Yao Jing’s reaction made Wang Dandan feel a sense of something was amiss. She looked at her smiling face that was seeping with a dreadful chill, and, based on what she knew about her, every time she was about to do something, she had the habit of twiddling her fingers… Wang Dandan could only feel that her heart was beating faster in her chest.
She’ll have to make a call to Uncle Yao, and she’ll also give Yang Heng a heads-up. As for Ye Jian… Wang Dandan, who was walking behind Yao Jing, had some hesitation. If she were to tell this to Ye Jian, wouldn’t she be betraying Yao Jing?
But if she doesn’t tell her, her instincts were telling her Yao Jing was plotting something big, something that was inordinately big.
Yang Heng’s words managed to shock Yao Jing into acting so unusually. She had only seen Ye Jian and Yang Heng talk for a bit. Her face was already that gloomy… with Yao Jing’s personality, blowing things up till it becomes everyone’s problem isn’t an impossibility.
Le Mei noticed her best friend wasn’t following, she turned around and waved with a smile: “Dan Dan, what are you looking at? Hurry up.”
A wind was blowing, Wang Dandan kept both her hands inside her uniform pockets and started jogging on the little path to catch up.
Let’s forget it; probably nothing would happen. The midterms are just around the corner, and Jing Jing even said that she’d have to get better grades this time. She’s preoccupied with exams, so it’s not too likely she’ll cause trouble, right?
At the end of October, the weather changed in a day, and the temperature dropped drastically. When they were in military boot camp, it was so hot they needed to wear short-sleeves, but everybody had to put on a jacket at the end of the month. Those with weaker constitutions had to add a thin undershirt under their clothes.
This time, when Ye Jian returned, it was coincidentally when the weather was changing. The temperature plunged quite rapidly, and even the boys were wearing jackets to fend off the cold. She was the sole person who wore short-sleeves into the school and received who knows how many gazes since the moment she stepped into the school until she returned to her dorm.
An Jiaxin, who was just about to get food from the canteen, noticed Ye Jian. She bulged her eyes outstaring, then rubbed her eyes and followed with a scream. “Ahh,” she pounced towards Ye Jian, “I thought my eyesight was going bad! So I wasn’t seeing things!”
“Eleven days, you’ve been on a leave of absence for eleven days. Jian-er ah, you have quite the guts, asking for eleven days of leave at once! You’ve made me so jealous, even I was thinking of asking for leave and returning to Fujun Town!”
Not only was An Jiaxin jealous, everyone who was even slightly exhausted by the thoughts of the exams was jealous!
Especially Teacher Tong, who said she’ll be participating in the midterms exam…, the students of Grade 11 Class One, including those with great grades, was jealous.
It is a common belief that most students in their schooling days only desired to escape one thing: exams!
Ye Jian laughed as she stabilized her friend. With cocked eyebrows, she said: “We have midterms on the 3rd, 4th and 5th. It looks like your preparations aren’t enough, huh.”
“My god, you were still thinking about exams when you went back home? No, it’s not that I did not prepare enough, it’s the golden flowers in our dorm room that aren’t prepared.” An Jiaxin stepped aside with smiling eyes, and behind her was Yang Yi, Li Qian, Liu Lizhen, and Zhang Yueyan, who slept on the bunk above Ye Jian. The four cute girls all looked at Ye Jian with eager expressions, the pitiful look in those eyes; they looked too pitiful.
Yang Yi also rubbed the corner of her eyes, and spoke with a miserable expression: “Jian-er ah, we’ve heard your house back home crumbled down, and you needed to return home for half a month, everyone was sad we couldn’t follow you home.”
“Is everything okay at home? Did your house get repaired?”
Everybody in the class knew that Ye Jian came from the countryside. They didn’t notice it usually, but when Teacher Tong mentioned Ye Jian’s house collapsed because of heavy rain, only then did they remember Ye Jian, the Absolute Number One Genius, came from the countryside and wasn’t someone who was from the cities.
In ‘97, there still existed an absolute disparity between city registers and countryside registers. Some city-dwellers even looked down on people who came from the countryside. This phenomenon is present everywhere, and it still exists in the twenty-first century.
