Shen Wanyi discovered something.
Her next-door neighbor, Lu Zhixing, scored 149 in math but told the whole class, “I didn’t do well.” Every weekly test, he landed precisely in 51st place: never standing out, never at the bottom, as if he’d measured it with a ruler. She had seen university textbooks open on his desk, their margins filled with notes.
He was pretending to be a poor student.
What made even less sense was that while pretending, he was also helping her raise her physics grade from a barely passing score to one of the best in the year, all in the most unobtrusive ways. He sorted her mistakes by type, prepared targeted practice, and worked backward from answers to questions. Every step focused on what she didn’t know, as if someone had drawn a map in advance and was waiting for her to follow it.
Shen Wanyi decided to expose him.
She followed him, looked through his books, and checked his records. Then she put the evidence in front of him. “You’re pretending to be a poor student. What does that have to do with me?”
He was silent for a long time.
“It does,” he said. “Because if I let you teach me, you’ll keep coming to knock on my door.”
Shen Wanyi froze. She thought of every time she had gone to him of her own accord, his hesitant expression in the doorway, and every time he had said, “I didn’t do well this time.”
So he had spent half a semester pretending, just waiting for someone to see through him.
So he had hidden all his brilliance because he was afraid that if he did too well, he would be recommended for early admission and have to leave, and then no one would knock on his door again.
Sweet campus romance / Secret crush becomes mutual / Two top students / Facing the college entrance exam together
From neighbors to deskmates, from weekly tests to the college entrance exam. He pretended to be a poor student for a whole semester, but there was only one thing he was serious about: he wanted to get into the same university as her.
