On the first day of sitting at the same desk as Meng Yanxi, Jin Zhao didn’t dare say a word. In fact, if breathing could be included, she wanted to save even that.

She didn’t know why it was like this. When they were far apart, she would deliberately take a detour to enter through the back door, pass by his side, and every time pretend to turn her head to talk to Luo Heng, going out of her way just to secretly glance at him. Now that he had actually sat down beside her, she didn’t even dare turn her head. Her neck was stiff, and half of her ear was burning hot.

At times like this, she really envied Si Tian’s ease and composure.

Si Tian turned around generously and casually talked to Meng Yanxi, expressing either joy or displeasure at his return. Yes—she herself was also a little conflicted. On one hand, she felt that Meng Yanxi was cold and distant, not as lively as Lu Jingyue; on the other hand, she felt that Meng Yanxi was easier to get along with than Lu Jingyue.

Although Jin Zhao could not, no matter how hard she tried, associate Lu Jingyue with liveliness, nor could she associate Meng Yanxi with being easy to get along with. She was even more surprised at how Si Tian could, within just a few sentences, describe such a jumbled mess of thoughts and feelings so clearly.

Jin Zhao stared at her in shock, not knowing what to say.

Meng Yanxi, on the other hand, was much more straightforward. His fingers idly spun the pen as he asked, “How long has your condition lasted? What did the doctor say?”

Si Tian: “……”

Two seconds later, she turned her head and complained to Jin Zhao, “Zhao Zhao, you must also be reluctant to part with Lu Jingyue, right?”

Jin Zhao looked at her innocently, wanting to say, you two can hurt each other all you want—don’t drag me into it.

Si Tian grabbed her hand. “I get it! You definitely don’t like Meng Yanxi either. Ever since this guy sat over here, you haven’t said a single word!”

That sentence successfully dragged Jin Zhao into the water. Meng Yanxi turned his head to look at her.

Jin Zhao: “……”

His cool, detached gaze fell straight on her. Even if Jin Zhao were blind she could have felt it—let alone the fact that she wasn’t blind. In the corner of her vision, it was all him.

Left with no choice, Jin Zhao braced herself and turned her head, meeting those beautiful peach-blossom eyes.

She tried to casually say something to express her fondness for her new deskmate, but unfortunately she was tongue-tied and chose the most insincere sentence possible: “Why did you change seats?”

At that question, Meng Yanxi’s thumb abruptly pressed down on the pen, and the pen spinning between his fingers stopped.

His hands were very good-looking—long fingers, sensual knuckles. When he spun the pen, that tiny dark-red scar on his wrist bone was like a cinnabar mole, swaying now and then, making one’s heart itch. In the moment he pressed the pen down, it inexplicably gave off a sense of coolness.

Jin Zhao thought he would, as he had with Si Tian, retort with a sharp-tongued remark. She had even prepared an apology.

But Meng Yanxi merely let out an “Mm” and said, “Recently I’ve been a bit nearsighted. I can’t see clearly from the back.”

Jin Zhao looked at his eyes with concern. They were the most beautiful eyes she had ever seen. If they became nearsighted, she would feel a little regretful.

Meng Yanxi lowered his gaze to look at her. The pen at his fingertips began spinning again as he said, “False myopia. It can recover.”

Jin Zhao let out a sigh of relief.

Si Tian propped her head up to the side and suddenly said, “Then you could switch with Zhao Zhao. There’s no need to insist on switching with Lu Jingyue.”

Both of them looked at her at the same time—one innocent, one disdainful.

Meng Yanxi couldn’t even be bothered to respond. He shifted his gaze away and said flatly, “Talking too much is bad for the brain. Don’t always do things that add insult to injury.”

Si Tian really wanted to take back what she had just said about Meng Yanxi being easy to get along with.

It must have been because they’d been apart for more than a semester—distance had created beauty—to the point that she had actually forgotten just how poisonous Meng Yanxi’s mouth could be.

Luo Heng from the back row rarely chimed in to agree. “Exactly! Switch with Jin Zhao! The way you’re doing this, people will think Jin Zhao split you two up.”

“Split up who?” Meng Yanxi’s right eyelid twitched.

“Jing Yan Shen Xing, of course!”

Jin Zhao couldn’t help asking, “What Jing Yan Shen Xing?”

“You don’t know?” Luo Heng blinked. “Yan-ge, you don’t know either? You and Yue-ge—Jing Yan Shen Xing is your CP name!”

Meng Yanxi: “……”

Jin Zhao: “？”

Si Tian’s eyes lit up. She slapped the desk. “Wow! There’s already a CP name? When I was following it, there wasn’t even a CP name yet!”

Luo Heng: “It was just coined last Saturday.”

Si Tian: “Last Saturday? What happened last Saturday?”

Remembering the scene of Meng Yanxi fighting at the school gate last Saturday, Jin Zhao’s heart skipped a beat.

Luo Heng: “I just happened to catch a glimpse before that post got deleted. It seemed to say Yan-ge got into a fight with some blond guy at the school gate—lots of people saw it, but no one knew exactly why. Someone posted on the forum to ask about it, and pretty soon someone else uploaded photos of Yan-ge and Yue-ge with their arms around each other at the gate. People guessed the blond guy was harassing Yue-ge, and Yan-ge flew into a rage for his beauty. The melon-eating crowd immediately gave the two of them the CP name Jing Yan Shen Xing.”

Si Tian listened with relish. After hearing it all, she even turned to ask the person involved, “Yan-ge, is it true?”

Meng Yanxi looked at Jin Zhao. “False.”

Jin Zhao felt a bit disoriented.

Lu Jingyue being harassed by a blond guy, Meng Yanxi flying into a rage for his beauty?

Then what about her? Was she just a part of the Jing Yan Shen Xing play?

She couldn’t help glancing at Lu Jingyue, who had already taken a seat in the back row. She didn’t know whether it was Luo Heng’s mouth being too persuasive, or Jing Yan Shen Xing simply being too well-matched, but for a brief moment, Jin Zhao actually suspected that the person Yu Lei truly wanted to pester was Lu Jingyue—and that him blocking her every day at school was just a way to attract Lu Jingyue’s attention.

Jin Zhao was startled by her own all-destroying imagination and forcefully shook her head.

Luo Heng and Si Tian were still beside her, singing in harmony as they shipped the CP.

“Pa!”

The pen in Meng Yanxi’s hand suddenly pressed down onto the desk. The pen shaft struck the wooden desktop with a sound that was neither light nor heavy.

Luo Heng and Si Tian immediately shut up tactfully. Si Tian turned back to her seat and pretended to work on practice problems. Luo Heng glanced at the blackboard, made a small sound of surprise, muttered, “Why hasn’t anyone wiped the blackboard?” and got up to erase it.

Soon, the break ended. The bell rang for the last class of the morning. Jin Zhao lowered her head and took out her math test paper from the desk.

“I don’t like Lu Jingyue.”

At the instant the bell stopped, everything around her became unusually quiet, as if the noisy world had suddenly paused. Jin Zhao heard the voice of the boy beside her.

She turned her head instinctively.

Meng Yanxi turned his eyes to the side. Those pitch-black peach-blossom eyes quietly reflected her, the background filled with the brilliant daylight outside the window.

Their gazes met, and Meng Yanxi did not move his eyes away for a long while.

For a fleeting moment, a girl’s inexplicable intuition made Jin Zhao feel as though he was waiting for her to say something.

But she didn’t know what she should say. She couldn’t possibly ask in return: Then who do you like?

Just then, the math teacher walked in holding a thermos cup. Meng Yanxi finally shifted his gaze away, and at the same time said in a low voice, “Just rumors. Don’t believe them.”

Jin Zhao reacted half a beat later and belatedly replied, “Mm.”

Why did you change seats?

Mm.

——That was all the words Jin Zhao said to Meng Yanxi on the first day they sat together.

When she later thought back on it, she would always feel that she was truly dull— the more she cared about someone, the less able she was to be open and at ease.

She began leaving home twenty minutes earlier every day, just so she could sneak a bottle of goji berry and chrysanthemum tea into his desk before he arrived at school.

Traditional Chinese medicine says that goji berry and chrysanthemum tea brightens the eyes and is good for eyesight.

Meng Yanxi would of course notice the extra bottle of water. Holding the light-colored drink bottle in his hand, he would turn his eyes to her in puzzlement.

His eyes were pitch-black, always making it impossible to tell what he was thinking. Every time this happened, Jin Zhao would feel a kind of caught-in-the-act nervousness—her heart thumping all the way up to her throat—yet on her face she pretended it had nothing to do with her.

She didn’t know. She knew nothing. It must have been sent by some girl from another class.

She looked back at him innocently, her acting flawless.

Meng Yanxi said nothing, twisted open the bottle cap, and tilted his head back to drink.

Jin Zhao watched the sharp lines of the boy’s Adam’s apple roll as he swallowed, and inside she felt both happy and unhappy.

But most of the time, she was happy. Meng Yanxi had become her deskmate, and the tiny grain of white sugar she had secretly hidden in her heart turned into a richly sweet milk candy, melting now and then, making even the early summer air grow sweeter along with it.

May 26 was the campus arts festival. The affiliated school’s arts festival had only been introduced in recent years. It operated on a voluntary registration basis, with individual entries or free groupings, and did not require participation by class. No one knew where the school got its confidence; sure enough, it was run worse each year. Without compulsion, fewer and fewer people signed up, and this year they couldn’t even scrape together enough programs to fill the evening gala.

So with only one week left before the arts festival, each class teacher received a mobilization order from the administration, returning to a class-based competition system.

Chen Shu asked the arts committee member to tally registrations, but the timing was poor. With the monthly exams approaching, no one wanted to waste time. Apart from Meng Yanxi, who had signed up early for calligraphy, not a single person from Class A registered.

But Meng Yanxi’s calligraphy pieces were only for exhibition; he couldn’t even go on stage to pad out the gala’s running time.

Chen Shu had a headache and did not hesitate to take up Chinese class time, earnestly persuading them from the podium—

“Three years of high school pass in the blink of an eye, students. Besides textbooks and exam papers, shouldn’t we have at least a few moments we’ll remember for a lifetime? The arts festival is exactly such an opportunity. It’s not that you have to sing exceptionally well or dance professionally to go on stage. Even if you just rehearse a short skit with classmates, recite a poem, or perform a comedic sketch, those are your moments to shine. I know many of you are afraid of performing poorly and wasting time, but think about it—after you graduate, when you look back on these three years, will you really remember which monthly exam you lost a few points on, or which question you got wrong? You won’t. But you will remember rehearsing programs with your classmates, laughing until your stomach hurt over a certain line, shining together on stage. Even if it’s just once, that’s enough to make you smile every time you recall it, for decades to come.”

Chen Shu truly lived up to being a Chinese teacher. After class, an immediate crowd formed around the seat of the arts committee member, Zhao Yu. Even Si Tian and Luo Heng went to sign up, forming a team to perform crosstalk.

Jin Zhao didn’t move from her seat. Meng Yanxi was sitting on the outside beside her and turned his head to look at her. “Not going to sign up?”

Jin Zhao shook her head.

Meng Yanxi: “Why?”

Jin Zhao felt the question was a little strange. Did not signing up need a reason? Signing up was what needed a reason, wasn’t it?

She looked at the boy beside her and asked in return, “Then what about you? Why did you sign up?”

Her almond-shaped eyes were clear, her brows and eyes clean. Meng Yanxi suddenly remembered that day—back when he hadn’t yet switched seats with Lu Jingyue—passing by Lu Jingyue’s side, hearing her praise him with admiration: “Your handwriting is so good!”

She must never have seen truly good handwriting.

The moment he went out, he signed up for calligraphy.

After signing up, he felt he was being pretty chunibyo¹Chūnibyō (中二病) is a Japanese slang term for a phase in early adolescence (around 13-14 years old) where teens develop grandiose delusions, believing they possess special powers, secret knowledge, or a dark past, often mimicking anime/manga characters.. Luckily Lu Jingyue didn’t wear makeup—otherwise, if she were to praise Lu Jingyue with a “Your makeup looks so good,” would he have to go learn makeup too?

Such an embarrassingly chūnibyō history—of course Meng Yanxi wouldn’t say it.

“Just signed up randomly.” Meng Yanxi told a very perfunctory lie.

“Don’t believe it.” Kind people were always kind. Jin Zhao even came up with a reason for him. “It’s because your handwriting looks good, right?”

After a week of being deskmates, Jin Zhao was already familiar with his writing. It had both the firm strength of iron strokes and silver hooks, and a hidden liveliness of free, flowing spirit. She had originally thought Lu Jingyue’s handwriting was already good enough; now she felt Meng Yanxi’s was even better.

Meng Yanxi: “Mm. My brush calligraphy is even better.”

Jin Zhao: “?”

Perhaps even Meng Yanxi himself felt he was being a bit peacock-like, so he changed the subject. “Have you considered signing up for dancing?”

Jin Zhao looked at him and, possessed by a sudden impulse, asked back, “Would you dance even better too? If so, I can be your backup dancer.”

Anyone else would have heard that she was teasing him, but Meng Yanxi had never understood what modesty was in his life. He nodded without hesitation. “Sure. Go sign up.”

After the two of them signed up with the arts committee member, before they even returned to their seats, still standing amid the crowd, Meng Yanxi turned to look at her and calmly finished the second half of his sentence: “But you might need to teach me first.”

Jin Zhao: “?”

Footnotes

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  Chūnibyō (中二病) is a Japanese slang term for a phase in early adolescence (around 13-14 years old) where teens develop grandiose delusions, believing they possess special powers, secret knowledge, or a dark past, often mimicking anime/manga characters.