Chapter 493: Qiao Mu Private High School

After a year, Bai Liu once again ate beef noodle for eight dollars a bowl.

There were three of them, but they only ordered one bowl of noodles, which was rightfully placed in front of Bai Liu, who paused, without taking his chopsticks, "Aren't you going to eat?"

"We usually eat very well, the dormitory above us takes care of the food at night." Dian Fang sighed regretfully with her cheeks, "Eh, it's just that today is Sunday, the kitchen of our dormitory is out of order, otherwise we could still steal food and feed you."

"Keep your voice down." Lu Yizhan was helpless and crying, "If someone hears us again, Bai Liu won't be able to have a late-night snack again."

"OKOK." Fang Dian gave an OK sign without much care, she excitedly shoved the chopsticks into Bai Liu's hands, "Eat quickly! If you don't eat the noodles, they're going to get lumpy!"

Fang Dian and Lu Yizhan looked at Bai Liu eagerly, they were really happy for Bai Liu.

After Bai Liu didn't have a late-night snack, Fang Dian and Lu Yizhan never went to the late-night cafeteria again, even though they received a fifty-pound allowance for late-night snacks every day.

It was the first time they'd set foot in this late-night cafeteria after a year, but they hadn't eaten anything.

He asked Fang Dian and Lu Yizhan why they did not go, since they were subsidized.

Fang Dian just smiled and rubbed Bai Liu's head, saying, "It doesn't smell good when there's one less person to eat, so we're not going.

Bai Liu was quiet for a long time, he finally picked up the chopsticks, slowly ate the bowl of beef noodles.

What does one less person mean?

Bai Liu didn't ask at the time, but now, he seemed to understand what Fang Dian meant.

After eating, Lu Yizhan and Bai Liu explained many things, to the point where Fang Dian began to urge him, "Old Lu, it's almost ten o'clock, we have to go up."

"Got it." Lu Yizhan looked at Bai Liu with extremely complicated eyes, he finally just smiled relievedly and patted Bai Liu's shoulder, "Don't feel pressured, 351 is already very good."

"I can see that you're trying, you're really a good kid."

"Okay, you're the one who talks too much, I still have something to say to Bai Liu, go away!" Fang Dian pushed Lu Yizhan away, she pulled Bai Liu to the side, her eyes smiled as if she had seen through everything, and asked, "Did you find the life you wanted?"

Bai Liu quieted, "A little idea."

"So soon? That doesn't make sense, I thought with your screwed up nature, you wouldn't be able to figure it out until at least after the entrance exams." Dian Fang stroked her chin as she asked rhetorically with amusement, "Did you ...... meet someone you want to live with?"

Bai Liu paused, he didn't answer.

"Forget it if you don't want to talk to me." Fang Dian waved her hand, she generously did not count, then from behind the book bag pulled over, from which a book by book out of the teaching aids and notebooks, methodically explained, "Last time the old Lu gave you those notes to do a little hasty, your foundation is weak, for fear that you can not read, go back, I am the first in this grade to personally help you throughout the senior year's knowledge points and exam questions have been sorted out once!"

"Reading it guarantees you'll get a four hundred on the test!"

The heavy notebooks and teaching aids were slammed into Bai Liu's hands by Fang Dian, who smiled, with a clearly visible greenish-blackness under her eyes, "Nuo, this is the weight of knowledge, read it well!"

Bai Liu took the notebook and was quiet for a long time again, "You stayed up all night to do this?"

"It didn't stay up for long." Fang Dian smiled, "Idle anyway."

How can you be idle?

The senior high school curriculum is already heavy, Bai Liu is aware that she and Lu Yizhan in addition to the college entrance exams, but also to prepare for all kinds of competitions, the so-called must-go program for the school to compete, not to say busy feet hit the back of the head, but also is absolutely unable to find the time to help him sort out these knowledge points.

But Fang Dian made it work.

Bai Liu paused for a moment, he hmmm'd and took the worn out teaching aids and notebooks, "Count me as owing you a favor."

"This doesn't count." Fang Dian arched her eyebrow and flicked Bai Liu's forehead, "Favors are something you call owed only when you beg for something, you didn't beg me, I did it for you willingly, this doesn't count as a favor."

Bai Liu lowered his head as he looked at the heavy, battered Dian Dian schoolbag he couldn't hold in his two hands, and calmly asked, "I don't really know much about it."

Fang Dian asks, "What don't you understand?"

"You and Lu Yizhan spend this work on anyone on the mountain, you make friends with anyone on the mountain." Bai Liu looked up, "Both can be rewarded far more than I. They will give you many things, money, status, social contacts, a smooth sailing future."

"Why are you spending this totally unworthy endeavor on me?"

"It's simple." Fang Dian replied bluntly, "It's not like we want to be friends with them."

"It's not like we like them, but we like you a lot and just want to be friends with you."

"But you are excellent and valuable." Bai Liu looked straight at Fang Dian with dark eyes, "It's a bad trade off for you to work so hard to be number one and two in your age, to be the most valuable students in this school, only to waste that value on me."

Fang Dian's amber eyes curved up and she suddenly smiled softly, "Remember what I told you before Bai Liu?"

"I say a person studies hard in order to choose a life they like."

"We strive to be first and second in age, not to go for more value, but to choose a life I love for myself."

The moonlight fell on Fang Dian's face and she smiled softly and brightly, "Choosing to be friends with you is how we like to live our lives, and neither Lao Lu nor I feel like we're wasting my own value."

"It's almost ten o'clock, bye!" After Fang Dian finished speaking, she turned her head and pulled Lu Yizhan toward the mountain to rush away, her voice still with a smile, "I'll see you next time, Bai Liu!"

Bai Liu watched as Fang Dian's ponytail bounced as she ran, and a humanoid black line appeared on his side, which was attached to Bai Liu's body the moment it appeared.

"Why did you suddenly disappear just now?" Bai Liu inquired in a flat tone.

Spades lies on Bai Liu's back, his chin resting on Bai Liu's head, his voice depressed, "I can only show up when you're alone."

"Appear when you're alone?" Bai Liu asked rhetorically, "But before that you could exist when I was in my dorm and classroom."

"It has nothing to do with exactly how many people there are." Spades says, "It's when you feel like you're in the state [of being alone] that I can exist, but when you feel like you're not alone, I don't exist."

"When you were in the classroom and the dormitory, you felt like you were alone, so I could show up, but just now when they were eating beef noodles with you, you didn't feel like you were alone, and I couldn't exist."

Bai Liu paused, "You and Lu Yizhan, they can't coexist?"

"You could say that." Spades embraces Bai Liu and buries his head in the crook of Bai Liu's shoulder, his voice muffled, "I'm the monster that exists to keep you from being alone."

"When there are other humans to make you feel like you're no longer alone, there's no point in me existing."

"Are you this type of monster?" Bai Liu took Spades' hand on his shoulder in his left hand and spoke calmly, "Then you should be around for a long time yet, because I prefer to be alone."

His left hand clutched the bag of notebooks Fang Dian had given him, then let go.

Immediately after the big test comes the parent-teacher conference.

Lu Yizhan and Bai Liu, two students with exceptional families, do not have parents to help with parent-teacher conferences.

Neither did Fang Dian.

Bai Liu has no interest in finding out about other people's home upbringing, and never asks why Fang Dian never had a parent come to a parent-teacher conference, but humans have always had a secret desire to snoop on the best and brightest mavericks in the collective, as if the more they know about each other, the closer they get to each other's place.

Bai Liu heard about Fang Dian from his roommate's gossip.

Fang Dian was first in her grade in junior high school, her parents were good people who loved her very much, and her family's situation was quite good, so it can be said that the first fifteen years of Fang Dian's life were "smooth sailing" and "happy and fulfilled" in the best interpretation of these words.

As if God wouldn't allow her to stay happy, when Fang Dian was fifteen years old, her family had a big change of heart.

Fang Dian's mother is seriously ill. Her father spends a lot of money to cure her mother, but it's still not enough. Finally, in order to raise money, her father is deliberately lured to the gambling table by someone who has the intention to do so.

Overnight, he lost all his money and had a lot of gambling debts.

It seemed like the next thing you know, Fang Dian was supposed to be living an extremely difficult life, but no, there was a heart and ability to swing for the fences extremely strong in this woman, who yanked her own dad off the table, tied her shoulder-length hair up, and got to the table empty-handed.

Another night, and Fang Dian wins back everything her dad exported, and then stops.

Her dad broke down hysterically grabbing her by the shoulders yelling, "You keep gambling! You're so good at gambling! You win back all your mom's medical bills!"

"Why don't you go gamble if you have the power!"

Her father looked at Fang Dian, who was firmly shaking her head, and fell to his knees in a trance and froze, as he looked at his daughter with tears in his eyes, "Will you please count on Daddy?"

"I won by cheating, I can't gamble anymore." Fang Dian said softly, "Dad, in a game like gambling, besides money, people export themselves."

"I don't want to see you suffering from something bad besides mom."

Fang Dian's father, unable to understand his daughter's choice, leaves all the money to Fang Dian and then runs away, leaving Fang Dian to deal with all the mess.

Fang Dian took care of that too.

She scored first in the city in the midterm exams, and many schools offered her lucrative offers, including some public schools with good learning environments and atmospheres. Fang Dian was prepared to go to a public school close to her home, but in the end she chose Qiao Mu, which offered the highest bonuses, and barely scraped together enough money to pay the medical bills and choose a treatment plan for her own mother.

Still, her mother rapidly emaciated and passed away within six months of treatment.

Fang Dian handled her mother's funeral all by herself, relying on various competition awards for prize money, plus the generous special honor student subsidy fee Qiao Mu gave her every year, and a sum of money left over from her mother's treatment, and a large sum of money that suddenly appeared in her account after her mother's passing away - supposedly from the money she had run off to who knows where her father had hit.

With this money, Fang Dian was able to redeem the old house that the family had sold for medical treatment, and she finally had a place to live away from school.

--And this place became the most common place where Bai Liu and Lu Yizhan stayed when they were away from school.

It's like ...... a very small home.

It's odd that no one has parent-teacher conferences for the first and second oldest students in their grade, but Qiao Mu is ridiculously generous with its exceptional students - the school has granted Lu Yizhan and Fang Dian permission to have their own parent-teacher conferences.

The rationale is that good students manage their studies and their lives without parental supervision; they are their own parents.

But on the contrary, Bai Liu doesn't have this privilege. Once the parent-teacher conference is over, his seat is always empty.

Lu Yizhan and Fang Dian would have loved to come, but Qiao Mu's parent-teacher conferences are usually held for all the classes in the school, so when Bai Liu had a parent-teacher conference, Lu Yizhan and the others would have been there as well.

It is worth mentioning that Lu Yizhan, for some reason, has a special obsession with holding parent-teacher conferences for Bai Liu, and has tried to escape his own parent-teacher conferences several times to help him, but was caught back by the teachers of their classes.

"Why do you want to open it for me so badly?" Bai Liu asked Lu Yizhan strangely.

"You don't understand." Lu Yizhan looked at Bai Liu with sultry eyes, "Being able to parent you and be your father is the kind of thing that everyone around me harbored intense expectations for in the beginning."

Which person in the Heretic Authority didn't curse Bai Liu and want to be Bai Liu's father ......

Bai Liu slow: "?"

This time too, Bai Liu's seat was still empty at the parent-teacher conference.

The class was loud and noisy with people coming and going, the parents of the students dressed up in their most expensive outfits, their most expensive watches, necklaces, rings and bags, and every now and then my pigeon's blood ruby ring brushed against your freshly done hair, and I'm sorry that my handmade customized mechanical watch bumped into your chambray leather bag, I'm so sorry.

It's like a cockerel and hen with a lot of energy and feathers on display.

The students had long since been forgotten aside, and these parents were loudly and falsely exchanging fake smiles and pleasantries with each other, and the whole scene didn't look like a parent-teacher conference in a school, but rather a large socializing joint held in some hotel:

"What kind of car did you drive here today? I drove my BMW in today, and I couldn't find a parking space. Qiao Mu should really expand, otherwise it's hard to park for a parent-teacher conference."

"Did your family get another suite in the new Sunnyside development?"

"There's been a move in the upper echelons of the company recently, and a position may be opening up."

"Double 11 Lan's face cream is 10% off and it's only four thousand more! Want to buy it together?"

In short, even though it was a parent-teacher conference, it didn't seem to have much to do with the students.

Bai Liu's participation in such parent-teacher conferences had always been 0, but it was true that he had no need to participate either, because after all, there were only two monotonous and boring topics for the whole occasion:

One, parents are climbing over each other, and two, students are climbing over each other.

Adults will still have a layer of worldliness to hide behind, but the competition between seventeen and eighteen year olds is much more straightforward.

"My mom just bought me the latest shoes." Bai Liu, the boy next to him, shook the shoes on his feet with a smug look on his face, "I brought them to the parent-teacher conference today for me to try."

"Wow, these are over three thousand dollars."

The boy wiggled his fingers pretentiously, "nono."

"Holy shit, you got a ballerina's signature on these!"

"Holy shit, this is a two year old limited edition, how did you get it?"

"How else did you get it?" The boy shrugged, he grinned in disbelief and waved his foot in front of Bai Liu's face, "Money, you can get it by paying a high price, plus postage cost almost six thousand dollars."

"Six thousand, what a deal, I want it too!"

"Go back and ask my mom to look for it for me too, my little aunt is abroad, she should be able to find it."

Bao Kangle, who was listening with a somber and jealous expression, stared at the pair of sneakers valued at more than six thousand dollars with lust in his eyes.

Bai Liu, who had heard no less than a thousand such words, turned his head away and leaned out of one of the windows at the back of the classroom corridor, his eyes falling on the inside of the window.

Through the window, you can see that his seat is empty, filled to the front and back with affluent parents who have taken their own seats and, as if that weren't enough, placed their expensive handbags on Bai Liu's desk.

It's as if this position, which belongs to Bai Liu's family, was born to be empty.

The boys who were discussing sneakers enthusiastically next to Bai Liu saw that Bai Liu didn't give any reaction, their faces sank, they looked at each other from side to side, and surrounded them unspecifiedly.

The boy in the lead shoved Bai Liu's shoulder, "Hey."

Bai Liu coldly swept back at him, "Something wrong?"

The boy cheekily stuck his head in front of Bai Liu, "What were you just looking at?"

The boy pretended to probe, looking over Bai Liu's shoulder to the inside of the classroom, tutting twice, "Looking for your parents?"

"But you don't have parents!" The boy spread his hands in feigned regret, "Tell you what, I got new sneakers today and I'm in a good mood."

"How about you call me Dad and I'll go in and help you with your parent-teacher conferences?"

Several of the other boys stifled their laughter, and Bao Kangle, whose face had been grim, stretched, and he looked at the besotted Bai Liu with a look of disgusted excitement, as if he were looking at some inferior being.

As long as there's Bai Liu in this class, he's not the one having the worst time.

"It's not bullying you either haha." The boy gave Bai Liu's shoulder a firm squeeze under false pretenses, "It's mainly because you have no father or mother, poor thing."

"And my parents have been so good to me, I should be doing good deeds to an orphanage out like you, kind of giving back to society, right?"

"Look." The boy smiled playfully and forcefully pressed Bai Liu's shoulder to let him look at the classroom in the window, "My parents are sitting in front of your seat, they put their bags on your seat, your seat can be stained with my parents' blessings, I'm good to you, aren't I, call out to your father?"

Bai Liu was just about to open his mouth when his words stuttered on his lips, and through the window glass he saw a human-shaped mass of black lines sitting on his otherwise empty seat.

The mass of black threads curiously studied Bai Liu's seat and raised its hand to sweep down the two handbags placed on Bai Liu's seat that were blocking it from sitting down.

A man and a woman sitting in front of Bai Liu's seat in the classroom heard the sound of a carrier bag falling and turned their heads over to look, frowning in question:

"Who swept our bag down?"

"Isn't this spot reserved for bags?"

Someone next to me kindly reminded, "No, this is the seat of one of their classmates, Bai Liu, but he doesn't have a parent to come to the meeting, so it's empty."

The man and woman waved their hands dismissively, their faces wearing obvious boredom:

"The one you're talking about Bai Liu I know, out of the orphanage, dirty and cheap, I heard that she would also steal the food that her classmates put in their lockers, our cubs especially hate it."

"Before all do not know our family cubs sit in front of this person, wait for the end of the meeting to go to find Mr. Xu reflect, give him a position, otherwise all day long to sit in front of this kind of people, learning are not good, affecting the mood."

Said, these two people pick up the handbag, shoot but not shoot, so the attitude of arrogant and natural to be put back on Bai Liu's desktop.

The humanoid black line slowly raised its head, and Bai Liu, who had been held down by the uproarious boys outside the window, stood still for a moment in his expression, clearly seeing the black line suddenly change from a black line to a man with a blurred outline when the man and the woman said he was dirty and cheap.

The man had very fine and perfect features, an upright figure, very insistent on tucking his tall and long frame into Bai Liu's small seat, an expressionless face, and appeared to be no more than eighteen or nineteen years old, with a pair of very eye-catching silver-blue eyes.

Is this ...... what this mass of puppy lines, Spades, really looks like?

It seems his vision hasn't declined in the future either.

Spades looked up indifferently, his silver-blue eyes locking with the two men and women who were just about to place their handbags on their desks.

The man and woman's expressions were stunned for a long moment, and they seemed to see in the air a silver-blue door slowly opening to them.

In the next second, their expressions twisted.

By the window, the boy was still scoffing arrogantly, "Why don't you resist? Seeing my parents looking envious?"

Panicked screams suddenly came from the window:

"Mr. Wang, Mrs. Wang, what are you doing?!"

The boy's movements faltered as he let go of Bai Liu's collar and looked in the window suspiciously.

Inside the classroom, his parents were like two dogs, their eyes upturned and parted to the sides, sticking out their drooling downward tongues, lying on Bai Liu's desk and licking frantically, as if they were eating some extremely sweet food, with that strange smile on their faces.

"Smells good ...... hehehehehe ...... smells good ......"

I can't say it's a total loss of image, I can only say it's dumbfounded a classroom of people.

The people next to them were screaming and trying to rip them away from Bai Liu's desk, but these two would actually bite ferociously.

After biting two parents in a row who tried to go up and rip them off, the boy, also confused, pushed the window open and shouted, "Mom and Dad, what are you doing?"

His parents slowly bent their necks and looked out at their own children, the look that sent a chill down the boy's back as he took two steps back.

But before he could turn and run, the parents darted from their desks and out the window, glaring menacingly as they held their child down for dear life.

The boy was held down by his own parents and fell to the ground with a buzzing jolt to his brain and a few dry heaves with a blank expression, but his parents didn't stop there, instead they bared their fangs and began to carefully sniff the boy's body.

The boy was scared shitless, struggling frantically on the ground, screaming in desperation, "Help me!"

A few of the boy's followers had already been scared and ran away, the only one left around him was Bai Liu, who didn't run away, this boy who was held down by his parents and sniffed on the ground couldn't care less, he pulled Bai Liu's pants leg and shouted at the top of his voice: "Help me!"

"Get them outta here!!!"

Bai Liu looked indifferently at the boy who was tugging at his pants leg for help, "Want me to save you?"

The boy nodded frantically, snotty.

"Yes." Bai Liu said faintly, "Call me Dad."

The boy was dumbfounded, he was just about to curse fuck you who is going to call you dad when his parents started to smile that weird smile that scared him so much he broke down and immediately yelled out, "Dad, dad! Help my dad!"

As if the word "Daddy" had hit some switch in the parents, they began to crouch down, their eyes blank, their faces wearing strange and ingratiating smiles, leaning down and sticking out their tongues, pressing the backs of their tongues to the tops of their children's shoes, licking them carefully one by one.

The parents actually started licking their kid's sneakers.

"Hehehe, supervisor dad, hehehe." The man looked fawningly at his son whose expression had been completely dumbfounded, his eyes filled with empty and urgent desire, "I've licked your shoes well, and I've also sent you a million and six hundred thousand dollars before, that position that was vacated before, don't you think it's time for me to take my turn?"

The woman is also seriously and diligently licking, she licked the expression extremely charming, but also shook his shoulders and pampered: "Husband, husband, husband, father husband, look at my performance is so good, the next month's living expenses to give a little more ~"

"People want to buy a $200,000 emerald bracelet."

"If you buy it for me, I can call you daddy all the time~"

The boy's expression had been shocked into blankness, and even if he was the kind of dude who didn't know anything, he knew what his parents were doing with this gesture.

The onlookers next to him had a look of disbelief on their faces.

Halfway through licking, this man and woman suddenly shook their heads, that lust-filled expression on their faces all but disappeared, as if snapping out of some kind of demonic state, they covered their heads with severe headaches and slowly looked over to their son, who was sitting paralyzed on the floor with a demented look on his face.

They lowered their heads and looked again in a trance at their son's sneakers.

The name of the player on this sneaker is newly signed, and it has just been bragged by their son that he got it signed by a special player.

But now, because they had just licked too hard, only a blurry half of this signature remained.

Their tongues tingled hotly, leaving dark, marker-stained clumps on the surface of their tongues.

A short while later, the security guards who had been urgently called by the other parents arrived, and the two parents were helped up by the security guards, who walked past the watching crowd with their heads bowed and their faces as ugly as hell.

The man suddenly grabbed his son's hair and slapped him hard twice, wanting to cover up his anger, "You □□ pup! Damn it! You got such a low score! It drove me and your mom crazy!"

"Spending so much money on you, providing you with such good conditions, and taking such a small test, pissing off your old man's old mother to commit a crime!"

The boy had been blindsided, and he was just about to argue when his father came down with two more hard slaps, instantly swelling his face, and the man warned viciously, "I'll settle the score with you when I get back!"

The boy was slapped hard all the way around, and no one stopped him, and he was practically dragged back by his own dad, his mouth drooling from the beating, and his dad didn't even stop, like he was taking out some kind of grievance on him.

All those followers who had been walking behind this boy earlier pretended not to see the boy's pleading gaze, and unanimously backed away from this boy with their heads down.

Bai Liu looks to Spades in the window, who locks eyes with him through the window, and he raises his jaw faintly, signaling the guy to come out and explain what's going on.

This guy must be the culprit behind the suddenly insane parents.

Spades prudently pushed his head back, pretending not to see Bai Liu's eyes signaling him to come out, and sat demurely in Bai Liu's seat, mimicking the other parents seriously looking at Bai Liu's test papers on the desktop with an air of [I'm holding a parent-teacher conference for you, don't interrupt me].

Bai Liu: "......"

Can you read the roll? Just read it there ......

In this.

After a short and scary interlude, the parent-teacher conference of the 37th senior class was still held successfully

Xu Wei walked up to the stage and summarized the key points of the exam, summarizing the top ten and bottom ten students, and the parents of each student summarized had to stand up to receive her comments.

Parents of students at the top of the achievement scale are honored; those at the bottom are more embarrassed.

Bai Liu is usually ranked in the back row, but this time he was rarely out of the bottom ten and not in the group of poor students being critiqued.

He was in the middle of another wave of summarized students this time.

"Next, we will summarize the students who have made great progress in this exam." Xu Wei lowered her head, looking at the roster in her hand, "These students have all made great progress recently, it's worthwhile for all the parents to learn from each other and learn a bit from each other's education methods, it's senior year, I hope that everyone pays a little bit of attention to their own children."

One by one, she read them over, and the parents of each student read to stood up, looking as if they were implicitly and dejectedly accepting praise, as if it wasn't their child who had improved, but themselves.

"One hundred and twenty percent grade improvement, Hou Tong." Xu Wei looked full of appreciation to Hou Tong's father who stood up, "Your child is very good, and has improved in grades several times in a row."

"Can we not make progress?" Hou Tong's father, an easy-going looking middle-aged man, smiled helplessly, "It's all down and out, down in the valley, and progress is progress anywhere you go."

The class laughed amiably.

"You sit down." Xu Wei instructed the other party to sit down, she looked at the roster again, the expression on her face cold, "The last one to progress is a special student in our class, I won't mention it here, his parents didn't show up."

Hou Tong's father couldn't help but say, "Teacher, people's parents didn't show up or they still have to say it, right?"

"People's parents didn't show up, but they're making progress, so there's no reason not to talk about it, right?"

Xu Wei's face instantly became embarrassed beyond measure as she searched for a replacement, "It's something that just came up, and things are a bit tight for this meeting, so it's just ......"

"Mr. Xu you continue." Hou Tong father raised his hand to interrupt Xu Wei's explanation, he shook his head with his face averted and muttered in a small voice, "How is this for a teacher, no wonder Xiaotong doesn't like ......"

Xu Wei's face was hard to see, she cleared her throat and tried her best to squeeze out a smile, "The last student who improved this time, Bai Liu."

She swept a glance at Bai Liu at the window almost with malice and said in a joking tone, "Hou Tong's parents are right, all students should be treated equally, now following the normal procedure, Bai Liu's parents who are not here stand up to receive praise."

"A round of applause for Bai Liu's parents."

Everyone turned their heads to the empty seat and applauded.

Bai Liu also looked towards that seat.

Spades stood up from whatever seat he was in, and he stood straight and tall amidst the applause, mimicking the other parents with a slightly reserved nod of his jaw, as if receiving the praise for Bai Liu.

The corner of Bai Liu's lips curled up very slightly.

After the parent-teacher conference, the school usually has a half-day vacation so that students can follow their parents home.

Bai Liu is the last student to leave the classroom because he doesn't have to go home, or, in his case, the situation is reversed and his "parents" are on top of him, going home with him.

The lines of Spades' transformation into human form are noticeably weaker, and he lies motionless on the back of Bai Liu's shoulder.

"Aren't you not allowed to touch other people?" Bai Liu asks in a flat tone as she walks away, "What was that all about just now? Sweeping handbags and driving people crazy, you seem pretty capable."

"It wasn't supposed to be." Spades' tone was muffled, faint enough to border on an airy tone, "By the rules, I can't interfere with and disrupt your high school life."

Bai Liu paused and asked, "And just now?"

Spades paused, "Because I was so angry, I broke the rules."

"They're not allowed to talk about you that way."

"There's a price to pay for breaking the rules, right?" Bai Liu asked calmly in return, "So now you're too weak to walk and have to be carried by me?"

Spades muffled a hmmm, and he buried his head into Bai Liu's back as if he knew he'd done something wrong.

There was a moment of silence between the two men.

As the sun sets, the slowly falling sunlight is warm and long, and the light shines obliquely, pulling Bai Liu's shadow into a long, long stretch.

"Next time, don't do this stupid rule-breaking thing." Bai Liu carried Spades on his back as he walked towards the dormitory, his eyes downcast as he looked at the long drawn shadow of himself alone at his feet, his tone paused for a moment, "It'd be fun if you played yourself out."

The Spades on his back had no shadow, and he had only the shadow of his feet alone, but he had the feeling of two men walking together.

The Spades on his back was also weightless. Bai Liu carried Spades on his back for such a long time, but it was as easy as if he had nothing on his back.

But so heavy, so heavy that Bai Liu couldn't help but lean forward, as if he were actually carrying someone on his back, a doggy wire ball, a monster that had come just for him and given him a parent-teacher conference.

"Remember?" Bai Liu made sure again, his tone a little colder, "Don't do that next time."

Spades was silent for a long time before he replied, "I can't help it."

"Why can't you control it?" Bai Liu asked.

"Because I like you so much." Spades hugged Bai Liu tightly with all his might, and he pressed himself against Bai Liu's back, repeating over and over, "I like you a lot."

"I like you, Bai Liu."

"Bai Liu I like you."

"I especially like you."

Bai Liu was quiet for a long time before replying, "I know."

"Oh." Spades is quiet for a moment, then-"I like you, Bai Liu."

"I know."

"I like ......"

"Got it."

The sunlight pulled Bai Liu's shadow behind him for a long, long time, and behind him, in the high thirty-seven class on the second floor of the school building, the sunlight shone in diagonally through the corridor windows and shone on the blackboard at the back of the classroom.

On the blackboard, right in the middle is the honor roll of the students who have made progress, and there are a lot of students' names written in neat and beautiful chalk letters, the penultimate name written in beautiful chalk letters is [Hou Tong 】, while the last name is crooked.

The name is Bai Liu.

Xu Wei intentionally did not write Bai Liu's name on the honor roll, thinking that in this school, in this world, no one would remember Bai Liu's slight progress in such a test, nor would they care whether Bai Liu's name was on the so-called honor roll.

Because Bai Liu has no parents.

But there's a monster that remembers, that cares, that exists.

It quietly, clumsily, carrying Bai Liu, drained of its own energy, unskillfully picked up the chalk and wrote his name carefully in one stroke on the last position of this honor roll.

Because it really thinks Bai Liu is honorable.

--like the moment it heard Bai Liu's name and stood up for Bai Liu at the parent-teacher conference.