The feeling of falling from the cloud is more painful than staying in the mud.
A small southern town, No. 2 Middle School. The eight seats in the last row of the classroom, next to the trash bins, are nicknamed the "Cape of Good Hope." The rules in the grade: the higher the score, the further forward you sit; the worse your score, the further you sit in the corner. The people in the front row called us "sailors" - we had bad grades and bad people, and we were done until graduation.
Zhu Ling once didn't believe in this evil. She was just shy of being admitted to No. 1 Middle School, and just short of being admitted to the top class, until a severe cold turned into chronic sinusitis, and her memory plummeted, dragging her from the top ten to the bottom ten in the class, and sent her to the Cape of Good Hope.
She pinched the bottle of dependent nose and told herself: This is just a temporary stop. When she recovers, she will return to the front row sooner or later.
Until Wan Xing fell from the top class and sat next to her.
The boy who once stood on the podium and whose photo was always displayed in the most conspicuous position on the bulletin board now wore an old watch on his wrist that stopped at 3:17, tearing up the scratch paper filled with correct answers. He wrote "AC" on the blackboard and "What you need is time" in the hole on the table.
She thought he was coming to save her light, but later she discovered that they were the straw in each other's hands when they were drowning. The Cape of Good Hope did not sink.
Neither did we.
Concept: Seats cannot define grades, and scores cannot measure life. Eight teenagers who were exiled to the last row of the classroom found their way back to each other in each other's dim light. They were once labeled as "poor students" and were weighed down by prejudice, but they learned to support each other in the most inconspicuous corner. This is not a story about a genius rescuing a loser, but a group of ordinary people who prove that success does not only come from being admitted to a prestigious school, nor does it mean being sober only by following the mainstream route. Finding your own value and a path that suits you under the existing system is the best path.