The warning bell for morning self-study had already rung, and the main teaching building had settled into silence. Only Class 7 of the second year remained undisciplined, with most of the students still eating breakfast. The classroom was filled with the smells of all kinds of food.
Shining High School used a small-class system, with one desk per student. Because of his height, Liao Xingchen sat in the very corner of the classroom.
His white school uniform shirt was spotless, and the top button was fastened all the way to his throat. Long brown hair fell beside his face, and paired with his black-rimmed glasses, it almost completely concealed his features.
Pressing his lips together, he opened the nearby sliding window as wide as it would go. A gust of morning wind swept through, instantly dispersing the jumble of odors around him.
Only after he could finally breathe fresh air did Liao Xingchen feel a little better. He put on his earphones and began working through a test paper.
A sudden noise came from the seat beside him. A black schoolbag was slammed onto the desk.
Su Qin shuffled into the Class 7 classroom through the back door, looking as though he had not woken up yet. He dropped onto his chair, bent over, and reached into the space beneath his desk as usual.
After rummaging around for a while, he found it completely empty.
There was nothing to eat or drink.
“Where’s my breakfast?” Su Qin asked irritably. Straightening up, he looked at Lin Zi, who was eating in the row ahead, and said, “Did you take it?”
Lin Zi happened to bite into a translucent piece of lap cheong. Startled by the question, he swallowed it whole, thinking, Who would dare take your breakfast? “Th-this is what I bought from Old Ye’s.”
Shining High School had no dormitories, so every student commuted. The school store sold just about everything except hot food. As a result, every morning, the front and back gates were lined with all kinds of mobile food stalls, selling steamed buns, egg-stuffed flatbreads, cold rice noodles, and more.
There was something to satisfy every appetite.
The Old Ye Lin Zi mentioned was a sticky-rice stall with no signboard. People called it Old Ye’s because the vendor was a white-haired old man.
His glutinous rice was steamed so that every grain was distinct and plump. One bite was fragrant and chewy, and paired with his handmade cured lap cheong, it was simply unparalleled. Once they had tasted it, students could never look at glutinous rice from any other stall the same way again. It was extremely popular at Shining High School.
Its only flaw was that it was unbelievably difficult to buy.
Old Ye set up his stall whenever he felt like it each morning, and packed up as soon as he sold out. Apart from always appearing at the back gate, everything else about the stall was a mystery, from the time it opened to where exactly it would be set up.
If the weather was bad or something came up at home, Old Ye could even disappear for several days, leaving the students who had gone specially to wait for him empty-handed.
He was a laid-back vendor whose food could only be found by chance. Anyone who managed to buy it had every right to call themselves one of the lucky few.
Lin Zi had once been fortunate enough to try it and had never stopped thinking about Old Ye’s sweet, delicious lap cheong. He had gotten up especially early that day, gone all the way around to the back gate, and, after a stroke of incredible luck plus twenty minutes of waiting in line, finally managed to buy some.
Su Qin smelled the familiar fragrance, and his hunger made him even more irritable. “Then where did my breakfast go?”
Lin Zi and Old Gao exchanged a glance, understanding the situation without saying a word.
For the past year, Zhao Yang had been responsible for buying their boss’s breakfast and delivering it to Class 7 at the same time every day. Iced soy milk and sandwiches in summer, millet porridge and hot soup dumplings in winter, with something different every day, always nutritious and varied.
Su Qin had long since grown accustomed to arriving at the classroom on an empty stomach and having something to eat the moment he sat down.
There was only one obvious reason his unfailing breakfast had been absent today.
Only now did Su Qin remember a certain someone, and his face darkened again.
With the oppressive atmosphere behind him, Lin Zi forced himself to finish his glutinous rice. It was like chewing wax. This couldn’t go on. Life was becoming way too damn miserable. Things had to return to normal.
He decided to find an excuse for Zhao Yang. “Boss, I don’t think the little follower meant to act like that yesterday.”
“He must have been embarrassed and said the wrong thing!”
Old Gao nodded along beside him. Confessing in broad daylight on Starlight Avenue took more than courage. You also needed skin thick enough to withstand it.
The little follower had such delicate, tender skin that merely looking at Su Qin for a couple of seconds could make his face flush. Clearly, his skin wasn’t thick enough.
Old Gao said, “Zhao Yang has liked you for a whole year. He’s always followed you around. Wherever you go, he goes.”
“There’s no one else in his eyes besides you. That love letter was definitely for you.”
Su Qin remembered the iced soy milk and shrimp rice noodles from yesterday morning, as well as Zhao Yang’s bashful smile when he had asked Su Qin to go to Starlight Avenue. His resolve began to waver.
“Then… why is he avoiding me?”
Lin Zi wanted to say, Because you’re scary. “Maybe he feels too ashamed to face you because he knows he did something wrong.”
Su Qin raised an eyebrow. “He did something wrong and still won’t come apologize?”
“There’s another possibility.”
Old Gao suddenly let his imagination run wild and cut in. “Zhao Yang is avoiding you on purpose. What’s that phrase again?”
He racked his brain for a long while before finally digging up an idiom. Slapping his thigh, he shouted, “Oh, right! It’s called a bait and switch!”
Lin Zi, a twenty-four-karat, pure-bred academic failure, asked blankly, “What’s a bait and switch?”
Old Gao’s own knowledge was limited, so he gave a haphazard explanation. “It means… he acts like he doesn’t care about you on the surface, but in reality, he’s madly in love with you.”
The words “madly in love” improved Su Qin’s mood somewhat. For the sake of the breakfasts Zhao Yang had brought him throughout the past year, Su Qin decided to forgive him and let yesterday’s incident go. Lowering himself to send Zhao Yang a voice message, he told him to meet at Ting Wang after school.
Old Gao gave him a thumbs-up and praised his friendly tone. It sounded like he was coaxing someone.
Lin Zi also guaranteed that Zhao Yang would be so happy when he heard it, he’d jump through the roof.
The earphones were playing gentle, soothing music. It helped calm the mind, but did not fully block out the sounds around him. Supporting his head with his left hand, Liao Xingchen unconsciously wrote an idiom on the test paper with the pen in his right.
The strokes were forceful yet messy, completely out of place beside the pile of chemical equations.
A bait and switch?
Liao Xingchen drew several circles around the four words and added a few question marks. He seriously doubted that, with Zhao Yang’s intelligence, he would be likely to come up with such a clever tactic.
Then why hadn’t he brought breakfast today? Bringing breakfast didn’t require him to run into that Su fellow…
Liao Xingchen pondered for a long time, but still couldn’t figure out the cause-and-effect relationship.
Class 1.
The unknown entity Zhao Yang bowed three times to the slogan before beginning his journey of study.
The first class that morning was mathematics.
Wei Guoxue entered the classroom carrying the placement-test papers from before the start of term.
The parents had already been informed of the rankings yesterday, so today’s main task was going over the questions. Wei Guoxue did not have the habit of standing at the lectern to write on the board. He liked to roam around the entire classroom while teaching.
He taught the lesson while keeping an eye on classroom discipline.
Holding the test papers, he walked toward the back of the classroom. As he passed a particular desk, he lowered his head and glanced at its surface.
There was a test paper, a pen, and the words “Study hard and make progress every day.”
The student in the seat had his head lowered and was writing. He was not doing anything unrelated to class.
Wei Guoxue nodded in satisfaction and continued his inspection.
Wait. Something seemed wrong.
After taking two steps, Wei Guoxue sensed that something was strange. He backed up to where he had been, his gaze moving back and forth between Zhao Yang and the desk several times before he finally spotted the incongruity.
Zhao Yang was actually paying attention in class?
What kind of miracle was this?
Wei Guoxue was not the only one who was shocked. Every teacher who taught Class 1 wondered whether they had walked into the wrong classroom and mistaken the student. But over the course of the morning, Zhao Yang’s seat, and Zhao Yang himself, became a tourist attraction.
Even the teachers from the third-year classes upstairs came down after hearing about it to take pictures and check it out. The entire staff room was discussing Zhao Yang’s unusual behavior.
The biology teacher for Class 1 had just returned from class. She stopped in front of Wei Guoxue’s desk and began chattering excitedly. Her agitation rivaled that of someone discovering that a paramecium was not a single-celled organism.
“Oh my God, I can’t believe what I saw today.”
“When I was leaving, I passed by the back door, and Zhao Yang was actually sitting quietly in his seat taking notes!”
The biology teacher nervously leaned over and took a closer look. Although the test paper was covered in dense writing, a closer inspection revealed that most of it was nonsense. Very little of it had anything to do with the questions.
It was difficult to tell whether he had truly been paying attention or was simply writing random things, but that attitude alone was enough to shock everyone.
When something was too unusual, there was bound to be a reason. When a troublesome kid suddenly became too quiet, he was probably plotting something.
Wei Guoxue genuinely couldn’t understand Zhao Yang’s baffling behavior. He was even more afraid that the boy was preparing some grand scheme, perhaps another confession on Starlight Avenue.
A young teacher teased him, “Oh, come on. What’s so hard to understand? He’s been hurt by love.”
Wei Guoxue said, “Hurt by love?”
The young teacher said, “Yep.”
His confession had failed yesterday, which was why he was so well-behaved today. This was what happened when someone turned his grief and anger into the power to study.
These teachers had taught so many batches of teenagers discovering love for the first time. They had seen more than enough cases of students working toward first place, or dead last, for the sake of the person they loved.
One teacher, clearly speaking from experience, analyzed Zhao Yang’s strange behavior. “The deeper the love, the harder he studies.”
Wei Guoxue leaned back, almost convinced. His eyes drifted toward Old Zhou as he said, “In that case, should I thank that Su boy?”
Zhou Kai’s desk was next to Wei Guoxue’s. Hearing this shameless conversation, he let out a disdainful snort.
He had heard a little about the Zhao Yang in Class 1. The boy was even more troublesome than Su Qin, with no major incidents but a steady stream of minor ones. He spent all day running over to their Class 7.
He was young and should have been studying, yet all he thought about was puppy love.
Fortunately, he hadn’t affected Zhou Kai’s precious star. Otherwise, Zhou Kai would have beaten him senseless.
After snorting, Zhou Kai looked up and realized the student in front of him had not left. He immediately asked in a gentle voice, “Is there anything else?”
His gaze was as tender as if he were looking at his own son.
Liao Xingchen had come to turn in the summer homework. Class 7 had thirty-six students in all. Old Zhou had given the slackers an extra day, yet still received less than half the assignments. Liao Xingchen had intended to report the names of those who had not submitted their work, but swallowed the words before they left his mouth.
He drew back his gaze, which had wandered somewhere unknown, and slowly lifted his eyelids. His face remained devoid of any unnecessary expression, his cool indifference revealing a hint of frost. “No.”