Chapter 46: The Whole Family at School p1
The boy that Jiang Yi and Lu Qing were talking about, Liu Jinchen, Zhou Wanfeng saw him at the entrance of First Year, Class Three’s classroom.
There were three boys together. It was the break time after dinner, and there was still some time before the evening self-study. The three of them had wandered to the entrance of First Year, Class Three’s classroom. They would peek in through the window for a moment, then wander to the front door, and then to the back door.
The three of them would take a look, then retreat to the hallway outside and whisper.
The boy by the window was so annoyed by them that he couldn’t do his homework. He stuck his head out and shouted at them, “Hey, who are you looking for? You’re so annoying, coming back and forth.”
This shout attracted the attention of the whole class. Everyone looked over.
Zhou Wanfeng looked up. In the middle of the three boys was a boy in a white short-sleeved shirt. He had red lips and white teeth, a clean face, and a pair of smiling peach blossom eyes, which made him look much more handsome.
His skin was very clean, at least there were no pimples. His hair was neat, his eyebrows were not messy, and his nose bridge was very straight. He was a 7.5 out of 10 in terms of looks, and with his height of over 1.7 meters and his fashionable clothes, his total score was barely a 9.
Zhou Wanfeng saw that the boy in the white short-sleeved shirt was a little shy, but he looked directly at Yun Jingya and, even in front of everyone, put a bottle of soda on the desk of the classmate by the window. “For Yun Jingya. Let’s be friends.” A boy next to him pointed at the boy in the white short-sleeved shirt and shouted with a laugh, “His name is Liu Jinchen.” After shouting, he was pulled away by Liu Jinchen.
The boy by the window looked at the soda. It was the most expensive kind in the school’s tuck shop.
“Jingya, he’s looking for you,” Wang Feili, Yun Jingya’s junior high school classmate, said. She knew her friend’s situation very well.
During the New Year’s Day and Christmas performances in junior high, her desk would be filled with oranges and candies. She was very popular.
The orange soda was passed to Yun Jingya’s desk. A few meaningful “oohs” and “aahs” came from the class. On the surface, it was about making friends, but everyone knew that it was a gesture of goodwill, a case of love at first sight.
Yun Jingya looked at the orange soda awkwardly, not knowing what to do with it for a moment. It was mainly the gazes of the class on her that made her extremely uncomfortable, as if she had some kind of relationship with that person.
While many of the boys and girls in the class were curious about what Yun Jingya would do with the soda, they saw her stand up and put it on the podium.
“Yun Jingya, if you’re not going to drink it, give it to me. I’ve never had such an expensive soda before.”
“Just because you haven’t had it doesn’t mean she hasn’t. Didn’t you see the big black sedan after the military training? Do you recognize that license plate? I asked about that shiny golden Crown when I got home. It’s an imported car. The lowest model costs several hundred thousand.”
“Yun Jingya, what does your family do? Do they own a company?”
“They must own a company. Otherwise, who can earn so much from working?”
The family backgrounds of the students in the class were varied. Some had come from the townships and counties. They had to take the county bus to get home, which took about an hour and a half to two hours. When they got to the county seat, they might have to take a village bus. When they got to the market town, they would have their family pick them up on a bicycle or a tricycle, and then it would be another half an hour to an hour to get home.
Their parents were either farmers or did some odd jobs at a local factory to earn some extra money, or they would go far away to work.
Most of the students in the class had parents who were both working.
A little better would be self-employed, with their own shop or something.
Yun Jingya was exquisite from head to toe. Even the notebook she used was different from others’. The shoes she wore, you could tell they were very expensive.
The half-joking, half-envious voices in the class, Yun Jingya pretended not to hear and went back to her seat to read seriously.
Jiang Chen sat behind Zhou Wanfeng and intentionally or unintentionally poked her back, whispering, “He’s from Class Six. Lu Qing even said his name was Niu something Chen. He can never remember the names of people he doesn’t like. His name is clearly Liu Jinchen.”
Seeing that Zhou Wanfeng was still reciting the text, Jiang Chen slowly sat down.
Wu Junfeng shouted twice, “Quiet down! Have you all finished your homework? Have you all memorized the text? Go and do your homework!”
Wu Junfeng maintained order. If you wanted to talk about who had a good family background in the class, he wanted to say that his deskmate, Zhou Wanfeng’s, family was definitely not bad.
His ballpoint pen had fallen on the floor, and he had seen the shoes on Zhou Wanfeng’s feet.
He had seen the latest model at the mall before school started. He had shamelessly gone to the store to try them on. They were very comfortable. The salesperson had come up with a smile and introduced them as the latest model with some kind of high-tech material. He had slipped away without even daring to ask the price.
He had thought he had seen wrong. He had deliberately dropped his ballpoint pen several times and squatted down to take a look. The details were exactly the same. It couldn’t be wrong.
Zhou Wanfeng had lead bags tied to her shins for training. Her pants were tapered and covered them, so others couldn’t see. When she was reciting Chinese texts or English words, her textbook would be laid flat on the desk, and her hands would not be idle. She had a hand grip in her hand, about the size of a baseball. When she squeezed it, the protruding part would go into the groove, and when she let go, it would immediately pop out.
There was a powerful spring inside. If you didn’t use force, it wouldn’t go into the groove at all.
When Zhou Wanfeng was reciting the text with her eyes closed, her hands were not idle.
Wu Junfeng saw all of this and was secretly amazed. As expected, those who could fight were all trained. Kong Xiaoxu, who had only practiced during the summer vacation, was nothing.
After the official start of school, a habit of Zhou Wanfeng’s from her three years of junior high would always unconsciously emerge.
The moment the teacher finished lecturing, she would raise her hand and stand up. She wouldn’t even wait for the teacher to call her name. She would just stand up, hold her book, or directly point at the part of the blackboard she didn’t understand or was confused about.
The math teacher, Meng Yuanzhi, would frown with a serious expression, but he would still go over it with her briefly. Zhou Wanfeng also realized this and changed.
The people in First Year, Class Three all discovered that during the break, you basically couldn’t hear Zhou Wanfeng speak. She didn’t chat with anyone. But if someone asked her, she would say a couple of words. Most of the time, she wouldn’t take the initiative to chat. But when it was class time, all the classmates would find that Zhou Wanfeng was much more active.
She was like two different people in and out of class. She would actively answer the teacher’s questions, actively interact with the teacher, and make full use of the 45 minutes of class.
Occasionally, Wu Junfeng would discover that Zhou Wanfeng would study in advance. No matter which subject, she would look at it once in advance and take notes on the parts she didn’t understand. When the teacher got to the part where she had taken notes, she would listen carefully. After that part, she would continue to study on her own.
It could be said that her learning progress was ahead, and so were her workbooks.
He was very curious. There were only 24 hours in a day. Where did she get so much energy and time? Didn’t she get sleepy?
Zhou Wanfeng didn’t live in the dorms. She knew that there was a lights-out time in the dorms, and you couldn’t read after that. In this respect, the rented house was more convenient.
Basically, she would get up at five every day, have about 20 minutes of morning workout, 10 minutes to wash up, take some time to recite the three minor subjects, and 10 minutes on the road to think about the day’s lessons and the things she had to do.
Every night, she would go to bed after twelve. The rented house had two bedrooms and one living room. Zhou Wanfeng and Yun Jingya would both study in the living room. It was too quiet in the bedroom by oneself, and sometimes, you would just close your eyes and fall asleep.
After starting high school, Zhou Wanfeng realized that the higher you went in school, the more it was a competition of IQ and talent. The knowledge in junior high was still okay, but high school was really not easy. Once you fell behind, it would be very difficult to catch up.
Zhou Wanfeng’s hard work also affected Yun Jingya.
In the three years of junior high, with one monthly exam, one mid-term exam, and one final exam after another, the three years of junior high had passed in the blink of an eye. Time passed too quickly.
Zhou Wanfeng’s feelings were very complicated. She both hoped that high school would pass quickly, and also hoped that it would not be so fast.
After graduating from high school, she would be an adult. She could be in complete control of her own life. The Yun family, Zhou Zhiru, her guardian—she could completely ignore them and just do what she wanted to do.
But the workload in high school was very heavy, especially English. She probably didn’t have a talent for languages. Apart from rote memorization, she had to expand her English reading, read more English classics, and memorize more words, as Yun Jingya had said. And for listening training, she would just play the cassette tapes at home over and over again.
The background music when she woke up in the morning was the listening test.
Sun Mulan, her junior high school homeroom teacher, was still at Shuangshu Model Middle School. The two of them were still in contact. After Zhou Wanfeng started high school, she would still provide her with good learning methods. The English cassette tapes were what she had helped her find.
It was also Sun Mulan who had told Zhou Wanfeng not to waste time in her three years of high school, and to just bury her head in her studies. When you’re tired, when you’re sleepy, wash your face with cold water and continue. It’s a rare opportunity in life to have three years of pure study. You will benefit from it for the rest of your life. After three years, you will spend the rest of your life thanking yourself for having persevered.
After Sun Mulan had found out which university Zhou Wanfeng wanted to go to, she had been encouraging her and cheering her on.
When Zhou Wanfeng’s brain was fried from studying, she would stand at the window and let the cold wind blow on her. She would deliberately make herself recall painful memories to motivate herself to move forward.
The events of her past life seemed very distant, but they were still deeply ingrained in her memory, never forgotten.
Whenever she thought of them, Zhou Wanfeng was very glad that she could live like this in this life.
The homeroom teacher, Xu Lei, had learned from the feedback of the various subject teachers that Zhou Wanfeng was a very active and good student. Her spirit of learning was very infectious, especially for the class president, Wu Junfeng, who could feel it the most.
If he was tired during the break and closed his eyes to sleep, he would hear the rustling of a pen on paper, from soft to deep, from slow to fast… like a special effects shot in a movie, like time was rustling past him. That intangible sense of panic made him feel that it was a mortal sin for him to be sleeping with his eyes closed.
In the first exam, Zhou Wanfeng, who had been in the upper-middle range in the high school entrance exam total score ranking, had broken into the top ten in the class.
The first year of high school held a monthly exam summary meeting. The first-year grade director even read out the names of the top ten in each class at the summary meeting to encourage them.
There was a very large blackboard downstairs at the first-year teaching building. You could see it on your way to the cafeteria, back to the dorms, to the restroom—anyway, you could see it. After the start of school, that blackboard had been written with “celebrating the start of school.” Only today did all the first-year students know its real purpose.
It was to transcribe the exam results. The top ten of each class were all written on it. Class, name, rank, total score. The comparison could not have been more obvious. Especially since the scores were written in red chalk.
The difference between some people was only a few points, but their grade-level ranking was more than a dozen places apart. Wasn’t that stimulating?
As expected of the No. 1 High School. They were very serious about improving their grades. At the same time, all external factors that affected learning had to be nipped in the bud.