Second side

He had already come to school a day ago. At Tan Yuze's repeated requests, the principal transferred him to Class 6, which made him very happy. As for Xie Yu, she was transferred to Class 9.

Three days later.

Sure enough, a transfer student joined the class, but he arrived late. Zhou Chen had arrived on the very first day of school at No. 1 High School.

Most of them were transfer students, but he was treated as a transfer student.

In the afternoon, right after class, Teacher Cao brought him into the classroom and introduced him to everyone. The boy was wearing a black T-shirt, black pants, a watch on his wrist, a black earring in his left ear, and his hair was parted in a 3/7 style. His eyes were full of disdain.

He seems to harbor a lot of resentment towards the whole world.

"Hello, my name is Tan Yuze." Some people laughed and some clapped. After speaking, he looked at the teacher and said, "Alright, Tan Yuze, you sit behind Xu Li."

He turned his head and saw the girl from the basketball court outside the school that day. Yes, it was her; she was the one he had met that day. He then sat down behind Xu Li, whose deskmate was her childhood sweetheart, Leng Yuxuan.

He sat behind her, staring at her hair, which was tied in a low ponytail.

Then class started, and while everyone else was listening and taking notes, all he could think about was why he couldn't be her deskmate. Tan Yuze thought about everything except whether it was because he wasn't a good student.

But he quickly dismissed the idea, because he felt that he was doing quite well in his studies and had nothing to do with being a bad student.

He quickly became familiar with almost everyone in his class.

He was a little unfamiliar with Xu Li, so he started asking other classmates about Xu Li's personal information.

He then went to ask Lu Yi.

"Hey bro, what do you think of that Xu Li?"

"She's good-looking, and she gets along well with our Miss Mu. Her family is quite wealthy. But what's the main thing? The main thing is that she's also exceptionally good at her studies." Lu Yi didn't mince words.

"The Miss Mu you just mentioned is..." Lu Yi asked directly and frankly.

"Mu Mu is first in her class and grade, just like Xu Li."

"And her?"

Shh, she has a boyfriend.

"Who is it?" Tan Yuze seemed genuinely gossipy.

"Zhou Chen, he's the one pursuing her."

"Where does Xu Li rank in the class?"

"Secondly, they've studied so well, haven't they!"

He didn't say anything.

On the surface, everything seemed calm, but inwardly, Tan Yuze was thinking, "Interesting, I can give it a try." A day later, Tan Yuze met Lu Yi and asked, "What's the relationship between Xu Li's deskmate and her?"

"Oh, you mean that? They're childhood sweethearts, there's a high chance they'll be together." Lu Yi even started gossiping. Tan Yuze noticed Xu Li this time by the window in the study room. It was a drizzly spring afternoon, and he was holding his physics workbook, ready to reserve a seat, when he was attracted by the girl buried in her books by the window.

Her eyebrows and eyes were edged with gold under the lamplight, her pen drew smooth lines on the calculation paper, and the hibiscus hair clip in her hair swayed gently with her movements, like a butterfly about to take flight.

"Hey, is that seat taken?" he asked tentatively, glancing at the book of "The Book of Songs: Translation and Annotation" on the corner of her desk. Xu Li looked up, her eyelashes still damp with ink: "Oh, you can sit here. I'll leave as soon as I finish this problem."

Tan Yuze's heart skipped a beat. The girl's features were delicately framed by distant mountains, and a shallow dimple played at the corner of her mouth as she spoke. He suddenly wanted to steal that pen—the lingering scent of old ink from the nib as it twirled between her fingers seemed more captivating than the misty rain of Jiangnan outside the window.

Why do you keep asking me about Xu Li every day?

"Bro, you don't have a crush on Xu Li, do you?" Lu Yi asked, chewing on potato chips, his eyes more teasing than usual.

Tan Yuze smashed his soda on the table, creating bubbles: "Stop messing around. But she did well on her math test this time, and I'm thinking of asking her to watch the basketball game next week."

Lu Yi suddenly shoved a piece of paper with geometric shapes drawn on it in front of him, the pencil tip poking his hand: "Dude, you're staring at wildflowers without recognizing their thorns." "What do you mean?"

My deskmate pulled out a blue-lined notebook from his drawer. On the first page was a yellowed photo of two children with pigtails making a peace sign under an old locust tree. The boy on the left was wearing a distressed sailor uniform, and the girl on the right, with a bow in her hair, was holding half an ice pop and smiling with her eyes crinkling like crescent moons.

Lu Yi said, "Do you know Leng Yuxuan? They were deskmates since kindergarten and were classmates for three years in junior high." Tan Yuze's Adam's apple bobbed: "Is that the cold-faced guy who's her deskmate now?"

"More than that." Lu Yi lowered his voice, "I heard that during the middle school entrance exam class allocation lottery, Leng Yuxuan held Xu Li's admission ticket in his palm and rubbed it for five minutes, and in the end, he got into the key class by two points."

...

He suddenly leaned closer, the bag of potato chips rustling: "There's a rumor that Xu Li originally filled in a foreign language school outside the province as her first choice for the high school entrance exam that year, but in the end she filled in all the corrections on her application form. Wasn't that because someone secretly hid the application form for three days?"

After getting to know her better, he started talking to her.

"I want to copy the answers after school today, do you want to come with me?" Tan Yuze crumpled up his physics test paper and casually tossed it to Xu Li, who was packing her schoolbag. As the girl tilted her head in thought, she noticed the hibiscus hair clip catching the afterglow of the setting sun.

“Okay, but I have to go with Leng Yuxuan to tune the pipa next Monday, so I can probably only stay with you until five o’clock.” Tan Yuze’s Adam’s apple bobbed, and his fingertips unconsciously rubbed the cracks on the corner of the table.

Suddenly, I recalled last week's music class. Leng Yuxuan was holding a pipa and tuning it. The twilight that splashed as her fingertips danced on the strings was just like a swordsman wielding a sword in a martial arts movie.

"By the way, I ate red date dumplings made by Leng Yuxuan's grandma last week. Do you like red date filling too?" Xu Li took out half a piece of brown paper candy from her schoolbag.

"Here, take this. Leng Yuxuan said it'll wake you up..." The candy wrapper melted warmly in his palm. The moment Tan Yuze bit into the candy, the aroma of dates filled his mouth, but he also tasted a hint of bitterness. He looked at the faint frown lines between the girl's brows and suddenly felt that those faint lines were more troublesome than any physics problem.

"I noticed that those two even had perfectly synchronized breathing rates!"

Lu Yi rushed into the classroom with a basketball in his arms. The sound of the ball hitting the podium and bouncing out startled the sparrows on the windowsill. Tan Yuze was sharpening a pencil down to just half.

"What do you mean?" Tan Yuze asked.

"During today's morning exercise break, Xu Li suddenly burst out laughing while doing the third set of broadcast gymnastics. When she turned around, she met Leng Yuxuan's eyes, which were trying not to laugh." Lu Yi imitated the angle of their eye contact: "Guess what? Both of their white shoelaces were tied in an inverted figure-eight knot, and even their shoe polish was a pearly white!"

Tan Yuze tossed the half-used pencil, covered in lead shavings, into the desk drawer: "Doesn't Xu Li have a scar on her wrist? Last time I accidentally bumped into her, when she recoiled in pain, I noticed Leng Yuxuan's wrist bone also seemed to have a dent..."

Lu Yi suddenly lowered his voice: "I heard from the sports committee member that during the sports meet in the second year of junior high, Xu Li cut her wrist on the edge of the mat while high jumping. Leng Yuxuan rushed over and knocked over the timer..."

Thunder rumbled outside the window, and swallows returning home swept across the dark clouds. Tan Yuze stared at his school uniform, soaked by the rain, and suddenly felt that the blue fabric was woven with the winds and frosts of twenty years of changing seasons.