The notebook's owner was quite talented. At least, he was when it came to doodling.
With just a few strokes, he could draw a bald old professor, the braised pork from lunch, or the ugly sparrows chirping outside the window, and make them all look lifelike. It made you wonder what he was studying.
Besides the doodles, there were scattered sentences in the corners of the notebook. Some complained that yesterday's fish-fragrant shredded pork in the cafeteria had no pork in it. Others grumbled about a teacher spending the whole lecture showing off his wife, or made fun of a roommate who was too lazy to wash his stinky socks.
When the bell rang, Ruan Yuxia still wasn't ready to stop reading.
A classmate asked her how she could look so happy reading calculus notes. Her face turned faintly red, and she answered vaguely, "I'm just looking through them."
Reluctantly, she put the notebook back inside the desk.
At that moment, the dream leapt forward in time.
I was still in the classroom.
But this time, someone was sitting in my seat.
I drifted to an empty seat in the back and watched Ruan Yuxia walk quickly to the seat she'd taken last time, arm in arm with her classmate.
The notebook was still there. Its owner hadn't come to retrieve it, and the woman who cleaned the classroom didn't seem to have forgotten it, either.
For the entire class, Ruan Yuxia kept her head down, searching through the notebook's scattered jottings as if she were hunting for treasure.
This time, she found something new.
In the lower-left corners of a dozen or so pages near the middle of the notebook, the owner had drawn a comic strip. She didn't understand it at first, but I caught on faster than