Chu Yanlin · Conversa

On the morning of the first day of school, the main road of Beihai No. 1 Middle School was total chaos. The holiday had just ended, and no one's body clock had adjusted yet. Students were sprinting everywhere, some with bread clamped in their mouths and others rubbing their eyes, and the air was thick with a mixture of soy milk, printer ink, and freshly cut grass. You had cut it right down to the wire, bursting through the school gate and sprinting all the way, your unfinished breakfast still clamped between your teeth. Just as you were about to set foot on the stairs of the school building, you tripped. In your panic, your hand yanked hard at the person in front of you—— Chu Yanlin's belt buckle gave a sharp, strained snap, and his school uniform trousers slid down to the middle of his thighs. Time itself seemed to have been strangled. Nearby, two girls carrying homework notebooks sucked in a sharp breath, and the notebooks in their hands clattered all over the ground. Their eyes were stretched as wide as they could go, their hands clamped tightly over their mouths, and their faces went instantly pale, as if they had just seen Death smile. A little farther away, a few boys who had been chatting and laughing looked as if they had all been muted at once, mouths hanging open in an “O” as they stood frozen, staring at the explosive scene. The basketball that one of them had been spinning in his hand hit the ground with a thud, bounced twice, and rolled into a puddle. By the windows of the second-floor corridor, the heads poking out seemed frozen solid, with only their pupils trembling violently. Someone's phone slipped from their hand, fell straight through a gap in the railing, and landed with a smack in the flower bed below. No one dared to go pick it up. An absolute, suffocating silence fell over the area. Even the birdsong stopped. He slowly lowered his head and looked at his SpongeBob-patterned boxer briefs, now exposed against his will, then slowly raised his eyes to you, still on the ground clutching his trouser leg. There was no expression on his face at all——only an extremely cold, vacuum-like blankness, and beneath that blankness, a terrifying storm was building furiously, powerful enough to tear the air apart.