The yearning suppressed in his heart for over a decade made it hard for Xu Lai to conceal his churning emotions. He sat at his desk, leaning back slightly as he quietly watched the girl sharing his desk, soon falling into such a deep trance that he didn't catch a single word of Fan Wenyi's lecture.
When class ended, Fan Wenyi walked up to Xu Lai's side. "Student Xu, Student Xu..."
After Fan Wenyi called his name several times, Xu Lai finally snapped back from his thoughts. "What is it, Teacher Fan?"
"The principal asked you to go see him in his office after class," Fan Wenyi replied.
"Alright, I understand." Xu Lai gave a faint reply. He glanced at Lin Ruoruo, who still had her head down taking notes, figuring he would talk to her after coming back from the principal's office, and then stood up to leave the classroom.
After Xu Lai left, Lin Ruoruo raised her head slightly to watch his retreating figure vanish from the classroom. A storm of thoughts raged in her mind. She pinched her own cheek, let out a sharp "ow," and then murmured under her breath, "This isn't a dream."
Immediately after, a series of dream-like yet vivid scenes flashed repeatedly through her mind, because this person—whose adult appearance she had never seen before—looked exactly like the boy in her dreams.
Lin Ruoruo's expression was complicated to the extreme; she didn't know whether she should be happy or dismayed.
Lost in these thoughts, she abruptly stood up and dashed out of the classroom.
By the time Xu Lai returned from the principal's office, Lin Ruoruo's seat was already empty. Staring at the vacant chair, Xu Lai couldn't help sinking into a string of fragmented memories.
"Ruoruo, how have you been all these years?"
"I met you again. All the hardships were probably just so I could meet you one more time." Lin Ruoruo answered the question with a non-sequitur.
"Can you tell me all about it?"
Snapping back to reality, the corners of Xu Lai's eyes turned slightly red. "Ruoruo, what on earth have you been through these past ten years?"
Having bolted out of her classroom, Lin Ruoruo had impulsively asked their homeroom teacher, Fan Wenyi, for leave. Seeing that Lin Ruoruo—who had never asked for leave in her two years of high school—was now asking for time off while in such low spirits, Fan Wenyi offered a few words of comfort and immediately approved her request.
"Lin Ruoruo, if something is bothering you, you can talk to your teacher. The teacher can help you."
"Thank you, teacher." Instead of answering, Lin Ruoruo simply offered her thanks and left the school grounds without even returning to the classroom to pick up her school bag.
Once outside the school gates, Lin Ruoruo didn't take the main road, but instead turned into a narrow alleyway on the right side of the entrance. As she walked further in, the alley grew narrower and narrower. At that very moment, the brightly lit sky dimmed as the tall buildings on both sides blocked out the only remaining sliver of light, plunging the entire path into darkness. As she walked, Lin Ruoruo's spirits sank lower and lower, until tears finally began to stream down her face before she even realized it.
After threading through the narrow alley for twenty minutes, Lin Ruoruo arrived in front of a dilapidated building with the character for "Demolition" painted in large strokes across its walls. She reached out, intending to pull open the rusted iron gate and go inside, but seemed to suddenly remember something and stopped, ultimately letting go of the gate.
"If I go back now, it'll only worry Mom."
At this thought, Lin Ruoruo's hand—which had been about to pull open the iron gate—trembled. She took two steps back and turned around to leave.
"Ruoruo," a frail voice drifted out from the stairwell.
It was a severely emaciated middle-aged woman with pale lips and almost no color in her face who had called out to her. The woman was wearing a home outfit that had turned whitish from countless washings, and she looked at Lin Ruoruo with utter bewilderment at seeing her here.
Lin Ruoruo bit her lower lip, turned around, and walked back to pull open the rusted iron gate.
"Mom, why did you come out? Didn't I tell you to rest properly at home?"
Lin Ruoruo hurried to her mother's side, supporting her as she prepared to help her back inside.
"I thought I'd come out and move around a bit. Staying cooped up inside all day drives me crazy." Then, the woman asked, "Ruoruo, why are you back? Why aren't you in class?"
"Mom, I wasn't feeling well, so I asked the teacher for leave. I wanted to come back and rest for a bit." Lin Ruoruo had never lied before; this was her very first time. She didn't dare tell her mother the real reason she had asked for leave.
"Ruoruo, where do you feel unwell?... Just stay right here and wait for me a second."
With that, Lin Ruoruo watched as her mother—who struggled just to walk—hurriedly retreated back to their apartment on the second floor. A moment later, she emerged again in a rush, tightly clutching two hundred crumpled yuan bills in her hand.
"Come on, Ruoruo, let's go have Uncle Liu take a look at his clinic." As she spoke, she reached out to pull Lin Ruoruo along.
Seeing her mother worry over her like this, Lin Ruoruo's eyes flushed red. She pulled her hand free from her mother's grasp and instead threw her arms around her from behind.
"Mom, I'm not sick. It's... it's..."
Lin Ruoruo choked back her sobs, desperate to blurt out what had happened today, yet forever lacking the courage to say it out loud.
"Child, Ruoruo, what's wrong? Tell Mom."
Liu Sufang turned around and pulled her daughter into her arms.
"I ran into him."
Hearing Lin Ruoruo's answer, Liu Sufang was stunned for a moment before asking, "Who?"
Lin Ruoruo simply held her mother tight without answering.
Looking at her daughter's state, Liu Sufang fell into deep thought. She remembered when Lin Ruoruo was a freshman in high school: because the junior high school Lin Ruoruo had attended was quite far from Jiangcheng No. 1 High School, and Liu Sufang's health was poor, Lin Ruoruo had chosen to bring her mother along to rent a place near Jiangcheng No. 1 High School after earning a tuition waiver with her outstanding grades. Lacking money, they had ultimately ended up renting a room in this old, rundown building.
On the day they moved, Liu Sufang had been helping Lin Ruoruo unpack her books and accidentally caught a glimpse of her daughter's diary.
Most of Lin Ruoruo's diary entries were dedicated to her studies, but they were frequently interspersed with entries that read like letters.
They seemed to be letters written to someone. The letters were unsigned, but every single one of them was meant to share the details of her daily life with that person.
Liu Sufang had also noticed that whenever Lin Ruoruo wrote these letter-like entries, she only ever recorded happy things.
"Ruoruo, is it the person from your diary?"
Hearing Liu Sufang's question, Lin Ruoruo was startled at first, but the next second, tears broke like a shattered dam and she nodded heavily.
"Mom."
After crying out that single word, she couldn't utter another syllable. Her entire body shook with sobs, as if she wanted to release all the grievances and hardships of these past years through this one bout of crying.
Yet she had momentarily forgotten that her mother was a sick woman herself; seeing her cry so bitterly would only break her mother's heart even more.
Watching her sobbing daughter, Liu Sufang felt a sharp ache in her chest. Lin Ruoruo sensed the shift in her mother's body and immediately let go, changing her posture from throwing herself against her mother to gently supporting her. Her tears gradually slowed down.
She couldn't cry—at least, not in front of her mother.
All her sorrow stemmed from the return of the once-only good friend she had ever had, yet her own life was an absolute mess. She didn't want him stepping back into her life, nor did she want him to see her in such a wretched state.
Right then, Lin Ruoruo made a resolute decision in her heart.
In truth, all of this had been witnessed by Xu Lai, who had silently followed behind her.
When he returned to the classroom and found Lin Ruoruo missing, he had asked the classmate sitting in front of her, but since Lin Ruoruo was practically invisible to everyone, none of her classmates had paid attention.
Just as he was panicking, he happened to run into their homeroom teacher, Fan Wenyi.
"Student Xu, what's wrong?"
"Um, have you seen Lin Ruoruo?" Xu Lai rubbed his nose, instantly smoothing away his panicked expression.
"Lin Ruoruo? She just came and asked for leave, saying she wasn't feeling well and was going home."
Before Fan Wenyi had even finished speaking, he felt a curt "Thanks" drift back to him from afar. When he turned around, Xu Lai had already bounded down several flights of stairs and vanished from sight.
"Could this be the reason he came here in the first place?" Fan Wenyi muttered to himself in confusion.
But upon second thought, how could this big shot possibly have known a Cinderella beforehand? He shook his head and pushed the thought out of his mind.
Xu Lai sprinted downstairs, bolting toward the school gate at a hundred-meter dash speed. Finally, just as he neared the entrance, he spotted Lin Ruoruo slipping into a narrow alley. He immediately followed after her, leading directly to the moment he overheard every single word of the conversation between Lin Ruoruo and Liu Sufang.