English Class

After looking at him a couple of times, she found no trace of this classmate in her memory. That meant he was neither a good student nor a troublemaker.

She reached out and tapped him. Several boys looked at her in surprise. Apparently, after only two days, her personality was already common knowledge.

"Move over. Class is starting."

Her deskmate turned back in a daze, looked at his friends behind him, then at the teacher waiting on the podium for them to quiet down on their own. Finally, he kept glancing at Lin Er, who was expressionlessly rummaging for a book in her desk.

Clearly, he was curious why his "idiot" classmate seemed a little different today.

"All right, settle down. I know you're excited to see former classmates in an unfamiliar school, but it's class time now—I expect you to maintain discipline!"

The sudden burst of English silenced all sixty-two students in the classroom. Teachers at this time had to rely on their own voices to make themselves heard, which showed just how loudly she had spoken.

Lin Er put the black spellbook under her English textbook. After hearing that long speech, she shamefully put it away again.

Teacher Yang had never expected anyone to understand. That whole speech was just to intimidate them.

Once they had all quieted down, she repeated it in Mandarin.

"I know some of you studied a little English in elementary school, but I suggest you forget it all. From now on, my classes will be taught entirely in English, and you need to get used to the accent I teach!"

Lin Er looked at the petite female teacher on the podium, whose presence made her seem six feet tall. After the overwhelming shocks of the day had left her face mostly expressionless, a faint smile appeared.

The current Teacher Yang was still inexperienced. Soon she would discover that, never mind teaching entirely in English, for the first two weeks, her son would be the only one to respond when she asked questions in class.

That was because the other students could either understand only one or two words or nothing at all.

This counted as their second English class. Yesterday afternoon, all three teachers of the core subjects had tried teaching a class.

Each of them had introduced themselves in English during the first class and chosen an English name from the character list at the back of the textbook. Under the cover of Lin Er's English textbook were the names Lin Er and Ann.

Ann was the name she had chosen for herself yesterday, for no other reason than that it was easy to remember.

Yesterday, too, her pale, ashen face had given the teacher quite a fright. Today, the teacher had done her best not to let her gaze linger on Lin Er's area, though she hadn't ignored her either. Their classroom rule was to start each round of questions with the first student in the first row of the first group.

Everyone answered in order. If they didn't know, they could stand up and say so openly without being made to feel awkward, and the next person would take their turn.

But everyone who stood up to answer a question would have the whole class's attention on them. A child's immature sense of shame could leave them unable to hold their head up, and Lin Er had once reacted more strongly than anyone.

In their year, just as Teacher Yang had said, some had learned a little in elementary school, while others were only just encountering English.

Lin Er's elementary school was a Hope Primary School founded by a Hong Kong businessman, and its teaching staff was fairly decent. When they were in third grade, the school had made the youngest and most highly educated teacher on staff, a math teacher, take a crash course in English and come back to teach them.

It hadn't been much use. All it had done was give them an extra step now: changing their accents.

So, during their first proper English class, their teacher had frowned the entire time, her sky-high heels nearly stamping through the wooden boards on the podium. She had been just short of throwing down the textbook, pointing at them, and saying, "You're the worst class I've ever taught!"

Lin Er touched her wand and nearly laughed at her own thoughts. Then she thought, Oh, I'm one of the ones she looks down on too. I've even had nine more years of schooling than everyone here. Suddenly, she couldn't laugh anymore.

She kept her head down and sensibly stayed out of the teacher's way.

When class ended, the students listened to the clomp of high heels recede until they could no longer hear it at all. Only then did the first student in the class let out a loud breath, followed by an explosion of noise.

They were all talking about the same thing, marveling to their friends at Teacher Yang's imposing presence and slipping in a little gossip.

Lin Er looked around and saw a very tall boy sitting in the middle nodding in agreement and complaining with his deskmate. Imagining the looks on the faces of the students around him when they later found out his name was Jun Yang amused her.

The Jun was the Jun from their third-year dean, and the Yang was the Yang from their Teacher Yang.

Her deskmate was chatting with the row behind him again. They seemed to have endless things to say. They had all come up from the town's elementary school and knew far more gossip than she did, coming from the mountains.

"What kind of gathering place for immortals is our class? Our English teacher's scary, right? Ha ha, the Chinese teacher's even more of a devil. My brother said he could kick a student from the podium all the way to the bottom of the stairs in the hallway!"

Lin Er wanted to say what teacher would dare, but then she suddenly remembered that teachers at this time really did dare.

Most young people in their area went elsewhere to work, leaving a great many children behind. Lin Er was one of them.

So, when many grandparents brought their children to enroll, the first thing they said was, "Teacher, we don't understand anything. If the child misbehaves at school, just hit them."

It wasn't that they didn't love their children, but that they loved them too much.

Later, their area would lead the country by a wide margin in the number of students who jumped from buildings.

That was because education had long been highly valued there. In every parent's mind, studying was the only way to have a future; without an education, no one would hire you even if you went elsewhere to work.

Otherwise, even children with intellectual disabilities wouldn't have been able to attend school.

And the story wasn't exactly a false rumor. In her memory, their homeroom teacher had done something like that in front of the whole class, though she couldn't remember which student it had been.

Ignoring the gossip around her, Lin Er took out the spellbook she had put away during class.

The spells recorded in it had long since been hidden. Now it was just a blank notebook, though its leather cover gave it a vintage look.

She opened her Hello Kitty pencil case. She was the very picture of the saying that bad students had lots of stationery.

Her father had taken her to buy it at the stationery store before school started. She had been so frightened she hadn't dared ask for a single cent of pocket money, yet she had clung to this stationery and refused to let go.

Fortunately, parents in their area were genuinely obsessive about education. After making sure she hadn't grabbed duplicates or random things, he had bought everything without a word. He had seemed like a different person from the one who was only willing to give her five yuan a week in pocket money.

She casually took a new pen from the case and wrote her name on the first page.

She hadn't expected anything, but the writing vanished as if it had been erased with an eraser.

Lin Er sprang to her feet in shock.

The long bench jerked upward, and her deskmate fell to the floor with a thump.

"Sorry, sorry, I forgot."

Lin Er hadn't expected that to happen either. It had been so long since she'd sat on a bench like this that she had stood up without a second thought.

Even after she quickly pulled him up, her deskmate still hadn't recovered.

The people around them were already laughing. Those in the row behind were laughing so hard they slapped their desks. Lin Er didn't feel much of anything, but her deskmate had gone completely red.