Chapter 3: The Tail End of Youth

The grand and lively school anniversary finally drew its magnificent curtain under the cover of night.

It was already past ten o'clock when Xiao Lan and Jiang Bufan returned from the school auditorium; in the end, Zhou Xiaoru still did not go to attend the anniversary ceremony.

For this, she silently repented in her heart for the whole night; it was not that she did not love her alma mater, but when facing Gu Liyan, she could only bury the deepest love and highest respect she held for this school at the bottom of her heart.

To put it bluntly, she just did not want to see that face of Gu Liyan...

At this moment, Jiang Bufan and the others were still discussing the anniversary ceremony from tonight, while the person sitting at the desk under her own bed pretending to flip through materials, although her eyes were looking at what she was leafing through in her hands, her ears were like they were receiving radio wave signals, listening to the conversation of the few of them.

Jiang Bufan glanced at that lonely back and shouted at the top of her lungs, "Xiaoru, still preparing for tomorrow's interview?" After finishing, she couldn't help but snicker behind her back.

The person sitting straight-backed did not turn around, though the sound of her flipping through things in her hands grew quite a bit louder, and she replied.

"Yeah, still looking through them." Actually, bullshit! She hadn't taken in a single bit of material all night; her brain was filled with things from the daytime.

Xiao Lan walked over on tiptoe and leaned into the ear of the person who was flipping the book so loudly it rustled, "Tonight's anniversary was so exciting, the handsome Gu... tsk... tsk... it's really a pity you didn't go, you missed a good show."

"Snap!" Slamming the book in her hands shut, Zhou Xiaoru glared at the person to the side, "Stop mentioning that scum to me!"

Jiang Bufan also walked over, saying with a look of 'heartache', "Oh my, baby, what's wrong with you again? Didn't you two already shake hands and make peace today? In order to seek your forgiveness, didn't the handsome Gu even drink that special Ten-Complete Nourishing Soup of yours?"

She gave a disdainful roll of her eyes at the person who had put on an act, "If I had known, I should have found a pile of dog shit back then and seen if he would eat it!" What a man with no integrity! He would stop at nothing to achieve his goals!

At this time, another roommate in the dormitory, Yao Xiang, also gathered around and said earnestly, "Xiaoru, don't keep holding onto it. Since his attitude in admitting his mistake was so sincere, you should be the bigger person and not hold it against him. Anyway, you don't see Gu Liyan many times throughout the year."

This was indeed true; after Gu Liyan finished his postgraduate studies, he went abroad to work, and she was about to graduate and planned to stay in this city to work for a few years first. If it weren't for running into him at the school anniversary today, she felt she would never see that person again in her life.

Thinking of this, Zhou Xiaoru's mood, which had been depressed for half the day, suddenly cleared up.

She stood up from her seat and patted Yao Xiang's thin shoulder, "A Xiang, you really are my life mentor; you're still the reliable one at critical moments."

This made the other two unhappy, and Jiang Bufan's mouth twitched, "Your attitude... don't you even want to know what happened tonight? Tonight's anniversary ceremony was explosive!"

Just as Gu Liyan finished his speech on stage and hadn't stepped down yet, a sophomore girl from the Social College actually carried a huge bouquet of roses and publicly went on stage to confess her love! Could it be any more explosive!

Zhou Xiaoru, however, was uninterested, "I'm not interested at all." If there really were any big news, she wouldn't need them to tell her; she would naturally hear wind of it in school tomorrow morning.

Zhou Xiaoru and Jiang Bufan and the others were all students of the School of Social Public Management, studying a currently popular major: Human Resource Management.

When Zhou Xiaoru was in high school, she had already decided to apply to this university because Gu Liyan was at this school.

Clearly, the power of love was truly great; Zhou Xiaoru's grades in high school could only be considered upper-middle. In order to get into this national key first-tier university, she had put in the effort. In the month before the college entrance exam scores came out, she burned incense and prayed to Buddha at home every day. She had already decided in her heart that if she didn't get in, she would go to another university...

Because all the universities she filled in her applications for were in the same city...

In the end, she got in as she wished...

Lying on the bed, staring at the avatar on her phone's WeChat that had been pulled out of the blacklist...

Zhou Xiaoru looked for a long time. Call her petty or lacking in breadth of mind, but she just couldn't let go of that relationship from two years ago.

The more she thought, the angrier she felt. Her fingers moved, and she gave the owner of this avatar a nice nickname: The Man Who Eats Shit!

The next day was another bright and sunny day, but Zhou Xiaoru's mood was not bright at all.

Last night, she suffered from insomnia...

Last night she tossed and turned, rolling around until past five in the morning before falling asleep, but after falling asleep, she kept having dreams.

In the dream, a man held a big bowl of skewers and chased her. After catching up to her, the man handed that big bowl of skewers to her with a sinister look on his face, saying.

"Xiaoru, your favorite dog-shit skewers..."

Zhou Xiaoru, sporting a pair of blurry panda eyes, sat in the cafeteria, eating the food on her tray one bite at a time.

Thinking of the dream she had in the morning, she felt depressed. Sure enough, the frequency of her saying "dog shit" yesterday was too high; even her dreams were full of dog shit.

She had slept until eleven o'clock. Fortunately, it was the second semester of her senior year, and usually, apart from preparing for her graduation thesis and finding an internship company, there were basically no classes.

Jiang Bufan, sitting opposite her, saw her spacing out again and reached out to wave in front of her eyes, "Baby, you're the one who has an interview this afternoon. Are you going to see your interviewer in this state?"

With a jolt, she almost forgot about the interview!

Xiao Lan, sitting diagonally opposite, looked heartbroken and shook her head repeatedly, "It's over. Once she runs into the handsome Gu, our Xiaoru loses her sense of direction." When they were dating, they were all witnesses; Zhou Xiaoru was a typical example of someone who valued romance over friendship.

A sharp gaze shot over from diagonally opposite. Zhou Xiaoru quickly found two thin ginger shreds in the vegetables on her tray and placed them onto Xiao Lan's tray.

"Lanlan, eat more ginger, it's good for the kidneys!"

Xiao Lan looked at the things placed on her white rice with disgust. Who among those sitting there didn't know she hated eating ginger the most? This person was truly asking for a beating.

The peacemaker Yao Xiang reached out with her chopsticks and picked up those two ginger shreds, "My kidneys aren't good, let me have them to nourish myself."

"Pfft..."

The other three all spat out their rice in unison upon hearing this...

After eating, Zhou Xiaoru returned to the dormitory to take a shower. Standing in front of the vanity, she looked at the person in the mirror.

Today, as soon as she left the dormitory, she heard about what happened at the anniversary ceremony last night. They said that after that girl confessed, she was politely rejected by Gu Liyan on the spot. That menace really is a disaster!

She slapped her face hard; she shouldn't think about that man who eats shit anymore, and she probably wouldn't see him again in the future.

Exhaling a long breath, although she, Zhou Xiaoru, wasn't some peerless beauty, she could be considered a girl next door, and she had people chasing her, okay!

She decided that if the interview at Tengyuan Company this afternoon was successful, she would find herself a boyfriend at Tengyuan Company!

She was already over twenty years old and had only dated one boyfriend; it was truly embarrassing to say out loud.

Xiao Lan had just mocked her, saying she was afraid she would hang herself on the tree of Gu Liyan for the rest of her life, so she would just find a few more trees to show her!

The interview was at two-thirty in the afternoon. Tengyuan Company was a famous large company in City A, and Jiang Bufan and the others were all worried about Zhou Xiaoru's interview that afternoon.

This Tengyuan Company wasn't somewhere you could just get into; the number of people whose resumes were rejected was simply too high.

Of the few in the dormitory, Jiang Bufan didn't need to find an internship company for the time being because she was going to study for a postgraduate degree. Yao Xiang was going back to her hometown after graduation, and Xiao Lan had successfully interviewed at another company two days ago and would be going for an internship next week.

That just left Zhou Xiaoru...

Before she was about to set off, the few of them dressed her up and styled her, making it look like she was going on a blind date...

Awkwardly stepping in a pair of high heels, under the strong demands of the others, Zhou Xiaoru put on the lake-blue woolen coat that Gu Liyan had bought for her when they were dating two years ago.

They all agreed that although Gu Liyan was scum, his taste in choosing clothes was unanimously recognized by them.

This piece of clothing had been hanging in the closet by Zhou Xiaoru; she had originally wanted to throw it away, but in the end, she couldn't bear to—this coat cost over a thousand big ones.

Zhou Xiaoru had never bought such expensive clothes for herself before!

The lake-blue color made her already fair skin look even whiter, and paired with a pair of short high-heeled boots and a ponytail, she looked more like a white-collar worker who had just walked out of the workplace.

She wrinkled her face and pleaded, "Can I not wear high heels?" This pair of shoes had also been strongly insisted upon by the others when they were shopping before, and she had hardly ever worn them.

Zhou Xiaoru always felt that after putting on high heels, she had the sensation of donkey hooves walking on stilts...

Jiang Bufan rolled her eyes and pushed up the leopard-print eyeglass frames on the bridge of her nose, "Baby, the height of these high heels determines the height of your future in the workplace! The higher the heels you can handle, the more successful the men you can handle!"

She glanced sideways at the brazen woman, "Didn't you say before that the height of one's chest determines the height of one's career? How has it changed again now!" This woman had a bunch of fallacies all day long.

Jiang Bufan gave a sheepish laugh, "Did I? Did I say something like that?" After finishing, she looked at Yao Xiang and Xiao Lan who were watching from the side, and the two of them had expressions that clearly said, "You did say that."

Zhou Xiaoru was already too lazy to pay any more attention to her, so she picked up her bag and the prepared resume, "I'm leaving." If she didn't leave now, she would be late, and she didn't want to leave a bad impression on the interviewer.

Tengyuan Company was not too far from Zhou Xiaoru's school; there was a direct bus at the school gate, and it took less than an hour to get there by bus.

After leaving the dormitory and getting on the bus, Zhou Xiaoru started to regret it.

She really shouldn't have listened to those women and worn these damn high heels out; by now, she already felt that her toes were hurting, and her heels were hurting too.

Now she was in a position where she couldn't get off the tiger, so she could only press on, praying in her heart that today's interview would go smoothly.

She had already lived in this city for four years, and now was the first step of her truly stepping into society...