BTO CH3

Sneaking over the wall to enter or leave the school was a serious offense. It was marked in bold on the very first page of the school rules: violators would be penalized and required to give a school-wide self-reflection.

Although Xu Sheng broke the rules all the time, he was rarely caught in the act. Without concrete witnesses or material evidence, he would just bluff his way through, lying through his teeth that he hadn’t done it, leaving the teachers helpless against him.

Back in his freshman year, his relationship with the teachers could even be considered quite good. Although the first reaction of every subject teacher upon hearing the name “Xu Sheng” was a headache, human relationships are a wonderful thing—even scolding can foster a sort of affection. When you visit the teachers’ office that often, it’s hard not to get familiar with them.

In short, he wasn’t afraid of this situation, but it was troublesome nonetheless.

Half-sitting on the wall, Xu Sheng hesitated, caught between jumping and not jumping.

At night, the hot and noisy cicadas from the summer noon had gradually quieted down, and the streetlights stretched out his shadow. The teenager on the wall leaned one hand against the edge, hesitating for a moment, before finally jumping down.

“You didn’t see anything, and no one jumped down from this wall,” Xu Sheng said, brushing the wall dust off his hands. He stepped forward and spoke in a tone that could hardly be considered a negotiation. “…Understand?”

Now that they were closer, Xu Sheng could finally see what the person looked like clearly.

He was a bit taller than himself. He wore his school uniform impeccably, buttoned all the way up to the very top, almost too properly… But does the Sixth High uniform really look that good on people? Xu Sheng’s train of thought derailed for a second.

Aside from that, there was only one word to describe him: cold.

That coldness didn’t stem from his appearance, but rather from an indescribable aura that kept people a thousand miles away.

Truth be told, the person in front of him was good-looking. The teenager had deep-set eyes with a prominent double eyelid crease, and the messy black bangs covering his forehead added to his cold demeanor. Xu Sheng considered his own aesthetic standards to be quite high. In the entire school, aside from himself, the only other people he would admit were “good-looking” were the teachers and directors he occasionally needed to strategically flatter with a “you look really handsome, sir.”

However, the person didn’t even look at him, bypassing him to walk into the dormitory building.

Hearing the noise, the dorm supervisor pushed open his window. He seemed very familiar with the student in the uniform, greeting him warmly: “You’re back? Everything okay at home?”

“It’s fine.” His voice was also cold, but a bit deep.

“That’s good,” the dorm supervisor opened the attendance book and handed him a pen. “Cancel your leave, sign here, and you can head up.”

“Sir,” School Uniform finished signing his name and added, “there’s one more thing.”

“Is the screen window in your dorm broken?” the dorm supervisor asked. “Sigh, a lot of people have come to me about that these past few days. I reported it to the school today, they said they’ll fix them all at once in a few days.”

“It’s not that.”

Xu Sheng had just stepped onto the first stair when he heard School Uniform say, “That guy over there, the one not wearing a uniform.”

The next sentence was: “He just snuck in by jumping over the back wall.”

“…”

Xu Sheng nearly missed his step.

With it spelled out so clearly, how could the dorm supervisor not understand? He took back the attendance book, then slammed it onto the desk, shouting, “That student without a uniform, stay right there. Come here.”

Two minutes later, Xu Sheng was herded into the supervisor’s lounge by the dorm supervisor.

Standing next to him was School Uniform.

Except, Xu Sheng was the one being interrogated, and School Uniform was part of the jury.

The dorm supervisor shut the door with a bang. It seemed he had had nothing to do these past few days, and now that he had finally caught someone, he planned to have a proper interrogation. “Who wants to speak first? What happened?” The dorm supervisor pulled up a plastic stool, sat down in front of the two of them, and turned to Xu Sheng. “He says you snuck in over the back wall?”

Xu Sheng cursed ten thousand times in his head.

If his English grades were decent, he would have cursed him ten thousand more times in another language.

“What’s your deal?” Xu Sheng asked, lowering his voice. “Didn’t we have an agreement?”

School Uniform finally looked him directly in the eye. Xu Sheng heard the guy ask back in a cold, unsympathetic tone, “We?”

“…”

Fuck!

The dorm supervisor urged him, “I’m asking you a question. Did you climb over?”

Xu Sheng had no choice but to give a grunt of affirmation.

Dorm supervisor: “What did you sneak out over the wall to do?”

Xu Sheng picked through the excuses in his head and finally found one that sounded somewhat justifiable: “To clear my head.”

Dorm supervisor: “What could you possibly need to go off-campus to clear your head about?!”

Xu Sheng: “Too much academic pressure.”

If Meng Guowei or any teacher in the high school academic department heard this, they would have a breakdown right then and there: What academic pressure do you have? Have you ever even studied? Where is the pressure coming from?

“…” The dorm supervisor said in an annoyed tone, “No matter how great the academic pressure is, you can’t just casually climb over the wall to leave. If every student acted like you, would the school have any order left?”

Forced to bow his head while under someone else’s roof, Xu Sheng sighed, “You’re right.”

“Students these days really don’t take the school rules seriously. It’s written right there in rule number three: students must strictly follow the school’s prescribed times for entering and exiting!”

The dorm supervisor wanted to pull out the school rules to suppress this student, to make him understand his mistake more profoundly. But the school’s regulations were numerous, and he couldn’t necessarily recite them from memory on the spot. Halfway through, he got stuck. “Students are not allowed to… uh, not allowed to…”

A deep, cold voice took over.

“Students are not allowed to climb the walls or enter and exit the school at will. Those who violate the aforementioned entry and exit regulations will be punished according to the severity of the circumstances.”

Xu Sheng clicked his tongue in his heart, wondering what kind of rare specimen this was.

He could recite the school rules backwards and forwards.

“Sir,” School Uniform apparently didn’t want to just stand around on the sidelines anymore. After speaking, he glanced down at the time on his phone and asked, “Can I go now?”

The dorm supervisor’s attitude toward him was worlds apart from his attitude toward Xu Sheng. To one, he was as warm as spring; to the other… Xu Sheng was the other.

The dorm supervisor beamed. “Alright, alright, go ahead. Go back and check your windows. If there’s any problem, report it to me tomorrow.”

Xu Sheng figured the dorm supervisor was in a good mood now and followed up by asking, “Can I go too?”

The smile on the dorm supervisor’s face vanished in an instant. “You stay right there. We aren’t done settling this score.”

“…”

Xu Sheng wasted another five or six minutes before the dorm supervisor finally relented. He waved his hand and said, “Alright, I won’t make things difficult for you. We’ll handle this by the book. Go back and write a five-hundred-word self-reflection… Have you written a self-reflection before?”

Writing a reflection itself was a small matter, but Linjiang Sixth High School had a rule that bordered on perverted: the required word count for reflections accumulated. That meant the first time was 500 words, and the second time it had to be 1,000 words.

And back in his freshman year, because of the uniform incidents, Xu Sheng had already written six or seven reflections of varying lengths.

That meant his reflection tonight needed to be 3,000 words.

Xu Sheng forced himself not to think about the sight of School Uniform’s retreating back, lest he actually do something akin to bullying a classmate. “I’ve written them… I’m quite experienced.”

But Xu Sheng couldn’t quite hold himself back. He pushed the door open, rested his hand on the doorknob, paused for two seconds, and then let go. “Sir, about that guy just now.”

Dorm supervisor: “?”

Xu Sheng kept his tone as calm and even as possible. “Who is he, what’s his name, what class is he in, and what’s his dorm room number?”

Without waiting for the supervisor to answer, Xu Sheng forced himself to calm down again. He turned the doorknob and said, “Forget it. Don’t tell me. I’m afraid I won’t be able to control myself.”

The dorm supervisor, growing increasingly confused: “??”

Xu Sheng stayed up late into the night writing the reflection. His handwriting drifted so wildly that no one other than himself could decipher it. At the very beginning of the reflection, he earnestly and sincerely wrote the word “Fuck,” and after writing it, he restrained himself and crossed it out.

Because of this reflection, Xu Sheng didn’t go to sleep until 2 AM. By the time he woke up the next day, he had already missed morning study hall. When he grabbed his reflection paper and walked out of the dorm building, the school had just reached the morning exercises and flag-raising segment.

The national anthem drifted over from the sports field.

The five-star red flag rose to the very top, fluttering in the wind.

Xu Sheng weaved through several classes before he finally spotted the figure of Meng Guowei standing with his hands behind his back. “Sir, I’m late.”

First thing that morning, Meng Guowei had been jolted awake by a phone call from the Dean of Discipline: “Xu Sheng from your class was caught climbing the wall last night! He has severely violated school rules. He needs to be disciplined properly and give a school-wide self-reflection!”

He truly hadn’t expected this student to get into trouble in such a short amount of time.

“You’re not late.” Perhaps because things had reached an extreme and rebounded, Meng Guowei was in an unexpectedly calm mood. “You’re right on time. Just in time to read your self-reflection.”

“…”

Xu Sheng hadn’t anticipated this reaction from Meng Guowei either. “…You’re in a good mood today?”

Meng Guowei: “When a person is in a state of extreme sorrow, they often cannot shed tears.”

Up on the flag-raising platform, a student representative took the microphone and began to broadcast the disciplinary notice. “Xu Sheng, a student from Class 7 of the sophomore year, has violated school rules and regulations by sneaking in and out of the school over the wall last night. The nature of his actions is egregious. We will now invite student Xu Sheng up to the stage to present a self-reflection to all the teachers and students of the school.”

As soon as these words came out, the entire school exploded.

To them, the new semester had just begun. Even if you subtracted the two-day assessment exams and test paper reviews, today was the true first day in a meaningful sense.

And the school tyrant had a freshly-baked self-reflection to read on the very first day of the new semester.

“That’s way too badass,” someone whispered. “What kind of speed is this?”

Truth be told, Xu Sheng himself was quite surprised. He always knew what he was doing. If it hadn’t been for some unknown classmate scheming against him behind his back, he wouldn’t have ended up doing a reflection.

Thus, all the teachers and students watched helplessly as a teenage boy walked out from among the thousands of people below the stage. Even though it was morning, the sun still plated the entire field of grass in a scorching layer of gold.

He was still wearing a T-shirt, its hem hanging loose as he stepped onto the stairs.

Xu Sheng took the microphone from the student beside him. The transfer of the mic produced a short, piercing burst of static, followed by the uniquely arrogant and casual voice characteristic of boys his age. That voice tested with a “Hello?” before saying, “Respected teachers and fellow students.”

Everyone assumed the reflection had begun.

However, the voice suddenly changed direction: “My reflection this time might be a bit long. Before I read it, I would like to make a suggestion to the school leadership.”

Xu Sheng was ad-libbing this part; he hadn’t even opened his reflection paper. “Could we set an upper limit on the accumulated word count for reflections? Otherwise, if it ever adds up to thirty thousand words, it won’t matter to me, but the other students still have classes to attend.”

Meng Guowei finally understood: when you are in a state of extreme sorrow, not only do you not have tears, but even your breathing and heartbeat will suddenly stop. When Xu Sheng came down from the stage, he took a deep breath and said, “Xu Sheng—come to my office before class starts.”

Last night, Meng Guowei had been making preparations for his “one-on-one mentorship” plan.

Shao Zhan from their class was a student of excellent character and academics, a good student in the eyes of teachers and peers, and the ‘ideal child’ in the eyes of parents. If Xu Sheng could interact more with such an outstanding student, Meng Guowei believed that after a semester of being positively influenced, he would definitely discover the true path in life and establish proper values regarding learning.

There are no unteachable students, only teachers who don’t work hard enough.

So, having stood in the teachers’ office for less than three minutes, Xu Sheng realized that the content of Meng Guowei’s talk was quite different from what he had expected.

Meng Guowei had scolded him, sure, but after the scolding, he abruptly changed the topic. “The classes just got reorganized. Are you still a bit unfamiliar with your classmates?”

Xu Sheng handed in his reflection. Meng Guowei glanced down at it. The entire paper was covered in illegible chicken scratch; heaven only knew how he had managed to read from it. However, the first crossed-out word, “Fuck,” was written quite beautifully.

After handing in his reflection, Xu Sheng said, “Yeah, I’m not very…” not very familiar.

Before he could even say the word “familiar”, Meng Guowei cut in again: “It doesn’t matter if you aren’t familiar. You have to take the initiative when interacting with your classmates, participate actively. If you communicate more, you’ll get familiar. How about this, let me introduce you to our classmate, Shao Zhan.”

Shao Zhan.

Xu Sheng had an impression of this name.

It was the very same Study God that Zhang Feng had been muttering about for ages yesterday without actually seeing him, the guy who beat second place by twenty-something points.

But this sounded wrong.

Introduce my ass?

Meng Guowei took a sip of water, adopting a posture that suggested he was about to talk for three days and three nights. “Our classmate Shao Zhan…”

Meng Guowei and Xu Sheng were on completely different wavelengths. Xu Sheng thought he had made himself perfectly clear yesterday: you stay out of my business, I won’t cause trouble for you, and we’ll both be at peace.

If it were any other teacher, they guaranteed wouldn’t bother wasting any more energy on him.

Although Xu Sheng didn’t know exactly what medicine Meng Guowei was selling from his gourd, he straightened up and interrupted, “I don’t want to meet him.”

He was obviously a step too late in saying this.

A voice came from behind him:

“Reporting in.”