Girls are a kind of divine creature. Naturally, school is a huge harem, and almost by instinct, all elementary school students learn to compete for favor. If the teacher smiles at someone, it makes everyone else extremely envious. Every day before school ends, the homeroom teacher summarizes the day’s events; the children who are criticized feel very upset, while those who are praised will, after dismissal, rush into their parents’ arms to proudly “show off.” Interestingly, the desk shared by Zoe Young and Zachary Lewis seems to be invisible—they have never received any praise or criticism. No matter how straight Zoe Young sits during quiet time, the ones who get praised are always the same few: Fiona James, Emily Xavier, Crystal Carter...

Moreover, Zoe Young’s life now has a new goal—the Little Red Flower Chart.

...So far, it’s still zero. Both red flowers and black flowers are zero. She and Zachary Lewis seem to be a baseline, sadly leaving a blank space.

Finally, on Wednesday of the second week after school started, after dinner, Zoe Young solemnly went to her grandma and said, “Grandma, I want to walk home by myself from now on.”

After finishing her IV drip, the doctor told Grandma to take a walk every day, so she would take Zoe Young and Tina Young to and from school every morning and evening. The elementary school attached to the Normal University is very close to their home, only about a fifteen-minute walk, and there’s no need to cross any main roads—just weaving through small streets and apartment buildings gets them home. Grandma thought for a moment, patted Zoe Young’s head, and said, “But I have to take Tilly. Isn’t it more convenient for you two to go together?”

“But I want to walk by myself.” Grandma raised her eyebrows and smiled, “Zoe, you don’t like Tilly, do you?”

Yes. Tina Young chatters endlessly like a sparrow all the way, talking about her class—from Mr. Zack to Andrew Lane to little red flowers to little black flowers to praise and criticism... Zoe Young doesn’t want to listen, not at all.

She doesn’t know if it’s because she’s jealous—Tina Young is ranked fifth on her class’s Little Red Flower Chart, and every day on the way home she asks, “Zoe Young, did you get a little red flower today?”

Mind your own business! Zoe Young doesn’t want to lie, so she can only shake her head. Tina Young never tires of asking, and after asking, she’ll vigorously shake Grandma’s hand, as if hoping Grandma will comment on the difference between her granddaughter and grandson—fortunately, Grandma always just smiles and stays silent. But she doesn’t want to say the word “hate” to Grandma, so she explains earnestly, “Our Mr. Hughes said we need to develop independence. If you don’t live far from school, it’s best not to have your parents pick you up.”

Zoe Young thought, is she really Brother Joe’s successor? She can make things up at the drop of a hat. Grandma thought for a moment and agreed with a smile. However, on the first day, she still quietly followed Zoe Young from a distance with Tina Young, and after seeing there was nothing to worry about, she felt at ease.

Zoe Young’s life improved a little because she could walk alone. The thoughts suppressed during the day at school were all released during the short fifteen-minute walk home. At some point, the face of the villainous BOSS in her mind was replaced by the arrogant vice class monitor Emily Xavier, and after transforming, Zoe Young became a little star even more dazzling than Little Swallow, completely quelling Emily Xavier’s arrogance.

The “Ah Q spirit” is an instinct of the Chinese people, cultivated from children like Zoe Young. The TV station started airing a new cartoon, “Robinson's Adventures,” and Zoe Young really liked the light and pleasant theme song, even though it was a mix of Japanese and English. “LonelyWalk, LonelyWalk...”

Brother Joe, who was in middle school, could speak English. He said these two words mean “walking alone.” No, it’s not lonely at all. However, Zoe Young’s happy, solitary journey lasted only a week before it came to an abrupt end. It happened on a black Tuesday...

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8. Black Tuesday

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Actually, that Tuesday already had “strange omens.” Before leaving home, Zoe Young looked at the gloomy sky and took her little red umbrella. Although the weather cleared up later, her world was drenched in a downpour.

Today, the results of the first test would be handed out. It was the first pinyin test since starting school, and Zoe Young thought she did pretty well. Although she felt a bit uneasy, she believed that this test would finally let her break her zero streak on the red flower chart.

Forty points. A bright red forty. And six big crosses, two check marks.

Zoe Young felt a tingling, sour sensation running from her neck to the back of her head, not knowing where it came from. Only ten students in the whole class didn’t get a hundred, and Zoe Young was second to last. She slowly walked up to receive her test paper and two eye rolls from Mr. Hughes, then turned and walked back to her seat with her head down, catching a glimpse of Emily Xavier and Fiona James at her desk.

Emily Xavier curled her lips and raised her eyebrows, the sneer on her face making the tingling in Zoe Young’s neck even worse. But what made her saddest wasn’t Emily Xavier’s indiscriminate disdain—it was Fiona James, who looked at her with those beautiful, dark eyes, not laughing, but with a bit of kind sympathy.

The kind of pity and kindness often seen on the faces of main characters in cartoons. Don’t look at me like that, please. Zoe Young turned her head and quickened her pace, and when she got back to her seat, she turned her face toward the window, avoiding Zachary Lewis’s gaze. When she first started learning pinyin, she had once pointed at a row of finals on the blackboard and asked in confusion, “What’s that?

Why are we learning these symbols instead of Chinese characters?” Zoe Young knew many of her questions were silly, so she only dared to ask Zachary Lewis. And Zachary Lewis never gave a real answer to “why”—his answers were always, Didn’t you do such-and-such before? Didn’t you do such-and-such in kindergarten?

For Zachary Lewis, there is no “why” in the world, only routine. Because it was done this way before, it must continue this way, like a river that just keeps flowing forward, without worrying about where it’s going.

So, the pinyin that everyone else had learned in kindergarten or preschool was a complete mystery to Zoe Young. She followed the teacher in reciting aoeiuü, bpmfdtnl... but still didn’t know what these strange symbols were. For someone like Zoe Young, who was used to guessing the meaning of Chinese characters from fairy tale plots, this was unacceptable, so she simply couldn’t memorize them. When the teacher started testing b-a-ba, p-o-po, she was completely lost.

What are these things? She let her imagination run wild during the test, but her spelling on the paper made Mr. Hughes furious. Forty points, forty points, forty points, forty points... She and Zachary Lewis both finally broke their zero streak on the big chart on the back wall, but unfortunately, what she got was a little black flower. Mr. Hughes announced that from now on, any student who scored a hundred on a test would get a reward. The reward was a two-jiao eraser from the stationery store, printed with the twelve zodiac animals. Mr. Hughes bought two big boxes of White Rabbit brand erasers, one with tigers and one with dragons, which happened to be the zodiac signs of most of the kids in the class. Zoe Young stared at Zachary Lewis’s eraser for a while, pursed her lips, folded her test paper, and stuffed it into her Chinese textbook.

She got one yuan of pocket money every day; she could buy an eraser herself. But an eraser from the teacher was different.

...A holy eraser. She still had the habit of putting “holy” in front of things.

Misfortune never comes alone. An hour later, during math class, Mr. Hughes came in carrying a huge stack of exercise books and slammed them heavily onto the podium.

Today she was wearing a bright green sweater with dark purple suit pants, and carrying a light blue bag—as humans, we long ago lost the animal instinct for danger, so Zoe Young didn’t realize that such a garish and bizarre combination was often a sign of disaster.

Actually, there was no need to guess from the colors. Half of the exercise books in that stack had several pages torn out and stuck in sideways. From below the podium, the uneven edges and varying widths of the paper, all mixed together and piled high, looked like a precarious tower of building blocks.

Another group of people was in trouble. Including Zoe Young, all the students stared solemnly at the tower on the podium, as if it were a holy tower deciding their fate. Zoe Young lowered her head, playing with the strap of her bag under the desk, trying hard to act as calm as a heroine who had weathered many storms.

But she still nervously glanced up at the podium, then quickly looked down. The homeroom teacher stood at the edge of the podium, pacing back and forth twice, her bulb-like eyes wilting the fifty-seven flowers of the motherland. The children were so scared they didn’t dare breathe, yet all homeroom teachers seem to love using a gloomy expression to create an atmosphere of terror, as if it gives them a sense of ruling over all.