Chapter 6: What's on Su Xiaoqing's Mind

Time flew.

Before I knew it, it was Friday of the second week of school.

I, Fang Luo, reborn as a third-grader, had grown more accepting of my identity. I was now a mature elementary schooler.

The proof was my newfound initiative. When I got home from school, the first thing I did was walk over to the yellowing calendar in the living room and take a look. Very disciplined of me.

Mid-September.

There were only about two weeks left until the first monthly exam of third grade.

My parents had circled the date heavily in red ballpoint pen. They cared a lot about my studies too.

At this age in my previous life, my head had been full of either Knights of Valour at the arcade or how many Water Margin cards I’d collected from crunchy noodle packets. Who would have thought that my first serious test and survival objective after rebirth would actually be to treat an elementary school monthly exam as my top priority?

I had no choice. The system mission was waiting there, with new modules promised afterward.

First, I’d better check what the exam covered.

I returned to the study, spread out the textbooks for the three main subjects, and worked through the scope.

The first monthly exam in third grade covered essentially the first two units.

In Chinese, those units focused on descriptions of scenery and narratives. The key texts were “Our Primary School for Ethnic Groups,” “The Golden Meadow,” and “The Feet of the Virginia Creeper.”

The questions would be things like writing words from pinyin, distinguishing similar-looking characters such as the ones for “petal” and “braid,” making words with characters that had multiple pronunciations, and writing out the beautiful passages we were supposed to memorize.

Last came a narrative of about three hundred Chinese characters.

For the composition, I’d write about my mother holding me when I caught a cold on a rainy night. I could show off my writing, but I was better off keeping a low profile.

As for math, we were up to conversions involving millimeters, decimeters, kilometers, and metric tons, plus multiplication and division of three-digit numbers.

The hard part was mixed calculations involving units and word problems requiring you to work backward.

Naturally, none of that was a problem for me.

English was still in its infancy. The first two units covered greetings like “Hello, I’m Mike,” stationery words like pen, pencil, ruler, and eraser, and basic colors. The exam would mostly involve picking the word that didn’t belong and answering simple listening questions.

Once I’d sorted it all out, the pressure I hadn’t really felt in the first place grew even lighter.

Third-grade Chinese characters, vocabulary, and idioms came easily to me, apart from a few passages I’d need to memorize.

As for English, I’d barely passed the CET-4 and CET-6, and my vocabulary included what I’d picked up from the occasional foreign-language email at work. Among kids who’d only just learned to pronounce B as “bee,” I had an overwhelming advantage.

Still, to stay within the abilities of an ordinary nine-year-old, I should probably look through the textbook. I didn’t want to throw a string of business English phrases into the monthly exam composition and give the English teacher a heart attack.

Math? That was like a pro playing against beginners.

My revision plan was extremely simple. To avoid looking like I wasn’t trying, I’d spend some time each day completing the unit review tests in the accompanying exercise books and the exercises after each lesson.

Once that was done, I’d be finished.

Proper revision? There was no need at all.

This was only third grade.

As I finished thinking it through, the doorbell rang urgently, ding-dong, ding-dong.

“Fang Luo, a classmate’s here for you! Go answer the door!” Mom called from the kitchen, where she was chopping ribs.

I put down my pencil and opened the security door.

A lean figure stood outside.

Su Xiaoqing wore her blue-and-white short-sleeved uniform and uniform shorts, showing her slim, sun-browned legs. She clutched a dog-eared *Math Champion* exercise book. Fine beads of sweat covered her forehead, and her bangs were damp.

“Fang Luo… Help!”

The moment she saw me, her little face crumpled as though she’d finally found a lifeline. “Dad says if Teacher Liu calls him in again tomorrow, he’ll cut up my basketball! If I fail math on the monthly exam, I won’t get to touch a ball for the rest of the semester. Please, teach me how to do these decimeter and millimeter problems!”

Me: “…”

Allow me to introduce Su Xiaoqing: my neighbor in the same building, the girl who’d robbed me of my lollipop the first time we met, and an athletic tomboy by the look of her.

Seeing how frantic she was, my first instinct was to close the door and send her away.

In my previous life, helping elementary schoolers with homework had ranked first among the top ten activities likely to give you a heart attack.

“But you promised me before…!” Su Xiaoqing pounded on the door. “Open up!”

All right, I had promised.

For the past two weeks, she’d been doing my homework. Every day after school, she’d take the Chinese character copying and word-tracing I’d tossed her and finish it on time using her unorthodox method of tying two pencils together side by side. Her wild scrawl looked like oracle-bone script, but it had passed Old Wang’s spot checks and let me slack off in peace for half a month.

When someone pays you, you do the job.

Sigh. Sigh, sigh. A deal was a deal.

“Come in. The slippers are over there.” I opened the door and stepped aside.

As if granted a reprieve, Su Xiaoqing kicked off her Warrior sneakers and scampered in barefoot across the floor.

“Change your shoes!”

“Oh, right.”

At my direction, she followed me inside.

When she entered my bedroom, she looked around at the neat desk, the smoothly folded bedding, and the shelves lined with classics and picture books. She couldn’t help exclaiming in genuine amazement, “Whoa… Fang Luo, why is your room so clean? It’s tidier than our living room! My dad piles oil cans and car parts everywhere at home. The whole place smells!”

She pulled up the round stool beside the desk as though she owned the place, sat down, and slapped her rumpled exercise book on the table.

I pulled up a chair beside her and flipped through it. My head began to ache.

Three whole pages of unit review problems, more than half blank. The answers she’d written on the rest had almost nothing to do with the questions.

But I’d agreed to this difficult job myself.

Time to start helping her study.

—Teaching mode—

…

“Here, look at this one.”

I pointed at the first problem with my pencil. “A piece of timber is two meters long. Eight decimeters are sawn off. How many decimeters remain? What’s the first step?”

Su Xiaoqing leaned closer and stared at it wide-eyed for a long time without speaking.

“I don’t know.”

Great. She hadn’t unlocked her brain yet.

I began patiently teaching her.

As I did, I noticed she had no sense of caution at all about the difference between boys and girls.

She was almost sprawled across the desk, her elbow pressed against my arm. With our light summer clothes, her cool skin brushed mine several times.

Instead of the powdery scent common to little girls, she smelled faintly of sweat and sun-warmed grass and plants. Like a restless little animal, she seemed ready to press her eyes right up against the page.

Her unguarded closeness made me uncomfortable. I quietly edged half a seat away and cleared my throat, keeping a serious expression.

“Still can’t work it out?

“Another hint: first, put everything in the same unit.

“How many decimeters are in one meter?”

Su Xiaoqing tilted her head, chewed on her pencil, and thought hard for a full ten seconds before looking at me tentatively.

“…A hundred?”

I drew a sharp breath, thinking her math teacher could rest in peace.

“One meter is a hundred centimeters, and ten centimeters make one decimeter. So one meter is ten decimeters!”

“Oh, oh! Right, ten decimeters!” Su Xiaoqing nodded in sudden understanding and wrote a ten on the paper.

“Then how many decimeters are in two meters?”

“Twenty!”

“And if you saw off eight decimeters, how many are left?”

Su Xiaoqing held out her fingers and muttered to herself as she counted. After a while, she looked up excitedly. “Twelve!”

“Right. See? Isn’t that easy?” I breathed a sigh of relief.

“But… what about the unit? Do I write centimeters or decimeters?” She scratched her head.

“The question asks how many decimeters are left. If you write centimeters, are you trying to give the carpenter a scare?” I folded my arms and shook my head.

For the next half hour, the pressure of studying seemed to fill my room.

I hadn’t imagined Su Xiaoqing could be this unbelievably bad at it.

In a brain full of dribbling feints, changes of direction, and pull-up jump shots, abstract mathematical logic seemed to hit a wall. By the third word problem involving subtraction with borrowing, she’d reversed the numbers and calculated that the orchard had negative three apple trees after they were picked.

Ha. Negative three trees.

She could sit next to that grandma who ran 180 kilometers an hour.

“Aaaaah, this is so annoying!”

Su Xiaoqing suddenly slammed her pencil on the desk and buried her face in her arms. The tips of her ears turned red, and her voice took on the tearful frustration of a little girl at the end of her patience.

“Why do I have to learn math anyway? Can’t you just use your fingers to work out the bill when you buy vegetables? If you’re driving long-distance, you only need to read road signs! I’m not going to run a bank. Why does Teacher Liu give me these problems to torture me every day?”

Looking at her bristling with frustration, I put down my red pen, leaned back, and tapped the desk like a proper elder.

“Don’t bury your face in the desk like an ostrich.”

I gave her a level look. “Who told you using your fingers was enough to shop? If someone overcharges you ten yuan for a basketball one day, you won’t even be able to figure it out.

“And throwing a tantrum whenever you run into a little difficulty is what a coward does.

“I’ve been explaining things until my mouth is dry, and I haven’t lost my temper. But you’re already acting up?”

Su Xiaoqing’s back stiffened slightly.

She slowly lifted her head. There was still a hurt shine in her eyes, but the wild defiance in them gradually subsided.

“…Hmph. Nerd,” she muttered.

?

Seriously? This little demon really didn’t listen.

Just then, Mom’s quick footsteps sounded in the living room, and the rich aroma of pork-rib soup slipped through the crack in the door.

The door opened.

Mom poked her head in and smiled at us. “Fang Luo, Xiaoqing, don’t study too late. Dinner’s ready! And Xiaoqing, don’t go home tonight. I made lotus-root and pork-rib soup. Stay and eat with Fang Luo!”

Ordinarily, the fearless Su Xiaoqing who swaggered up and asked me for a lollipop at school would have jumped at the invitation.

Instead, the moment Mom asked her to stay, the willfulness vanished from her face. She looked visibly at a loss.

She sprang up from the stool, fumbled for her bag and exercise book, and shook her head repeatedly. “N-no, thank you, Auntie! I’ll… I’ll eat at home. My dad might be back soon, so I’d better go!”

Grrrrowl.

An almost cartoonish rumble of hunger sounded in the bedroom at exactly the wrong moment.

Su Xiaoqing froze with her hands on her bag. Color flooded her cheeks and spread all the way down her neck.

Mom was amused, and I could barely keep a straight face myself.

She came forward, gently took Xiaoqing’s hand, and drew her out without accepting an argument. “Oh, sweetheart, no need to be polite! Come on, wash your hands. The ribs are wonderfully tender today.”

In the end, Mom’s warm insistence won out, and Su Xiaoqing sat down at our table.

The meal, however, was unusually quiet.

The wild girl who usually behaved like a mischievous monkey sat with her legs together, holding her rice bowl in both hands.

More surprising still, with her usual appetite, two bowls wouldn’t have been enough. Today she finished one small bowl of rice, set her chopsticks neatly across the rim, and said softly, “Auntie, I’m full.”

“Only that much?”

“R-really, it’s enough!”

“…”

…

After dinner, Mom cleared the dishes. Su Xiaoqing quietly put on her schoolbag and headed for the door, ready to say goodbye.

“Su Xiaoqing.”

I stopped her in the entryway.

She paused, avoiding my eyes. Clearly, something heavy was on her mind.

I leaned against the shoe cabinet and looked at her. “There are still two pages of math you don’t understand, and you’re leaving already? Didn’t you just say you’d be in trouble if you didn’t do well?”

Su Xiaoqing bit her lower lip and scuffed a toe against the floor tiles, twisting it back and forth. After struggling with herself for a long moment, she silently slipped the bag from her shoulder.

She followed me back to my bedroom, and we closed the door.

Outside, darkness had fully fallen, and streetlights came on one by one.

After our earlier work, the tutoring went much more smoothly. Su Xiaoqing seemed to set aside all her restlessness and irritation. Even when she couldn’t understand a multiplication or division problem with carrying, she simply bit her lip and listened as I broke down the logic, nodding now and then as if she partly understood.

The hands of the clock quietly reached eight thirty.

I closed the exercise book, now full of notes, dropped my pencil into its holder, and turned to her with a small sigh.

My conscience was clear now.

But there was something I wanted to ask.

“Were you really full at dinner?

“Mom probably made extra rice, so you didn’t need to worry… Being so polite isn’t like you.”

Su Xiaoqing’s hand stopped as she packed her stationery.

The soft white light of the desk lamp fell across her stubborn profile, her long eyelashes casting shadows beneath her eyes.

She was silent for so long that I thought she wasn’t going to answer and was about to turn away. Then she spoke in a subdued voice, almost too quiet to hear.

“When I first started first grade… Dad was often away driving at night too.”

Her fingers picked at a loose thread on her schoolbag strap, and her voice carried a precocious self-consciousness.

“I didn’t know any better then. Grandma Wang downstairs invited me to dinner at her house, and I went happily and ate a whole lot. Later… one time I was skipping rope in the courtyard, and I heard a lady from Grandma Wang’s family chatting with someone. She called me ‘a wild girl who eats at everybody else’s house,’ said I was always going around mooching food, that my dad didn’t care about me and I had no upbringing.”

She sniffed. Her eyes reddened, but she held back the tears, though her voice caught.

“Th-that night Dad came home and found out. He bought a lot of things and took them to Grandma Wang’s.

“He didn’t scold me, but I saw him squatting outside smoking, and I knew I’d embarrassed him. Later he told me not to eat at other people’s houses. I know he didn’t want them gossiping. He leaves me money at night too. I… I really don’t want to talk to you about it anymore. Go away.”

Perhaps because her tears were about to fall, she suddenly turned her face away and pushed me with her right hand.

The room was so quiet that all I could hear was the clock.

A truck-driver father who spent his life risking himself on the road, and a little girl who’d heard the neighbors gossip about her far too young.

That was probably what had been weighing on Su Xiaoqing.

I looked at her vulnerable expression and sighed inwardly.

The adult world was full of exchanges of interest. Sometimes you lost face, but if there was something to gain, it didn’t matter much.

Children’s pride was different. They could be stubborn about the strangest things, and their pride was often more fragile than a soap bubble.

“What? That’s all?”

I tried to sound unconcerned. “I thought you didn’t like Mom’s cooking.”

At a time like this, I needed to find another way to protect her pride.

“You’re overthinking it. You’re welcome to eat at my house. It just shows we’re good friends. Why would anyone gossip about that?

“Besides, you’ve copied my homework for half a month. This is payment for your work, understand? You earned it. It’s only right.”

Su Xiaoqing looked up at me, stunned.

The lamplight fell into her eyes, seeming to clear away the shadow there. I didn’t know what she was thinking, but thankfully she gave me a bright, slightly silly smile.

She sniffed hard. “Fang Luo, you’re really nice.”

“Huh?”

“Then I really should eat more… Wait, what does ‘earned it’ mean?”

“It means you deserve something in return for what you did…”

“Never mind!”

Su Xiaoqing suddenly swung her bag onto her back and stood, looking straight into my eyes with great seriousness. “Let’s be good friends for our whole lives!” she said excitedly.

“…” Now I really wanted to say, Huh?

I couldn’t quite follow her train of thought.

Our whole lives?

Kids made promises so easily. They were worth even less than the stock options my old boss had dangled in front of me.

A whole life was a long, weighty thing.

Still, living upstairs and downstairs from each other, we might count as childhood friends in a way. Sigh, sigh, sigh. Who’d have thought being reborn would let me use that phrase too?

Suddenly, she punched my shoulder.

“Yay!” I had no idea what she was celebrating.

“Stop fooling around.” I waved helplessly and pushed her toward the door. “Go home and memorize the remaining formulas twice. Study hard, and you can do well.”

At the door, Su Xiaoqing changed her shoes and made a face at me. “Hmph. So heartless!

“Oh, Fang Luo, there’s no school tomorrow. I’ll knock at nine in the morning, and we can go play basketball!”

I rejected her coldly. “I’m staying home to read, sleep, and enjoy my weekend.”

“No way! I don’t care!”

With that, as though her visit the next morning were settled, she dashed up the stairs to the fourth floor. A security door slammed in the stairwell.

As it turned out, I’d seriously underestimated the determination of these overenergetic children.

At eight fifty on Saturday morning, while my family was still eating breakfast—

Knock, knock, knock! Knock, knock, knock!

“Fang Luo! Open the door! Come play ball!”

I opened it with a dark expression.

Outside stood Su Xiaoqing in sports clothes, holding a basketball. Beside her was Zhang Wei, drenched in sweat and clutching two fried dough sticks and a bag of soy milk!

“Luo! Xiaoqing said you’re taking us to play half-court today!” Zhang Wei chewed his dough stick, eyes shining.

Oh, come on.

Before I could refuse, Mom came out of the kitchen with freshly boiled eggs. Her face lit up at the sight of the two of them.

“Oh, Xiaowei and Xiaoqing are here! Fang Luo, hurry and change! A boy shouldn’t spend the whole weekend moping indoors. Get some sun, run around, and grow taller!”

“Mom…” My own mother.

“Don’t ‘Mom’ me! You have three minutes to get dressed and put your shoes on. Don’t spoil your classmates’ fun!”

She issued the supreme command, slipped me two yuan for water, and pushed me out the door, shoes and all. Dad, who’d come home too late to join dinner the night before, watched the scene that morning and shook his head with a smile.

Soon afterward, September sunlight spilled over the outdoor concrete basketball court.

Cicadas screamed themselves hoarse in the treetops. The concrete was warm under the sun, and a red rubber basketball rose and fell, striking it with solid thumps.

“Fang Luo! Catch! Defense! Zhang Wei, you stupid fatty, get out of my way!”

Su Xiaoqing tore back and forth across the court like the wind, changing direction and driving forward, her lean legs full of explosive energy. When her layup went in, her excited cheer nearly shook the leaves from the treetops.

Zhang Wei panted after her, his flesh wobbling. Unable to get the ball, he shouted in frustration.

I stood in the shade beneath the basket, sweat dripping from my young chin, listening to the children’s uninhibited shrieks and laughter.

My heart pounded from the exercise, and my lungs filled with grass-scented air.

All right.

I wiped the hot sweat from my forehead, caught Su Xiaoqing’s pass, and sprang up.

I’ll play with you just this Saturday.

“Whoa, Fang Luo, nice shot! Let’s play basketball together for our whole lives!!”

“Whoa! Even my older cousin can’t shoot like that!”

“…Do these kids ever stop?”

“Fang Luo, you’re secretly smiling! Come on, high five! Yay ☆! Yay, yay, yay!”