Hello, Old Times Chapter 50

Chapter 50: You are different to others

Yu Zhou Zhou’s changes were like a street tree that suddenly turned green after a night of spring rain. One morning, she walked out of the front door sleepily carrying her school bag.

She liked to smile more and more but she didn’t speak much. It was as if she was carrying a big secret and was waiting for something.

She was also happier, her happiness radiated from inside and wasn’t expressed from just being cheerful. She became more introverted and quiet as if all the joys, sorrows and concerns of the peers around her were just kid’s play. Subconciously without realizing, she had already stepped into a different world. A world that was more mature and also more mysterious.

She was no longer a little girl but a teenage girl.

She continued to prepare for her cello exam every summer until the final tenth grade which was like a full stop, a complete goodbye to a certain someone and a certain world. As for Maths Olympiad classes, she no longer attended and she was now even able to ignore Teacher Yu’s glares – Shan Jie Jie though, couldn’t and one day, quietly asked her, “Zhou Zhou, what happened to you?”

Yu Zhou Zhou straightened her pencil case, pushed the ‘Detective Conan’ novel that she had rented from the book store into her desk then tilted her head and smiled, “Nothing happened.”

“I think you’re a little weird,” Shan Jie Jie muttered in a low voice. Seeing that Yu Zhou Zhou didn’t plan to explain any further, she mumbled out her real intentions,

“How are you so close with Zhan Yan Fei?”

“You don’t like her?”

“No!” Shan Jie Jie discovered that Yu Zhou Zhou was getting better and better at shifting attention and was becoming more and more like…that cousin brother of hers. She hurriedly smiled, “How do I not like her? I’m just… see you don’t even pay attention to me anymore.”

Shan Jie Jie’s voice became softer as she spoke. Yu Zhou Zhou laughed and pulled her hand, “How am I ignoring you?”

“Yesterday, everyone was going to the wholesale market to buy classmate record books together but you didn’t come with us.”

“Oh…” Yu Zhou Zhou scratched the back of her head and laughed, “It was because I didn’t need to buy a classmate record book so I didn’t want to go.”

“Have you already bought it?” Shan Jie Jie was extremely surprised, “You didn’t even tell me!”

Yu Zhou Zhou shook her head, “I haven’t bought it and I don’t want to buy it either.”

“You’re not going to write a classmate record book?” Shan Jie Jie almost felt like she was looking at a strange creature.

At the start of summer this year, almost everyone was frantically passing around their classmate record books in secret. The girls crowded together in a dilemma over the different styles, if they should use a big book or a small book, if it should be pink or blue, landscape or cartoon, loose leaf or in a folder, whether the content is complete, if there is a section to put in star signs and blood types, if there was a question on mottos, favourite celebrities and food…

The contents of the classmate record books represented each person’s popularity over the six years so everyone placed great importance on it. Yu Zhou Zhou accumulated a pile of loose paper with the owner’s name marked in pencil on the upper right corner of each piece. She quickly filled in her name, nickname, star sign, birthday… then seriously wrote in the graduation message section of each piece, “I wish you a bright future and hope you’ll always be happy, everything will go smoothly and all your wishes will come true.”

 Humorous, sentimental, intimate… Everyone was busy creating all kinds of personalized messages but more importantly, a lot of people who had hidden ambiguous feelings treated this classmate record very, very seriously. Everyone was anxious as whether or not they could pass into the Normal University Affiliated Middle School or No.8 Middle School weighed upon these boys and girls like a large rock but they couldn’t say anything, they could only simply state on there, “We will forever be best friends.”

Yu Zhou Zhou always wrote those lines and it was only on Shan Jie Jie, Li Xiao Zhi and Zhan Yan Fei’s classmate records that she wrote a few more sentences on the recollections of their past.

No one knew that she just didn’t want to leave any traces. Yu Zhou Zhou had experienced a lot of separations in her life, she seemed to have realized a lot earlier than her peers how fragile these so-called promises of being “forever best friends” were – in front of time and distance, they were all powerless, they can’t even fight against their own forgetfulness and heartlessness. On the path of growing up, there were always things that were more novel and friends who were more interesting. However, the human mind is small and can’t hold so many things so people will keep abandoning things as they progress forward on their path.

On a Tuesday in mid-June, Lin Yang blocked Yu Zhou Zhou on the path home.

The fourth grade drum and horns and flower bouquet teams were going to participate in the Communist Youth League celebrations and had to train in the afternoon which would be incredibly noisy so the whole school was let off on break in the afternoon. Yu Zhou Zhou walked past the court, carrying her bag on her back. She looked over at those children lining up in the bright green drum and horns uniforms under the sun and sudden raised her head to look towards the grey teaching building with a funny sense of reincarnation.

Life was like a spinning top, turning around and around, in a hoop that never ends.  

She had just stopped feeling emotional when she noticed Lin Yang leaning by the wall with his school bag, staring at her.

“What’s up?”

Lin Yang pulled out a piece of light green paper, “How can you still ask? Look at what you wrote for me?”

“Lin Yang, I wish you a bright future and hope you’ll always be happy and everything will go smoothly.”

Yu Zhou Zhou read it back and forth a few times, “What’s wrong with it?” There weren’t any typos.

“How can you… can you…” He was flustered for a while without being able to finish his sentence.

He asked Zhan Yan Fei to help hand his classmate record log to Yu Zhou Zhou and had been looking forward to it for a long time. He finally received it back today only to see such an generic sentence.

Plus, more importantly, he knew that Yu Zhou Zhou had written the exact same sentence on many classmate records.

How can what was written for me be the same as what was written for them? Lin Yang felt extremely aggrieved but he could only grip the paper and shake it in the air for a long time before finally saying through gritted teeth, “What you wrote for me is exactly the same as what you wrote for everyone else’s plus…plus…you missed a line!!!”

Only then did Yu Zhou Zhou discover that she had missed the line, ‘Hope all your wishes come true’

“Sorry, I’ll add it on for you right now.”

Lin Yang was so angered by her that there was smoke coming out from his nose, “This isn’t the point! Rewrite it for me!’

“Rewrite it?” Yu Zhou Zhou looked down at the piece of paper awkwardly. Lin Yang’s classmate record log was extra large so for the sake of making the message section look less empty, she wrote those sentences vertically and deliberately made each word larger so now, there simply wasn’t any room to change it.

“I’ll give you a blank piece, rewrite it!” After Lin Yang finished talking, he began to rummage through his bag and dug out everything but couldn’t find it.

“Why don’t we talk about it tomorrow.” Yu Zhou Zhou raised her hand in front of her forehead to block the deadly sunlight of the start of summer.

“No, you drag it out. This piece of paper with just twelve words took you two weeks to write. Wait until tomorrow? Perhaps you won’t even be able to return it to me at our graduation!”

Yu Zhou Zhou helplessly spread her hands, “Then what do you want me to do?”

Lin Yang stood there thinking for a long time before suddenly blushing. He stammered for a while before stiffly saying, “…Come to my house.”

His parents had gone to work so they wouldn’t know. During the afternoon, he can let her stay at his place and properly write it. If she couldn’t write it well, then she can rewrite it. Lin Yang planned it out quickly and in one moment, almost even wanted to run back to class to borrow Teacher Zhang’s class pointer in preparation.

“I’m not going,” Yu Zhou Zhou shook her head.

Actually, she had deliberately written the same graduation message for Lin Yang as she had for everyone else. Facing that green piece of paper with a picture of a little fox on it, she was at a loss for many days before finally making up her mind to write out the message.

Writing the same words as she had for everyone else was because he was different to everyone else.

Yu Zhou Zhou didn’t know what exactly she was panicking about, to the point of actually missing a line.

Not going wasn’t allowed! Lin Yang was completed ignited by her attitude or, to say, he was frustrated that cold water was thrown on something that he had looked forward to so much. He was so angered that he had completed forgotten about his parents that he was afraid of. He directly held her hand and ran out the gates, pulling her along.

“What do you want to do?” Yu Zhou Zhou spent a long time trying to pull her hand away but even as her wrist turned visibly red, she still couldn’t pull it out. She never knew that Lin Yang had such strong strength.

After Lin Yang ran out from the courts, his anger subsided bit by bit but instead, a strange feeling suddenly appeared in his heart.

He loosened the strength of his hand little by little but didn’t dare to turn around to look at what the expression of the girl behind him had. But now, even if he was loosely pulling her along, she no longer struggled and allowed him to lead her home silently.

Just like this, they maintained their strange posture with one in front and one behind, their arms twisted, heads lowered, footsteps erratic and palms hot.

Their surrounding scenery gradually faded into a meaningless scenery board. Lin Yang’s throat was tight and his arms were twisted very painfully. The girl behind him had fully become a sweet burden. He wanted to let go of her had to relieve his arm a bit but he was reluctant to. Just as he was in a predicament of riding a tiger that was difficult to dismount*,  the footsteps behind him that had been dull the whole time suddenly quickened. Lin Yang’s heart skipped a beat, he turned his head to discover that Yu Zhou Zhou had walked to his side.
*[Getting into a position with no way to back down]

And, she had not let go of his hand.

Lin Yang’s footsteps were like he was drifting, he felt like he was in a dream yet didn’t know when this dream started, just like how people would never consciously realize when they fell asleep.

“Zhou Zhou?”

“Mhm?”

“Nothing.”

Lin Yang lowered his head, the corners of his mouth rose gradually, overflowing with unspeakable sweetness.