Yang Xinlan had worked two consecutive night shifts. She had not even had time to take off her white coat when she saw the WeChat message from Wei Guoxue, which detailed her son’s scores on this exam.
As usual, he had failed every subject. As usual, he had come in last in the class.
When Yang Xinlan saw that bright-red report card, she nearly stopped breathing and almost fainted.
She stormed home in her high heels and practically smashed open Zhao Yang’s bedroom door. With her hands on her hips, she launched straight into a tirade:
“What is wrong with you?? Huh!? There were thirty multiple-choice questions in biology, and you only got one right. And that one was the freebie question everyone in the entire grade could get!”
“Isn’t that embarrassing? I’m asking you, isn’t it embarrassing?”
“Are you trying to become the first person in the courtyard who can’t get into college?”
“Your teacher also told me you skipped class tonight! Where did you go!??”
Since graduating from high school, Zhao Yang had not seen his mother this furious in many years. Hearing it again nearly scared him to death on the spot.
It took him a long while to calm his racing heart. Damn, this was incredible. Was this the fear engraved in his DNA?
“I’m talking to you! Where did you go tonight!?”
When she still received no answer from her son, Yang Xinlan asked again, even louder.
Zhao Yang’s little heart trembled once more.
Ms. Yang’s voice was piercing, sharp enough to cut through the night and stab straight into the sky. Binjiang Courtyard had been built in the 1960s, and all the old buildings shared one common flaw: the soundproofing was terrible.
Even Old Man Li, who was playing chess at the entrance, heard her roar. Xu Lei’s mother happened to be hanging laundry on the balcony, and she came out to chat with a neighbor who had also stepped outside to watch the commotion.
The neighbor glanced toward the sixth floor across the way and laughed. “Oh, the Yangs are scolding their son again.”
Xu Lei’s mother was quite close with Yang Xinlan and did not want to gossip about her friend, so she casually replied, “Zhao Yang probably didn’t do well on the exam again.”
The neighbor asked, “By the way, Stone’s in the same class as Yangyang, right? How did he do this time?”
Xu Lei’s mother answered modestly, “He did all right, all right.”
Xu Lei had actually done quite well, placing in the top ten in his class and the top hundred in his grade. At any other school, he would unquestionably have been considered one of the top students. His mother was satisfied with his results.
But what kind of place was Binjiang Courtyard? More than eighty percent of the residents were highly educated. Competition was fierce, and everyone loved to compare themselves with everyone else. From grandparents to children, every meeting was bound to include a round of comparisons.
And where there were comparisons, there had to be a benchmark.
For example, Zhao Yang’s parents. Or Liao Xingchen.
The neighbor clearly had no concern for stirring up trouble. Sure enough, her next words brought out the benchmark: “I heard the child from the Liao family came first in the whole school again.”
“Your Stone still needs to work harder.”
On the surface, she sounded as though she was concerned about Xu Lei. In reality, she was putting him down by comparison.
Xu Lei’s mother’s smile froze on her face. She went back inside before she had finished hanging the laundry.
Other people’s children were always better. When Xu Lei’s mother returned indoors, she found him sitting on the sofa with his legs crossed, leisurely watching a TV drama. His excellent top-ten class ranking instantly turned into a painful thorn in her eyes.
She walked over and scolded him. “All you do all day is watch television. Have you finished your homework?”
“With that attitude toward studying, how are you ever going to get into medical university??”
Xu Lei had done nothing to deserve the scolding. He slunk back to his room and started working through the practice papers from his tutoring class.
Downstairs from the Yangs’ apartment.
Liao Xingchen was also doing his homework in his room. To keep his hair from blocking his view, he had casually tied his normally fine, loose hair into a little knot at the back. His exposed brows and eyes looked austere, and the lines of his profile were sharp and firm.
He looked like an entirely different person from the one at school.
His tidy desk stood right beside the window, and whenever he looked up, he could see a luxuriant camphor tree. The summer night breeze drifted in through the gaps between its leaves. By this hour, the cicadas and frogs had quieted down, but through the thin ceiling, he could clearly hear the argument coming from upstairs.
Shining High School had few holidays and moved through the curriculum quickly. There were basically exams every week, so Liao Xingchen heard an argument like this once every other week.
Every time, one side roared with fury while the other responded with an irreverent, carefree attitude. The content never changed, repeating itself over and over.
“This is just the best I can do. It’s not like I’m some genius.”
“I don’t want to be a doctor. Living off other people and doing nothing all my life sounds fine to me.”
“Can you stop meddling in my business?”
The boy spoke as though none of it mattered. From his tone alone, one could imagine his arrogant, overbearing expression.
For someone with no ambition, someone who even fled at the last moment when confessing his feelings, Liao Xingchen felt nothing but contempt. He shook his head and habitually opened a drawer, taking out his earphones. He was just about to put them on when he heard that familiar young voice quietly say:
“I’m sorry.”
In the past, whenever Yang Xinlan scolded Zhao Yang, he had always acted carelessly and never listened. His attitude toward her was even worse than it was toward Wei Guoxue, and he would sometimes talk back. The things he said could infuriate someone to death.
This was the first time he had ever lowered his head and apologized.
The scolding stopped abruptly, and the courtyard fell silent again. Yang Xinlan sat down while holding onto the back of a chair. Her son’s apology had caught her completely off guard, and all the anger in her chest vanished.
She had not actually lost her temper because of Zhao Yang’s grades. It was not as if his studies had only been poor for a day or two. She had become immune to that ages ago.
What made her angry was Zhao Yang’s consistently lazy attitude.
To be fair, his parents also bore some responsibility for the way Zhao Yang had turned out.
She and Zhao Hai had spent all these years consumed by work. They were either working endless overtime or constantly away on business trips, and were hardly ever home.
The family elders had died early. Zhao Yang had always been a wild one, and, by sheer bad luck, he had lacked proper guidance and discipline during the most crucial years of his upbringing. That was how things had ended up like this.
Her son’s rare apology struck directly at the part of her heart where she blamed herself most. She could not help raising a hand to wipe away the tears at the corners of her eyes.
“Mom, don’t be angry.”
Seeing his mother make that gesture, Zhao Yang’s own eyes stung. He walked over and crouched down, his voice steady and resolute. “I promise you, I’ll study hard from now on!”
He spoke with force and conviction.
Yang Xinlan froze.
Downstairs, Liao Xingchen was startled as well. The pen in his hand accidentally drew a long line across his test paper. The white earphone still hung from his index finger. He had not put it into his ear.
For some inexplicable reason, he imagined what Zhao Yang must have looked like while saying those words.
Upstairs.
Yang Xinlan stared at her son’s youthful but serious expression for a long time. She wondered if she had heard him wrong. “You, what did you just say?”
Zhao Yang repeated, “I’m going to study hard from now on.”
He had not said it on a whim or tossed the words out casually.
Back then, he had done disastrously on the Gaokao, setting a new low for the entire history of the courtyard and stunning all the neighbors. He had stubbornly refused to repeat his final year and take the exam again, rebellious to the extreme. In a fit of anger, Zhao Hai had thrown him out to work as a security guard at the entrance to Binjiang Courtyard.
Calling it “working as a security guard” was being generous. In reality, it was a dead-end job for passing the time, the kind of position retired people took.
Zhao Yang had skipped evening self-study and spent two hours riding the bus, touring the entire Shijiang District.
The city looked just as he remembered it, but back then, construction and development had been happening everywhere in Shijiang District, and the place changed dramatically every year. Now, after returning to his old home a decade later, Zhao Yang felt as though the roads were new and even the residential compounds were new.
Only the area around Binjiang Courtyard still carried the old-fashioned atmosphere of the last century: bluestone bricks, concrete walls, apartment buildings covered in ivy, and stairwells plastered with advertisements.
It was as though time had stopped and never moved forward.
Zhao Yang sat outside the security office for a long time. He remembered the years he had spent guarding the entrance in his previous life. Every day, he had watched different people rushing about with their busy lives. Even Old Man Li, who had worked alongside him, had enrolled in a senior citizens’ university to enrich his life.
It had seemed as though he was the only person in the entire world living a futile, aimless existence.
No matter how broad-minded or accepting a person was, it was impossible to endure a life like that forever.
There had only been two regrets in his previous life. One was Su Qin. The other was his education.
The first had been dealt with completely. The second was going to be a major undertaking.
He would have to take it slowly.
Zhao Yang had already decided what path he wanted to take in the future. He comforted Yang Xinlan for a while and made another promise, swearing that he would put his mind to studying and work hard, striving to drag his grades up to the undergraduate cutoff over the remaining two years.
Yang Xinlan was happy and worried at the same time, but more than anything, she was shocked. She was a neurologist, and she had nearly let her professional instincts take over and stood up to check whether something had gone wrong in her son’s brain.
She wanted to ask whether Zhao Yang should sign up for tutoring or something. After all, he had fallen so far behind over the years, and given his current situation, reaching the undergraduate cutoff in two years was a little too far-fetched.
But she was afraid that pushing him too hard would make him change his mind. After hesitating and struggling for a long time, all the words in her heart finally condensed into one sentence: “Mom believes in you.”
.
The next day, as soon as Xu Lei entered the classroom, he saw the guy sitting behind him scratching his head over a sheet of A4 paper.
He must be writing another love letter to Su Qin.
That was Xu Lei’s natural assumption. He leaned over, wanting to peek at all the embarrassingly sentimental things written on the page, but unexpectedly saw four serious red characters:
[Study Plan]
????
Xu Lei rubbed his eyes. Unable to believe it, he looked several more times, confirming again and again that the words said [Study Plan] and not [Dating Plan].
He asked in a trembling voice, “W, what is this?”
Zhao Yang put down his pen. “A plan.”
Then he elaborated, “My study plan for the next two years.”
Xu Lei’s eyes widened in disbelief.
This was the first time he had ever heard the word “study” come out of Zhao Yang’s mouth. It was even more shocking than Zhao Yang’s declaration yesterday that “I don’t like Su Qin anymore.”
Xu Lei’s worldview began showing signs of collapse. “Study? Are you serious?”
Zhao Yang nodded. He picked up his pen again and solemnly wrote a [1] followed by a period on the paper. Then he asked reverently, “Stone, tell me, what should I do first?”
He had never written a study plan before and had spent the entire night unable to come up with a clue.
Xu Lei decided that he must have entered the classroom the wrong way today. This conversation was far too bizarre!
Xu Lei tried to set the world back on its proper course. “Right, Su Qin came to the classroom looking for you three times yesterday. He looked pretty furious. How are you planning to deal with that?”
“You really don’t like him anymore?”
As soon as he heard Su Qin’s name, Zhao Yang’s expression changed. He waved dismissively and said, “I really don’t like him anymore.”
Xu Lei refused to give up. “Really, really?”
He really did not like him anymore!
How many times did he have to say it before Xu Lei would believe him aaaaaah!!!
Zhao Yang was practically on the verge of collapse. He gritted his teeth and told Xu Lei to get lost, ending the subject.
Zhao Yang’s study plan never came into existence in the end, but he did not give up. Instead, he wrote a large slogan and stuck it to his desk to remind himself every moment of every day.
Whenever Xu Lei turned around to discuss life or Su Qin with him, he saw the conspicuous words on the desk: “Study hard and make progress every day.” They were unbearably affected and painful to look at.