Ever since the power went out, the Grade 11 classes upstairs had been in constant turmoil. Footsteps could be heard through the ceiling, never stopping for even a moment.
After all, the Grade 11 students were a year older. They had been at No. 1 High School for a year longer, and quite a few had already become old hands at getting around the rules.
When faced with something like a power outage, they weren’t nearly as obedient as the Grade 10 students. They immediately started packing their schoolbags, planning to make a run for it.
As long as they could sneak back to the dorms and lock the door, they wouldn’t have to attend evening self-study tonight.
“Let’s go, brothers, hurry!” Fan Yue stuffed a few books haphazardly into his schoolbag and urged his roommates on. “If we don’t run now, are we waiting for the power to come back?”
Tang Yuan was the fastest. He had already packed up everything on his desk in the shortest time possible and slipped out through the back door amid the chaos.
The main force of students trying to escape evening self-study ran straight into their homeroom teacher, Teacher Li, who was holding a flashlight.
Fan Yue: “Uh……”
“Go on, go on. Don’t panic or push each other on the stairs. Watch your step and stay safe.” Most of the students above the third floor had already slipped away, and Teacher Li couldn’t be bothered to police them too closely. “Xiao Yan, stay.”
“What for?” Fan Yue instinctively reached out, wanting to drag his roommate along with him.
“I don’t know.” Teacher Li shook his head. “The homeroom teacher of Class 3, Grade 10, downstairs told me to catch you. Apparently, you corrupted their Luo Zhiyu.”
Xiao Yan: “……”
“That’s nonsense.” Fan Yue immediately defended his roommate. “Does Luo Zhiyu even need corrupting? He was never capable of sitting still in the first place.”
The stairwell was illuminated by dim emergency lights.
Xiao Yan and Luo Zhiyu stood on opposite sides of the stairwell entrance as punishment. In the Grade 10 classrooms, the students in every class were still waiting for the power to come back and hadn’t left.
“I’ve thought about this many times,” Xiao Yan said, breaking the silence in the stairwell.
“What?”
“We’re not even in the same grade. So why do I keep ending up standing punishment with you?”
“Who knows?” Luo Zhiyu had grown tired of standing and took two steps back toward the wall. “I’ve been wondering the same thing. With so many people playing on their phones during evening self-study, why was I the one who got caught?”
After saying that, he came to his own conclusion.
“I guess I wasn’t playing enough.”
“You’re pretty skilled at selling out your teammates,” Xiao Yan said.
Seeing that no one was around, he changed his position and stood beside Luo Zhiyu.
Luo Zhiyu disdainfully took a step to the left, but Xiao Yan reached out, grabbed him by the arm, and pulled him back before he could get away.
Unable to dodge, Luo Zhiyu found himself looking straight into Xiao Yan’s eyes.
“It was my first time selling out a teammate. I had no experience, so I failed to clear myself,” Luo Zhiyu said with a deliberately humble smile. “Besides, whose fault is it that you messaged me during evening self-study?”
“Come on. We’re in this together. Neither of us gets to run.” Xiao Yan straightened him out and resisted the urge to pat his cheek. “Look at the chat history yourself. Who sent the first message?”
“Then who was the one who stuck a note on my back first?” Luo Zhiyu protested.
“Then who was the one who drew the turtle on the window first?”
If they really wanted to trace things back to the beginning, they could probably have dragged the argument all the way back to kindergarten.
The two sensible people gave up on the subject, allowing it to end at “the turtle” without digging any deeper.
“I’m tired.”
The dim surroundings made Luo Zhiyu increasingly sleepy. He gradually leaned against the wall.
“I can’t stand anymore.”
“Stand properly.” Xiao Yan raised his voice slightly. “Your homeroom teacher told me to supervise your punishment while I’m at it. Consider it a chance for me to make up for my own offense.”
Being stern was useless.
Luo Zhiyu wasn’t afraid of him in the slightest.
“Then don’t lean against the wall.” Xiao Yan compromised.
He lifted Luo Zhiyu back up as the boy slowly slid downward, then patted the dust off his clothes.
“Your whole back is covered in dust from the wall.”
“Half an hour at most.” Xiao Yan checked the time on his phone. “If the power isn’t restored soon, they’ll let the Grade 10 students go too. We won’t have to stand for much longer. Stop complaining about being tired. When you chase me around trying to beat me up, you can run three whole streets without even getting out of breath.”
Luo Zhiyu stopped talking.
The two stood silently for a while.
In the end, Xiao Yan gave up first. He looked around the dim hallway.
“Forget it. Let’s go. No more punishment.”
“Really?” Luo Zhiyu immediately perked up. “We’re making a run for it?”
“Let’s go. The power probably won’t be back before classes end. It’s this dark, no one will notice us leaving, and the teachers don’t have time to deal with us.”
Xiao Yan slung his schoolbag over one shoulder and led Luo Zhiyu downstairs by the hand.
They didn’t encounter any teachers along the way.
There were only a few scattered students sneaking out.
Luo Zhiyu let Xiao Yan pull him along, following him downstairs. Somehow, he found a strange sense of happiness in sneaking out like this.
He couldn’t tell whether the fun came from escaping evening self-study itself, or from the person taking him along.
Outside the teaching building, it was actually much brighter than indoors.
The lights across half the city had gone out. A thick layer of snow covered the ground, and snowflakes were still drifting down from the sky.
The reflected glow of the snow mingled with the starlight, revealing the outlines of the distant sports field and administration building.
Luo Zhiyu’s umbrella was still in the classroom.
Xiao Yan told him to wait a moment, then dug his own folding umbrella out of his schoolbag.
A layer of snow had accumulated along the first-floor corridor, with all sorts of messy footprints stamped across it. The smooth marble floor looked especially slippery.
The irregular footprints and marks on the ground made Xiao Yan guess what had happened here.
He called out a warning.
“Careful……”
“Whoa!”
Before Xiao Yan could finish, someone hurrying forward suddenly slipped.
He landed hard on his butt, then slid down three steps and crashed into the snow outside the teaching building.
At the same moment he fell, instinctively and without the slightest hesitation, he grabbed Xiao Yan by the ankle.
Xiao Yan: “……”
“I’m gonna beat you up, Luo Zhiyu!”
Xiao Yan’s umbrella, which he hadn’t even had time to open, landed on the ground.
He went sliding out after Luo Zhiyu, looking like he was about to beat him up.
Luo Zhiyu knew he’d caused trouble.
The fall had hurt quite a bit, but he didn’t have time to worry about that. He immediately prepared to run.
Unfortunately, he flailed around twice in the snow and still couldn’t get up.
Xiao Yan pinned him down and gave the back of his neck a pinch.
Amid the snowflakes flying up from the ground and falling from the sky, Luo Zhiyu flinched slightly, then turned around and gave Xiao Yan a pleading smile.
Xiao Yan had originally intended to teach this troublemaker a proper lesson.
But the moment he looked up, he suddenly froze.
Half the city had lost power because of the heavy snow, cutting off the neon lights and noise of the city.
The night sky had once again become dazzlingly bright.
That star he had once lured away with the fireworks of the mortal world had quietly fallen onto the snow-covered ground.
He wanted to capture that star and make it his own.
“I’m freezing to death! Ahhh! It’s all your fault.”
Outside a small convenience store, Luo Zhiyu hugged a cup of rock-sugar pear drink to warm his hands.
“Don’t you have any conscience? I already fell, and you were still thinking about beating me up.”
Luo Zhiyu lay sprawled over the table, clutching the paper cup listlessly.
“My butt hurts. It’s all your fault.”
Xiao Yan: “???”
Xiao Yan: “You fell by yourself, okay?”
“Fine, fine,” Luo Zhiyu said.
Several curious looks immediately shot toward them from inside the convenience store.
“Eat your food and don’t say anything. If you’re still hungry, I’ll buy you another one.”
Xiao Yan tapped Luo Zhiyu’s fingers with the unopened straw in his hand.
“If you hadn’t grabbed me and made me fall with you just now, I might even have been able to help you up like a civilized person.”
“We’re in this together. Neither of us gets to run.”
Luo Zhiyu moved his chair closer to Xiao Yan.
“You said it yourself.”
“Are you a little parrot?” Xiao Yan was once again irritated into laughter.
This time, he didn’t restrain his hand. He reached out and patted Luo Zhiyu’s cheeks twice.
“Whatever I teach you, you learn immediately, huh?”
“Learn one thing and infer three. Guaranteed to learn it and master it.”
Luo Zhiyu readily admitted to it and leaned a little closer to Xiao Yan.
“After all, I’m brilliant.”
“Cold?” Xiao Yan noticed his movement. “If you’re cold, we can go back to the dorm first. Want me to walk you back?”
“No rush, no rush. I don’t want to go back. Let me stay with you for a while. There’s no power back there either, and they’ve confiscated my phone. It’s boring.”
Luo Zhiyu said, “Let me enjoy the emergency lights at the convenience store for a while.”
Luo Zhiyu had left his schoolbag in the classroom, but Xiao Yan was still carrying his.
Taking advantage of the emergency lighting, Xiao Yan finished working through the problem he’d left unfinished in class.
The Grade 11 textbooks caught Luo Zhiyu’s interest.
While Xiao Yan worked on his homework, Luo Zhiyu flipped through his textbooks beside him.
“Do you have any scratch paper?”
Luo Zhiyu found something interesting in the math textbook and leaned across the table, tilting his head toward Xiao Yan.
“I haven’t learned this yet. You didn’t write out the steps. Let me solve it.”
“I’ll give you half.”
Xiao Yan had only brought one sheet and was already using it, so he turned the paper around and gave Luo Zhiyu a blank section.
Outside the window was wind and snow.
Inside was dim emergency lighting and a scattering of numbers intertwined across the paper.
The snow came down fiercely, but only lasted for one night.
The next day, the sky cleared.
The temperature, however, had dropped several degrees.
When Luo Zhiyu arrived in class, he had added a light-colored scarf over his school uniform.
[Not a Cicada]: Aha! Big bro!
[Not a Cicada]: I got my phone back! Let’s chat!
[Not a Cicada]: My homeroom teacher said I had a good attitude while standing punishment last night hahaha. Thanks to Brother Yan for taking me out. Brother Yan is a good person.
[Orange Isn’t Bad]: Fairy Frown.jpg. Can we talk after class?
[Orange Isn’t Bad]: I don’t want to stand punishment again.
[Not a Cicada]: Don’t chicken out.
Xiao Yan’s class was having math.
The teacher was going over a more difficult Gaokao paper, occasionally asking students to answer questions.
“You’re not looking at these Gaokao papers early just for the sake of it. These are all concepts we’ve covered recently. You have to learn how to answer these questions.”
The teacher drew diagrams on the blackboard.
Even through the screen, Xiao Yan could sense how excited Luo Zhiyu was to have his phone back.
He was talking even more than usual.
[Not a Cicada]: Oh no, the director is checking classes. That was close.
Xiao Yan was distracted.
He was thinking about Luo Zhiyu from the night before.
The boy who had fallen into the snow, who had looked back at him with a smile after Xiao Yan had pinched the back of his neck and made it hurt.
There had been something mischievous and something timid about that smile.
It made Xiao Yan want to tease him.
And protect him.
Those two extremes created a contradictory feeling, causing the image to linger in his mind throughout the entire night.
Not only did the contradiction fail to disappear, it only grew stronger and stronger—
This was an inability to forget that had nothing to do with pheromones.
“0301, Xiao Yan, stop looking down all the time. I know you’ve already learned this, but you still need to listen.”
The teacher called on him.
“Explain how to solve this problem.”
“Which one?”
Xiao Yan nudged Fan Yue with his foot.
“Quick.”
“The second-to-last one. Damn, you brought the wrong test paper.”
Fan Yue pushed his own paper over.
“What happened? In broad daylight, are you thinking about peaches?”
Xiao Yan: “……”