Chapter 4: Just Like a Dream

Jiang Ciqiu walked into the classroom that morning with her head full of that mysterious black cat. Plus, all her attention had gone into planning how to snap back at that teacher, so she hadn’t even noticed where Lin Xia had been assigned to sit.

Only now, standing beside her own seat, the one that had always been in the back corner of the classroom, and looking at the extra person who had suddenly appeared next to her, did she finally catch on.

“Um, you’re sitting here?”

Unlike the other students’ desks, which were stacked with tall walls of books, everyone practically trying to hide their whole face behind them, Lin Xia’s desk was cluttered with a messy pile of test papers.

Some were blank. Some had handwriting and grading marks on them.

Probably because the seat had been empty for so long, everyone around had gradually come to treat it as a place to dump their stuff.

“Yeah. I’ll just tidy it up a bit. This happened to be the only empty seat near you.”

The boy raised his head slightly and smiled at her, then reached out and made an exaggerated gesture in the air, showing a height.

“Don’t judge it by how it looks now. When I first came into the classroom, the stuff on this desk was piled even higher. It almost reached my chin.”

“Oh, oh.”

Jiang Ciqiu nodded stiffly, pulled out her chair, and sat down.

It wasn’t that she was unaccustomed to having a deskmate.

As a seasoned office worker who had been through the grind for over a decade, she was long used to sitting at long tables with no partition at all.

Even if the colleague next to her was on the phone arguing heatedly with a client, she could keep typing her code without changing her expression.

After all, a private office was a privilege reserved for bosses and upper management. Ordinary working stiffs had nothing like that.

But sitting next to Lin Xia as deskmates was different.

While her mind was still wandering, the two boys in front turned around and, laughing and chatting, started moving things back off Lin Xia’s desk.

“Sorry, Lin Xia. You took such a long sick leave and never came back, so I really had nowhere else to put these. I just left some papers on your desk.”

“Me too, me too! Really sorry about it. Here, have this lollipop. Think of it as compensation for using your desk.”

Lin Xia took the candy and said in a good-natured tone that it was no problem. He even accurately called out the names of the two boys: “It’s all right, Zhang Yucheng, Wu Yue. I just got out of the hospital, so I might not be able to keep up with the lessons. I might have to ask you guys a few questions later.”

Zhang Yucheng immediately pounded his chest and promised it would be absolutely no problem. Beside him, Wu Yue widened his eyes in surprise behind his glasses: “You only showed your face on the first day of school before taking leave. You’ve been gone this long, and you still remember our names?”

Lin Xia smiled but didn’t answer.

Thanks to the changes in his body, his perception and memory were far sharper than an ordinary person’s now.

And it was precisely because of that keen perception that he could sense that the close friend sitting beside him seemed different from before.

The pauses in her movements, the shifts in her micro-expressions, even the sort of indescribable aura about her, all felt different from the girl in his memories. The one who was always tense, who would still smile and encourage him even when she herself was exhausted.

But for now, Lin Xia couldn’t quite put his finger on what had changed.

“Congrats, Sister Jiang. You’re finally the last one in our class to escape the single-seat club.”

After cleaning up the desk, Zhang Yucheng in front suddenly turned the conversation toward Jiang Ciqiu. He winked eagerly as he probed for gossip: “Speaking of which, Lin Xia, what exactly is your relationship with Sister Jiang? I saw her going to the hospital to bring you notes all the time. You two aren’t…”

He deliberately dragged out the last syllable and flashed a “you know what I mean” grin.

“No, no. Don’t make wild guesses. We’re just good friends.”

Lin Xia smiled wryly and waved his hand, quickly clearing things up. At the same time, he unobtrusively watched Jiang Ciqiu’s expression from the corner of his eye.

An ordinary girl might get shy when teased like that. But based on past experience, if it were A Qiu, she would most likely get angry.

However, contrary to his expectations, the girl sitting beside him didn’t get angry at all. Instead, she stared straight back at him.

“What, what is it?” Being stared at so openly made Lin Xia feel uneasy first.

“Nothing.” Jiang Ciqiu propped her cheek with one hand, a trace of vague nostalgia in her voice. “I just think it’s been a long time since I’ve seen you in a school uniform.”

“Ooooh.”

As soon as she said that, the two boys in front immediately burst into even more exaggerated jeers.

Amid the classmates’ laughter, a slight blush appeared on Lin Xia’s fair face too.

“It hasn’t been that long, has it?” He tugged at his collar awkwardly and looked away. “Seven months ago, I wore it at the opening ceremony, didn’t I?”

Jiang Ciqiu thought to herself: Seven months, not even close. I haven’t seen this face of yours for over ten years.

“Is seven months not long? High school goes by fast. A few months, a couple of years, they pass in the blink of…”

Halfway through her words, she suddenly noticed that the two boys in front were looking at her with the same strange, otherworldly stare, like they were watching an alien.

The girl paused, then realized what was going on.

For miserable high school students who woke up at six in the morning, went to bed at midnight, and felt like they were serving a prison sentence every single day, a comment from a working adult did sound a bit detached from reality.

“Ah, I mean, seven months without wearing a school uniform, you must have missed a lot. Be careful not to be lost in class later.”

Tsk. The more she tried to explain, the worse it got. That sounded preachy no matter how she put it.

Jiang Ciqiu clicked her tongue in annoyance.

Lin Xia saw her furrowed brows and let out a light laugh instead. “Don’t worry. With you coming to the hospital to tutor me every week before, I think I can still understand at least most of it.”

Hearing the phrase “going to the hospital to tutor every week,” which left plenty of room for imagination, the gossipy Zhang Yucheng in front lit up.

But just as he was about to continue digging into their relationship, the class bell rang at an inopportune moment.

“OK, class begins.”

As the English teacher stepped onto the platform and spoke, the whole class stood up neatly when the English class representative Ilya said, “Stand up.”

Jiang Ciqiu was half a beat slower, as if she only realized she was supposed to stand when she saw everyone else doing it, and she rose unhurriedly.

“Did you not rest well? You seem sleepy and low on energy today.” During the interval of standing and bowing, Lin Xia tilted his head slightly and asked in a low voice.

“Yeah, I stayed up late last night.”

That wasn’t exactly a lie. The night before she traveled back in time, she really had sat at her workstation and worked through the night revising code.

“Why are you still staying up late?” A note of disapproving blame crept into Lin Xia’s lowered voice. “Last time at the hospital, I clearly told you to take care of yourself.”

“Relax, relax.” Jiang Ciqiu waved her hand dismissively. “As long as I don’t stay up fourteen days straight, it won’t kill me.”

To her, the biggest problem right now obviously wasn’t whether this young body could handle staying up late. It was that she couldn’t understand the English test paper that had just been passed down from the front row.

The handwriting in the answers was definitely her own from when she was sixteen. No mistake about that.

But what did all those dense, tiny English letters mean when put together?

The girl’s mouth twitched. She rubbed her brow in pain.

After entering the workforce, whenever she came across foreign language material, she just threw it into AI translation. Her English reading ability had long since degraded, let alone being able to understand the subjunctive mood that the teacher was currently scribbling furiously on the blackboard.

Listening to the endless stream of explanation from the middle-aged woman at the podium, Lin Xia looked up at the blackboard for a while and found that he really could keep up. That put his mind at ease somewhat.

Then he turned his head and looked at Jiang Ciqiu, who was frowning miserably at the test paper, and suddenly laughed.

“What are you laughing at?” Jiang Ciqiu glared at him, half-embarrassed and half-annoyed.

“Nothing.” Lin Xia turned his face away and lowered his voice to the barest whisper, as if about to share a secret that only the two of them could hear. “I was just thinking, it’s amazing to be able to come back to school… Like I’m dreaming.”

Jiang Ciqiu’s body stiffened when she heard that.

That was exactly what she was thinking too.

To be able to miraculously return to her student days, to sit in a classroom as deskmates with the best friend who should have died thirteen years ago, to listen to the teacher’s dull yet reassuring lectures…

This scene was something she had only ever seen in dreams during those thirteen desperate, numb years.

On the camphor tree outside the window, the early cicadas were chirping without pause.

The setting sun slanted through the glass, landing on the two of them at their desks, baking out the scent of ink and paper from the test sheets.

Jiang Ciqiu looked up at the boy’s focused profile as he turned back toward the blackboard. Before she realized it, a curve had formed at the corner of her mouth.

“…Yeah.”

“Just like a dream.”

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