Su Yiting’s good mood inexplicably turned sour. Lying on the table, she bit on the end of her pen for a while before surreptitiously sending Lu Qiaochen a message. “Hey, what have you been up to lately?”

Lu Qiaochen’s reply came much later. There were no words, only a single picture. It was a picture of a tall stack of mathematics questions that Su Yiting hated more than anything in the world.

Su Yiting pouted and shoved her phone back into the drawer to ignore Lu Qiaochen.

Normally, when she didn’t reply to Lu Qiaochen, Lu Qiaochen would send her another message to ask her what was wrong, but this time, even when school was over, Su Yiting didn’t receive another message from Lu Qiaochen.

Even after returning home, Su Yiting couldn’t stop glancing at her phone. She was so distracted that she answered less than twenty percent of her homework questions correctly.

But this was weird. Why would Lu Qiaochen not replying to her make her more anxious than when Liang Yang didn’t reply to her?

Su Yiting bit on the end of her pen in thought. Eventually, she snapped a picture of a math question and sent it to Lu Qiaochen. She attached it with a crying emoji and a plea of “Teach me.”

Then, Su Yiting started an internal countdown, starting from ten, nine, eight, seven… There was still no call when she reached one.

Previously when she didn’t know how to solve an equation, she only needed to snap a picture to Lu Qiaochen, and he would video-call her in less than ten seconds to give her a precise explanation.

But today…

Su Yiting pouted and was about to switch off her phone out of anger when her phone rang. It was a call from Lu Qiaochen. She hurried to answer it, and she only managed to get out the “Brother” from “Brother Qiaochen” before Lu Qiaochen interrupted her and explained the solution of the problem to her in a very formal tone. When he was done, he asked, “Understood?”

The moment Su Yiting replied that she understood, the phone was hung up. Su Yiting’s mood dropped to the darkest abyss.

Until Su Yiting graduated from high school, other than the “good luck” she received before her midterms, Lu Qiaochen never voluntarily contacted Su Yiting. Even when Su Yiting was messaging him, he seemed like he was in that state of being forced to communicate with Su Yiting. As this continued, Su Yiting also stopped trying to talk to Lu Qiaochen, and the two childhood friends slowly parted from each other.

In fact, during summer holiday, there was one whole month where Lu Qiaochen and Su Yiting hadn’t said a word to each other.

Just as Su Yiting and Lu Qiaochen’s relationship was going to wilt and die, Su Yiting was ‘dumped’ by Liang Yang.

Technically, she wasn’t dumped. It was because Liang Yang was leaving the country. Liang Yang’s mother had discovered their secret relationship, and she ordered him to ‘deal’ with it before he moved overseas. Liang Yang argued with his mother for a mere ten minutes before he surrendered. Under his mother’s scrutiny, he wrote a hundred-word message to Su Yiting. He explained as best he could, and after the message was sent, his phone was confiscated by his mother.

Honestly, when Su Yiting received Liang Yang’s message, she was a little bit saddened but not to the point of having her heart broken as the web novels like to describe. However, this didn’t stop her from learning from the web novels and calling all of her friends one by one, pretending to cry, asking them to join her at the bar because she was going to nurse her ‘broken heart’ with plenty of alcohol.

The first person that came to her mind was Lu Qiaochen. Lu Qiaochen, who sounded cold and detached on the phone, suddenly turned into a concerned friend when he heard she had been dumped. “I know a place that’s not bad. Shall we go there? I’ll pick you up.”