Chapter 10 Who Does He Think He’s Better Than?

Three women make a play, and even top students were enthusiastic about gossiping on topics between the sexes.

Luo Yi covered her ears and lay on the bed, her little face flushed red like a boiled shrimp.

Qian Jiayun was listening with great interest as Shen Xinyi vividly spun stories. When she looked up, she saw a small lump arched up under the quilt on the upper bunk—Luo Yi was curled up inside.

“Luo Yi, are you going to rest already?” Qian Jiayun said. “It’s only half past ten. The lights aren’t even off yet. Come chat with us for a bit.”

“Mm…” Luo Yi was tongue-tied. Chat about what? About how she got pressed against a tree and kissed by Ye Xiaoyang?

“Aiya.” Du Lin slapped her thigh. “She’s definitely embarrassed. This kind of topic… tsk tsk, you two dirty old women.”

“What dirty old women? You’re the one listening with such relish.” Qian Jiayun laughed and went to tickle Du Lin’s armpits.

Du Lin hurriedly begged for mercy: “I was wrong, I was wrong!”

“Alright, alright.” Shen Xinyi stopped the farce. “Let’s not disturb her rest. She still has an injury on her face.”

Thinking of this, the three girls were surprisingly unanimous. Those who needed to wash up washed up, those who needed to get into bed got into bed. This topic was finally put to rest.

Luo Yi silently let out a breath of relief, as if she had just escaped a disaster.

In the week after the midterm exam, although the students attended classes and studied as usual, their mental state was indeed much more relaxed.

There was a saying: small exams mean small play, big exams mean big play, no exams mean no play. What’s more, after the parent-teacher meeting ended, it would be the May Day holiday. No.1 High had unusually given the Grade 10 students three days off.

That evening, Luo Yi and Qian Jiayun were about to go to the cafeteria for dinner when class monitor Tang Kunyu called them to a stop.

“For May Day the class is planning to organize a spring outing to Liusha Bay. Are you going?”

Tang Kunyu was tall and big, a full 1.9 meters. Who knew if Ji Changming had chosen the class monitor based on height. But when it came to being class monitor, he was truly skilled and could handle all kinds of matters with ease.

“Originally we were only organizing for the day students to go, but there are two boarding students who also want to go, so we’re asking all of you uniformly,” Tang Kunyu explained. “Oh, and this is privately organized by us. Don’t tell the teachers, or it’ll turn into a pile of trouble again.”

“May Day, huh? I have to go home, so I can’t go.” Qian Jiayun was a bit regretful. She asked Luo Yi, “What about you? Aren’t you going back to Tongze?”

“Me?” Luo Yi shook her head. “I’m going to my aunt’s place. I’m not going back.”

“Then come along. Liusha Bay is in the suburbs. It’s only a few dozen minutes by bus from school. Go in the morning and come back in the afternoon. It won’t delay anything.” Tang Kunyu strongly encouraged Luo Yi to join. “There are already twenty or thirty classmates who signed up. You still don’t fully recognize the classmates in our class, right? This is a perfect chance to get to know more people.”

The class monitor was so enthusiastic that Luo Yi found it hard to refuse, so she nodded and agreed.

“Oh, right. What’s your QQ number? I’ll add you later and pull you into the class group,” Tang Kunyu said.

Luo Yi left her QQ number, then left with Qian Jiayun.

On Saturday, the school organized the parent-teacher meeting.

Luo Hengzhou was far away in Africa, so Luo Yi’s aunt, Luo Xueqing, came to handle it in his place.

Actually, this parent-teacher meeting didn’t have much to do with Luo Yi. The school’s main purpose was to report the students’ first-half semester study situation and school performance to the parents, and to convey the school’s arrangements for the second half of the semester.

The first half was held in the school auditorium, with the entire grade gathering for a large meeting. The principal and the grade director attended in person.

The second half was small meetings by each class. Luo Yi brought Luo Xueqing to her own seat. Other classmates’ desks had midterm exam papers and score sheets laid out, but her desk was very clean.

Just as Luo Yi was about to leave the classroom, she heard Luo Xueqing call out, “Sister Shu, why are you here too?”

“Little Luo, how is it you?” A clear and pleasant female voice rang out.

Luo Yi turned her head and looked. Sitting in Ye Xiaoyang’s seat was a woman with beautiful features.

Her makeup was exquisite, her hair in long wavy curls. She wore a slim-fitting hip-hugging skirt and thin high-heeled sandals. Her dressing was fashionable, and her temperament was very much like a Hong Kong female star from the 1990s.

Looking carefully, she resembled Ye Xiaoyang a bit—clearly his mother.

Luo Xueqing was thirty-eight this year. Calling her Sister Shu meant she was older than Luo Xueqing.

But just looking at her appearance, she didn’t look like a woman around forty at all, because she took such good care of herself.

“Is this your daughter?” Ji Shu asked.

“My niece. Her dad went abroad, so I had to come open the parent-teacher meeting for her,” Luo Xueqing said with a smile.

“I only remember last time Old Ye said your daughter was still in junior high. Just now I was wondering how she became classmates with my son.”

“Oh, so this is your son? Just now I even heard the principal praising him. Giving birth to such a good son, you husband and wife are truly blessed.”

“Not at all, not at all. He just knows how to use a bit of cleverness.” Although Ji Shu’s words were modest, her face was blooming with smiles. “Having a daughter at home is still better—the parents’ little cotton-padded jacket. You don’t know, boys are really hard to educate.”

“Look at you saying that. Does your son still need you to worry?”

The polite small talk between adults left the two children not knowing where to put themselves.

“Mom, I’m heading out first.” Ye Xiaoyang was about to be drowned by the endless flattery and really couldn’t take it. “You two take your time chatting.”

“Auntie, I’m leaving too.” Luo Yi then said to Ji Shu, “Goodbye, Auntie.”

“Ai, what a well-behaved little girl.” Ji Shu smiled as she watched the two children leave.

Once out of the classroom door, Luo Yi let out a long breath.

Ye Xiaoyang saw that she wasn’t wearing a mask and that her little face had returned to its usual fair and smooth state, so he opened his mouth and asked, “Is your face better?”

“Mm, mostly better.” Luo Yi nodded, then as if remembering something, added, “I didn’t tell my aunt.”

The implication was that she hadn’t complained to the parents, so he didn’t need to worry.

Ye Xiaoyang gave a faint smile.

While the parents were in the meeting, the students were free to move around.

Two boys came over holding a ball and shouted to Ye Xiaoyang, “Going to play football?”

“I’m not going. You guys play,” he said.

The two boys were just feeling puzzled when they saw Luo Yi standing beside Ye Xiaoyang. Thinking that this female classmate had just been smashed by Ye Xiaoyang and that it had probably left him with a psychological shadow, they didn’t press further.

After the two left, Luo Yi asked, “Why aren’t you going?”

“Don’t feel like it,” Ye Xiaoyang said lightly. “Those two are pretty bad at it.”

Luo Yi: “…”

Looking at the two boys’ chatting and laughing backs, they definitely didn’t know Ye Xiaoyang was badmouthing them behind their backs.

A boy and a girl standing in the corridor made the atmosphere a bit strange. Luo Yi couldn’t think of any other topic she could still have with Ye Xiaoyang.

“I’m going to the library,” she said. “I want to borrow some books to take back and read over May Day.”

“I’m going to the library too.” Ye Xiaoyang turned around to look at her, his tone calm, as if this had been his plan all along.

At the end of April, the sky was filled with drifting willow catkins. The crabapple blossoms on campus were in full, fiery bloom, like a stretch of fiery clouds.

The two of them inexplicably walked all the way to the library together.

There weren’t many people in the library—scattered here and there. Two or three classmates sat in seats, and a few others wandered between the bookshelves.

No.1 High’s library wasn’t small. The collection was rich, and they regularly collected opinions from students and purchased new books, so basically any book available on the market could be found in the library.

Luo Yi usually liked reading some literary works, so she went to the literature section to look for books.

The books here could truly be described as dazzling. Chinese literature, European and American literature, Japanese literature, Russian literature, and so on, divided into many small areas according to the authors’ nationalities. She stopped in the Japanese literature area.

She quite liked the writing style of certain Japanese authors—delicate brushstrokes that were good at digging into the deeply hidden aspects of human nature.

Luo Yi pulled out a copy of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 . Just as she was about to open it for a look, a hand pressed down on the cover of the book.

She looked up in confusion at Ye Xiaoyang, who had somehow come to her side.

“You want to read this?” he asked.

“The author is quite famous. Why not?” Although Haruki Murakami accompanied the Nobel Prize in Literature every year without winning, when it came to contemporary Japanese writers, he was definitely the one carrying the flag.

“Oh.” Ye Xiaoyang expressionlessly let go of his hand and tentatively asked her, “Have you read his books before?”

“I’ve read some short stories.”

In her impression there were two called The Attack on the Bakery and The Second Attack on the Bakery . They were written in an absurd and nonsensical way, making people unable to hold back laughter while at the same time feeling a kind of loneliness and emptiness that was hard to put into words. That was the charm of literary works.

This was Luo Yi’s thought.

She didn’t know that in the eyes of many middle school students, Haruki Murakami’s books were the equivalent substitute for little yellow books, for no other reason than that his books contained large amounts of detailed descriptions of sex scenes.

In reality, many literary works revolved around sex to unfold the story. Even people who reviewed books would include a writer’s skill in describing sex within the scope of evaluation. This was an extremely important link in the expressive power of words.

Of course, the premise was that it was a literary work, not those messy little yellow texts on the internet.

“I feel like you might not be very suited to reading his books,” Ye Xiaoyang said. Golden sunlight fell on the side of his face, and there was a circle of soft light along the edges of his long eyelashes.

“Why?” Luo Yi blinked.

Ye Xiaoyang took the book from her hands, casually flipped a few pages, and held it up in front of her eyes.

Luo Yi took one look and immediately flushed red to her ears.

This page was about the female protagonist Aomame going to a bar with a friend to hook up. They hooked up with two men, and the four of them spent an entire absurd night together.

Little girls who had never been in a relationship often imagined love and sex as pure and inviolable. They simply couldn’t accept things like hookups and multi-person revelry.

If this were put into a web novel, a female lead like this would still get a happy ending with the male lead, and the author would be cursed to death by the readers.

It wasn’t that Luo Yi couldn’t look at descriptions of sex scenes. It was just that this kind of behavior exceeded her psychological tolerance range.

Besides, even if she wanted to look, she would have to do it secretly. Ye Xiaoyang had already pointed it out to her. If she still forced herself to look now, it would seem as if she particularly wanted to read it.

“Why are you here?” She was a bit annoyed, and even felt he was a little bad.

“I’m borrowing books.” He pulled out a book by Keigo Higashino from the shelf above her—it was the Detective Galileo series.

Luo Yi had also read a few of Keigo Higashino’s books. She suddenly felt that Ye Xiaoyang was a bit similar to the protagonist of Detective Galileo , Yukawa Manabu—smart mind, handsome appearance, popular with girls, yet with a personality that was hard to fathom.

She stuffed 1Q84 back onto the shelf.

Ye Xiaoyang took a book from the shelf beside him and held it out in front of her.

“This one is more suitable for you.”

Luo Yi lowered her eyes and looked—

Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window ?

Children’s literature?

Who was he looking down on?