Pen Pal

"What are you doing, getting up all of a sudden?!"

Lin Er knew she was in the wrong and apologized a few more times. The class bell rang, and the boy, like a punctured balloon, slapped his book down on the desk in a huff.

At their middle school, classes were usually held in double periods, so, as expected, it was English again. Lin Er had already been called on that round, so she followed her heart and kept the notebook out.

She was too curious. She hadn't expected there to be a wizard who had already been chosen on the other end of the notebook. This was the key person who would determine whether she could use more spells later. How could she resist trying to communicate?

[What is this? Are you a wizard?]

The words that appeared left Lin Er dumbfounded. The first part looked familiar, but she couldn't make sense of the words together, and she didn't know the last word at all.

Clinging to a faint hope, she searched the vocabulary list at the back of her textbook from beginning to end. Unfortunately, it wasn't there.

She used the textbook to translate word by word: what, is, this, are, you, a, wizard.

Putting it together, the first sentence probably meant: What is this?

But what about the second? You are a what?

Right. She'd forgotten that wizards were all foreigners. How was a Chinese person like her, who couldn't even remember whether there were twenty-six or thirty-eight letters in the alphabet, supposed to earn their trust?

But not communicating was out of the question. Her gaze swept over the textbook on her desk, and the person who had once been glad she didn't have to push herself to pass CET-4 because she was in a junior college suddenly felt a powerful urge to learn English.

The person on the other end was still writing, and Lin Er couldn't look up words in her textbook as fast as they disappeared.

She wanted to scream in frustration. Why didn't she have a phone to translate between English and Chinese at a time like this?!

Unfortunately, a glance came slicing over from the lectern. Lin Er froze, instinctively shoved the magic book beneath her English textbook, and didn't dare move.

After class, the students rushed to the cafeteria in a frenzy. Middle school meals hardly had any oil in them, and the students were still growing, so most of them were hungry by the second period.

Lin Er was even hungrier. She'd only eaten an apple that morning.

At the thought, she scanned the classroom and soon spotted a chubby boy who hadn't gone to eat. She walked over in a few strides, and the boys gathered around him slowly went from curious and disdainful to somewhat apprehensive.

Lin Er glanced at them, switching back and forth between memory and reality. So these classmates hadn't been born bold, and the boys hadn't been born confident and outgoing either. Right now, they looked terrified that she might suddenly lash out and hit someone, and it was obvious they were putting on a brave face.

"Yuecheng, are you eating lunch? Are you still going to eat it?"

The chubby boy stiffened and turned to look at Lin Er, his eyes darting away. Fortunately, he still had enough conscience not to keep pretending he didn't know her.

"No. Why?"

"Give me your meal ticket."

Ying Yuecheng was completely stunned. He did as she said, obediently taking the whole sheet of meal tickets from his textbook and handing it to Lin Er.

"Wait, what are you doing?" A boy beside him looked back and forth between them. The chubby boy was instantly overwhelmed with embarrassment and wanted to snatch the tickets back, but in the end he didn't move.

"Eating. If you're not eating it, give it to me."

Lin Er found today's lunch ticket, tore it off, and returned the rest to him. As expected of the cousin who'd had the most spending money of all her younger cousins during their school days, he could just decide not to eat a special meal that cost ten yuan.

She couldn't even bear to waste her regular meals, which cost five yuan each.

Lin Er took the ticket and left, leaving Ying Yuecheng behind to evasively explain to his friends that she was his older cousin.

After lunch, they could make a quick trip back to the dormitory, because they bought all their hot water at the cafeteria for fifty cents a bottle.

Why did Lin Er have bottled well water and apples in her suitcase? Because she was so poor she couldn't even afford water. Half of the five yuan she got each week had to be saved to buy hot water for bathing, and the other half went toward stationery or a piece of cocoa butter substitute chocolate after evening study.

Otherwise, she'd get so hungry at night that acid reflux would inflame her throat.

That chocolate had done a great deal to help her quickly put on weight after she'd started school looking like an African refugee. The only thing was, once she'd put it on, it had stayed for good; she hadn't lost it for the rest of her life.

The regular lunch was pumpkin and cabbage. She suspected that the little oil in it all came from the slices of fatty pork, of which there wasn't even one per person.

The basins holding the special dishes were smaller and more delicate: one held chunks of fish with pickled greens, one held pork belly stewed with cabbage, and one held braised winter melon without meat.

This was also the serving window the teachers used, and when Lin Er went over to line up, her homeroom teacher was right in front of her.

He was a decent young man, but his temper was genuinely explosive. Back in her second year of middle school, Lin Er had almost joined the girls in her class in getting his teaching license revoked.

In the end, they'd been talked out of it by the fact that he had a family, relied on his wife to support them, couldn't afford to raise their three children, had to carry buckets of mortar at a construction site on weekends to earn extra money, lived far away, and wore the same set of clothes all week without changing or washing them.

Of course, Lin Er hadn't been one of the main participants, and she hadn't had the nerve for it either. She'd only slipped a paper star into a gift when everyone was giving him presents together, too timid even to write her name on it.

The homeroom teacher handed out everyone's meal tickets, so he had a general idea of which meals each student had ordered. After all, only three or five students in a class got the special meals.

Although she could tell he was trying hard to control where he looked, his gaze still swept over her twice.

Lin Er looked up and smiled when his gaze swept over her a third time.

"Sir, the meal ticket is Ying Yuecheng's. He's my younger cousin, and he doesn't feel like eating this meal."

Gao Haibo's face immediately turned red. Fortunately, although he was young, he was also an experienced teacher. He quickly recovered and turned around to look at Lin Er openly.

"I see. There's fish today, so come stand in front of me. Otherwise, there might not be any left by the time you get there."

Well, she'd still caught him off guard and embarrassed him. He looked perfectly at ease, but he probably hadn't planned on saying that before the words came out.

Lin Er didn't make things difficult for him. How interesting. Yesterday, she'd still been a homebody who liked shutting herself away, and today she'd already started enjoying teasing people. These people from her past were all so interesting!

Sure enough, as long as she wasn't embarrassed, everyone else would be.

After getting her meal, Lin Er didn't stay in the noisy cafeteria. She hadn't remembered to bring her thermos down that morning, so she had to go get it now, or she wouldn't have hot water for a bath that evening.

Most importantly, she needed to finish her errands quickly, then go back and find a way to contact the person on the other end of the magic book.

Middle school had a midday rest period too, but unlike in elementary school, they weren't strictly required to sleep. Perhaps because the term had just started, the teacher wasn't watching over them.

In any case, Lin Er was able to look for words in her English textbook in peace.

Her deskmate was a little curious, but because of that fall in the morning, he still hadn't made up with her. The dividing line he'd gone all the way to the lectern to get a piece of chalk to draw was still clearly visible.

[I don't know English.]

Uh, that wasn't very convincing. It sounded irritating.

[Chinese,Twelve years old,Student.]

Could the person understand? Probably, right? It was so obvious: how could a young foreigner speak English? So, person on the other end, could you learn Chinese instead?

The person on the other end fell silent for a long time. Perhaps they hadn't expected that the hardest part of being pen pals would be being unable to communicate.

[Name]

Great! This pen pal didn't know Chinese, but had clearly grasped Lin Er's difficulty. Look how easy that was to understand. They were asking for her name!

Lin Er was immediately excited. They could talk!

[My name is Lin Er. ] She'd only just learned that, and it had already come in handy. Speaking of which, when writing her name in English, should she put her surname last?

[My name is Prince.]