Back in High School, I Married My First Love

On our seventh wedding anniversary, Lu Yuzhou and I had been giving each other the silent treatment for three months. I prepared a table full of dishes for our anniversary, but he messaged me saying, “Working late.” I cried myself to sleep. When I woke up, I was sitting in our senior-year high school classroom. Beside me was his 18-year-old self, looking at me with the eyes of a 30-year-old. “Niannian, I came back too.” We became desk mates again, carrying the memories of our troubled marriage with us. This time, he confessed to me in front of everyone at the sports meet, secretly held my hand under the desk, and wrote “My wife's so beautiful today” in our exchange diary. I thought that was the greatest happiness I could ask for. Until years later, when we went to visit our retired homeroom teacher, Mr. Wang. He took an old box out of a cabinet. Inside was the complaint letter from back then, stamped with four words: No action taken. There was a secretly taken photo of us sitting side by side on the rooftop. There was a seating chart decorated with hearts. And there was a sentence that made me burst into tears: “From the very first day I met him, that boy had eyes for no one but your daughter.” It turned out that someone had witnessed our supposedly secret romance from beginning to end. It turned out he had known before we did that we were meant to be together. It turned out the best teacher in the world is love's guardian angel. That day, I cried at Mr. Wang's house for a full ten minutes. With red-rimmed eyes, Lu Yuzhou bowed deeply to our teacher. Mr. Wang laughed. “All right, all right. I'm just an old man who can't mind his own business.” On the way home, I asked him, “Lu Yuzhou, why did you ask to be my desk mate back then?” He was silent for three seconds, then said: “Because you smiled at me on the first day of school, and I knew I was done for.”