Chapter 90 — Taking It Out on the Exam Papers
The Blossom Guardian · Page 1 of 2
"Uh..." Kang Xiaofeng finally pulled his head back in. "No idea whether Tang Zhi's back yet or not."
"You think you've got a chance with her?" Wei Zhao asked bluntly, watching the look on Kang Xiaofeng's face.
"No." Kang Xiaofeng was refreshingly self-aware; he shook his head with absolute certainty.
"No chance and you're still staring—wasting your time?" Wei Zhao smacked him on the back of the head. "Get back and hit the books. Fail the college entrance exam and see what happens to you."
"It's not that I was thinking I've got a chance—but what about you, Boss?" Kang Xiaofeng said with a bitter smile. "I was thinking, today you played the hero saving the damsel, so maybe Tang Zhi would treat you differently. Who'd have guessed... differently is right..."
Hm? Kang Xiaofeng's words set Wei Zhao thinking about something else entirely. Could Tang Zhi have thought he was playing the hero saving the beauty? Or that he'd staged the whole thing through Zou Ruoming? If so, she might have mistaken him for another Zou Ruoming, out to court her. If that were the case, that whole string of strange behavior from Tang Zhi suddenly made sense.
What a fiercely self-protective girl, Wei Zhao thought, a faint, barely-there smile flickering at the corner of his mouth. Still—she was interesting. If not for the mission he was on, he'd have liked nothing better than to throw himself wholeheartedly into campus life and savor the hazy, subtle little entanglements that passed between students their age.
"Let's go, class is about to start." Wei Zhao gave Kang Xiaofeng a reminder and quickened his pace; the warning bell for the evening lecture had already rung.
Kang Xiaofeng did not dare linger either, and followed Wei Zhao into the Year Three, Class Five classroom.
Gu Mengyao and Shen Yushu had long since returned; the two of them were sitting at their desks now, heads together, murmuring about something. Seeing Wei Zhao come in, Shen Yushu glanced up at him, then lowered her head again and went on talking with Gu Mengyao.
What surprised Wei Zhao somewhat was that Zhong Yongliang was not in the classroom. His two underlings, Gao Xiaofu and Zhang Naipao, were both present, but Zhong Yongliang's seat alone sat empty.
Before long, though, Kang Xiaofeng came back from asking around with the news: a police car had pulled up to the school a little while ago and taken Zhong Yongliang away.
That result made Wei Zhao pause. Was it because of Brother Black Panther? If Black Panther hadn't held out and had named Zhong Yongliang, then the kid had simply been unlucky.
The evening tutoring session was another test. For the first hour everyone worked through a set of exam papers; after they handed them in, the study committee member took the stack, flipped them over to shuffle them, and passed them out at random. Then, while the teacher explained the questions, everyone graded each other's papers below, and at the end the scores were tallied up.
This way the teacher's grading time was saved. In senior year, when there were tests almost every single day, this method suited the tense, fast-paced life well enough.
What Wei Zhao hadn't expected, though, was that the study committee member was none other than Shen Yushu. So the girl was a class officer after all—he'd never noticed before. When the test ended, Shen Yushu took the stack of papers and began handing them out. When she reached Wei Zhao's side, she didn't so much as look at him; with a perfectly proper air she dropped a paper in front of him and moved on to the next person.
Only as she turned away did Shen Yushu sneak in a couple of sly little smirks—though she wiped them off her face quickly enough.
"Gu Mengyao?" Wei Zhao looked at the name on the paper and was momentarily speechless. How could there be a coincidence like this? He could now be one hundred percent certain that Shen Yushu had done it on purpose.