Chapter 9
"You're calling me in the middle of the night to ask about my blanket?"
"There's a ghost! There must be a ghost!"
It was seven in the morning. Zhou Zifang on the other end of the phone was brimming with energy and excitement, like a wife catching her mistress. Lu Jiyu threw back the covers and rolled over in bed, his eyelids tightly shut. Yesterday, after sending the locksmith off, he'd forced himself to take a shower, and it was almost three o'clock when he finally went back to bed. He ignored Zhou Zifang, his pale hand resting on the dark gray bedside table, fumbling for the air conditioner remote. With his eyes closed, he turned the temperature up a few degrees.
Zhou Zifang had originally thought he was asleep, but after hearing two beeps, he knew Lu Jiyu was still awake. It was rush hour, and Zhou Zifang, carrying his schoolbag on one shoulder, staggered into the breakfast shop at the school gate.
"Boss, a beef patty and a bowl of soy milk."
He put on his Bluetooth headset and unpacked a pair of disposable chopsticks with great interest: "Tell your brother what happened yesterday."
"You don't have to tell me. I'll go ask her directly after school today. You know I can do anything."
Just as Zhou Zifang finished speaking, he raised his eyebrows and caught a glimpse of a familiar figure. Coincidentally, the boss brought beef patties and soy milk to the table. Zhou Zifang couldn't help but grit his teeth and plunged his chopsticks into the patties, silently cursing "bad luck" in his heart.
Chen Wulin sat down diagonally across from him, a bowl of wontons in front of him. He held a spoon in one hand, an English vocabulary handbook in the other. Two girls at the table next to him had been staring at him constantly since he sat down. Zhou Zifang knew one of them; she was considered the most beautiful girl in Class 8.
Although he hated Chen Wulin, thinking that he was shameless, hypocritical, and liked to say one thing in front of others and another behind their backs, he could not deny that he was indeed popular in the school.
Chen Wulin and Lu Jiyu were in the same class next to each other, both known for their academic prowess. But everyone in their class knew that Lu Jiyu was unique at No. 3 Middle School. Whether it was his academic performance, his demeanor, his appearance, or his interpersonal skills, he was exceptional in every way, a master of every subject. Chen Wulin was good enough, but there were many students just as good at No. 1 Middle School. He simply relied on a connection to a leader in the school's Academic Affairs Office, which naturally filtered down his perspective.
Lu Jiyu's status as a temporary student was exposed thanks to Chen Wulin. It was the second half of the semester of his first year of high school, and the school required students to complete a student profile. The next day, an anonymous post appeared on the No. 3 Middle School forum, revealing Lu Jiyu's status as a temporary student. The post went viral that day, and I heard it was only deleted after a school teacher intervened.
Being a student on loan isn't uncommon. Lu Jiyu wasn't the first at No. 3 Middle School, and he certainly wouldn't be the last. But this matter fundamentally concerns educational equity, and it happened to a student as prominent as Lu Jiyu. The controversy raged for quite some time, with some parents even planning to sign a petition. Ultimately, the drama ended with Lu Jiyu withdrawing from the national math competition. His replacement was a child of one of the parents who signed the petition.
Zhou Zifang knew Lu Jiyu had put in immense effort for the national competition. He had never seen him work so hard, day and night, since he'd known him. He went to the school and the teachers, indignant. Lu Jiyu, however, continued to study and play as he pleased, with a nonchalant air, his expression calm and composed, without a trace of reluctance. He never cared about what others thought. He lived in his own world, using his own methods to reach the top.
In the final exam of the first year of high school, Lu Jiyu achieved a perfect and dazzling result and firmly occupied the first place in the grade list, leaving the second place behind by nearly 30 points.
The second best student in the grade at that time was Chen Wulin.
Zhou Zifang only realized later that this exam was the beginning of Lu Jiyu's rise to fame at No. 3 Middle School. He had been praised to the highest peak, and also slammed into the mud. He wasn't himself when he was praised to the highest peak, and he wasn't himself when he was trampled into the mud either.
The Lu Jiyu who climbed back to the highest peak in one step from the quagmire and shook off the mud on his body was the real him.
"Lu Jiyu--." Zhou Zifang sighed with a slight emotion.
The person who closed his eyes and didn't speak gave a perfunctory "hmm" as a response.
"The price of beef patties at the school gate has gone up! Damn it!" Zhou Zifang said, taking a long sip of soy milk in anger. "Not only is the price increased, but there's even less meat in the filling."
Lu Jiyu turned on the loud speaker of his phone, and suddenly as if he remembered something, he opened the Candy Crush game that he had finished playing halfway yesterday. His sleepy eyes became clearer, and she was quite capable. She finished five levels in one go in just a short while yesterday. Lu Jiyu sat up from the bed and threw his phone aside. He leaned over the end of the bed and picked up the half-drunk bottle of mineral water on the ground. With the quilt pressed under him, the boy's broad and delicate back was exposed to the cool air in the early morning. After taking a shower yesterday, he didn't bother to find clothes to change and went straight to bed. The bedroom window was not fastened, and the gauze curtains swayed gently in the morning breeze.
"Why don't you say anything?"
"Hmm." Lu Jiyu was still very frugal with his words.
Zhou Zifang was anxious. He could only hear the rustling sound of the quilt. His mind was always filled with pornographic material, so he immediately thought of some restricted scenes.
"What are you doing? What's going on?" He smiled in a mean and ambiguous way.
After Lu Jiyu finished drinking the water, he slowly sat back on the bed. He reached out from beside the pillow and took out his phone. While looking at his level-clearing record in Candy Crush, he cursed silently, "You're crazy."
"What? I'm serious. I see you're just feeling romantically aroused." Normally, it's never a good thing when Zhou Zifang gets serious.
"If that doesn't work, then tell me about the blanket."
…
Lu Jiyu had no choice but to patiently tell Zhou Zifang briefly what happened this morning.
"She was locked out of her bedroom door and asked you to help unlock it, and then—"
"After you helped her find a locksmith, you even found a blanket and sent it to her."
"Lu Leifeng, I guess my summary is correct."
"Exactly."
"It's not that you're not here." Lu Jiyu exited the game and opened the WeChat interface: "If you were here, I wouldn't have to go back and find a blanket. You could just take off what you're wearing and give it to me."
Zhou Zifang laughed, sweeping away the bad luck brought by Chen Wulin: "That's why the ancients said that no one knows a father better than his son. After all, you understand me best."
"Why did you send her a blanket? You're not really interested in her, are you?"
"It shouldn't be uncommon to be interested in her." Lu Jiyu has always been frank, even when he is shameless and guilty.
Zhou Zifang laughed uncontrollably on the other end of the phone, then immediately became worried. "But when I think about her unclear relationship with that guy, I feel uneasy. Maybe she was locked out yesterday on purpose, pretending to be pitiful to gain your sympathy."
"Have you read 'Liao Zhai'? Every scholar in it was bewitched by a female demon and lost his mind, eventually even his life."
To be honest, when Jiang Wan came to see him yesterday, Lu Jiyu had the same thought as Zhou Zifang for a moment.
After all, these coincidences have been piling up all day, which really makes people doubt.
But when Lu Jiyu stared at her face in the hazy moonlight, he felt that with a look like this, she didn't need too many skills in some aspects, and just had to be beautiful.
"What did you tell me at the beginning? Didn't you say that even if you die under the peony flowers, you will still be romantic as a ghost, brother?" Lu Jiyu deliberately confronted him.
To put it bluntly, yesterday's visit to him was just a convenient favor. Even if he had other thoughts, they were fleeting.
Lu Jiyu has always disliked people who are involved in trouble, especially those related to Chen Wulin.
Zhou Zifang didn't expect that he would remember the nonsense he said casually and bring up the past again: "I won't stop you if you want to be a playboy, just don't come to me crying when the time comes."
"I'm not going to cry to you. I'm going to hang myself in front of your house, okay?" Lu Jiyu was too lazy to waste words with him and pretended to give in. After saying that, he glanced at the time in the upper left corner of the phone screen and reminded him: "It's 7:15, can you still eat?"
Zhou Zifang usually pretends to be nervous, but today he was surprisingly calm: "Tang Huahua went out of town for further studies this week. No one cares about us." Tang Huahua is the head teacher of their class. She is beautiful and loves to dress up, especially printed skirts, so she got such a nickname.
"But I really have to go. I have a math exam in the first period this morning, and Lao Zhang will probably have to take up the morning class. You can explain everything to me in the evening."
"I'm not free tonight." Lu Jiyu immediately rejected him.
"You're not free tonight? What are you going to do? You haven't made an appointment with her yet, have you?"
Lu Jiyu was already a little annoyed with him: "Make an appointment with your mother. The old lady's flight will arrive in Nanyuan today. I will pick her up this afternoon."
Zhou Zifang immediately reacted: "The one from the capital?"
"Exactly."
The old lady came to Nanyuan this time at the invitation of a cultural salon as a guest for a dialogue.
In fact, she hasn't traveled far for a long time. The reason why the organizer was able to call her this time was mainly because the old lady had some selfish motives.
Nanyuan, this is the base camp of her rebellious nephew.
Nanyuan City's international airport was located in the suburbs, close to the sea. Nanyuan City had been booming in recent years, and the airport had also been expanding. Lu Jiyu circled the area twice before finding the entrance to the parking lot.
Lu Jiyu's grandmother lived in Nanyuan for many years when she was young. Even though she hasn't set foot in this city for a few years, she still has a special feeling for it from the bottom of her heart.
At the moment, this feeling may be mainly reflected in the fact that Ms. Cheng Xiang just took time out from the capital to attend a salon, and she was fully armed with two 29-inch suitcases.
"You have so much luggage with you. Are you planning to live here for a long time?" As the car drove onto the elevated road, Lu Jiyu took a moment to glance in the rearview mirror at an old lady in exquisite new Chinese style who was clutching the handrail tightly.
"Lu Jiyu, just drive and don't talk to me. Also, I have to bring a few extra clothes for the event. What do you know about wearing only black, white and gray?" Cheng Xiang didn't expect Lu Jiyu to actually drive to pick her up himself. "When did you get your driver's license? I think it was not long after your birthday. Is your driver's license legal?"
Lu Jiyu pulled a small black notebook from the armrest and handed it to the old lady in the back seat. "I learned how to drive in a dream. My birthday was last month. I drew my own driver's license. Check it yourself to see if it's legal."
He is one of the best at making every word he says have a response, but none of his words are pleasing to the ears.
Cheng Xiang felt that Lu Jiyu's pretentious manner was exactly like his grandfather's, no wonder the two of them had always been at odds.
She took the driver's license handed to her by Lu Jiyu, opened it, and her eyes fell on the ID photo in the lower right corner. She didn't realize it when she was young, but after she went to middle school and grew up, Cheng Xiang realized that Lu Jiyu and Shanshan were simply cast in the same mold.
Shanshan is Lu Jiyu's mother.
"You just got your driver's license last month?"
Lu Jiyu looked ahead and comforted the old lady: "Don't worry, I got my driver's license in the United States when I was sixteen."
It was summer vacation, and he drove with a few friends to chase the sunset in Yellowstone Park, chase tornadoes in the Mississippi Plain, and chase the aurora in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
His friends at the time joked that he was good at pursuing everything except girls.
Lu Jiyu picked up his Sony a9m3 and pointed it at the distant sky. Under the dimming sky, it was filled with pink and blue sunset glow with gold edges, which was like a dream and made people intoxicated. After pressing the shutter button several times, he thought of a sentence: everything in the world is most beautiful when it is about to happen but has not happened yet.
For example, love.
When it seems like love but is not love, that is the true love.
The evening breeze made the boy's shirt rustle in the night. Lu Jiyu lowered his head to check the photos in his camera, his bangs brushing against his eyebrows. He smiled and said, "It's not that I don't know how to pursue someone, it's that I haven't met anyone I want to pursue."
He'd used the word "flipped," and several of his American friends, deeply moved, began chatting about the girls they'd fallen head over heels for. That night, four young men, with the vast stars overhead and the vast expanse of land beneath their feet, didn't discuss grand ambitions, simply recounting their youthful, unrefined, and love stories, like a handful of red balloons drifting in the wind, stories spreading wherever the wind carried them.
Lu Jiyu remembered that they didn't drink, but the atmosphere was particularly good. By the end of the conversation, they all felt like they were drunk. Their faces were flushed, but their eyes were bright.
At that time, he had never thought about what kind of girl he would fall in love with in the future.
Cheng Xiang closed his driver's license, turned his head and stared at the rows of tall buildings passing by outside the window, and suddenly said, "I heard you are in love?"
Here we go again.
The traffic light at the intersection turned red, so Lu Jiyu tapped the brakes and brought the car to a steady stop. He glanced in the rearview mirror and then went on to tell her story, "Yes, we're dating, and we've already decided to spend our lives together. We'll get married after meeting their parents."
Cheng Xiang knew he was just talking nonsense again, constantly promising her the future. Lu Jiyu had just started middle school and was starting to grow up. She'd met him once, during a meeting in Nanyuan. Her first reaction was that he looked like he might fall in love too soon. Lu Lin was incredibly busy with work at the time, too busy to care about her. Cheng Xiang immediately considered bringing Lu Jiyu back to the capital.
But Lu Jiyu did not agree.
At the same time, Lu Jiyu's grandfather did not agree and left a friendly advice.
"If you dare to do bad things, we'll just break your legs and lock you up at home. We can afford it anyway."
It is truly a touching education of love.
"Why not wait for another day? Take me to see him today?" She said this cooperatively, but saw Lu Jiyu picked up his mobile phone and fiddled with it in front of him without saying a word.
"What are you doing?" the old lady asked him in dialect.
Lu Jiyu was actually searching for directions to the hotel, but he was happy to play double duty with the old lady: "Nothing, I just wanted to see which one I'd like you to meet first today. You know it's different from Monday to Friday - Hey, what are you doing? What's wrong with you, an old lady from the capital? We don't allow passengers to hit drivers here in Nanyuan -"
Cheng Xiang: Beat you up.
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