Chapter 19: 19 Chapter 19 Part 4

Yu Qinjiu was the English class representative. She had a sweet voice and a sweet smile, and was the favorite of the English teacher, who had returned from abroad and changed her clothes every day like a fashion show.

Ji Qingyou hummed again, and her brow relaxed.

Li Nanli glanced at her. “Hey, let me tell you. Just now, some boys from the class next door were talking bad about you. Saying you were gloomy and scary when you talked to people, and what’s the big deal about being good at studying. Yu Qinjiu heard them…”

The pen Ji Qingyou had just picked up fell, leaving a blot of ink on the exam paper. “She didn’t fight with them again, did she?”

In the end, she refrained from using the word “fight.” They were already in their second year of high school. Yu Qinjiu no longer flared up and got into physical fights like she did in elementary school, and she wouldn’t pout and complain about this or that hurting afterwards.

“Well… she didn’t fight.” Li Nanli snapped her small mirror shut and threw it into the desk drawer. “She just picked up a stool, walked over, and stared at the boy calmly until his face turned red. Then she sat down slowly and asked him, ‘Who is scarier, you or her?’ ‘Who is more gloomy?’ and ‘Should he go ask his homeroom teacher if being good at studying is a big deal?’ That boy had never seen anything like it. He’s usually not good at studying and often gets into trouble. He was afraid his homeroom teacher would hear about it. He held out for a while, then gave in…”

Speaking of Yu Qinjiu standing up for Ji Qingyou, Li Nanli got excited. She acted it out like a bad actor who had watched a few movies. “In the end, she even told him that her brother was the ‘Third Brother’ known to everyone within a hundred miles of Nanwu High School, that he had plenty of little brothers in the school, and that he even kept a Tibetan mastiff that could bite! If he didn’t apologize to you, she would set the dog on him!”

“The guy didn’t believe it at first, but then a senior from the third year came down. He was pretty formidable, and he really did know Yu Qinjiu’s brother. He just tapped the guy on the head, and he chickened out.”

Ji Qingyou’s brow furrowed so deeply it could kill a fly.

Li Nanli leaned in again, curiosity piqued. “Is Yu Qinjiu’s brother really the ‘Third Brother’?”

Ji Qingyou glanced at her, her brow relaxing with effort. She looked down at the book in her hand and answered Li Nanli’s question absentmindedly.

“Her brother is studying for his master’s degree in another city. Finance major. He used to keep an electronic Tibetan mastiff in a virtual pet device.”

Li Nanli was dumbfounded.

Ji Qingyou added, “But he’s in Nanwu now. He used to be the student council president here.”

Li Nanli remained dumbfounded.

Ji Qingyou glanced at her. After two seconds, she was still in the same expression. But it seemed her gaze wasn’t fixed on her, but on the window behind her.

Her expression became stranger and stranger.

Ji Qingyou squinted. She turned her head to look at the window. She saw Yu Qinjiu, smiling and resting her chin on her hand, watching her through the glass with an innocent smile.

There was a stack of test papers on the windowsill beside her. She must have just returned from the office. The high ponytail she had tied just now was now in two pigtails, falling softly and loosely over her shoulders. The outdoor light made her hair look a lighter color, like a sweet, soft shade of caramel chestnuts.

Ji Qingyou’s gaze was calm. She looked away, ignoring Yu Qinjiu’s sudden whim.

A few seconds later, Li Nanli’s expression started to get weird again, the kind of weird you get when you’re trying too hard not to laugh.

Ji Qingyou squinted at her. With just that one look.

Li Nanli couldn’t hold it in. She laughed like a splashing duck. “Pfft, hahaha——”

Even the people at the desks in front and back were attracted by the commotion. They peeked at the window and started laughing too.

Ji Qingyou calmly looked towards the window behind her. She saw that Yu Qinjiu hadn’t retracted the funny face she had been making. Her eyes were mostly showing the whites, her features twisted and crooked.

Being a lover of beauty, Yu Qinjiu always gave it her all when doing this kind of thing.

Seeing her look over, Yu Qinjiu finally put her hands down, letting her features return to normal. She curved her eyes and smiled, then quickly opened the window and greeted Li Nanli. “Did you get a picture of Ji Qingyou’s puzzled expression just now?”

Harming the enemy a thousand, losing eight hundred of your own.

Doing so many ugly expressions, just to catch a picture of Ji Qingyou’s confused expression.

Li Nanli’s face was stiff from laughing. “Oh no, I didn’t think of that.”

Yu Qinjiu clicked her tongue. “What a shame.”

Ji Qingyou didn’t intend to acknowledge these two. She closed the window that Yu Qinjiu had just opened, saying only two words. “I’m cold.”

Then she turned her gaze back to the textbook spread open on her desk.

But Yu Qinjiu wouldn’t let it go. She opened the window she had just closed again and threw her a lollipop. “Here! Strawberry flavor!”

After saying that, before she could react, she quickly closed the window again, bringing a sweet-smelling breeze, mixed with the smell of rain on the earth. It lingered around the tip of her nose, a little noisy.

The strawberry lollipop had landed in the middle of her textbook, obscuring an important number. Ji Qingyou stared at it for a while, then picked up the lollipop and put it in her drawer.

There were many strawberry lollipops in the drawer.

Every time Yu Qinjiu went to the campus convenience store, she would bring her one, even though Ji Qingyou felt she was no longer at the age to enjoy lollipops.

“Ji Qingyou, do you know what Yu Qinjiu’s zodiac sign is?” Li Nanli suddenly asked.

Ji Qingyou looked at her suspiciously. She knew there was a trap, but she still jumped in.

“Dog.”

Li Nanli suddenly took out her new Sony DV, snapped a picture of her at lightning speed, then slowly put the camera away. “Oh, I see.”

With that, Yu Qinjiu came walking in from the front door of the classroom, a smile on her face, holding the test papers. The ends of her hair bounced slightly on her shoulders. When she saw a group of students still discussing which movie to watch, she chimed in.

“I vote for Love Letter.”

Ji Qingyou pursed her lips, then suspiciously stared at Li Nanli, who was now looking straight ahead, and her classmates in front and behind, whose backs were now straighter than ever.

She suddenly realized something. So she looked again at the window behind her. At a glance, she saw the marks Yu Qinjiu had left behind. Two rabbit ears drawn on the glass with a black oil-based pen. She had even positioned them perfectly. It was clearly a coordinated move with Li Nanli.

And they had taken a photo from who knows what angle.

Yu Qinjiu’s ideas were always strange.

Ji Qingyou wasn’t angry, nor was she annoyed by it. She just looked at it silently for a while, then took some tissues out of her pocket, wet them with a bit of medical alcohol, and carefully wiped the rabbit ears off the glass.

Outside, the wind howled and the rain poured. Inside, the classroom was in an uproar.

She did this quietly.

Li Nanli felt a little guilty. “Monitor, you’re not mad, are you?”

Ji Qingyou’s tone was flat. “I’m not mad.”

“That’s good.” Li Nanli propped her chin up, watching her wipe the glass. The marks from the oil-based pen weren’t easy to remove. She had to rub them clean bit by bit. Li Nanli thought for a moment. “It wouldn’t have hurt to leave them on. They’re cute.”

Ji Qingyou glanced at her. “When the hygiene inspector comes, we’ll lose points.”

Li Nanli suddenly understood. “So you’re not wiping them off because you don’t want to keep the rabbit ears!”

Ji Qingyou paused. “If we lose points, the homeroom teacher will definitely find out who drew them and deduct the points from her account… she’s already been late eight times this month and lost so many points. If she loses any more, she’ll have to clean the toilets.”

As she spoke, she pursed her lips, glanced at Yu Qinjiu, who was laughing among the crowd, and said in a voice so low it seemed only she could hear.

“Yu Qinjiu, you idiot.”

Li Nanli clicked her tongue and looked at her with a changed expression.

Ji Qingyou pursed her lips and added, “What I mean is, she would definitely make me go clean the toilets with her. I don’t want to clean the toilets.”

Li Nanli grinned. “Makes sense.”

When the bell rang, before they started the movie, Ji Qingyou handed out the mock application forms she had gotten from the homeroom teacher. When she got to the first seat in the sixth row, she and Li Nanli stared at each other for a few seconds.

Li Nanli smiled as she took the form, pointing at their original seats. “Yu Qinjiu asked me to switch seats with her. She wants to sleep. She wants you to cover for her.”

Ji Qingyou looked over. Yu Qinjiu was sitting in Li Nanli’s seat, chatting with the boy at the desk in front. But she keenly caught Ji Qingyou’s gaze. Her eyes lit up, and she waved her hand, as if afraid people wouldn’t know she had switched seats with Li Nanli.

Ji Qingyou calmly looked away, continued handing out the forms, then turned off the lights and closed the door to the classroom. She turned on the movie everyone had chosen and returned to her seat.

Yu Qinjiu stood up to let her in. The application form spread open in front of her showed Southeast University—one of the top eight schools for architecture in the province, still within the province.

Yu Qinjiu seemed carefree, but she had always been a very goal-oriented person.

Ji Qingyou seemed decisive, but she had never been able to find her own target university.

The classroom was playing a slow-paced romance movie. It intercut memories with the present, easy to get lost in. Many boys weren’t interested. They started discussing the application forms they had just received.

The boy at the front desk turned around to chat with them. When he saw that Ji Qingyou’s form was still blank, he asked in surprise, “Monitor, do you even need to hesitate? Isn’t it just between Tsinghua and Peking University for you?”

The boy’s deskmate leaned in. “I heard that your maternal grandparents, mother, and sister are all doctors. Your whole family are doctors. Monitor, you should be thinking about studying medicine too, right? If so, you wouldn’t go to Peking University or Tsinghua. You’d go to the best medical school in the country. Which one is that?”

“Peking Union Medical College?” the boy at the front desk guessed, then remembered. “Oh, right, Zhejiang University School of Medicine is also good. And it’s closer to Nanwu.”

Ji Qingyou covered her blank application form with her textbook. “I haven’t decided yet.”

“Who says just because her family are doctors she has to study medicine?” Yu Qinjiu had been lying on the desk, but now she lazily propped up her head and looked at the two chatting boys. “She’s so good at studying, she can do anything. Even if she sells pork, she could make it into the biggest chain in the country. Even if she set up a little stool outside and opened a stall, she would make people look at her with new respect.”

A few days ago, when Yu Qinjiu saw the news on TV about a Tsinghua top student dropping out to sell pork in his hometown, she was so surprised her jaw had dropped. But today, she had already accepted it as a very impressive thing.

As she spoke, she lifted her chin, yawned lazily, her eyes squinting into slits, but she still finished her sentence on her behalf. “Right, Ji Qingyou?”

Ji Qingyou looked at her. She picked up Yu Qinjiu’s school uniform jacket, which had fallen behind her chair, and gently placed it over her slender shoulders. She didn’t intend to discuss the Tsinghua top student selling pork with her. She just hummed in agreement. “Go to sleep.”