Chapter Thirty-Two
Heavy rain on Friday evening.
The results of the senior high school entrance exams had just been released, and the area in front of the honor roll was crowded with umbrellas. Xu Li's name was ranked first, 11 points higher than Tan Yuze, who was fourth.
In the crowd, Zhou Yu clutched a piece of draft paper folded into a small square, his knuckles white. On the paper was a printed copy of the "whistleblower letter" he had written the previous night:
"...I have witnessed Xu Li and Tan Yuze alone together in the laboratory building after evening self-study on multiple occasions. Their intimate behavior suggests that they are in a relationship, which is affecting the class atmosphere..."
Raindrops pounded on the paper, the ink spreading into patches of dark clouds. Zhou Yu stared at the names on the list, as if he wanted to pry them off. In lab 302, the old light bulbs crackled and hissed.
Xu Li was labeling the test tubes when Tan Yuze leaned against the doorframe, waiting for her. "Zhou Yu asked me today, 'Are you with Xu Li?'"
How would you answer?
“I said, ‘If it really is true, I’d love to broadcast it throughout the whole school so he won’t bother you again.’”
Xu Li chuckled softly, slapped the last label on, and casually tossed the empty reagent bottle into the recycling bin, the sound of shattering glass ringing out crisply.
"Let's go, it's raining heavily, here's an umbrella for you." He handed over a folding umbrella.
Xu Li raised an eyebrow: "Then what are you going to do?"
"I like walking in the rain."
Before she had taken ten steps out of the building, the wind flipped her umbrella inside out. Tan Yuze sighed and tilted his black umbrella at a forty-five-degree angle toward her.
In the surveillance footage, the two stood side by side, their shoulders separated by the rain, as if by an invisible wall. Zhou Yu, hiding behind a pillar in the library, took three photos with his phone.
In the scene, the light under the umbrella is dim and yellow. Xu Li's profile is wet with rain. Tan Yuze bends down to tidy her disheveled bangs—actually, he is just picking off a feather-like willow catkin, but in the shot, it looks just like a kiss.
Zhou Yu dragged the photo into the attachment of the complaint letter, his finger hovering over the "send" button, trembling like a leaf.
He finally pressed the button. Recipient: Director Cao of the Moral Education Department.
Ten seconds later, he regretted it and rushed to the Moral Education Department to withdraw his message. Old Cao had already opened the email and looked up at him: "Come in too, let's make things clear together."
The clock in the meeting room ticked to 19:40.
Xu Li and Tan Yuze were called away one after the other, and the remaining people in the classroom began to whisper among themselves.
Zhou Yu returned to his seat and pulled out the crumpled draft paper from a compartment in his bag—the printed copy had already been sent out, but the original was still there. The last line was what he had written last night, crossed out, and then written again:
"I just wanted Xu Li to see me."
He crumpled the paper into a ball, stuffed it into his mouth, chewed until his mouth was full of bitter ink, and couldn't swallow it. Finally, he rushed to the toilet and vomited violently. 5
Old Cao's office was lit by a stark white light.
Xu Li went in first, her coat half-wet and her hair dripping wet, like a snowman just pulled ashore.
"Some people are saying you're in a relationship, and it's with Tan Yuze?"
She looked up and asked, "Teacher, does it count as puppy love if the first and second students in the grade are doing homework at the same time?"
Old Cao choked and pushed the printed photo over.
Xu Li pointed to the wet cuff of her school uniform in the photo with her fingertip: "Look, I didn't even put my hands in his pockets."
Old Cao frowned and called Tan Yuze over again.
The boy entered the room, looked at Xu Li first, then at the photo, and finally at Lao Cao, saying in a flat tone: "Teacher, if I really want to date, I won't choose a rainy day—it's too noisy and not good for memorizing the periodic table."
Old Cao: "..."
The surveillance footage showed the two people under the umbrella were always separated by their school uniform sleeves. Old Cao rubbed his temples, recalling Zhou Yu's red-eyed words, "They're definitely together," and suddenly felt a headache coming on. 6
The conversation ended, and half of the corridor lights went out.
Xu Li walked in front, while Tan Yuze lagged behind by half a step.
"What do you plan to do about Zhou Yu's email?"
“There’s nothing we can do.” Xu Li stopped and turned around. “He just wanted me to see him, but unfortunately he used the wrong formula.”
Tan Yuze laughed: "Then next monthly exam, I'll make him admit defeat."
"No," Xu Li kicked at the puddle in the corner, "Let him win this once. If he beats me, he won't keep targeting me anymore."
Are you sure?
“I’m not sure,” she shrugged, “but I’m sure—”
The second half of her sentence was drowned out by the sudden lighting of the corridor. Tan Yuze didn't hear it clearly, but he saw the corner of her mouth curve slightly, like a fleeting spark in an electrical circuit.
Old Cao called Xu Li and Tan Yuze into his office separately, closing the doors tightly as if to stifle all rumors. "What's going on between you two?"
Old Cao pushed up his glasses, his tone as if he were reviewing a wrong answer. Xu Li stood ramrod straight, her face displaying the indifferent air typical of the top student in the grade, an air of ease with grades and the world at large. "Teacher, whatever Zhou Yu says goes?"
She retorted, "So if he says I'm in love with the moon next time, would you believe him?" Old Cao was taken aback and turned to ask Tan Yuze. The boy, hands in his pockets, school uniform zipped all the way up, looked weary: "If I'm in love, my grades will drop. Look at this monthly exam, I still got a perfect score in physics."
He spoke as objectively as if grading a test, saying, "It doesn't make logical sense." Old Cao didn't believe him. Good students are the best liars, especially when they use grades as a shield.
He pulled up the surveillance footage and found that the so-called "evidence" was just sharing an umbrella on a rainy night—Xu Li's umbrella ribs were broken, and Tan Yuze took her back to her dormitory on the way. The two were about an arm's length apart and didn't even touch each other's sleeves.
“That kid Zhou Yu…” Old Cao rubbed his temples, recalling Zhou Yu’s red-eyed complaint, as if the only answer to his exam paper had been stolen.
The next morning during reading time, Xu Li passed by Zhou Yu's desk and casually tossed out a remark: "Next time you make up a story, remember to write the physics formulas correctly." Zhou Yu gripped his pen, his knuckles turning white, when he heard Tan Yuze chuckle from the desk behind him—a soft laugh, but enough for Zhou Yu to know that he hadn't lost to rumors, but to the gap between them where even gossip couldn't get in.
Later, Lao Cao sighed in the teachers' office and said to his colleagues, "This year's students, even 'puppy love' has become a competition question." He pulled out Xu Li's competition file, on which was written in red pen: Target university, Tsinghua Yao Class.
Tan Yuze's page is from Peking University's Turing Class. As for Zhou Yu, strange metaphors began to appear in his essays: "They are like two black holes in parallel universes, attracting each other but always maintaining a light-year distance, while I am a meteorite that strayed into orbit, torn apart by gravity, not even worth a speck of dust."
Teacher's comment: The rhetoric is good, but don't write about real people and events next time.
On Monday during lunch break, the back door of the classroom was slammed open. The lunch break bell had barely faded when the classroom felt like a sweltering pot.
Xu Li carried an unopened iced Americano and walked straight to Zhou Yu's table.
The entire classroom automatically went silent, even the fans wisely slowed down. Zhou Yu was pretending to memorize vocabulary words, the letters appearing as gibberish before his eyes.
Xu Li pressed the coffee down in the center of his workbook with a "thud," without spilling a single drop—his accuracy was even more consistent than when he shot a basketball.
She leaned forward, her voice not loud, but loud enough for the three rows in front and behind to hear clearly—"Zhou Yu, let's settle the accounts." "Three things." She held up three fingers, her voice not loud, but enough to make the last row of people prick up their ears.
"The first cut."
She tapped her fingernail on the dense red pen annotations on his test paper. "The whistleblower letter said I 'stayed in the lab building after evening self-study'—you arranged the duty roster that night, you deliberately put yourself on the same floor as me, but wrote Tan Yuze in the lab next door. What, trying to create an alibi for yourself?"
Zhou Yu's lips turned pale: "I..."
"Don't say 'me, me, me,' the duty roster is still posted on the bulletin board, and the whole class can see it."
She turned her head and called out to the back row, "Does anyone have a phone? Take a picture and project it, so he won't change his mind later."
With both phones raised at the same time, Zhou Yu's ear tips instantly turned into signal lights.
"The second cut."
Xu Li pulled out a neatly folded A4 sheet of paper from her pocket—it was the original draft of Zhou Yu's handwritten report.
“Last night I went to the printing room to look for the test paper, but the printer jammed, and this is the paper I pulled out.”
She slammed the paper onto his textbook, her fingertips hovering over the last line of words that had been crossed out and rewritten—
I just wanted you to see me.
The whole class erupted in uproar.
Zhou Yu instinctively reached out to grab it, but Xu Li flicked her wrist, and the paper was already above her head.
"Don't worry, there are also photocopies."
With her other hand, she magically produced three photocopies, scattered them to the side, and the students in the front row laughed and passed them around for a while.
Zhou Yu's back bent like a shrimp, and he shrank into the table.
"The third cut."
Xu Li suddenly raised her hand and ripped open Zhou Yu's school uniform jacket hanging on the back of the chair.
A stack of photos slipped out of the inner pocket—all candid shots.
Under an umbrella on a rainy night, a silhouette in the cafeteria, a silhouette in the library... there's even a close-up of an eyelash magnified to the point of being blurry.
She held the photo of the eyelashes in her hand and waved it up in the light, as if displaying a specimen under a microscope.
"Zhou Yu, do you like me, or do you like being a paparazzi?"
Zhou Yu managed to squeeze out a short "I'm sorry," his voice so soft it was almost inaudible.
Xu Li slammed the photo on the table with a loud thud, like a slap. "How many credits is 'sorry' worth? Daring to write it but not admitting it, daring to take the picture but not daring to take responsibility—is this the backbone of someone third in the grade?"
Air condenses into a solid.
Zhou Yu finally raised his head, his eyes red-rimmed, but he couldn't utter a single word. Xu Li suddenly leaned closer, his nose just a fist's width away from Zhou Yu's, his voice extremely low, audible only to him:
"You could have just told me openly, 'I, Zhou Yu, like you.' Instead, you chose the dirtiest path, treating me, Tan Yuze, and the whole class like fools. Now, are you satisfied?"
As the last word fell, she stood up, the chair leg scraping against the floor with a piercing squeak.
Zhou Yu felt as if his bones had been removed; he slumped back in his chair, his chest heaving violently, yet he couldn't utter a sound.
Tan Yuze entered through the back door, and Xu Li happened to look up as he passed by.
He waved the physics competition paper in his hand, his tone languid: "Next question, shall we go together?"
"Okay," she answered crisply, as if nothing had happened. Zhou Yu lowered his head and slowly tore the water-smeared "admire" into pieces. The surrounding classmates began to whisper, some whistling, some clapping quietly.
Xu Li folded the draft paper covered with "admire" in half twice, then crumpled it into a small ball and accurately threw it into the trash can at the back door of the classroom.
With a "bang," the ball went in.
She clapped her hands, as if brushing away something dirty, then turned and shouted to the whole class:
"Let's call it a day. We still have twenty minutes left in our lunch break. Don't keep everyone from doing their practice problems."
The crowd scattered with a roar, but no one dared to look at Zhou Yu.
The air conditioner started blowing again, carrying the lingering bitterness of the iced Americano.
Zhou Yu stared at the trash can, his lips moved, but he ultimately didn't utter a sound.
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