“……”
Xiao Yan rubbed the top of his head. An extra little tangerine had somehow appeared on top of the rice in the meal tray in front of him. Drawn on it was a meme of someone side-eyeing while eating melon. Both the drawing technique and the method of committing the crime were extremely familiar—and clearly well-practiced.
It was obviously a crime committed by someone he knew, and definitely not the first time.
Sure enough, when he turned around, he saw a figure wearing a red-and-white school uniform flash past in the direction of the cafeteria’s back door, escaping at lightning speed.
At the table in the back row, Luo Zhiyu’s roommate, Jing Ximing, was tiptoeing away.
“Huh? Yan-ge, where did you get that tangerine? It looks pretty sour.” Zhang Shu, who had been buried in his dinner, lifted his head and saw the extra tangerine in Xiao Yan’s tray. “Doesn’t our stingy school only give fruit to the first-years?”
“Oh, who in first year has their eyes on our school heartthrob again?” Fan Yue had just returned from buying water at the store and immediately spotted the tangerine in Xiao Yan’s hand. “They’ve already started giving you food and drinks. But tangerines aren’t even that good. With so many kinds of fruit, why did they pick a tangerine?”
“Let it be our after-dinner fruit.” Fan Yue really wasn’t picky.
“They’re not interested in me. They’ve got their eyes on me.” Xiao Yan stuffed the tangerine into his school uniform pocket. “Someone’s asking to get beaten up again. Let’s eat first. Tonight, I’m going to his class to beat him up.”
Fan Yue: “……Pfft, Luo Zhiyu.”
“I’m going to beat him up good.” Xiao Yan squeezed the tangerine in his pocket. “No mercy.”
Luo Zhiyu waited for Jing Ximing not far outside the cafeteria. The gradually setting sunlight dyed the treetops gold. Luo Zhiyu crouched beneath a tree, picking up leaves and playing with them.
When he was little, there had been a huge parasol tree at the end of his neighborhood. Back then, after school, Xiao Yan, who was already in fifth grade, would stand beneath the tree and throw parasol tree fruits at him whenever he wasn’t paying attention.
“Let’s go.”
Luo Zhiyu saw his deskmate walking over, so he stood up from the ground and dusted the dirt off his clothes.
“You can still go provoke him while you’re eating. Are you two planning to never stop fighting from now on?” Jing Ximing hadn’t even had time to put his backpack on properly in his hurry.
“It’s not like I’ve never thought about calling a truce.”
To prevent Xiao Yan from retaliating, the two of them took a small path back to the classroom. Parasol trees lined both sides of the path, and the fallen leaves were gradually filling the ground beneath their feet.
“But I’ve only thought about it.”
There was no way the two of them could suddenly get along peacefully overnight.
“What you said makes some sense, but I think Xiao Yan probably thinks the same way. You two are like a vicious cycle. I don’t know when you’ll finally find a way to break it.” Jing Ximing casually gave Luo Zhiyu a hand. “You still remember that you need a favor from him, right? You have to go to the hospital with him this weekend. Hey, watch where you’re going……”
The fallen leaves covered the path, hiding the drainage manhole cover beside the road as well.
“I don’t provoke him. He’s the one who provokes me. I’m just retaliating. It’s normal. You’ve never seen how he bullied me when we were kids. All I can say is, what goes around comes around……”
Luo Zhiyu was speaking enthusiastically and didn’t notice what was under his feet. He stepped directly onto the old, dilapidated manhole cover at the side of the road.
The sewer wasn’t deep. It had dried up after years of disuse and was covered with layer upon layer of parasol tree leaves.
With a crisp crack, Luo Zhiyu didn’t have time to pull his foot back. He twisted his ankle, and his entire body lost its balance.
Luo Zhiyu: “……Ow.”
Jing Ximing: “……Holy shit.”
“How did you manage to fall this badly?”
The girl at the infirmary was disinfecting the wound on Luo Zhiyu’s knee.
“So why did you two have to take that old, dilapidated path when you were walking perfectly fine? And even if you were going to take it, don’t you students ever look where you’re walking?”
When Luo Zhiyu fell, his final thought had actually been to protect Xiao Yan’s school uniform.
He had braced himself against the ground with both hands, and not a speck of dust had gotten onto the school uniform he was wearing.
As a result, he was now sitting in the infirmary, grimacing as the school nurse disinfected the wounds on both his palms before wrapping them in gauze.
“Hurts, hurts, hurts.”
There was also some gauze wrapped around Luo Zhiyu’s wrist.
“He hit his forehead too.” Jing Ximing brushed aside the loose hair above Luo Zhiyu’s forehead. “Tsk, what a disaster.”
“This one’s fine. It won’t leave a scar. Pain is unavoidable. What were you thinking about while you were walking?” The school nurse examined his wounds. “I’ll give you a simple dressing. Try not to get it wet for the next few days.”
Luo Zhiyu, who had been thinking about how to cause trouble for Xiao Yan while walking, silently swallowed this loss.
“I have to go through the interview process with the Student Union tonight.”
Luo Zhiyu limped along while leaning on Jing Ximing.
“Luo Zhiyu is physically disabled but spiritually determined. Do you think the teacher will give me extra points?”
“Are you sure you can manage?” Luo Zhiyu had taken quite a fall, and Jing Ximing, who had witnessed the whole thing, was still shaken.
“I can. This little injury is nothing.” Luo Zhiyu was extremely confident. “Help me back, and then I’ll go upstairs to Class 3 to find Xiao Yan’s roommate and get the approved application form.”
Inside the Grade 1, Class 3 classroom, evening self-study hadn’t started yet. Most of the students hadn’t returned, and only a few scattered students were racing against time to work on problems and complete their test papers.
Luo Zhiyu’s seat was easy to recognize.
Like everyone else, he had piles of books on his desk, but his pile was higher than anyone else’s, as though he had built a defensive fortification on top of his desk, firmly blocking most of the teacher’s line of sight.
At a glance, it was obvious that he must be up to quite a few little tricks during class.
Xiao Yan walked closer and took a careful look. Luo Zhiyu didn’t have many textbooks or supplementary study materials. Instead, quite a few sketchbooks had been mixed in among them.
The students in Class 3 all knew Xiao Yan, and several even greeted him on their own.
“Luo Zhiyu went to dinner. He hasn’t come back yet.” Lin Ziyi said, “Why don’t you wait for him at his seat?”
An open Chinese textbook was spread across Luo Zhiyu’s desk. It had only been a few days since school started, but every passage in the book had already been given an illustration by him.
Beside the Chinese textbook was a copybook for practicing Shoujin-style calligraphy.
Xiao Yan was bored, so he flipped through the copybook. Luo Zhiyu really had been working hard at practicing his handwriting. However, amid the completely incompatible handwriting between the templates and the tracing paper, Xiao Yan could see a completely unruly soul.
“What does the school heartthrob want with Zhiyu?” someone in the class who loved gossip asked.
Xiao Yan casually tossed out two words:
“Beat him up.”
Before evening self-study began, Xiao Yan waited for Luo Zhiyu’s roommate, Jing Ximing, but he never saw Luo Zhiyu.
Jing Ximing: “……”
Sure enough, the victim who had been hit in the head with a tangerine had come looking for trouble.
“Where’s Luo Zhiyu?” Xiao Yan asked. “Did he do something bad and not dare come back?”
“He……just went to your class……”
He’d said that he could totally hop up the stairs by himself on one leg.
Xiao Yan: “……”
Inside the Grade 2, Class 3 classroom, the curtains were drawn tightly shut. The students who had already returned to the classroom were having their pre-evening-study tea party.
Someone once again brought up the scumbag from the neighboring school, and the conversation returned to what had happened that morning.
Fan Yue deliberately wanted to clear his roommate’s name. Seeing everyone return to the same topic, he quickly added a few words.
“Xiao Yan and Luo Zhiyu are going to test their pheromone compatibility this weekend for scientific research. There’s nothing going on between them. Zero percent, guys. It’s already good enough if those two don’t fight.”
“I think so too,” someone in the class said. “Xiao Yan definitely doesn’t look like one of those scumbag Alphas.”
“Xiao Yan isn’t a scumbag Alpha. He doesn’t bully people.”
“It’s all a misunderstanding. The school heartthrob is the face of our school. He’s handsome, gets good grades, and his character is fine too.”
“Exactly.”
Tang Yuan’s little lecture on scumbag Alphas had begun again.
“A true scumbag Alpha usually has a deceptive quality to him. On the surface, he’s gentle and mild, but inside, his emotions are turbulent and complicated. And the friends around him usually go along with him and help cover up the fact that he’s a scumbag. I don’t think they’re difficult to identify. You just have to pay attention. A scumbag Alpha might already cause emotional harm to the omegas or betas around him during middle or high school. And in more serious cases, there can even be physical harm!”
“For an Alpha like that, we should start resisting him from middle and high school.” Fan Yue said, “Birds of a feather flock together, and people of the same kind associate with each other. We should resist the people around him too.”
Everyone in the classroom listened with rapt attention.
The back door of the classroom was pushed open, and Xiao Yan walked in.
“What are you guys talking about again?”
“We’re praising you,” Tang Yuan said. “Praising you for being reasonable and understanding.”
“Has Luo Zhiyu been here?” Xiao Yan had come upstairs all the way from the east staircase and hadn’t seen Luo Zhiyu.
“Huh?” Fan Yue said. “No, I haven’t seen him. We’ve been chatting the whole time. Did you go find him to settle the score?”
Getting hit in the head with a tangerine.
A grudge as vast as the sky.
“Yeah.” Xiao Yan nodded. “I went downstairs to beat him up.”
But he hadn’t found him.
“Hahahaha, he really does need to be taught a lesson. He’s just asking to get beaten up.” Fan Yue chimed in.
They were still talking when the classroom’s back door was pushed open.
Limping and hopping his way up the west staircase, Luo Zhiyu arrived at the Grade 2, Class 3 classroom. Panting, he pushed open the door.
Both his wrist and palms were wrapped in gauze. There was also a piece of gauze on his head, and a Band-Aid under one of his eyes.
He had sweated all over from walking there. His cheeks were slightly flushed, and combined with all those injuries, he looked especially pitiful.
This time, there wasn’t even any background music in Class 3’s classroom.
It was extremely, extremely quiet.
“Sorry to interrupt.”
Luo Zhiyu caught his breath, braced himself against the classroom door, and limped one step forward. He was about to ask about the Student Union.
“Xiao Yan, you……”
“He beat him up that badly……”
Someone sucked in a breath.
“This really has that vibe.”
Luo Zhiyu: “?”
Xiao Yan: “???”