Chapter 71: Comfort
There’s a line in a Stephen Chow movie, “When a girl closes her eyes, she’s asking you to kiss her.”
In that brief moment, Tong Yao’s mind became a battlefield. She wasn’t a block of wood without feelings; she was just someone who had never been in a relationship. They were so close, and the New Year’s Eve atmosphere was so thick. She suddenly had the impulse to throw everything away and indulge just once.
The last day of the year.
The first day of the new year.
Just this once…
She held her breath, leaned forward slightly, and against the young girl’s cherry-colored lips, she planted a light, gentle kiss, like a dragonfly touching the water.
The young girl’s heart pounded wildly, filled with immense joy. She subconsciously wanted to get closer, but the touch was already gone. She opened her eyes in a daze and found that Teacher Tong was standing at her original distance, her pretty face almost hidden in her scarf.
Did she and Teacher Tong… just kiss?
Tong Yao’s earlobes were burning. Seeing the girl staring at her, utterly entranced, her face turned even redder. She said in a low voice, “What are you looking at?”
The young girl came back to her senses, put her hands behind her back shyly, and asked in a small voice, “Just now…”
Tong Yao suddenly took out the little fox doll and pointed to its fluffy mouth.
“Just now… it kissed you.”
The young girl was stunned for a moment, then smiled.
“Oh, I see.”
Who had kissed whom, both of them knew very well.
But if Teacher Tong didn’t want to point it out, then the young girl was willing to wait for the day it was pointed out. If she couldn’t wait for Teacher Tong to take the initiative… then she had to become strong as soon as possible and point it out herself.
“We should go back,” Tong Yao said in a low voice. “It’s so late.”
“Mhm.”
Ruan Xi gently touched Tong Yao’s hand. Feeling the hand tremble, she slowly held it. Tong Yao’s breath hitched. She pretended not to know and hurried back.
She said, “Let’s go back.”
**
Around one in the morning.
Under the puzzled gaze of the guard, Tong Yao sent the young girl into the school and then got into the car alone.
She took out her phone and found a missed call.
Oh no.
She tremblingly called back. The phone rang and rang. She didn’t know what kind of judgment awaited her.
“Hello… Mom,” her heart was pounding.
“Yao Yao, where are you?” Jiang Wu’s voice was a little urgent. “Are you… at a hotel?”
Tong Sicheng’s roar could be faintly heard on the other end.
“…Mom, what are you thinking?” Tong Yao brushed the hair from her forehead and let out a sigh of relief. She thought her improper relationship with the young girl had been exposed. “I’m in the car, about to go home.”
“In the car? Alone?” Jiang Wu was not at ease and continued to ask.
“Yes,” Tong Yao didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “I just wandered around outside today, with a student, a girl.”
There was a strange silence on the other end of the line. Jiang Wu seemed to want to say something but held back. With a sigh, she finally just said, “Come back early.”
“Mhm, I’ll be there soon.”
Tong Yao hung up the phone, let out a long breath, and started the car.
**
After New Year’s Day, the pressure of the final exams loomed over the campus. No one was relaxed. The students rushed to the classroom early, some even skipping breakfast, holding their books and memorizing in the hallway, a picture of desperation.
Tong Yao came out of the office to get some water. Looking at the entrance of Class 7, she found that Ruan Ruan was one of the desperate ones in the hallway. She thought, this child is really working hard at school. Heaven will not let down a person who tries hard. In the future… she will definitely be successful.
But, what was their relationship now?
They weren’t lovers, but she couldn’t treat the young girl as just a student either. Why hadn’t she controlled her mouth? How much longer… until Ruan Ruan graduates?
She let out a heavy sigh and turned to walk back to the office. Two security guards ran past her. It wasn’t common to see security guards in the school building. She subconsciously turned back and found that they were running towards the surveillance room on this floor.
She didn’t know what was going on and returned to the office. A few minutes later, the broadcast sounded. Ye Wei’s deep voice was like a subwoofer.
“Attention all students, please check your valuables to see if anything is missing. If so, report to your homeroom teacher immediately. Repeating the notice…”
There was also a broadcast in the office, so Tong Yao naturally heard it. She was taken aback for a moment and asked, “Did a thief get into the school?”
Schools are one of the favorite places for thieves to visit. Most schools have lax security, but high school students don’t have much to steal. Thieves who steal underwear are more common.
“Yes,” a male teacher said. “I heard that the thief swept through three floors in the middle of the night.”
The office was full of subject teachers. The homeroom teachers were probably swamped right now. Tong Yao frowned. Seeing Li Hanqiang running towards the surveillance room from a distance, her heart instantly tightened.
Did Ruan Ruan lose anything?
She couldn’t sit still any longer and went straight to the surveillance room. She found that it was already crowded with people—several homeroom teachers, security guards. Zhang Zhenhua from the Student Affairs Office was calling the police, and Ye Wei was checking the surveillance.
“Teacher Li,” Tong Yao looked at the serious-faced Li Hanqiang. “How is the situation in Class 7?”
Li Hanqiang shook his head. “Two phones were stolen. I told them not to hand them in! They really need to learn their lesson. Two people lost a few hundred yuan, and…”
He looked unbearable and said, “Ruan Xi lost two thousand. Why did this child put so much money in her schoolbag? One of the stolen phones was hers…”
Tong Yao’s heart sank. Two thousand, that was an absolute fortune for the young girl, not to mention a phone. It was meaningless to pursue why she had put the money in her schoolbag now. The important thing was—
“Who stole it?”
She looked up at the surveillance.
“Three people, probably from outside the school. They climbed into the second floor at 3:10 AM on January 2nd, and then one person was in charge of each floor.” Ye Wei paused the screen, his face full of helplessness. “The surveillance is not very clear, but we can see that all three are men.”
“Then… how much was the total loss?” Tong Yao was a little annoyed and tried to make her voice sound calm.
“Probably over twenty thousand. It’s very difficult to catch these people from outside the school. Even if we do… the money is probably gone,” Ye Wei said in a low voice. “They don’t care about being locked up for a few days.”
The surveillance room fell into a dead silence, so quiet you could hear a pin drop. Just then, the door was pushed open, and Liu Jian came in with an anxious face, leaning on the computer.
“Can we get it back?”
“Probably… not,” Ye Wei said honestly. “Old Liu, what did your class lose?”
Liu Jian grabbed his head with both hands, as if he wanted to pull his hair out. He closed his eyes, his mouth open silently, as if suppressing his anger. He clenched his fists, and then finally released them powerlessly.
“…The class funds were stolen.”
“Six thousand.”
**
Class 4 was different from other classes in that it had a class president who was well-rounded in all aspects, Xu Yin. The teachers were at ease, and the classmates loved her. Liu Jian, as the homeroom teacher, would not touch the class funds, but would hand them over to Xu Yin to be fully responsible. The records of the use of the class funds had always been open and transparent.
No one would have thought that such a large amount of money would be stolen at school.
The police arrived during the morning reading session, went straight to the surveillance room, and recorded the losses.
“They were very precise in their search. It’s not yet certain if it was an inside job, if there were student accomplices,” the young man in the police uniform wrote a few notes in his notebook. “We’ll continue to study it when we get back. You can find a few students to come over and see if they recognize anyone.”
“Okay, okay,” Ye Wei nodded repeatedly.
Tong Yao couldn’t imagine how Xu Yin, who had lost the class funds, was doing now.
“Please… do your best to find these people,” she lowered her head and pleaded. “This money is very important to the students.”
The young policeman’s face flushed, and he said quickly, “We’ll do our best! We’ll definitely do our best!”
But the old policeman on the side looked troubled. “I can’t guarantee it. There are too many cases like this. We don’t have enough manpower, we can’t handle it all.”
Liu Jian was anxious. “Aren’t you the police? If you can’t catch them, are you just going to let these people roam the streets?”
The old policeman seemed to have heard this question many times and was not annoyed. He answered, “Do you know how many cases there are in our district in a day? We have to send people to handle them one by one. We don’t have enough people, and we don’t have enough funds.”
“Then why did you help find a foreigner’s lost bicycle?” Liu Jian’s emotions were a little out of control. “Are our students inferior?”
The old policeman had a good temper and said lightly, “That’s a reporting bias. Who said we don’t help students find things? You just didn’t see it.”
Most cases, after being filed, would sink like a stone into the sea, and there would be no more news. Maybe one day, someone would be caught for a murder case, and only then would it be found out that this case was also done by him.
In general, the hope was slim.
The police left, and the remaining people looked at each other. No one had experience with this kind of thing. Tong Yao walked to Liu Jian’s side, hesitated, and asked, “Teacher Liu… the class funds, how do you plan to handle it?”
Liu Jian smiled wryly.
“I don’t know.”
“Xu Yin… what did she say?”
Liu Jian shook his head. “I saw she was about to cry. We didn’t talk about it.”
The class funds were lost, which was the custodian’s dereliction of duty. But to make the custodian bear all the losses seemed wrong. The custodian was not a bank and did not receive any benefits. It was only because she was the class president that she had taken on this extra work.
But they couldn’t make the whole class pay the class funds again. That would be unfair to everyone. And a thief had gotten into the school, and the security facilities were useless. Did the school need to bear some responsibility?
No one could say for sure.
Xu Yin’s family was a working-class family. Six thousand yuan wouldn’t break them, but it wouldn’t be easy either.
Tong Yao silently retreated. In the hallway, she saw Xu Yin leaning alone on the railing, her head buried in her arms. The other students were in the classroom for morning reading. She suddenly realized that Xu Yin was also just a second-year high school girl. Although she liked to cling to her and ask for praise, she was not that strong. It was just that she was so outstanding that people thought she didn’t need care.
She slowly approached and asked softly, “Are you crying?”
Xu Yin wouldn’t look up. Her shoulders were shaking slightly, and the sound of small sobs reached Tong Yao’s ears.
“Actually… losing money is not a big deal,” Tong Yao wracked her brains to try to comfort her. “Money can be earned again. This time, you’ve suffered a loss, so just consider it bad luck. You’re so outstanding, your parents definitely won’t blame you.”
On her way here, she had thought of paying for it herself. After all, this amount of money was nothing to her. But she had stopped herself from having such a thought—her relationship with the students should not involve money. Unlike Chen Mo, six thousand yuan was not a heavy burden for Xu Yin’s family. If she paid for it, it would distort her relationship with Xu Yin.
Xu Yin was lying on her stomach, her sobs becoming more and more obvious. Finally, her grievances burst out, and she said with a sob, “I-I just didn’t bring my bag back to the dorm for one day yesterday… why did they have to go through my bag…”
The girl choked, and kicked the tiles hard a few times. “I’m not afraid that my parents will scold me… I just feel that it’s not easy for them to earn money, and they still have to pay for me…”
“Mhm, I know,” Tong Yao gently patted her back. “It’s all the thief’s fault.”
High school children were not heartless. On the contrary, many of them were sensible and sensitive, easily hurt, and easily blamed themselves.
“Let’s just curse the person who stole your money to be hit by a car, okay?” Tong Yao said.
The girl’s eyes were red. She wanted to nod, but hesitated for a moment, and wiped her tears.
“Cursing him to go to jail is enough.”
The bell for the end of class rang. The morning reading was over. The students were discussing this school-shaking theft. Some wanted to see Xu Yin’s condition and comfort her, but Xu Yin didn’t want to see anyone. She quickly wiped her tears and took a deep breath to adjust.
“Thank you, Teacher Tong. I’m fine.”
She said, putting on a brave front.
“Look on the bright side. The class funds don’t have to be replenished immediately,” Tong Yao coaxed. “You don’t need to spend the class funds recently. Look, you still have a winter break. Maybe you can earn some money yourself.”
“Mhm.”
Tong Yao smiled faintly, wanting to pat Xu Yin’s head. As she looked up, she saw a pair of red eyes not far away, looking at her with grievance.
The one who had lost a lot of money this time… was not just Xu Yin.
There was also a young girl who needed her just as much.
And how to comfort this young girl, Tong Yao had a headache.
