Doing It Over Again

After the school year began, life fell into a routine. In Shen Shao’s previous life, whenever he had free time at home he used to read books and take self-tests. Relearning junior high school-level knowledge wasn’t difficult. On the contrary, he actually thought the questions on the admissions exam were easier than they would be in future years. At least they didn’t give children problems from the Mathematical Olympiad as ordinary homework.

As an adult with experience in social interaction, he didn’t have much trouble making friends with a group of half-grown kids. Everyone knew he’d taken first place in the grade, but he usually played basketball with the other boys to get exercise.

The school’s playing field was a simple concrete pad. There was no so-called rubber runway for track and field, just an ordinary dirt track. In the middle of the playing field was a basketball hoop, and in another corner was a platform made of bricks for table tennis. This was the experimental junior high’s physical education field. As for the football field, tennis court, and swimming pool that many schools would have in the future, they didn’t exist.

However, most of the students were satisfied with the equipment. They could play table tennis on the table made of sand and brick. In this period, almost all students could play table tennis with varying degrees of skill. If anyone wanted to play badminton, there wasn’t a specific field, but they could buy a pair of badminton rackets for under ten yuan, draw a dividing line down the middle, and enjoy a lively game.

The world of these junior high school children was uncomplicated. Whenever it was time for physical education or music class, they were all smiles, but when it came to the three main courses of Chinese, math, and English, the joyful atmosphere disappeared.

After nearly two months of school, people thought of Shen Shao as serious and studious without being detached from the group. This image was deeply ingrained in the minds of his teachers and classmates in Class 1. When curious people from other classes asked what he was like, most students talked about him with admiration and rarely felt jealous. When people are young, they openly say what they think instead of weighing each word according to their self-interest. Whether they liked or disliked someone, they made it clear. It was only over time, as they became adults, that this heartfelt insistence on speaking plainly would gradually wear smooth, and they grew skilled at dancing with long sleeves.

Regardless of what would happen in the future, the students of experimental Class 1 would soon face one of their biggest challenges—the midterm exam. It was the most significant exam they would face since entering school. More importantly, the exam would rank everyone in the grade, and the results would be posted on the school bulletin board, which added invisible pressure. So the students went out to play less, and after class, aside from going to the restroom, they sat at their desks and read. As the saying goes, they were sharpening their spears just before going into battle, doing last-minute cramming so they wouldn’t lose face for the experimental class.

The students who’d entered the class through the back door were even more nervous than everyone else, because if their grades were in the bottom ten of the class this semester, they might be reassigned to one of the general classes. They didn’t want the humiliation of getting into the experimental class only to be sent to an ordinary class.

It wasn’t clear who was the first student to ask Shen Shao for help with a question, but they got a detailed answer. Soon other classmates also began to go to Shen Shao when they had trouble. There were other students in the class with good grades who obviously could have helped too, but they sometimes pretended not to know. Wasn’t everyone worried about competition on the exam? Why didn’t Shen Shao seem to care?

Shen Shao was surprised. After class, more and more classmates were coming to him for help. By the end of the day he felt like a junior teacher.

“Hey, did you hear?” Yang HongQiang came up to Shen Shao with an air of mystery. “One of the ordinary classes is saying we have an empty reputation and our grades aren’t much better than theirs.”

“Well, a lot of people in the ordinary class do well.” Shen Shao didn’t think it was a good idea to sort students into classes based on grades, but that was the way things were done these days and it wasn’t up to him. It was normal for a general class and experimental class to quarrel. Naturally, nobody wanted to admit to being worse than someone else.

“The thing that matters most is your own grades, not anyone else’s.” After Yang HongQiang began sharing a desk with Shen Shao, his admiration grew like a surging river. Good grades, good looks, good in sports even, liked by teachers as well as students. How many people in their class could say that?

What Yang HongQiang didn’t know was that in ten or twenty years, such people would be called “male gods” or “winners in life”.

“Instead of thinking so much about those things, think about how to raise your grade on the midterm.” Shen Shao took his math book out of the drawer. “Next class is math. Be careful, Mr. Yang might ask you to get up and do a problem.”

Yang HongQiang suddenly shrank down. He looked at the neatly written notes in Shen Shao’s math book, then at the pages in his own book where he hadn’t written a single word. He suddenly felt it wasn’t unreasonable for Shen Shao to be first in the class. At least he worked hard.

At first Shen Shao’s daily school life was calm and uneventful. No one knew who began spreading the rumors that Shen Shao was an orphan without a father or mother, his family was miserably poor, and so on.

Shen Shao was well-known, the top student in the entire grade, and the gossip soon spread to everyone. Eventually there were all kinds of versions of the story.

When the students in Class 1 heard the rumors, some of them didn’t believe it, but others went around secretly repeating everything. A lot of students from their class came from well-off families. In normal times they never came into contact with anyone from such bad circumstances. They saw Shen Shao every day and mostly just thought he was good at tutoring his classmates.

However, by the time the midterm exams were over, a lot of students had begun to stammer nervously in front of Shen Shao, and fewer went up to ask him for help. Shen Shao heard about the rumors too, but he didn’t care. Anyway, that kind of talk couldn’t affect him much.

On the Friday afternoon before the holiday break, Yang HongQiang, who’d been holding back for several days, finally couldn’t stop himself. “Shen Shao, is it true what those kids are saying about you?”

The moment he said this, the students in front and behind them immediately turned to stare at Shen Shao. Obviously, there was a lot of interest in this question.

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“You mean the rumor that my mom committed suicide and my dad ran away with another woman?” Because of the holiday, Shen Shao was packing up a few textbooks and preparing to go home to study. When he heard Yang HongQiang ask this question, he paused, then ducked his head and said in a low voice, “What they said is true. Right now I live on the money my mom left me to study. I live in a rented house. If you look down on me and don’t want to be friends with me anymore, I understand.”

“How, how could I look down on you?” Yang HongQiang stammered and quickly explained, “That’s not what I meant. I just… I just care about you, really!”

“Yeah, please don’t be sad, okay? That’s not what we meant.” The girl in the front seat, Yang XiaoXia, was the daughter of a business owner. Although her grades weren’t very good, she was able to enter the experimental class after her parents pulled some strings. “We just didn’t know what to believe, that’s all.”

Shen Shao intended to take advantage of these children’s sympathy, but it was best to take a light approach instead of making a solemn announcement or telling people how pitiful he was. “That’s good. I was just worried that after everyone knew, you wouldn’t want to be friends with me anymore.”

The other students looked at the bright smile on Shen Shao’s face. They were too young to be able to name the soft, tingling emotion in their hearts, but at an unconscious level, they formed another layer of good feelings for Shen Shao. They didn’t want him to be sad about those rumors outside, and they began to reassure him with childish language.

Shen Shao looked at his classmates and couldn’t help but smile. The kindness and innocence of these children was a precious thing.

Because the third-year students didn’t have extra classes that weekend, the students of year one and two were excused from evening study on Friday night. The students of grade one and two felt excited whenever the third year students had monthly leave, because they had fewer classes too.

After school ended in the afternoon, a throng of students rode their bikes home from the experimental junior high. Shen Shao, carrying a few books, watched the excited students and smiled as he walked back to his apartment.

When he got to the apartment building, he heard news that a family downstairs wanted to sell their place. Their apartment had a total area of 110 square meters and was selling for a little more than 25,000 yuan, including the furniture and household appliances. However, this was a time when most rural people were still in the mindset of saving enough money to build a two-story house on their land. They thought living in the city was expensive, because they’d have to pay for water and couldn’t farm their own food to ensure their livelihood. That was why so few people were willing to spend tens of thousands of yuan to buy houses in town. After all, twenty or thirty thousand yuan was almost the entire life savings of many families.

Shen Shao, however, felt a little excited.. He knew that two years from now this building would be slated for expropriation and demolition, and the relocated households would get a lot of compensation. Even the smaller, dilapidated, tile-roofed houses nearby would get a large payout.

Right now, the average price of rental housing in the capital was just two or three thousand yuan per square meter, not to mention here in their small, backward county. According to the current market, a price of 25,000 for a pre-owned house was indeed on the high side.

When Shen Shao found the owner to talk about the apartment, the other party had trouble believing a half-grown child was serious about buying it. However, after he saw Shen Shao’s serious face when discussing the price, the man began to answer casually with a “why not” attitude.

He was surprised when, in the end, that half-grown child really bought the house at a price of 23,800 yuan after transaction costs. The homeowner didn’t know or care how Shen Shao came by so much money. He happily told Shen Shao how filial his daughter was and how well-developed the capital was now. His family was going to move there soon.

Shen Shao listened quietly the whole time. As he was about to leave, he asked, as if he didn’t care, whether anyone else nearby was selling a house, saying that a few relatives were also interested in buying here.

When the owner heard this he felt excited, because it meant he might earn some referral fees. He patted his chest and promised to help Shen Shao contact some sellers in a few days, although most of their places weren’t as good as his.

Shao was buying for the future demolition payments and didn’t care what shape the houses were in. So one day later, with the help of the homeowner, Shen Shao looked over the other houses and began discussing price with the sellers. In the end, he bought three more apartments as well as a slightly dilapidated tile-roofed house priced at 5,000 yuan.

After finishing the transfer procedures, Shen Shao was glad there was no policy restriction on housing purchases. As long as he had the money, he could buy multiple properties, and the state didn’t stipulate that minors weren’t allowed to buy houses or deny them property rights. Otherwise, even if he knew there was such an opportunity, all he could do was watch.

When he returned home, he removed the black-framed glasses that had no prescription, took off his bat-winged shirt, looked at the property deeds in his hand and breathed a long sigh of relief.

He’d also posted several rental notices outside. It would be a waste to leave the houses unoccupied. Much better to rent them out and earn money for his monthly living expenses.

Even a mosquito’s leg was meat, no matter how small, not to mention he wasn’t exactly rich right now.

After the weekend, the biggest thing on the minds of the students of the experimental junior high was the posting of the midterm exam results. If their grades were too low, they’d have a miserable time after the parent-teacher meeting.

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