Chương 9: Lu Jianhao
9:00 am, The People's High School, Class 3-2
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After the morning assembly, the students went back to their homerooms for their teachers to brief them before they started their lessons again at 10 am.
Entering the classroom, Miss Li looked around for the girl she met yesterday. Did she decide not to come? Li Yue felt somewhat upset. When Wang Zhiyu took her diagnostic test, she had not expected much. After all, this was a girl that hadn't even completed the first and second year of high school. What was more, she got in due to connections.
As a teacher, she felt that this was unfair to the hard-working students in her class that had studied hard in order to go to this school. However, Wang Zhiyu's results took her by surprise. Not only was her Chinese essay flawless, but her English essay was also on par with several of the essays written by the American-Chinese students in her class. As a languages teacher, she knew how hard one had to work in order to polish their essay-writing skills, especially if they weren't a native speaker.
After talking to a science teacher that marked the maths and science sections of Wang Zhiyu's paper, Miss Li confirmed that Wang Zhiyu was a very bright student. As this diagnostic test was a synoptic test written by the teachers in the People's High School, it wasn't possible to practise using past questions or predict which topics would come up.
Therefore, a student needed to have a very good grasp of all their subjects in order to do well. In fact, most students who sat this test could barely get over half marks, so for Wang Zhiyu to get close to full marks was almost a miracle.
Miss Li sighed dejectedly and started going over the school rules. Although she did this every year, it seemed that the students forgot them after their summer break. Uniform must be presentable at all times, no smoking on school grounds, and so on and so on.
Once she was done talking about the school rules, she began lecturing, no, nagging them about their futures and how this year was very important, etc. It was during this speech that a series of knocks could be heard before the door opened.
A fair girl stood at the door, her shoulder length hair partially braided. Seeing her, the entire class wondered who this pretty student was. Was she a transfer student from a different city?
"Wang Zhiyu, what time do you call this? You are over an hour late on the first day of school. This behaviour is unacceptable for a third-year student." Although Miss Li sounded harsh, she was actually very pleased that Zhiyu had decided to come to school after all.
"I'm sorry, Miss Li. I was unaware that there would be traffic on the roads and left too late. It will not happen again." Hearing her speak, her classmates knew that this was no transfer student from a different city. Her strong Beijing accent marked her out to be a local.
Miss Li nodded in approval and asked her to introduce yourself. "Hi, my name is Wang Zhiyu. I hope we can all get along." Her short introduction was quite unlike a lot of students'. These students liked to brag about themselves and would often speak for a few minutes before a teacher had to stop them. As such, Miss Li's opinion of Zhiyu improved further.
"There is a space next to Lu Jianhao. You can sit there." Miss Li pointed at a seat next to a fairly good-looking boy wearing headphones.
Zhiyu walked towards the desk as Miss Li started rambling again about their futures. At this point, all the students were barely listening, watching the new student instead. She promptly sat down and turned to say hi to her deskmate. However, Lu Jianhao completely ignored her and continued listening to music, staring out of the window.
Seeing that he didn't want to interact with her, Zhiyu listened to Miss Li talk instead, occasionally sneaking glances at her deskmate, who seemed to be completely engrossed in staring out of the window next to him.
Lu Jianhao had styled his hair the same way as many K-pop idols, a short bowl cut hairdo that curled inward. It would have looked awkward on someone less stunning, but it worked fine on him. As he was sitting down, it was hard to tell how tall he was. But his legs were long enough to kick the chair in front of him, which he did every few minutes, causing the girl sitting there to flinch in fright.
His uniform was clean, despite the fact that it evidently had not been ironed. Although inconspicuous, Zhiyu could see that the ring he wore on his left index finger was made of pure platinum. She narrowed her eyes at this. It looked like this deskmate of hers also came from a wealthy background.
Eventually, a bell rang. Miss Li told the class to behave themselves and left, just as another teacher walked in. Classes had started. Zhiyu tried to concentrate but ultimately failed. It was not that the content was too hard; in fact, it was too easy! As the class was English, Zhiyu whose past self had been brought up in the UK was undeniably bored.
She could feel herself drifting, drifting into the world of sleep. Her eyelids got heavier and heavier and soon, she was lost to the world.
Lu Jianhao saw her sleeping and scoffed. Why did she bother coming into school if all she was going to do was sleep? Although he wore his headphones all the time, he wasn't actually listening to anything. He just didn't want to talk to anyone and wearing headphones gave him the perfect excuse to ignore them.
Although some teachers like Miss Li chose to enforce the school rules, most teachers were fairly lax with them, especially if the students who broke them did not have bad grades.
Lu Jianhao was one such student. Despite wearing headphones all year round, he never got below eighty per cent in all his tests. As such, the teachers never really bothered him about his lack of attention in class. However, it was not the case for Zhiyu, who did not really have any results to speak of yet.
Seeing her dozing, the teacher walked up to her and smacked the back of her head with his textbook. "What makes you think you can sleep in my class?"
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JadedCat
JadedCat I'm back!! ^^ I honestly think that uploading a chapter every 2 or 3 days might work better for me than uploading daily... So please let me try and figure stuff out for myself :)