During the winter break of her first year of high school, Yu Jingxing posted a photo of the answers in the class group chat and casually accepted a friend request from the top student in her grade.
It wasn't until school started again that she realized the person who'd asked her for answers every day that winter was sitting diagonally behind her. He kept a straight face and never spoke to her. But from then on, new sheets of paper began appearing one by one inside her physics textbook. They were all worked solutions, all written in the same handwriting.
One day, she finally couldn't hold back. She took the latest sheet of scratch paper to his desk, put it down, and said, “Why do you keep writing these for me? You're making me feel bad.” He didn't answer, but the papers kept coming all the same.
When the classes were reshuffled in her second year, he went to the advanced class. With an entire floor between them, she began spending an extra hour every day on physics problems, climbing more than a dozen places in the monthly exam rankings. She gathered up the problems she couldn't solve and brought them to him. The next day, he returned them covered in explanations, sometimes with a little arrow in the margin: “This way is faster.”
On the day the results were posted, she stood before the bulletin board and looked at his name. It was still at the very top, far ahead of hers. As she turned to walk back, she thought, I need to get faster.
Later, she went to university and turned eighteen. He came to see her with a bouquet of flowers. Standing before her, he said, “That day, you asked if I had nothing better to do. I wasn't bored. I wanted to help you.” She said, “Then you helped me for three years.” He replied, “How about we do things differently now? Will you be my girlfriend?” She took the flowers, looked up at him, and smiled. “What do you think?”
He spent three years writing out solutions for her. In the end, he wrote himself into her life, too.
