Lovely Allergen

Chapter 44: A Winding Echo

The sounds in the train were very noisy. Yue Zhishi stared at the messages on his phone screen, his face calm. His heart was beating very quickly.

He locked his screen and looked up at the train's route and upcoming stops. He couldn't help but turn on his phone once again — he read through Song Yu's messages once more, and then he took a screenshot, as if this way he wouldn't lose the words Song Yu had sent him.

His hand pulling on the strap handle, Yue Zhishi gazed at his reflection in the train's glass windows and had a hallucination: the person in the window looked exactly like him, but that person was wearing Peiya's student uniform.

And so he remembered the day Song Yu took Lin Rong's place and came to his parent-teacher meeting.

It was last year's October 10th, Yue Zhishi's birthday. No one would be happy at having a parent-teacher meeting during their birthday. It was very cold that day, the temperature having dropped in the morning. Yue Zhishi was originally wearing his thin sports uniform when Lin Rong called him back and ordered him to change into his knitted vest and winter coat uniform.

Thinking about it later, Yue Zhishi was very grateful to Lin Rong for forcing him to wear his proper uniform. He later received Lin Rong's messages during lunch, saying she needed to attend a very important party with Song Jin and that Song Yu was going to the parent-teacher meeting in her place. She even said they'll make up for his birthday over the weekend.

His lunch of scrambled eggs with carrots and Sichuan shredded pork with carrots substituting the usual bamboo shoots was actually really hard to eat, but Yue Zhishi was remarkably happy, so excited he didn't take a nap during his afternoon break. He rushed to clean and organise his entire desk, and when his desk mate came back later, she jumped in shock at his desk, as shiny as new.

"How'd you do this?"

Yue Zhishi finished scrubbing his desk with wipes for the third time, and after he threw them away, he patted his own hands. "With nothing but my hands."

He sat behind this bright and clean desk for the next three lessons, and he fastidiously tidied away all the materials he used after each single lesson, making sure to even go through his drawers. It was finally time for the parent-teacher meeting. Most students hated these kinds of meetings — if they were lucky, they would be invisible during the entire meeting. But for those who weren't that lucky, they were sending their parents to their own public execution.

It was the first time Yue Zhishi looked forward to the meeting so much.

The weather was worse compared to the morning, the sky completely covered in stormy clouds. Yue Zhishi started to worry if it was going to start raining, if Song Yu had brought an umbrella. Their class adviser came in early and pulled up her prepared PowerPoint on the presentation screen, telling the students to later wait outside in the corridor.

The first parent to arrive for their class was the mother of a female student. She was dressed very plainly and appeared in the classroom door looking a bit lost. Yue Zhishi watched as his classmate led her mother to her seat, and then he couldn't help but go outside. He crouched near the corridor railings for a while before he went to wait at the top of the stairs.

"Le Le, is your mom or your dad coming?" Another male student was standing at the stairs, and he bumped Yue Zhishi with his shoulder.

"They're both busy. My ge's coming."

"You have a brother? That's great."

A female classmate also walked over. "You didn't know? Ah, that's right — you weren't here for junior high. His brother used to be our senior in high school, he's handsome and had good grades."