Chapter 241: Can't You Put the Bamboo Copter on There?

Ma Guojun looked up from his seat and pushed his glasses up.

"Li Hua, I dropped a hundred yuan outside the corridor railing. Go pick it up for me."

Jiang Nian fell into thought, stroking his chin.

"I have an idea. If one desk-mate dies, can the other desk-mate get a guaranteed admission to college?"

Li Hua let out a sharp "Oh!" in an instant, clutching his chest in anguish.

He had originally meant to say "How dare you, bold commoner, to harm me, the Emperor," but he stumbled over his words, and what came out was—

"Bold commoner, how dare you harm me, the Emperor."

A burst of laughter erupted from the middle of the classroom, and the morning self-study bell rang amid this cheerful atmosphere.

Friday. English reading.

Zhang Ningzhi picked up her thermos, a slightly puzzled look on her face. She wondered if she had forgotten to wash it yesterday, but she clearly remembered she had.

She unscrewed the cap, and steam hit her right in the face.

"Haha." Jiang Nian gloated from the side.

Zhang Ningzhi was displeased. "Why didn't you tell me you filled it with water?"

"You didn't ask either."

"You—" Zhang Ningzhi was so furious she couldn't speak, and could only mutter sulkily, "Oh, well, thanks then."

"You're welcome." Jiang Nian began to whistle.

Zhang Ningzhi's face flushed a little. Today she was an angry lychee.

Li Hua, who loved to stir up trouble, egged her on from the side.

"Why won't you fill mine up?"

Jiang Nian glanced at him, his tone flat.

"Your cup's sitting under the bed. How am I supposed to fill it for you?"

"Huh? My cup isn't in the drawer—" Li Hua cut himself off mid-sentence, then suddenly burst out, "Shit shit shit!"

"Stop slandering me all day, damn it! It's you people who made it impossible for me to get a girlfriend! You rumor-spreading scummy guys! Shit shit shit!"

In fact, Li Hua had bought one before.

But the cheap ones were no good, and the good ones were too expensive. For a while he couldn't afford it, so he had to scrape together his pocket money. But once he had the money, he lost the courage to buy.

The first purchase took nothing but courage; the second time, his courage scattered like a drained kidney.

The spring breeze knows nothing of romance, yet it stirs the heart of the young man.

NetEase, ah.

The English morning reading was in full swing. Li Hua recited vocabulary while singing at the top of his lungs.

He thought of Doraemon's bamboo copter, and eagerly shared with Jiang Nian.

"Nian, if you had a bamboo copter, what would you do with it?"

Jiang Nian hadn't done any morning reading at all. Every morning reading period, he worked on practice problems without fail.

He always stuck to Qing Bao's three-step score-boosting strategy, working hard to grind through problems.

In Qing Bao's words, the foundation had already been firmly laid.

For physics and chemistry, if you don't know what score-boosting method works, you might as well try grinding problems first. Try every method, and maybe a quantitative change will lead to a qualitative one.

Hearing Li Hua's words, he thought for a moment, then pointed at his crotch.

"A bamboo copter? Put it on there."

Li Hua was stunned. Another day of heaven-defying remarks.

"Holy shit?"

"That thing is for flying!"

Hearing this, Jiang Nian glanced at him curiously.

"I know that. You don't need to repeat it. Who didn't have a childhood?"

Damn, that's even weirder.

Li Hua couldn't hold it in. He imagined the picture of a bamboo copter stuck on there—wouldn't that be a giant dick spinning around?

Truly Qin Shi Huang on a swing—royalty without limits.

"You're something else."

The dictation segment was about to begin. Li Hua closed his eyes and began recalling the words he'd memorized.

"Shit, I forgot them all."

Jiang Nian laughed, and Li Hua caught him.

Li Hua remembered that Qian Bao had once said that the two desk-mates sitting next to him both scored above 130 in English. He should ask them more often. So, in the spirit of seeking knowledge, he asked:

"Nian, is there any way to memorize words and never forget them?"

"There is. Is there someone you really like but never confessed to?" Jiang Nian asked.

Li Hua was taken aback. "What does that have to do with memorizing words?"

"Cut the crap. Do you want to improve or not?"

"Teacher, I want to improve so badly." Li Hua said earnestly. Once his English scores went up, basically, aside from Tsinghua or Peking, he could go to any university he wanted.

A 985 university wasn't bad compared to a vocational college. He was willing to settle.

After hemming and hawing for a while, Li Hua told the little story of the moonlight-white girl hidden in his heart.

Basically, back in middle school, he had met an ordinary, unremarkable short girl in class.

"Holy shit, a lolicon, huh?" Jiang Nian pointed at him like a husky.

"Get lost! Get lost, get lost!" Li Hua flushed with embarrassed anger, lowered his voice, and continued, "I still remember now—she was short, with short hair, so cute and adorable."

"And you still say you're not a lolicon, Hua. You're really a pervert."

"Redstone! Snow Leopard, shut it."

"OK, please continue."

"It was during the first semester of ninth grade, I remember." Li Hua fell into recollection, his expression unexpectedly softening. There's no one who doesn't love talking about past crushes—they just haven't found the right opening.

If they were boarders, they'd probably each take a turn slipping this memory in during the middle of a late-night chat.

Listening to his roommates' whooping and hollering, the corners of his mouth lifted in the dark.

In the end, amid a string of outrageous jokes, he let out a silent sigh.

"It was winter back then, one morning especially cold. I just felt it would snow that day, and sure enough, it snowed at noon."

"The whole teaching building was cheering. The teacher wouldn't let us leave the classroom, but she did let us go to the window to watch the snow, so a whole crowd of us rushed over."

"You know her, right? She was sitting by the window. I was the first to dash over, and a bunch of people behind me were shoving me, almost pinning me against the wall."

"Anyone who knew would think we were watching snow; anyone who didn't would think they were about to grope my chest."

"That was the closest I ever got to her—close enough to see even her eyelashes clearly. The sun came out too, weird right? The fuzz on her face was golden."

"I really wanted to talk to her back then, but there were too many people behind me. I hesitated for a bit and missed the chance, and after that I never found another chance to speak to her."

"All the way until the high school entrance exam, I memorized her exam hall and seat number in advance. I wandered through seven or eight stationery stores and found a really nice-looking pen refill—I bought the whole damn stock."

"I was such an idiot back then, didn't even check what size the refill was. 0.35—how is that not sabotaging people? The entrance exam required scanning the answer sheet, only 0.5 refills were allowed."

"When I found her exam hall, she was standing in the corridor. She was a bit short, but her hair was clean and neat, and when the sun hit her she really looked beautiful."

"My face must have been beet red. I stumbled through every word as I gave it to her. She just said 'oh,' then looked up at me and smiled."

In class, the English dictation had already started, but Li Hua clearly wanted to finish his story.

He gulped, and even now, talking about something that happened three years ago, he still got nervous.

"You know what happened then, right? We made eye contact, damn it."

"The total number of words I'd ever said to her, from when we met to the entrance exam, probably didn't even reach twenty. But when she looked into my eyes, I just knew... her."

"She definitely knew something too. It felt like we were really familiar, as if we'd already chatted for a hundred nights."

"I felt right then that if I just confessed, the relationship could move forward."

"I just needed one chance to blow the charge. But I figured the math exam was coming up soon, and she wasn't great at math—I didn't want to distract her."

"I missed that chance, and after that I never dared go to her exam hall. I'd originally planned to look for her after the entrance exam, but when it was over, she'd vanished."

"I asked around—her mom drove over and picked her up."

"After that I found out I couldn't reach her anymore. Damn, do you know how I spent that summer?"

"Fuck, not joking, I was so depressed I couldn't even get it up."

"It went on until almost the start of tenth grade, I'd nearly forgotten the whole thing, when suddenly my phone got a text message."

"Believe it or not? People still send texts these days."

"She'd gone to a neighboring county to study, because Zhennan Middle School was just too damn hopeless, a pure trash high school."

"When she went to the new high school, she only brought an old flip phone. So she could only send a text once a month."

"I knew she was panicking when she first boarded, that she'd cry the first night. But every time I found out, it was basically a month later."

"You know what I mean? It felt like something had expired. Not her—me."

When he finished, the English dictation was already half done.

Li Hua frantically started craning his neck to copy words, while Jiang Nian turned around and copied from Zhang Ningzhi's paper.

As he wrote, a picture formed in his mind.

On a sunlit recess one winter day, the little girl Hua liked rested her snow-white cheeks on her hand and, amid the crowded hallway, turned to stare blankly at the thick snow outside the classroom window.

He'd originally planned to play a little word prank on Li Hua, like the word "pigmightfly" (something impossible).

Broken down: pig (pig), might (would), fly (fly). Put together—unless pigs could fly, she wouldn't like you.

But Jiang Nian quickly gave up on the idea—way too damn risky.

Given how worked up Li Hua had been while talking, he probably still remembered his moonlight. If he pulled something like that on him, he'd likely tear him apart in a minute.

Five minutes later, the dictation ended.

Li Hua, having finished cheating, scooted over, his face full of the satisfied look of someone who'd just unburdened himself.

"Nian, what was that method you mentioned earlier for memorizing words?"

Jiang Nian thought for a moment, then answered.

"Just repeat it a few more times."

"You die!" Li Hua instantly activated the throat-lock technique!

Zhang Ningzhi had been pricking up her ears eavesdropping from the moment they started talking, never missing a single piece of gossip.

Even though Li Hua's voice was very quiet, her language sense was extraordinary. Piecing together fragments, she managed to reconstruct the general meaning.

She really wanted to know how the story ended, but was too embarrassed to ask.

So she turned to look at Jiang Nian. Their eyes met, and she blinked.

Jiang Nian understood instantly and held up one finger.

Meaning: one box of lemon tea.

Zhang Ningzhi pouted, dug a drink out of her desk drawer, and handed it to him.

"Here."

Jiang Nian smiled, then turned to ask Li Hua.

"Are you two still in touch?"

Li Hua froze, scratched his head, and didn't answer.

Lin Dong had just finished the dictation and glanced at his deskmate Sun Zhicheng.

"Ah-Cheng, you actually wore one with a hood?"

Sun Zhicheng now had the gray hood of his sweatshirt pulled over his head, his face full of melancholy.

"Don't even mention it. Yesterday I asked the psychology committee member."

"What did she say?"

"She told me to take a leave of absence from school."

(End of chapter)