Love Letter
September, the first day of the new school year.
The sky over Shijiang District was cloudless, with only a blazing red sun hanging overhead. The heat was so intense it felt as though it might bake the earth to a crisp.
It was the long break between classes. The corridors above the second floor of Shining High School were packed with students, all of them leaning over the railings to look at something below.
Shining High School’s main teaching building was shaped like the character [回] and stood seven stories tall. From the first year of middle school through the third year of high school, each grade had fourteen classes, with one grade occupying each floor. The top floor housed the multipurpose classrooms.
At the center of the enclosed courtyard was an open-air garden on the first floor. Anyone who stood in the middle of it could easily draw the attention of the entire school. Because it seemed to come with its own spotlight, students jokingly called the little garden the [Starlight Avenue].
No one knew which class had started it, but there was a rumor that confessing to the person you liked on Starlight Avenue would grant you a [one-hundred-percent success] buff.
Of course, a rumor was only a rumor. Sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds were generally too thin-skinned, and few students had the nerve to actually try it.
Yet today, two people had appeared on the boulevard…
Zhao Yang was awakened by a commotion like a rising tide.
The noise came from above his head, along with the harsh, scorching sunlight.
Zhao Yang felt as though his head were splitting apart. He struggled to open his eyes, and once he had adjusted to the glare, he suddenly discovered that seventeen-year-old Su Qin was standing right in front of him, while his own hand held an exquisite love letter.
The scene was all too familiar to Zhao Yang. This was clearly the day he had confessed to Su Qin!
Nine years ago, he had confessed to the person he had secretly adored for years in front of the entire school, only to receive a cold rejection.
“I’ve liked you for a long time.”
Those words of confession gave Zhao Yang the hazy sensation of suddenly waking from a dream. Before his eyes flashed the ten years he had spent as a shameless, self-abasing simp.
As the commotion overhead grew louder and louder, reality and the dream gradually merged. Looking at the person before him, both familiar and strange, a sentence inexplicably sprang into Zhao Yang’s mind:
[If a mistake has a starting point, it was this moment.]
“I’m sorry…”
Su Qin’s voice abruptly brought Zhao Yang’s drifting thoughts back. Before the other boy could refuse, he spoke first. “Sorry.”
Zhao Yang said those words with extreme courtesy. Then he withdrew the love letter he had been holding out halfway and tucked it back into his pocket, as though nothing had happened. “I gave it to the wrong person.”
The smile on his face remained bright, dazzling as the scorching early-autumn sun overhead. But compared with the stubborn boy from nine years ago, who would keep charging ahead even after running headfirst into a wall, there was now a little more ease and acceptance in it.
“Huh???”
Su Qin was completely stunned by his words.
It was not only the person involved who was left dumbfounded. The students watching from above also erupted in an uproar.
Most of them had no idea what was going on. “Gave it to the wrong person? What the hell is happening?”
“That’s Zhao Yang from Class 1, right? Hasn’t he always liked Su Qin?”
“Liked him like crazy, you mean? Last year, Zhao Yang was practically Su Qin’s shadow. Everyone in the second year knew it.”
“So who confessed to whom, and who got rejected?”
“…………”
The discussion grew louder and louder, and Su Qin’s face grew darker and darker. He had no idea what his little shadow was trying to pull.
He was clearly supposed to be the one doing the rejecting. How had things ended up like this?
Zhao Yang, however, paid no attention to Su Qin’s expression.
All he felt was the pent-up frustration he had accumulated over the past ten years finally being released. It felt incredible! He was so happy that he left the scene without looking back.
All he left behind was a carefree retreating figure.
Making a public confession on Starlight Avenue on the very first day of school had caused an atrocious stir. The culprit had barely returned to the fifth floor before he was grabbed by the scruff and dragged into the office.
Thinking about having to report to the principal’s office later, homeroom teacher Wei Guoxue was furious. He roared so loudly that the entire fifth floor could hear him:
“Is dating all you ever think about? Huh!?”
“Confessing to someone would be bad enough, but you had to make sure the entire school knew about it. You’ve got some nerve!”
There were teachers from other classes in the office, and the corridor outside was packed with students who had come specifically to watch the spectacle, so to speak.
From their angle, all they could glimpse was the slender back of a boy. His oversized sports uniform hung loosely over him, giving him an unmistakably youthful air.
For the sake of Zhao Yang’s dignity, assuming he still had any, Wei Guoxue had no choice but to lower his voice as he scolded him.
“Do you know what you got on the placement exam at the start of the school year? Last in the class! You scored only 26 in math!”
Wei Guoxue was a math teacher. In his decades of teaching, this was still the first time he had seen a score this low.
Wei Guoxue felt his lungs ache. “A student’s primary task is to study. Do you think the Gaokao is still a long way off? I’m telling you, two years will fly by in the blink of an eye!”
“You young people only ever look at what’s right in front of you. Oh, you think the person you like is the love of your life. I’ve seen plenty of young couples who break up the moment they graduate!”
Forget graduating. Judging by these students, Wei Guoxue suspected that once the school divided them into science and liberal arts classes next month, they would count it as a long-distance relationship and threaten to die over it.
Zhao Yang lowered his head and stared blankly at the pale green floor tiles. His eyes stung, and he felt an urge to cry. He knew this scene and this lecture all too well.
Back then, he had pursued Su Qin relentlessly. Even after being rejected, he had neither lost heart nor given up, and he had been willing to try every method imaginable. Compared with the string of increasingly outrageous things he did afterward, his first confession on Starlight Avenue had been nothing more than a minor incident.
Being dragged into the office and berated by Wei Guoxue had been a regular occurrence. The content never changed, and Zhao Yang had listened to it for three years, until his ears had practically grown calluses.
Back then, he had thought Old Wei was old-fashioned and incapable of understanding his feelings for Su Qin.
Hearing those words again now, he realized that his homeroom teacher had been speaking from the heart all along. Every sentence had been reasonable, and every word had struck painfully close to home.
Zhao Yang sniffed. “Teacher, I’m sorry. I was wrong…”
He genuinely knew that he had been wrong.
Wei Guoxue was startled by the admission.
Zhao Yang usually acted as though he had no worries in the world, as if he could laugh off even the greatest disaster.
It was difficult to see negative emotions such as sadness or heartbreak on his face.
Wei Guoxue guessed that this “failed confession” had finally allowed this energetic young man to taste the meaning of [sadness], and his tone softened despite himself.
Love at sixteen or seventeen was fragile and could not withstand the test of time. But it was also rare in its sincerity. Wei Guoxue had been that age once himself, and he did not want to dismiss the boy’s feelings as worthless.
He spoke earnestly. “Zhao Yang… once you get into a good university, you’ll meet someone even better.”
“Why hang yourself from a single tree?”
Whenever teachers across the country encountered students dating too young, they all brought out the same speech. But as Zhao Yang’s homeroom teacher, Wei Guoxue also had a personal reason for saying it.
He thought Su Qin was not worth it.
Shining High School was a private key school, built and funded by the similarly private Binjiang Hospital. The hospital’s original purpose in establishing the school had been simple: to cultivate more talent in the medical field.
Compared with other schools, Shining had three experimental buildings alone, and its chemistry and biology courses were both broader and more advanced than those at ordinary schools.
Famous doctors also frequently came to the school to give lectures.
But because it was a private key school, the students were a mixed lot.
There were top students who had genuinely tested their way in, rich delinquents who had bought their way through the gates with real money, and a small number who were both. Those were the children of Binjiang Hospital employees.
Both of Zhao Yang’s parents worked at Binjiang Hospital. They were renowned doctors with professorial standing, famous both at home and abroad.
Although Zhao Yang himself ranked at the bottom of his class, with every subject marked by a miserable red score.
Wei Guoxue did not think he was actually stupid. After all, he was a child from Binjiang Courtyard, and he had both good family genes and excellent educational resources.
If he were willing to shift his energy from romance to studying, getting into an ordinary second-tier university would certainly not be a problem.
Su Qin, on the other hand, was a textbook bad student.
He had been a notorious delinquent in Shijiang District ever since middle school. Smoking, drinking, fighting, brawling, he was good at all of it, and he was a permanent fixture in the school’s discipline office.
None of the public schools in Shijiang District had been willing to accept him. In the end, he had bought his way into Shining. Relying on his family’s influence and money, he ran roughshod over the school and had a long record of misconduct. Calling his parents in several times had done no good.
Not only the students, but even the teachers were afraid of him.
As the saying went, those who stayed near vermilion became red, and those who stayed near ink became black. Back when Zhao Yang had followed Su Qin around in the first year of high school, Wei Guoxue had warned him more than once that he should not judge people solely by their appearance. He needed to set his sights higher and farther, and pay more attention to what lay within.
Who could have guessed that Zhao Yang merely looked easygoing, or perhaps that he was simply stubborn to an unusual degree when it came to Su Qin?
At any rate, no matter how earnestly Wei Guoxue tried to persuade him, Zhao Yang always treated it as though the words had entered one ear and gone straight out the other. He continued exactly as before.
Wei Guoxue wanted to scold him some more, but seeing the boy standing before him with his head lowered as though he were about to cry, he could not bring himself to find the words. He waved a hand and ordered Zhao Yang to get lost, write a thousand-word self-criticism, and turn it in tomorrow.
Zhao Yang obediently nodded. When he walked out of the office, he was still dazed, wondering how a dream could possibly feel so real.
The headache from his hangover made his ears ring and his stomach churn. His only thought now was to end this bizarre dream as quickly as possible and wake up.
Zhao Yang had not realized that anything was wrong. After he left, the homeroom teacher of Class 2 patted Wei Guoxue’s back to soothe him.
“That’s what people are like at the age when they first discover love. They’ll do anything for the person they like. There’s a girl in my class who folded paper cranes for an entire summer to pursue Su Qin.”
Su Qin again.
Was this the legendary phenomenon of girls loving bad boys?
Wei Guoxue took a sip of hot tea and sighed. “I really don’t understand what students these days are thinking. Why must they like someone like that?”
Thinking of Zhao Yang, who visited Class 7 every day, Wei Guoxue wondered aloud, “Look at that Liao Xingchen in the same class as Su Qin. He’s first in the entire grade, not bad-looking, and even the student council president.”
“Isn’t someone that outstanding more deserving of affection?”
Even if he took ten thousand steps back, if Zhao Yang’s confession today had been directed at Liao Xingchen, Wei Guoxue would not have been nearly as furious.
At least Liao Xingchen would have been worth it, wouldn’t he?
The Class 2 homeroom teacher nervously glanced around. Only after confirming that Class 7’s homeroom teacher was not in the office did he finally relax.
“Hey, don’t ever say that in front of Old Zhou. That student Liao is his favorite. He’d probably love nothing more than for the boy to become a monk and have nothing in his heart but studying.”
At the mention of “Old Zhou,” Wei Guoxue wisely fell silent at once.