Chapter 56:
And I Did Not Copy Him!
BACK THEN, He Yu had still been in junior high— a time when young men and women seemed to undergo new changes every day, shooting up vigorously like green sprouts.
He Yu grew taller with each passing day, his youthful figure becoming very sturdy and upright as his voice suddenly deepened. His newly tailored uniforms were beginning to look too short after only half a semester, so he often left two buttons on his white shirt open and bought shoes several sizes up.
Aside from the physical changes, the tone of his social interactions also began to change.
There were suddenly way more tittering girls around him, girls who would immediately fall quiet when he drew closer and then burst into giggles again after he walked away.
In his desk drawer, aside from his neatly placed textbooks, sealed envelopes of varying colors began to appear. They contained sheets of paper spritzed with perfume and covered in insipid words of love that gave him goosebumps.
Even worse, sometimes he would be stopped in the stairwell of one of the school buildings by a girl whose face he couldn’t even remember, one who would hand him a gift with hopeful anticipation, and he would have to smile politely, give her appropriate assurance and comfort, and try his hardest to reject her without hurting her feelings.
He invariably found this so troublesome it made his head ache.
He could admit that he put on more of a pretense than Wei Dongheng, the popular, good-looking boy several years older than him. Whenever this happened to Wei Dongheng, he’d roll his eyes while giving a rejection, the words “I’m expensive, you can’t afford me” written clearly on his face. Meanwhile, He Yu needed to show utmost consideration for his reputation.
Wei Dongheng was handsome, but he had nothing else going for him. Everyone knew he was a worthless slacker. He Yu, however, was a xueba, an outstanding model student who never made the teachers worry. As such, He Yu could only repeat the same dull rejections over and over again—he even had to comfort the girls after he rejected them. His patience soon wore thin, waiting for a love letter from Xie Xue that never came while countless other girls showered him with unwanted affection.
Indeed, by the beginning of his adolescence, He Yu had already confirmed his feelings for Xie Xue. Though he appeared unaffected on the outside, he paid special attention to Xie Xue’s every move with detached eyes, patiently listening to her prattle on about all her favorite male celebrities and trying to figure out common traits in the people she liked.
In the end, using an IQ that could solve math Olympiad problems in seconds, He Yu came to a conclusion that was hard for even him to accept.
Xie Xue was a brocon. The men she approved of, whether they were actors, singers, or fictional characters, always had something in common with Xie Qingcheng: they were all unbridled, or arrogant, or cold, or unyielding, just like him.
That wasn’t to say that she actually wanted to date her brother, of course. It was just that although her brother was afflicted with straight man cancer and had a ton of annoying shortcomings, Xie Xue never-theless admired him from the bottom of her heart. Back then, her taste in men had been undoubtedly influenced by Xie Qingcheng, and she felt that men like her brother were the most reliable.
The influence was so subtle that Xie Xue didn’t even realize it.
“Ah, this actor is so warm. He looks like my brother when he’s cooking,” she would say without thinking. Or “Ah, this actor is so handsome. My brother plays basketball like this too.” Or “Ah, why does this actor have such long hair… My brother says men should look like men and be more masculine…”
He Yu was quite conceited; he had always thought that he was good-looking and had decent taste. He didn’t understand what was so great about an old man like Xie Qingcheng, who had already been battered by the tides of time. At first, he was unwilling to compromise and wanted to drag Xie Xue’s sense of aesthetics over to his side instead.
But regardless of whether he was gentle and respectful or arrogant and depraved, if Xie Xue didn’t sense anything about him that reminded her of Xie Qingcheng, she would remain completely uninterested in him.
“Don’t loosen your buttons. Students should look like students,” she would chide him. Or she would comment, “You should wear your cool-weather slacks. Your school’s gym shorts are too casual. They don’t suit you.”
Later, after a bit of thought, Xie Xue actually dug out an old class photograph of her brother in high school. Perfectly earnest, she pointed at the tall boy in the corner and said, “See, you’d look better like this.”
The Xie Qingcheng in the photograph was very young and very handsome, but to He Yu, he looked massively old-fashioned and stuffy. What kind of person would wear their full uniform so stiffly and clean himself up so meticulously that it looked like he had disinfected his whole body and was about to walk into the ICU? Even the age of the photograph couldn’t hide the glaring whiteness of his T-shirt.
And his legs—it was truly a waste to hide such a long pair of legs under those slacks. Everyone else in the group photo was wearing summer shorts; only Xie Qingcheng was bundled up in cool-weather attire, an indifferent expression on his face as if the calmness of his heart could keep him from feeling the heat.
Was Xie Qingcheng crazy?
How could this be called good-looking?
But Xie Xue said, “It is! And look at the hairstyle he had, the clothes he was wearing. Aiya, even though their faces don’t look alike, his steady temperament is just like Francis Ng’s character in Infernal Affairs II, the family head da-ge from the Ni family. So handsome, so strong, so elegant, so much more handsome than all you schoolboys now!” She paused for a moment before clarifying to He Yu, “I’m not talking about you, of course. You’re all right, but your temperament is more like that young Officer Lau. He’s a villain, and he looks a bit roguish sometimes when he smiles.”