Ch.29
“Wh-what?! You’re asking me to hug you tightly?” Song Yu Meng’s eyes were all wide, she was doubting her own ears.
“Yeah, if you don’t hold on tight, what if you fall off when I speed up?” Yi Ran said rationally.
Song Yu Meng’s face turned red and she folded her arms, looking away. “I’m not hugging you. So be it if I fall off.”
“Come on, what if you blame me for your fall?”
“I won’t blame you!” Song Yu Meng pushed Yi Ran’s shoulder. “Stop talking, hurry up and drive!”
Yi Ran sullenly “oh”-ed, then intentionally gave the throttle on the right handbar a big twist. The scooter immediately shot forward.
Caught off guard, Song Yu Meng yelped in surprise. “Crazy Yi, what’s wrong with you? Why are you driving so fast——?!”
The wind was whipping by her noisily, but Yi Ran heard her clearly. However, she intentionally acted as if she couldn’t hear.
“What? You want me to drive faster? Okay!” She twisted the throttle all the way and the scooter was chugging along at 60km/h.
“You’re mad!!!” Song Yu Meng didn’t have anything to hold on to, and she was especially afraight. But she still put on a brave front, not wanting to hug Yi Ran.
Yi Ran wasn’t panicking at all, she smiled calmly. She didn’t believe that Song Yu Meng would still be able to act so bravely in a bit.
On the way from school back home, there’s a slope with an incline of around 30 degrees, almost a hundred metres long.
Song Yu Meng’s heart was about to jump out of her chest when she saw this downhill slope. She pounded on Yi Ran’s shoulder while shouting: “Hurry up and slow down!!!”
Yi Ran acted as if she didn’t hear it and kept going down the incline. The wind rushed past their faces, blowing onto their face until it hurt.
“Ah—— Crazy Yi, you’re doing this on purpose!!!” Song Yu Meng choked back a sob and her body was pressed against Yi Ran’s back, partially due to gravity.
The road on the slope wasn’t perfectly smooth, and the scooter shuddered as it went dashing forward. Song Yu Meng was too scared, she couldn’t care about her reputation anymore. Her arms were firmly latched around Yi Ran’s waist, and her head was buried in the middle of Yi Ran’s back to avoid the wind. A few tears even escaped her eyes and fell onto Yi Ran’s shirt.
Yi Ran finally smiled widely and reduced the speed. At around 50 metres, the scooter started to slow down and the wind wasn’t as harsh anymore on the face.
After the fear in Song Yu Meng’s heart subsided, she slowly raised her head from Yi Ran’s back and saw the smile on the other girl’s face.
Angrily, Song Yu Meng thumped her fist on Yi Ran’s shoulder and whined: “You did it on purpose!!!”
Yi Ran smiled, her two eyes turning into crescents. “You only just figured it out, dummy!”
Song Yu Meng turned her head to one side, complaining about Yi Ran in her heart. Despite all that, her arms never loosened around Yi Ran’s waist. The two of them were very close, and Yi Ran’s scent kept wafting into Song Yu Meng’s nose with the breeze.
Just now when the scooter was going fast, her heart was racing. Now that the scooter was slower, her heart was still racing, and it even had an odd squeezing sensation.
After the slope, Yi Ran followed Song Yu Meng’s directions into the neighbourhood and stopped outside a villa’s gate.
“You stay here?” Yi Ran’s shock was apparent.
“Yeah, can’t I stay here?”
“No, you got me wrong. I just didn’t think that you stayed here too.”
Now it was Song Yu Meng’s turn to be shocked. “What too? You can’t possibly live here as well?”
Yi Ran nodded and pointed to the white, three-storey villa next door. “Coincidentally, I’m just right next to you.”
“Huh?” Song Yu Meng’s jaw dropped. Her enemy had just become her neighbour??? She asked: “Then why have I never seen you before?”
“I’ve never seen you before either, what’s there to be surprised about?” Yi Ran held her hands up. “Whatever, all that’s not important. I sent you home today, shouldn’t you thank me?”
Song Yu Meng only remembered when she was prompted.
“Thank……” Before she could finish the sentence, she immediately stopped. “No! I’m not going to thank you, otherwise you’ll say stuff like I need to be sincere. Then you’ll ask all sorts of weird stuff from me, I’m not falling for that!”
Yi Ran wanted to cry and laugh at the same time. “Even Xu Yuan said thanks to me, shouldn’t you do the same?”
Song Yu Meng didn’t take the bait. “Hmph, then you go claim a favour from Xu Yuan!”
“Alright alright, you win. Hurry up and go in.” Yi Ran really couldn’t do anything to her.
Song Yu Meng took three steps then looked back and saw Yi Ran was still standing there looking at her. Her face flushed and she jogged back home, stealing one last glance at Yi Ran before she closed the door.
Mrs Song saw her daughter with a flushed face and asked: “Xiao-Yu, what’s with your face? Why is it so red?”
“Huh?” Song Yu Meng looked in the mirror and touched her face. It was indeed hot and red.
She didn’t know why her face was red either, could it have been the wind blowing?
On the other hand, Yi Ran returned home to find Song Yu Meng sent her a few messages.
【Scaredy Cat: Thank you.】
【Scaredy Cat: You’re not allowed to say I must be sincere!】
【Scaredy Cat: (Knife emoji, knife emoji, knife emoji) 】
Yi Ran chuckled and deleted the words she had typed “You must be sincere when thanking someone”, and sent “Childish” over instead.
She lay on her bed looking at the ceiling and laughed.
“Childish brat.”
……
When she was sitting in the last row, Song Yu Meng always wanted to sneak glances at Liu Luo Yang. Now that Liu Luo Yang was sitting by her side, she was looking at him even more openly than before. She propped her head up on one hand and stared at him, not listening to anything the teacher said.
Liu Luo Yang knew Song Yu Meng was looking at him. Nobody would be able to miss that heated gaze, but he just pretended like he didn’t know.
“Idiot.” Yi Ran rolled her eyes and softly complained, with a look of displeasure. She was sitting right behind Song Yu Meng, she couldn’t not see Song Yu Meng fangirling.
But her chest felt tight and she couldn’t pay attention to the maths lesson at all.
“Song Yu Meng, which question are we talking about?” Tang Xiang Ping suddenly asked, she had been looking at Song Yu Meng for a long while.
“Umm……” Song Yu Meng didn’t know obviously, and she stood up, umm-ing and ahh-ing for a while.
Usually, Yi Ran would secretly tell her which question it was but even she didn’t know today. But even if she did know, she wouldn’t tell Song Yu Meng. It was her own fault for fangirling and not listening to the lesson.
“You don’t even know this. Clearly, you’re not paying attention. Stand at the back.”
Song Yu Meng took her book and walked sulkily to the back of the class. Liu Luo Yang’s lips curved upwards slightly. She was finally gone, nobody would disturb him now.
The unexpected part was, Tang Xiang Ping didn’t carry on with the lesson. She pointed at Yi Ran and said: “Yi Ran, tell Song Yu Meng which question we’re at.”
Yi Ran: “……”
She just knew being chosen by Tang Xiang Ping wouldn’t be a good thing.
“Seventeen.” Xu Yuan reminded her softly.
But Yi Ran heard it as “seven”[1] and she confidently answered: “It’s question seven.”
The whole class burst out laughing and Tang Xiang Ping smiled: “You stand at the back too.”
Thus, Yi Ran took her book and walked behind petulantly too.
“What were you doing, you weren’t listening either?” Song Yu Meng covered her face with her book and said softly.
Yi Ran hid her face too and said in a depressed tone: “I was doing whatever you were doing.”
“You were watching Liu Luo Yang gege too?” Song Yu Meng immediately went on alert. “You’re not allowed to look at him!”
Yi Ran looked at her like she was an idiot and replied helplessly: “I’d only look at Liu Luo Yang if I was crazy. I clearly was looking at you, okay?”
Immediately, Song Yu Meng’s face turned red like peach blossoms in spring[2] and she panicked. “You, you’re crazy, what are you looking at me for?”
“Looking at how you fangirl in class, can’t I?”
Song Yu Meng pouted and her whole face was red. Letting her enemy see such a side to her, she was so embarrassed she wanted to find a hole and burrow into it.
During the next class, Song Yu Meng was just about to sneak a glance at Liu Luo Yang when she suddenly thought of her enemy sitting behind her. She can’t let Yi Ran see her fangirling again!
But Song Yu Meng also wanted to know, if she continued to look at Liu Luo Yang, would Yi Ran still look at her?
At the thought of being stared at by Crazy Yi, her face flushed in shyness again.
Not even five minutes into class, Yi Ran saw that Song Yu Meng was staring at Liu Luo Yang again. She was quite despondent. Hadn’t she just spoken to her about it in the previous lesson? Why didn’t this person know how to control herself?
She didn’t know the meaning of shame at all, idiot!
Just as she was scolding Song Yu Meng mentally, Song Yu Meng suddenly turned around and Yi Ran couldn’t react in time to turn her head away and pretend she was looking outside the window.
Her heart was pounding in her chest, but her face remained still and composed. Only the blush couldn’t be hidden.
Song Yu Meng smiled and turned back towards the front, happily thinking: Turns out Crazy Yi really will look at me! She smiled foolishly.
Song Yu Meng was in a good mood, but Yi Ran was a bit embarrassed and annoyed, thinking: Why did she turn around all of a sudden, did something go wrong in her brain?
Hence, she took out a post-it note and wrote “dummy” on it before pasting it on Song Yu Meng’s back.
Xu Yuan saw it, but she just lowered her head and smiled.
Song Yu Meng didn’t know she had something stuck to her back, and she was still swaggering along the hallway after class. Students who saw the note on her back were all sniggering at her.
Song Yu Meng was utterly lost, thinking they were all crazy.
She only knew she had something stuck to her back after Su Xiao Xiao told her about it. Who else would pull such a useless prank, it had to be Yi Ran.
“Lame! Childish brat!” Song Yu Meng scrunched the post-it into a ball and threw it at Yi Ran.
Yi Ran smiled happily, though. She had managed to anger Song Yu Meng again, and it didn’t feel like an ordinary success today; all her negative emotions were gone.
……
The last lesson for the afternoon was physics and they were starting a new chapter. Old man Zhang asked them to take out the second textbook.
“Whoever doesn’t have the book, stand outside. If you’re not even bringing your books, why should you listen to the lesson!” The old man was so irritable today.
Everybody in the class was most afraid of him, who wouldn’t dare to bring the textbook.
However, there really was one. Song Yu Meng.
She had already thrown her second physics textbook somewhere at home and it was gathering dust, how could she magically pull it out now. She had already resigned herself to getting kicked out of class when suddenly, a book flew over and landed in the middle of her table.
Immediately after that, she saw Yi Ran walk out of class.
[1] Now this is another play on pronunciation. Xu Yuan said “十七题” which is pronounced shí qī tí and it means “seventeenth question”, but Yi Ran heard it as “是七题” or shì qī tí, which means “it’s the seventh question”. Different sounds on the first word, although the pinyin and pronunciation are the same on paper. No way to translate it perfectly into English, but yeah. Jump back up.
[2] 像春日里的桃花 – Peach blossoms, not sakura/cherry blossoms. Peach blossoms are pink while sakura/cherry blossoms are typically white!