Chapter 7(2)
As she felt the math teacher’s stare bore into her from the side, Zhong Youyou’s free-flowing pen froze on the spot, and then she flipped her paper over to a blank page, quickly hiding her previous, precise calculations.
After she crossed over, she realized that her walking posture and handwriting were the same as the original owner’s, so there was no possibility of exposure from there. But she had just gotten so high on the problems that she had forgotten that the original owner’s grades were extremely bad. If she suddenly got a perfect score, wouldn’t she be suspected?
It was obvious that the few multiple-choice answers she had put down had left the math teacher stunned on the spot.
Who would have predicted that the god of learning would one day need to pretend to be a dunse? Zhong Youyou released a sigh in her mind and then began to fill in the blank questions randomly.
There were eight fill-in-the-blank questions in total. Like the previous ones, she knew the answers to them at a glance, but because of the math teacher’s intervention, she decided to mix the answers up and fill in seven wrong answers. She also scratched her hair from time to time to sell the act of a completely confused student.
The math teacher stood beside her for a while, but finally gave up on his doubts after seeing her make so many mistakes while filling in the blanks.
‘…It seems Zhong Youyou is still the same old empty-headed Zhong Youyou. The first multiple-choice questions were all right, but that was probably a case of a blind cat running into a dead rat… Though she has really good luck; each multiple choice question has four options — amounting to only a twenty-five percent chance of a random choice being correct — yet she made wild guesses and managed to get ten right.’
After the math teacher left, Zhong Youyou relaxed.
After that she started to answer the remaining questions in the same way; even if she knew the right answer, she would choose to put down the wrong one. However, when she came to the final question, she found it so well-designed that she couldn’t resist putting down the correct answer.
The two-hour test ended quickly. The test, held every Friday afternoon, was considered a quiz for the whole grade, and so, after its completion, classes for the day were over.
Zhong Youyou stretched lazily and then stood up and began to pack her bag. On weekdays, the two siblings, Zhong Xiyou and Meng Shixuan, would be picked up together by the driver. Since she didn’t get along with the siblings, she always took the bus back home.
But today, she didn’t want to go home early, and instead wanted to go to the mall to shop. After looking at her wardrobe earlier in the morning, she had been shocked and had already discarded one of the clothes she’d found — the leopard print pants — and so, she decided that the rest of her afternoon would be spent buying some normal clothes that aligned with her identity as a student, and also saved Mr and Mrs Zhongs’ face.
“Zhong Youyou, how did you do on the test?”
The boy seated behind her, on catching sight of the pretty side view of her face as she focused on arranging her bag, felt so struck by her beauty that he couldn’t help but speak up.
Zhong Youyou looked back at him and responded, “Not bad.”
Not too far away from them, Xu Xiaoyue was annoyed. The test paper this time had been too difficult. She hadn’t completed the three big questions at the end — that was a total of fifty points missed! It was obvious that, even if she got all the questions before them correct, she couldn’t possibly get a good score! Not to mention that, when she had actually been solving those questions, she hadn’t had a clue of what to do!
Hearing Zhong Youyou’s words, Xu Xiaoyue’s annoyance immediately bubbled into anger, and so she spoke sarcastically, “What do you mean ‘Not Bad’? Did you do everything?”
Zhong Youyou, knowing that she had put the wrong answers down on purpose, responded with a calm “No.”
Xu Xiaoyue snorted coldly, compared to Zhong Youyou she still had a chance of scoring high. Who didn’t know that Zhong Youyou’s grades were terrible? Every time the class handed out papers after the test, she was one of the last to go up to collect them. Wasn’t that embarrassing? Thinking up to that point, Xu Xiaoyue felt her pride being restored, and she asked, “Can you please tell me the answer to the last multiple-choice question?”
The last multiple-choice question had been a bit difficult, but her tutor had explained it to her before, so she had been able to do it. But that question was one she guessed that few people in the class would be able to do.
Zhong Youyou looked at Xu Xiaoyue, amusement in her eyes, and said, “I chose C.”
That question was actually a very common variation of second-order multiplication, but it had a trap. If one didn’t pay attention, they could easily be induced to choose D.
On hearing her response, however, Xu Xiaoyue smiled victoriously and responded, “Zhong Youyou, you are wrong.”
And then she firmly continued, “The answer is D.”
After seeing Zhong Youyou write so quickly after getting the paper, she had thought she had studied well for the test — but it turned out that she had been filling them in blindly!
On hearing Xu Xiaoyue’s words, a girl next to her suddenly cried out, “Huh? Option D? Oops, I chose A! That question was too difficult, I could only choose randomly, but it was such bad luck. I didn’t even have a few points of luck?
Xu Xiaoyue said smugly, “It’s okay, it was really hard this time.”
The girl said, “But you made the right choice, so you definitely did well on the test this time.”
The anxiety in Xu Xiaoyue’s heart slightly mellowed at her words, so she raised the corners of her lips in a smile, said a few words of modesty, and then cast a slightly arrogant look at Zhong Youyou.
‘…Child, you are still too young.’
Zhong Youyou was too lazy to argue with this group of high school students who were three years younger than her, so she turned away quietly and walked out of the classroom with her school bag on her back.
But then the boy who had been chatting with her some moments ago suddenly spoke up in response.
“Xu Xiaoyue, we know you have good grades, can’t you say less?”
Hearing his words as she walked, Zhong Youyou felt very surprised that someone would actually do that for her. In the novel, the original ‘Zhong Youyou’ had been stated to be very unpopular in her class. Could it be that today’s facelift had changed these people’s impressions?
Speaking of which, the original owner had played a really bad hand. She had been so obsessed with getting the attention of the Zhong family that she had styled herself so she had that inhuman and ghostly appearance. But the aftermath of her rebellion was that she ruined herself, and no one felt sorry for her.
‘If she were like Meng Shixuan and looked pretty every day, she wouldn’t have been so unpopular in the class, right?’
Zhong Youyou sighed, and then, suddenly, the cell phone in her jacket pocket rang.
She pulled out from the pocket and suddenly her footstep paused — it was a call from Mrs. Zhong.
She was quite puzzled. In the novel, Mother Zhong had never wanted so much as to speak a few words to her daughter in person, let alone make a phone call!
‘…Did something happen?’
It couldn’t be that something had happened to Meng Shixuan and she was calling to scold her again, right?
Before she could answer it, the sudden sound of a series of hurried footsteps coming from in front of her drew her attention to the corridor, where she caught sight of Zhong Xiyou pushing aside several classmates as he ran towards her.
The second-year teaching building was quite far away from the third-year building, and yet, Zhong Xiyou had already arrived at her building when it hadn’t been more than five minutes since the bell had been rung. That alone made it obvious how fast he had run to check for her — not to mention the fact that his face was flushed red and filled with sweat from the run.
“Sister, you came to school?”
Zhong Xiyou sounded a little surprised, but he quickly shook it off, walked over to her to pull the school bag off her shoulder and flung it behind himself, smiling gently all the while.
“I’ll carry it for you.”
Zhong Youyou was speechless.
‘Why are these characters from the novel behaving so weirdly?’
She knew where the sense of dissonance lay — Zhong Xiyou had behaved strangely earlier in the day, even going as far as to serve her porridge, but she hadn’t thought much about it at the time.
But now it was even weirder. Shouldn’t he have been busy treating Meng Shixuan with this gentle attitude? What was he doing pestering her now?