February 7, 2022

Chapter 67: Teenager

Yansheng glanced at her phone during breakfast and was a little surprised that Lichen didn’t even send her a message.

She thought that it might be because they were not in the same class in this life and hadn’t had so much contact, so Lichen didn’t like her as much as before.

However, it didn’t matter to her. Everyone had their own lives, just like when they graduated from high school from her previous life, they would also go their separate ways in this life. So, she just needed to follow her fate.

At lunch break, when Yansheng and Zhiyuan met face-to-face, she just nodded and stepped aside to make way.

Zhiyuan stopped and asked, “Did you make up all the notes yesterday?”

“I did, thank you,” she replied.

Zhiyuan smiled and spoke again, “If you don’t understand anything, come and ask me.”

That’s not okay. Although Yansheng felt that this was a bit cold and ruthless, it was really ‘for his own good’. She had to deal with it as coldly as possible, so she just nodded once. “Hmm.”

However, Zhiyuan didn’t notice her coldness.

She was usually very lofty and cold, and rarely spoke to both boys and girls.

The girls were not afraid of her, they all loved to be coquettish with her. The more helpless she was, the happier the girls were.

On the other hand, the boys maintained some distance from her. But among them, Yansheng seemed to be a little different toward Zhiyuan.

She often asked him questions and borrowed his notes. However, they were separated by gender and several rows of physical distance, and Zhiyuan’s grades were not the best in the class. Some students liked to ask the students among the top 3 rankings.

Of course, no one would know that Zhiyuan was the future champion of the college entrance examination, so seeing how Yansheng treated Zhiyuan differently, everyone couldn’t help but have some thoughts.

These thoughts were not malicious, they were more about watching the excitement and commotion, they were at this age after all.

Yansheng’s side was okay. The girl who had a good relationship with her asked directly, but Yansheng directly denied it. She had always spoken coldly and succinctly, so the girls wouldn’t pester her with the same inquiry.

But on the boys’ side, many boys often teased Zhiyuan and would occasionally joke together.

Although Zhiyuan devoted most of his mind to studying, learning was not the whole of life after all. At this young age, Yansheng was such an attractive girl which was like a spring that arrived at the young man’s heart.

Zhiyuan hadn’t noticed Yansheng’s coldness at this time. It took him almost a week to slowly realize it and it took him a few more days from brewing emotions to doing psychological construction and making up his mind.

In this way, half a month has passed and Christmas was here.

This foreign holiday, which had become a shopping festival, a carnival, and a holiday in China, had nothing to do with the students in public schools, especially since Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were both working days this year, so it had nothing to do with them.

Foreign teachers would say ‘Merry Christmas’ while the local teachers would directly exclaim, ‘Birthday of whose holy saint? What does foreign religion have to do with us? There is only one saint in our country and his birthday is on the 27th of August of the Lunar calendar!’

However, on Christmas Day, Class 2’s homeroom teacher still sent everyone a lollipop that looked like a Christmas tree and said with a smile, “I’ll let you have some sweets first and tomorrow your favorite monthly exam will begin again.”

D*mn, who the hell likes monthly exams?!

The students protested unanimously with lollipops in their mouths.

It took two days to finish the exam both for the major and minor subjects, and another two days for the results to come out.

Immediately afterward, Lichen once again appeared behind the subway station after a long hiatus.

“I have two things to tell you.” He crossed his arms. “First, Qian has transferred to another school.”

The news stunned Yansheng for several seconds and subconsciously asked, “Why did she transfer? When did she transfer? What’s the reason for her transfer?”

In the previous life, both she and Lichen were expelled from school, while Qian stayed unharmed. Yansheng wondered why it was all reversed in this life. She didn’t do anything against Qian.

Lichen was also a little surprised. What he really wanted to say was not about Qian, he just mentioned it casually and that was all, he didn’t expect Yansheng to care so much about Qian.

He raised his head and said a little gleefully, “She was squeezed out by the girls in our class, those girls who followed her to teach you a lesson before.”

It was like the tide had turned. Qian had always led people to squeeze out others, but she didn’t expect that one day she would end up in this situation.

The small group joined forces to sell out Qian for their own benefit. As soon as the punishment came out, Qian understood what happened.

It was not because of friendship that the not-so-strong alliance formed in the beginning collapsed directly.

After doing such a thing, those girls were not very broad-minded and they didn’t believe that Qian would forgive them. Since that was the case, they could only push Qian to the opposite side.

These girls joined forces to isolate and squeeze Qian out.

Qian was beautiful. If it was only the girls who squeezed her out, she wouldn’t make it to the point of transferring to another school, but there was Lichen on the boys’ side.

Lichen had long established his status as a tyrant in Class 8. He took the initiative to step on Qian, so she really couldn’t stay in this class anymore.

The No.1 High School was divided into classes by grades and it was impossible for Qian to transfer classes based on her grades. She finally cried to her family and asked them to transfer her to a different school.

Her parents also came to the school to fight with the dean. They believed that their daughter was the victim of all the accusations, including the previous punishment, and that the other girls framed her to make her take the blame.

It made the dean’s blood pressure rise with anger.

This happened on Christmas Day. Qian left without taking the monthly exam.

Yansheng did not expect such a reversal in this life. Everyone’s life trajectory had shifted more or less. It seemed that the direct cause of Qian’s incident was due to the exclusion of the small girl group, together with Lichen’s help. But if you looked into it carefully, the root cause was the variable Yansheng.

Because Yansheng had changed, this change was like an energy diverging outward with her as the center, affecting others lightly or severely.

Lichen couldn’t tell Yansheng’s attitude from her expression. She seemed a little worried about Qian’s situation. What for? Qian is not who you think she is.

“Hey!” he called out to her and asked with a smile, “Why? Are you reluctant to part with Qian?”

Yansheng returned to her senses, ignored his ridicule, and asked directly, “You just said the first thing, what about the second?”

She didn’t even need to pay attention, but when she asked him, Lichen’s invisible tail was about to rise.

He smiled triumphantly, brought up a roll of paper in his hand, picked up Yansheng’s hand, and put it in her hand. “Look!”

It was a photocopy of the transcript, with the ranking of the grades. It was a partial copy, mainly to show the column where Lichen’s grades were.

Yansheng looked at it. “Hmmm…”

Lichen proudly asked, “Did you see it?”

Yansheng raised her head. “I said that I don’t talk to people who are ranked in the last one hundred, including the 100th place from the bottom.”

“I knew it, you wouldn’t get it.” Lichen became even more proud. “Look at my ranking. If you count from the bottom, I’m in the 101th place!”

Yansheng realized that this was the reason why Lichen hadn’t sent her a message after accepting his friend request.

Not to mention, this was really his character.

The two of them actually had a lot of similarities. They were not stupid, but they both liked to bite the bullet.

Yansheng was expressionless. “You counted it wrong.”

Lichen was taken aback for a moment. “What? Impossible!”

“Based on your count, you counted it using the previous total number of students.” Yansheng was even more expressionless, “But Qian transferred and left on Christmas Day. She didn’t take the monthly exam at all and you forgot to subtract her. So, you are at the 100th place from the bottom.”

As Yansheng said it, she slapped the transcript on Lichen’s chest. “Keep up the good work.”

Then, she waved her hand and left.

Lichen clutched the transcript, his whole body was sluggish.

He unfolded the transcript and counted it again. Yansheng was right. If one student was subtracted, he just happened to go from rank 101 to rank 100 from the bottom.

Lichen crumpled the transcript into a ball.

He was really upset.

Yansheng’s car stopped at a traffic light intersection about one hundred meters away from the subway station. Mr. Zhou glanced in the rearview mirror several times and finally couldn’t help asking, “Miss Yanyan, why are you so happy today?”

He could see that Yansheng had been smiling since she got into the car.

Yansheng endured it several times, trying to hold it back, but failed. She finally covered her forehead and trembled with laughter. “It’s nothing, there is just a stupid guy…”

She bit her lip as she laughed and didn’t say anything more.

Mr. Zhou thought to himself, ‘It seems that since I was hired by the Zhang family, I’ve never seen her laugh like this, right?’

Zhiyuan finally made up his mind the next day. When school was over, he stopped Yansheng.

Yansheng was a little surprised. Since she began to pay attention to keeping her distance from Zhiyuan, she hadn’t spoken with him for quite a few days.

“Is there something wrong?” she asked.

Zhiyuan pursed his lips nervously and asked, “Well… why haven’t you come to me for help recently?”

Yansheng thought to herself, ‘Did I do it too deliberately? Did the others notice it as well?’

“Recently, I have been asking Xiaoxiao, she just sits in front of me,” Yansheng said, “you are so far away from me.”

Zhiyuan knew clearly that this was a lie. Because Xiaoxiao had always been sitting in front of her, but she had always come to him to talk about topics before.

So why did Yansheng lie about this matter?

The teenager was no longer nervous. He lowered his eyes, thought for a few seconds, and asked, “Did you hear our classmates making some jokes?”

“What kind of joke.”

“About me and you.”

Yansheng understood that it was their male classmates who would make those jokes when they were bored. They actually didn’t dare to joke in front of Yansheng, but she would inevitably hear some of the boys laughing and joking.

She shrugged her shoulders. “They were just teasing, there is no malice, I don’t care about that.”

She thought for a moment and added, “If you don’t like it, I’ll talk to them.”

If she doesn’t care about those jokes, then why?

Zhiyuan finally asked, “Then why are you…”

At this age, it was still a bit uncomfortable to ask such straightforward questions. Zhiyuan licked his lower lip nervously, paused for a while, and then finished his words, “…avoiding me? Is there something about me that makes you unhappy?”

The young man’s eyes were bright and clean, with no bad intention, no hostility, and they were as clear as spring water.

Being stared at by this kind of gaze seemed to be so purifying.

At this moment, Yansheng felt envy.

A person, who was fifteen years old, should live like this.