On the first day of second grade, Jiashu walked into his newly assigned class, seeing many familiar faces from first grade. He walked to his desk, put down his schoolbag, and took out the Chinese textbook for the first lesson—the cover was carefully wrapped in calendar paper.
There was a big red backpack carelessly resting on top of his textbook. He looked up, slightly annoyed, and saw Zhou Yuanyuan grinning at him with the few remaining milk teeth from her teething stage. Only then did he notice the name "Zhou Yuanyuan" on the desk next to his. His mind buzzed. He pulled his textbook out from under her bag and coldly reminded her, "Don't crush my books."
Zhou Yuanyuan seemed to be startled by his rebuke, hesitantly picking up her bag and moving it to the neighboring desk before sitting down next to him. Then, inexplicably, she perked up and asked, "Do you still remember the underground kingdom?"
Jia Shu's face instantly turned bright red.
He took a ruler out of his pencil case and drew a line in the center of the desk. With each word carefully pronounced, he warned her, "From now on, don't talk to me during class, don't distract me. This line must not be crossed."
The preparatory bell rang.He stopped looking at her, opened his textbook to the first page, sat up straight, and stared ahead. His arms crossed on the desk.Although Jia Shu didn't talk to Zhou Yuanyuan, that didn't stop her from talking to herself.Most of the time, she was lost in her own thoughts, rarely speaking, but when sitting next to Jia Shu, she would chatter non-stop.Jia Shu hated this feeling, labeling it as the feeling of being "the same kind" as her.
On rainy days, during the break, Zhou Yuanyuan lay still on her side at her desk, watching the raindrops on the glass window.She muttered to herself, "The little raindrops crawl down slowly, like monsters, eating up their companions one bite at a time. The bigger they get, the faster they fall."The classroom was filled with laughter and noise, some chasing and playing, a chaotic mess, but her soft and slow voice could not be drowned out.
Jia Shu was buried in preparing for the lesson when he suddenly stretched out his hand and "slammed" the metal pencil case shut.
Zhou Yuanyuan paused for a moment, but then continued. She assigned different roles to the raindrops based on their shapes—crawling monsters, flying monsters, shape-shifting monsters. The tiny, still raindrops at the edge of the window were, in her mind, unhatched monster eggs.
Suddenly, the class bell rang, and she fell silent.
Jia Shu felt a sense of relief.
This class was math, and the teacher was explaining multiplication and division on the blackboard with chalk.
At first, Jia Shu's eyes were fixed on the blackboard, but gradually, his gaze began to wander. It felt like something was drawing his attention, little by little, until his eyes finally landed on the window to the left, covered with raindrops.
The teacher suddenly called out, "Zhao Jia Shu."
Jia Shu buried his head, his ears turning red. One hand gripped his pencil tightly, as though he wanted to snap it in half, his knuckles turning white.
He made up his mind: from now on, he would block out any influence from Zhou Yuanyuan.
But he had greatly underestimated her.
During class, sometimes Zhou Yuanyuan would treat sharpening her eraser as a fun activity. She would hide it in the drawer of her desk, first shaving it into slices, then cutting it into little cubes. As she sharpened it, she became completely absorbed, her mind seemingly drifting far away.
Her pencil was never used for homework, just as her mind was never on listening to the class. Her pencil was meant for scribbling all over her textbook. She could turn every illustration from the first page to the last into a complete mess.
When it came time to do her homework, especially math, she would stare blankly at her notebook, the pencil poking the paper, unable to solve a single problem. In the end, she would shift her focus to Jia Shu. For every problem he solved, she would glance at his work, not crossing the line, but tilting her head at an odd angle.
Jia Shu, disturbed and annoyed, eventually pressed his pencil case over his completed problems, cutting off her thoughts. But Zhou Yuanyuan started to sob quietly, and her crying drew the attention of the teacher.
The teacher glanced at her blank workbook, scolded her for not paying attention in class, and then, after a pause, turned to Jia Shu and said, "Jia Shu, teach her."
Jia Shu was reluctant, but since the teacher had given the order, he couldn't refuse. With a sigh, he patiently began explaining the problems to her. Zhou Yuanyuan sat still, listening intently, but her focus seemed to wander. It was as if she didn't fully grasp what he was saying, and her mind appeared lost in a fog, disconnected from the world around her.
A mist gradually formed in her eyes, but it wasn't from crying again. It was from trying to stifle a yawn.
Jia Shu, frustrated, handed her his workbook. "Forget it. You might as well just copy it."
Zhou Yuanyuan had watched TV shows and cartoons, losing herself completely in them. During self-study time, she even started drawing a sequel on the scratch paper.
Jia Shu rarely watches TV, not because his parents forbid him, but because he himself has little interest in it.His routine after school is fixed: after finishing his homework, he starts reviewing for the next day's lessons. Once that's done, he even brings textbooks from higher grades to study on his own. If he doesn't get a perfect score on a test, every lost point makes him anxious and he can't help but keep thinking about it.Sometimes, when his parents are watching TV in the other room, he hears the noise and his thoughts are involuntarily drawn to it, but he quickly manages to shake off the distraction and focus again.
He couldn't shake off Zhou Yuanyuan, though.While she was drawing, she also kept talking to Jia Shu, telling him what she was drawing.He really thought she was terribly boring, but while doing his homework, that rustling sound would always linger in his ears, and he couldn't help but get distracted and listen. However, when Zhou Yuanyuan finally proudly brought the pages she had drawn to him, showing him her work, he was extremely displeased. He waved it away impatiently, as if facing something contagious, "Take it away, take it away."
Zhou Yuanyuan's side of the desk was always covered with random pencil drawings every day. She would draw in the morning, and after school, she would erase everything with an eraser. The drawings were always different, and she did this every day.
Jia Shu was indifferent to it, but if he didn't sneak a glance at what she had drawn when she wasn't around, the day would feel incomplete. After seeing the drawings, he would deeply despise his own actions, but by the next day, he couldn't help but repeat the same behavior again.