for him. Gazing out at the playground, there was indeed a class doing outdoor activities, but with pitifully few students, and the adult leading them was stocky—not much like Yu Bei.
"Yu Bei, where are you? Teacher Yu, where are you…" She lowered her head, pressing the voice message button and muttering like a chant.
"Looking for me?" A voice suddenly pressed close from behind her head.
Chen Qingning turned around in pleasant surprise, about to put on a few airs, when she saw an old man standing beside him—not exactly kind-faced, but not one of those fat-headed, big-eared types she'd see at her father's dinner parties.
In Chen Yu'en's words, he looked like a cultured man at first glance.
Chen Qingning immediately switched to her adoring junior mode: "And this uncle is…"
"Principal Lin." Yu Bei introduced him succinctly.
"Aren't you cold?" The white-haired uncle seemed to know who she was, showing concern for her thin attire as he spoke gently: "Miss Chen."
"I'm not cold." Chen Qingning sized him up: "You're the principal here?"
"Yes, I am." He answered with a smile: "I've heard your father talk about you all the time—glad to finally meet you today."
Chen Qingning was taken aback for a moment: "I'm sure it wasn't anything good."
Lin Yuzhang shook his head: "He said you're pretty."
Chen Qingning pressed her lips flat and muttered: "A fact anyone can see isn't exactly a compliment."
Lin Yuzhang chuckled out loud, nodding in agreement with her point: "Miss Chen, are you settling in alright since you've arrived?"
Chen Qingning, emboldened by borrowed authority, seized the chance to complain: "It's fine, my roommate is really nice—it's just—"
She shot a sidelong glance at Yu Bei, puffing up indignantly: "Teacher Yu hasn't been very kind to me."
"Oh?" The old man was slightly surprised, looking at Yu Bei: "You haven't been taking good care of her?"
Chen Qingning said with righteous conviction: "Exactly, he just left me alone in the office."
Lin Yuzhang paused, then it dawned on him, speaking up for Yu Bei: "I'm the one who called him over, to have him bring me to see you."
Chen Qingning was half-convinced: "Really?"
Lin Yuzhang: "Really—and I'd also like to invite you to join us for a meal."
Chen Qingning raised an eyebrow slightly, her gaze fixed directly on Yu Bei's face: "He's inviting me alone?"
The man's look back at her turned utterly bewildered.
"I'm afraid I'll have to disappoint you, Miss Chen," Lin Yuzhang said, every wrinkle on his face brimming with amusement: "I'm the one inviting. On behalf of Baihe Special School and the other teachers, I welcome your arrival."