Stranded

Ma Guojun looked dumbfounded. He adjusted his glasses. "Bro, don't tell me that guy really was you?"

"What kind of talk is that? What are you even saying?" Jiang Nian dodged the question. "What guy? This has nothing to do with me. I want to see my lawyer!"

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"Bro, you're a man among men. Were you really that savage?" Li Hua gave him a thumbs-up. "That's our boy. The fucking king of men."

"Badass, badass, badass. King of kings. I'm not watching the NBA if you're not in it." Ma Guojun gave him a thumbs-up too. "Bro, take it easy when you play. I'm worried you'll elbow King James to death."

Yao Beibei happened to walk past and joined in with her own commentary.

"Fine, you got into a fight, but why did you take their shoes and throw them into the bathroom? Just imagining them going home wearing one shoe makes me laugh."

Zhang Ningzhi nodded too, concern written all over her face.

"You really shouldn't fight. It's easy to get hurt, isn't it?"

With a dozen or so pairs of eyes on him from every direction, Jiang Nian put on a perfectly polite smile. There was no way he would ever admit to that embarrassing piece of his past.

"Nope. It really wasn't me. (Serious face.)"

The whole group burst into laughter, drawing curious looks from the rest of the class. Li Qingrong, the class monitor seated in the first group, frowned slightly.

The bell rang for third period, and everyone dispersed.

Jiang Nian casually pulled his biology textbook out from under his desk and breathed a sigh of relief. That was close. "Shoe-Throwing Guy" almost became my nickname for the rest of senior year.

It wasn't entirely his fault, either. That was just the environment at No. 2 High School. The strong adapted; the weak dropped dead. He had wanted to be a good person, but nobody had given him the chance.

A handful of middle schoolers swaggered around like complete idiots, bullying people for no reason other than to establish their dominance. It hadn't had much to do with basketball. There had already been bad blood between them, so naturally, things had turned into a fight.

There had been three or four of them. Wasn't it perfectly normal to get carried away? Throwing their shoes away had been going easy on them. Not stuffing them back into their mothers' wombs had practically been an act of mercy.

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They had all been fucking idiots. Of course, he had been an idiot too, getting into pointless fights. Third-stage combat power, strong and invincible-until his allowance got docked and he immediately behaved himself.

His past was too painful to revisit. Let it disappear into the depths of social death.

Censor it to death. Lay that censorship on thick.

The biology teacher was a young woman of twenty-six or twenty-seven who wore a little portable amplifier at her waist while teaching. Her voice was sweet, and so was her name.

Zhong Qing.

Within minutes of class starting, seven or eight boys had flocked to the back of the classroom to stand through the lesson.

Li Hua was among them.

Right, right, right. The physics teacher was a middle-aged man, so you'd rather fall asleep than stand at the back. Now it's third period and you're wide awake, wandering around back there to get the biology teacher's attention, huh?

The seat beside Jiang Nian suddenly became vacant, and Ma Guojun promptly moved in to fill it.

Faced with the chubby gossip hound, Jiang Nian kept his words to a minimum.

"Lymphokines are proteins and are transported through exocytosis." Zhong Qing's voice echoed through the classroom. Outside the windows, the rain that had lasted all day finally stopped.

After afternoon classes ended, students trickled out of the room. The campus broadcast was playing Jay Chou's "Stranded."

"The sky that hasn't cleared in so long still holds your smile. Tears cannot bury my guilt. A kite lies stranded beneath cloudy skies, while longing still waits to be rescued."

Jiang Nian quite liked hearing songs over the school speakers. Most of his time at school was spent reading and doing practice questions, so hearing a song that clicked with him felt like scoring a freebie.

At home, it was different. That was already his time to have fun, and he was supposed to spend it listening to music?

Couldn't he listen while gaming? Although once a game got him worked up enough to squat on his chair and trade insults with someone, the music tended to fade into the background.

Zhang Ningzhi seemed much better that afternoon. She went off to the cafeteria with Yao Beibei to get something to eat. Apparently unwilling to trouble Jiang Nian, she left as soon as classes ended.

Jiang Nian slept with his head on his desk for half an hour before going to eat. When he returned, there was a carton of fruit milk on his desk.

He paused, then looked at Zhang Ningzhi, who was leaning over her desk in front of him, working on practice questions. Fruit milk was exactly what he had given her in the exam room. It was unmistakable.

She hadn't even needed to attach a little note with a smiley face. One glance was all it took to know.

Jiang Nian sat down and leisurely unwrapped the straw, then poked it into the carton. Ma Guojun happened to enter the classroom. He had been heading straight for his seat when he spotted Jiang Nian inserting the straw.

A heaven-sent food source. Milk in the wild.

People who liked foraging in the wild never had terrible luck. Not that he meant to discriminate against anyone-people who liked doing it in the wild had pretty good luck getting pregnant too!

"Hey, let me have a sip!"

Unfortunately, he was a moment too late. Jiang Nian already had the straw between his lips.

"What?"

Ma Guojun waved him off, looking disappointed. "Forget it, forget it."

Milk was nothing like iced tea, Sprite, or Coke. Before somebody drank straight from it, it was premium nourishment. Afterward, it was water from the Ganges.

"When did you buy milk?" Ma Guojun tossed him a small packet of White Rabbit milk candy.

At that question, Zhang Ningzhi's heart leaped into her throat. Her pulse quickened slightly, her cheeks grew hot, and her grip on her gel pen tightened.

"I didn't. Found it."

"Fuck, invite me next time you go foraging." Ma Guojun returned to his seat.

With that single sentence, Jiang Nian sent Zhang Ningzhi plunging from the peak of her emotional roller coaster straight to the bottom. I gave it to you! You're the one somebody found lying around!

Just a moment earlier, she had been hoping he wouldn't tell the truth.

After all, while not everyone had arrived yet, most of the class was already there. Giving him milk for no apparent reason could easily make people suspicious. Having him say it out loud would have been far too embarrassing.

But hearing him say he had found it...

The bell rang, signaling the start of the twenty-minute evening reading session. As she stood up, Zhang Ningzhi turned and shot Jiang Nian a fierce glare. The corner of his mouth lifted.

Evening self-study was great. By the second period, Jiang Nian wanted to die.

He wanted to play a game and unwind.

Jiang Nian tossed his pen onto his thick math revision booklet and leaned back against the desk behind him. Looking at the dense sea of mathematical symbols, he let out a long breath.

The classroom was brightly lit and utterly quiet, apart from the sounds of pages turning and students writing.

His grades were neither good nor bad. He ranked somewhere in the middle of the class. There wasn't much room to move up, and there wasn't much room to slip backward either.

He was only one-seventh of the way through senior year, and the college entrance exam would be somewhat harder. He figured that next summer, admission to a first-tier university was his baseline. A key university would depend on luck, and getting into a Project 211 university would be a win.

He was still daydreaming when he turned his head and met the class monitor Li Qingrong's eyes.

Eye contact was a

form of high-level communication, and Jiang Nian had no desire to communicate with the class monitor. He voluntarily muted himself and looked away, only to instinctively check again.

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He unconsciously glanced over once more. Huh? Why is she still looking at me?

Fuck, is not doing homework during self-study a crime against heaven now?

Two seconds later, Li Qingrong looked away.

Oh, right. She must have been looking out the window. It had been a false alarm. Anyone else would have been fine, but the female class monitor's gaze really did feel oppressive. She was like a fucking copy of Violet.

Jiang Nian had even noticed some girls blushing when they saw Li Qingrong. Shit, what kind of lesbian class is this?

(End of chapter.)