My Deskmate Chapter 18
Translated by Q the Panda (ko-fi)
Chapter 18
Chi Ye’s shoulder was a little too warm. His breath fanned out, tickling Wen Xiao. But Wen Xiao stood firmly, motionless and silent.
The clanging sounds from the construction site gradually faded until they were no longer audible. The last customer at the barbecue stall finished their meal and left. The owner came out of the shop, sat on a plastic stool, and lit a cigarette.
Wen Xiao’s gaze fixed on the flickering neon sign across the street. Suddenly, he remembered the night before. He had stayed up late solving problems, working until three in the morning. Just as he was about to open the bedroom door to head to the bathroom, he heard a faint sound from outside.
His grandma, thinking he was already asleep, came out of the bedroom and gently opened the study door. A short while later, soft crying could be heard. It was low and muffled, as if she was trying to control herself so as not to wake him.
He stood behind the bedroom door, his hand resting on the cold metal handle, listening without being able to name the feeling it stirred inside him.
They lived together, each doing their best to maintain a normal, peaceful front in front of the other. It was as if time had smoothed out all the sharp edges of what had happened, and those edges could no longer pierce them or cause them pain.
But what else could they do?
To this day, neither he nor his grandmother could bring themselves to turn the photo frame over. They had kept it turned face down.
Unhappiness often outnumbered happiness, and life seemed to follow this ratio and rhythm.
Another taxi passed on the road, honking its horn as it went by.
Wen Xiao heard Chi Ye suddenly speak. “You smell good.”
Wen Xiao: “Do you want to fight?”
Chi Ye let out a low laugh, his voice a bit husky. “Your prickly personality is really attractive.”
Wen Xiao couldn’t be bothered with this drunken nonsense.
Chi Ye didn’t give up. “You really do smell good. I’m not making it up.”
Wen Xiao was too lazy to reply. He lifted his right leg, preparing to knee him.
Chi Ye reacted quickly, blocking Wen Xiao’s attack with one hand and quickly stepping back. “A gentleman uses words, not fists. And if you knee me, I might throw up.”
Wen Xiao frowned and sized him up. Cautiously, he shifted to the side. “Can you stand steady?”
Chi Ye mumbled a “mm” sound. “My head is still heavy, and my stomach is churning, but I won't fall over. Thanks. If you hadn't come, I would have had to hug this lamppost.” He gestured to a nearby streetlight, and as Wen Xiao followed his gaze, he saw a bunch of explicit images that were completely inappropriate and better left unseen.
Chi Ye retracted his finger.
Wen Xiao wasn’t paying attention. He checked the time. “Where should we go now? Home?”
“Not yet. Yaya’s asleep, but she sleeps lightly at this hour. If I go back and make any noise, she’ll definitely wake up and jump out of bed to look for me.”
Eventually, the two of them arrived at the basketball court, the one not far from Wen Xiao's apartment.
It was late, and there wasn’t a soul in sight. Wild cats darted through the bushes, their cries eerie in the stillness. From somewhere in the residential building, there came a faint voice: “What’s three times five? You know it’s fifteen. What about five times three? Five times three?” A moment later, intermittent sobs followed.
Wen Xiao kicked a stone at his feet, looking up at the basketball hoop with no net. “What are we doing here?”
“Play basketball?”
Wen Xiao looked at Chi Ye as if he were a drunken fool who had lost his mind.
Chi Ye sat beneath the basketball hoop, his legs stretched out, making them look impossibly long. He pointed ahead. “This court... my dad used to bring me here to play basketball when I was a kid. He had long legs, could take big steps, and I was short back then, couldn’t keep up no matter how hard I tried. So, I cheated and hugged his leg. I never expected he could still make a basket just standing there.”
Wen Xiao wasn’t sure if it was the alcohol talking, but for the first time, he heard something about Chi Ye’s family.
“All’s fair in war, but in the end, it’s strength that determines the winner.”
A brief wave of sadness rose in Chi Ye, but it was quickly washed away. He laughed and looked up. “You really hold grudges, don’t you, deskmate? You remember everything I’ve said, every single word.”
It was unclear whether it was due to the cold, but Wen Xiao pulled the hood of his sweatshirt up. With the poor lighting, only the tip of his white chin was visible.
Wen Xiao adjusted the strap of his shoulder bag. “I just have a good memory.”
“Later, I brought Yaya here to play basketball once. My legs are long, hers are short, and she’s not as clever as I was at that age. She kept missing the ball. At first, she stood there crying, but then, with tears still in her eyes, she took a lollipop from somewhere and popped it into her mouth. While sucking on it, she mumbled, ‘Gege, you can do it.’”
Wen Xiao didn’t ask about his father. The answer was obvious, no need to guess. Either he was dead or he'd left.
Remembering something, Wen Xiao held out the plastic bag he'd been carrying. “Zhao Yiyang asked me to bring this for you. Grilled meat, bought at the snack street.” Then he realized, “It’s probably cold by now.”
He started to pull it back.
To his surprise, Chi Ye moved quickly, reaching out and grabbing the bag from Wen Xiao’s finger. “You brought it all the way from school. It’d be a shame to throw it away. I’ll try a bite.”
He bit into it. “Hiss, it’s really spicy.”
Seeing Chi Ye still planning to eat more, Wen Xiao stretched his hand out in front of Chi Ye. “How’s your stomach holding up?”
Maybe realizing he had just downed a lot of alcohol, Chi Ye sheepishly handed the bag of grilled meat back to Wen Xiao. “Okay, I won’t eat it.”
By the time Wen Xiao returned after throwing away the trash, Chi Ye had stood up. He braced himself against the basketball hoop to steady himself.
“Let’s go, it’s time to head back.” His gaze fell on some distant point. “Memories... they’re really not that interesting.”
Memories of the past, however beautiful, only served to deepen the weight of the present circumstances. They had no real purpose, not even offering any comfort.
Without waiting for Wen Xiao’s response, Chi Ye zipped up his jacket, slipped his hands into his pockets, and turned toward the exit of the basketball court.
As he passed by, Wen Xiao caught Chi Ye’s words — "So, I want to become my own sun."
Three days passed, and Chi Ye still hadn’t shown up at school. Zhao Yiyang had been waiting, eager to ask him about the grilled meat, but he never saw him.
After finishing morning exercises and returning to the classroom, Zhao Yiyang sighed as he turned toward the empty desk. “Sigh, Wen Xiao, do you think...”
“What?”
Zhao Yiyang hesitated. “Do you think Chi-ge might have been stabbed?”
He rubbed his nose. “I heard from the class next door that there was a fight two streets away yesterday. It was so intense that even the police got involved. Someone who passed by said one of the people looked exactly like Chi Ye. And since he hasn’t been at school for three days, I’m worried. What if he got stabbed? Some people even said the fight was organized by him, that he’s actually a small-time gang leader!”
Wen Xiao glanced toward the classroom door. “He wasn’t stabbed.”
“How can you be so sure? Do you know something we don’t? Is Chi-ge really a gang leader—”
Wen Xiao interrupted his rapid-fire questions. “He’s here, just ask him yourself.”
Zhao Yiyang froze for a few seconds before turning around. There was Chi Ye, carrying an empty backpack, walking around the podium, dressed neatly in his school uniform.
He didn’t look like someone who had been seriously injured and was on the verge of death.
Chi Ye met Zhao Yiyang’s gaze. “What, your Chi-ge didn’t get any plastic surgery. Is that the kind of face you’d make after not seeing me for eight hundred years?”
Zhao Yiyang: “Chi-ge, you... are you okay?”
Chi Ye raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean'?”
The topic was starting to teeter on dangerous ground, so Zhao Yiyang quickly recovered. “I didn't see you for two days, so I was worried you were sick.”
“I wasn't here for the first week of school, why didn't I see you worried then?”
“Back then, there wasn’t this rumor...” Zhao Yiyang trailed off, worried that Chi Ye might ask what the rumor was. He actually believed it wholeheartedly, as if his brain had gone on vacation.
He turned and sat down, noticing that several girls were standing by the windows near the corridor. From their uniforms, most were from the first and second years, with a few scattered third-years among them.
“Damn, this is impressive. Wen Xiao, Chi-ge, look at the windows down the hall.”
Wen Xiao and Chi Ye looked over, and the next second, they heard a chorus of surprised gasps from the doorway.
“You two are so good-looking, you’ve even attracted the senior girls who are about to take their exams! What does that mean? It means your looks have defeated the weight of the exam papers!”
Wen Xiao glanced over briefly, then lost interest and lowered his head to continue working on his problems. Chi Ye had no homework, so he propped his legs up. Picking up a pen from Wen Xiao’s desk, he began twirling it in his fingers while chatting with Zhao Yiyang. “Do you think more people came here to see me or to see my deskmate?”
Zhao Yiyang didn’t have a good answer, so he tossed the question back at him. “What do you think, Chi-ge?”
“I think there are more people looking at my deskmate. He's more attractive than me — ouch!”
As soon as the words left his mouth, Wen Xiao kicked him under the desk.
Chi Ye sucked in a breath. “Deskmate, you're really ruthless!”
Wen Xiao had solved half of a difficult math problem when he got a stuck. He thought that having Chi Ye as a deskmate was essentially the same as having none at all.
Sitting up straight, Chi Ye glanced over at Wen Xiao’s test paper. He could tell that Wen Xiao had hit a wall and was probably getting frustrated. So, with a knowing motion, Chi Ye mimicked zipping up a jacket. “You solve your problems, I’ll stay on silent mode.”
Following lunch, the classroom filled up with students. With the teacher out, some were doing practice questions, some were memorizing, some were secretly reading manhua under their book covers, and others were sneakily watching live streams with their phones hidden in their uniform sleeves. It was quite noisy.
Chi Ye walked in with four bottles of iced tea in his arms, followed by Shangguan Yu, who carried three more bottles.
The drinks were neatly lined up on the desks, arranged perfectly.
Zhao Yiyang was stunned. “Chi-ge, are you the lost son of a billionaire. Why the sudden generosity?”
Shangguan Yu, who had gone to the store with Chi Ye, answered, “Chi-ge bought a bottle of iced tea, opened it, and it said ‘Won one bottle.’ So he took another one, and it said ‘Won one bottle’ again.”
Zhao Yiyang was even more shocked. “No way, did all of these come like this?”
Shang Guan Yu nodded. “The shopkeeper wants to close up, so he let the dogs out and hang a sign that says, ‘No entry for Chi Ye.’”
Zhao Yiyang grinned. “Chi-ge, each bottle is 500 mL, so seven bottles is 3500. You definitely can't finish all of that. We're the successors of socialism. Just look at how bright our collective badge is! How about you give us one bottle to share some good luck?”
Chi Ye blocked Zhao Yiyang’s reaching hand. “Don’t move, my deskmate picks first.”
As he spoke, he tapped his fingers on the desk. “Which one do you want?”
Wen Xiao picked the bottle closest to him.
After the seven bottles of iced tea were divided up, Zhao Yiyang excitedly opened the caps, only to find that two bottles in a row said "Thank you for your patronage." He looked over at Shangguan Yu and Wen Xiao’s bottles — exactly the same bottle. Not convinced, Zhao Yiyang opened the rest of the bottles, only to find they all had the same message: "Thank you for your purchase."
Finally, his gaze landed on Wen Xiao’s hand.
Wen Xiao set his pen down, twisted open the cap, and, under the watchful eyes of everyone, read aloud the line on the bottle cap, “Won one bottle.”
Zhao Yiyang smacked his forehead against the desk. “This is incredible! Chi-ge's luck must have been transmitted specifically toward you, right?”
Chi Ye laughed. “Exactly. Got a problem with that?”
The lunch break at Mingnan Affiliated High School was not long, just an hour and a half including the time for eating. The default nap time was from 1:30 to 2:00 pm. But most students couldn't sleep for that long — they were often interrupted by teachers from various subjects for various reasons.
The English teacher entered the classroom holding a stack of graded assignments, distributing them to the students in the front row, who then passed them back.
“These are the assignments you handed in this morning. The questions were harder than usual, but your accuracy was unbelievably low. I marked so many mistakes I nearly wore my hand out. With such a level, how do you expect to take the college entrance exam? How can you compete with millions of others...?”
The classroom was silent, no one spoke, except for the soft rustling of papers being passed around.
After emphasizing the importance of doing the exercises seriously, the English teacher walked down from the podium, her high heels clicking sharply against the floor.
She stopped at the last row and called out Wen Xiao’s name. “Your accuracy on this test was quite good. I hope you continue to keep it up.”
Her tone shifted as she looked at Chi Ye, sitting at the next desk. “Chi Ye,” she called, but realized that she had said what she needed to say countless times already. Chi Ye remained carefree. Frustrated with this student, she finally sighed and left him with one last remark, “If you don’t listen to your teachers, you’ll regret it one day.”
After the English teacher left through the back door of the classroom, Chi Ye slouched against the wall, speaking to Wen Xiao. “She wasn’t entirely right. I only listen to one teacher.”
Wen Xiao thought he was referring to Old Xu. Among all the teachers, Chi Ye only respected Old Xu, probably because Old Xu rarely scolded him.
To Wen Xiao’s surprise, Chi Ye’s voice, clear and lazy, floated over to him. “I only listen to Teacher Xiao Wen.”