Chapter 113 Competition
"Fan Yingjie?" Liu Xingquan said.
Xiao Zhen nodded.
Yan Zhen's good friend, Liu Xingquan, tilted his head slightly, his dark bangs falling on his eyes. He said, "I think you know Fan Yingjie better than I do. You know, Fan Yingjie never talked to me before."
Asking you is like asking a useless question. "So do you think there was something wrong with him before this semester?"
Liu Xingquan shook his head with an expression that said, "I know nothing." Finally, he said, "Yan Zhen, why don't you ask Gao Yuan? He is the person who is closest to Fan Yingjie in the class."
In the back corner of the classroom, Gao Yuan was playing with a plastic soda bottle with his feet up. He had just caught two grasshoppers in it. After tightening the plastic bottle cap, he watched with relish as the two grasshoppers used their front legs to thrash around in the bottle.
"Fan Yingjie?" Gao Yuan didn't even raise his head, his eyes still fixed on the soda bottle, "I don't know what happened to him either."
"He hasn't been to class this semester. Have you visited him?"
"I went there several times. Teacher Feng also came to me and asked me to persuade him. But no matter what I said, this kid just refused to come to school. There was nothing I could do." Gao Yuan said sullenly.
"Then do you know what happened to him during the summer?"
Gao Yuan raised his head and narrowed his eyes, "Yan Zhen, you should know better than me."
"What?"
"I heard Fan Yingjie mention this during the summer vacation. He wanted to play a game with you." Gao Yuan lowered his head and tapped the bottle with his fingers. "He didn't bring me with him. You should know what happened to him better than I do."
"What game?"
"have no idea."
"Your grasshopper..."
"how?"
"Do you want to see them fight?" Xiao Zhen said, "I don't think you can see it."
"What? Look, their legs are flailing."
"This is a male and a female." Xiao Zhen stroked his chin and said, "They are preparing to mate."
“…”
Sure enough, the two grasshoppers leaned against each other, the tails of their bodies touching carefully, and began to mate.
"Grass!"
Amid the strange laughter of classmates around, the bell rang.
It was Teacher Lili who walked into the classroom. This class was an English class, but because Teacher Xiao Yuan suddenly asked for leave, Teacher Lili became the temporary .
Teacher Lili is fair-skinned, beautiful, tall, and has a cold temperament. She is completely different from Teacher Xiaoyuan. Teacher Xiaoyuan's lectures are as lively and relaxed as the spring breeze, while Teacher Lili uses a cold method to intimidate you to listen to the class. She always talks and writes on the blackboard in a leisurely manner when she teaches, and then suddenly picks students to ask questions without warning. Students who answer correctly will not receive any praise, but will only get a "hmm" from her as a matter of course, indicating that they should sit down. Once the students she picked out answer incorrectly, she will let out a strange sneer "ha". This sound is neither high nor low, but it is like a file that mercilessly scrapes the protective shell of the students' weak self-esteem. Whenever she throws this sneer, her eyes will narrow slightly, and with her pale and beautiful high cheekbones, the harshness can almost make the target students suspect that they are mentally retarded and wish they could be reborn immediately.
Unlike the strict teacher Li, who is usually a taciturn person, but once he starts to teach students, he will give them the same old long lectures, and they can retreat without any injuries as long as they divert their attention. Teacher Lily uses her sneer to teach students mentally. Her mental attack can directly crush you into the dust and crush all your ridiculous self-esteem. No student is immune.
"Iceberg witch" is what students secretly refer to Teacher Lily behind her back. Even Liu Xingquan, an excellent student, would refer to her as "that difficult woman".
Now she came to teach the English class, and the students in Class 2 couldn't help but feel like they had lost their parents. Everyone was terrified during the whole English class. Finally, when the bell rang, Teacher Lily suddenly announced something at the front desk.
"The next class is still English, but we will go to the audio-visual room with Class 1."
The students looked up at her, wondering what she was up to.
"It's an English competition between Class 1 and Class 2. The teachers will come to visit in a while. Students can choose the representative of Class 2 during the break."
…
"Why is there an English competition all of a sudden? It's too sudden."
"Fuck, she did it on purpose!" Xiang Zeyu shouted, "I heard that teachers from other schools came to visit these two days. Class 1 is a model benchmark class. She deliberately wanted to use Class 1 to beat Class 2 to show the school leaders and teachers from other schools."
"Too much!! Everyone in Team 1 must have been prepared. To surprise us is too much!"
"Don't be afraid. From what she said, she meant individual competition. Don't we have Liu Xingquan in our class?"
"Yes, we have Liu Xingquan and Xu Kewei!"
"Liu Xingquan, it all depends on you!"
Xiaozhen glanced at Liu Xingquan. He sat in his seat with a calm face, as if the upcoming English competition had nothing to do with him. His eyes were fixed on the blackboard that had been wiped clean, and he was daydreaming.
With Liu Xingquan, Class 2 should not lose. But Class 1 has Cui Mingzhi and Gu Yu, especially Gu Yu. She is the best girl in the grade. She is sharp and intelligent, strong in both arts and sciences. She has won many national competitions since elementary school and entered this key middle school with many halos. If she hadn't met Liu Xingquan, the overlord bug, she would have been the well-deserved queen of the second grade.
Even in this semester when Liu Xingquan was firmly in the lead, her grades were very close. Some of her scores in individual subjects had surpassed Liu Xingquan, and her overall score was only a decimal point away from the top of the grade. In fact, everyone in Class 1, including the teacher, was curiously waiting for this outstanding female student to dethrone Liu Xingquan. And it seemed that it was only a matter of time.
They went to the audio-visual room together. Class 1 had already arrived. Teacher Lily called several representative students to the front row. As expected, the contestants from Class 1 were Cui Mingzhi and Gu Yu. Liu Xingquan and several other selected contestants from Class 2 also sat in the front row.
Teacher Lili's pale cheeks were stained with moist red. Today's competition was undoubtedly a good opportunity to show the excellent students she taught. The teachers who came to visit sat in three full rows. With the nod of the school leaders, this temporary class English competition began.
The competition method is quick answer.
There are microphone grab buttons on the seats in the audio-visual room, and the contestants can answer the questions directly by quick response after listening to the questions.
It started with a simple word test, where students had to answer words based on the English meanings read out by Teacher Lily. The contestants from Class 2 and Class 1 competed fiercely, with Cui Mingzhi being the fastest. He answered , allowing Class 1 to take the lead right from the start.
The students from Class 1 and Class 2 who were watching the scene were whispering. Choi Ming-chi looked back at Xiao Zhen and made an apologetic gesture to him.
Then came the grammar fill-in-the-blanks projected on the screen by PPT. There were all kinds of grammars that gave the students headaches, such as past tense, past continuous tense, past perfect tense, present perfect tense, and all kinds of weird grammar traps. It was no longer possible to answer the correct answer in one go. The contestants began to make mistakes frequently. Xu Kewei and Sun Siyue from Class 2 each made a mistake, and Cui Mingzhi from Class 1 made two mistakes in a row. Gu Yu was calm and maintained her steady posture. She didn't answer quickly, but she answered correctly. Liu Xingquan seemed absent-minded. He hadn't answered in a rush since he sat down.
Liu Xingquan would only answer when it was his turn according to the procedure, and he rarely answered at other times. His passive attitude was soon noticed by the students in Class 2.
"What happened to Liu Xingquan?"
"I don't know."
"Look, Class 1 has answered the question again!"
"Squad leader, what's wrong with you?"
Liu Xingquan's eyes were just fixed on the table, as if he was counting the cracks on it. His head was lowered, his soft black hair covered his eyes, and one hand supported his white chin, as if he was not in this fierce competition.
Xiao Zhen decided to save Class 2 from the losing streak. He extended his consciousness tentacles, and the moment he touched the boy's forehead, he heard Liu Xingquan sighing in his heart in a Shakespearean tone: "Why, why, my pen pal didn't reply to my letter?"
“…”
Then Liu Xingquan lamented again in his heart in English.
"..." As expected of a top student, even his way of feeling sad is different from others. Xiao Zhen thought about it and sent him an irresponsible nonsense message hint, "If you play well in the game, your pen pal will write back to you." But Liu Xingquan is Liu Xingquan, his mental resistance is much stronger than Xiao Zhen thought, and this nonsense hint had almost no effect. It just made Liu Xingquan change his sitting posture and feel sad, and continue to ignore the game on the field.
Xiao Zhen thought about it and hinted, "Gu Yu is about to step on you, you better play well." But Liu Xingquan just glanced at the question and didn't mean to press the button on the table. Fortunately, Xu Kewei got the answer right, so Class 2 didn't fall behind badly.
But then it was Gu Yu's big performance, she answered four difficult grammar correction questions correctly in a row. Teacher Lily raised her head proudly with a smile on her face, now it was her and her students' stage.
The situation of Class 2 became increasingly worse. Sun Siyue lost the chance to answer questions because she got too many wrong answers. Only Xu Kewei was still fighting hard for Class 2. However, Gu Yu's speed and accuracy were truly astonishingly high.
Xiao Zhen felt that Class 2 was doomed to fail in this competition, so she gave up hope and sent another hint to Liu Xingquan: "If you continue to be so negative, your friend Yan Zhen will be very angry and he will break up with you!"
Liu Xingquan straightened up suddenly and pressed the button.
Liu Xingquan, who had returned to the battlefield, started a fierce battle with Gu Yu. He and Gu Yu answered almost at the same time, with only a millisecond difference. As long as they answered, whether it was Liu Xingquan or Gu Yu, their answers would be correct. So the competition became a wonderful battle between the two academic masters, and the students of Class 1 and Class 2 couldn't help but applaud and cheer for them. The fight between the two continued until Teacher Lily stopped the game.
Because Class 2 lost too many points in the early stage, the competition was won by Class 1. However, Liu Xingquan and Gu Yu's wonderful performance at the end of the competition won unanimous praise from the teachers. After the competition, Teacher Lili called Liu Xingquan and Gu Yu up and praised them in a rare gentle tone.
After school, Liu Xingquan picked up his schoolbag with a heavy heart. He came to the seventh teaching building of the school and took out the bottle under the seventh ball-shaped bush.
Liu Xingquan unscrewed the bottle cap and saw that the letter was still the same one he had put in ten days ago. There was no change.
His pen pal still hadn't replied.
