Chapter 5: The Handsome Guy Meets the Beauty

  In the few days after seeing Ding Ning, I called her several times, but it was always turned off. I couldn't think of this as a coincidence. Thinking about this, my mood started to deteriorate severely, and the reason is very complicated. If she were Tong Chen, why would she cheat me and hide from me...?

  With this question in mind, I vaguely finished two classes and finally made it to lunchtime. It's only at times like these that you can feel the vitality of the campus. After some discussion, my dorm-mates decided to go to the second cafeteria because they thought the chef there still had a bit of humanity left. For me, someone who doesn't often eat in the cafeteria, the food there still has a certain freshness to it, but for my fellow dorm-mates, choosing which cafeteria to eat at is harder than solving an advanced math problem.

  Parents often tell us that the gap between two generations is huge, but in my eyes, at least one thing has not changed; In the era of material scarcity, people worried about eating because they couldn't eat anything, but after going through earth-shaking changes, we still worry about eating, because we don't know what to eat. Every time you walk among the crowd going to the cafeteria, your ears are filled with words like "what to eat?" and "I don't know". Maybe this is a sign of economic prosperity.

  When I was still some distance away from the cafeteria, I saw Guo Cheng standing at the entrance waving at me. She is a very eye-catching girl. If we use the aesthetic standards of 20 years ago to look at Guo Cheng, she wouldn't be considered a beauty. However, in recent years, with the invasion of Western capitalist culture, people's aesthetics have quietly changed. Especially with the rapid rise of Chinese women like Lv Yan in Europe and America, many Chinese people feel that they still haven't caught up with the trend. Guo Cheng is this type of girl. Her fashionable attire, slender yet curvy figure, makes her a sexy but not overly cute girl. Our dorm's second-in-command once secretly told me that he often fantasizes about Guo Cheng. Guo Cheng also knows how to utilize her advantages, joining our school's modeling team and through the team's teacher, doing part-time modeling work outside of school, earning a considerable income each month.

  My acquaintance with Guo Cheng was a coincidence. We were in the same English class, and because the classroom for English lessons was quite crowded, if we arrived late, we could only sit in the last row. Since my friend Guo Cheng and I almost always arrived late, the two seats near the back door were always reserved for us. The difference was that sometimes I sat inside and sometimes she did, depending on who arrived later. As classmates, after running into each other several times unexpectedly, we started talking to each other and eventually became friends.

  "Hey handsome guy, what have you been busy with lately? I haven't seen you around?"

  "What else can I do, running around for a living? Unlike you, posing for a few photos can earn a lot of money." Talking to Guo Cheng is always worry-free, which makes me feel relieved.

  "Don't just stand there talking, you're always tapping away on your keyboard, aren't you earning enough?"

  "You don't know, people like us suffer from all kinds of radiation every day, how many years will we lose? The money we earn is really blood-earned."

  "Hey, what's wrong? You didn't sleep well last night, did you? There are so many bloodshot eyes!" Guo Cheng leaned her face close to mine, her two big eyes staring intently at my eyes. The close proximity made me smell the fragrance on her body, and I suddenly felt a little dizzy. At this time, several passing boys also gave me a fierce glare.

  "Look, how embarrassing it is to have you worry about me again. You know me, as a patriotic youth who cares deeply for the country, I'm in so much pain. Often in the middle of the night, I suddenly let out a loud cry, drenched in cold sweat, and sit up with worries about China's future prospects and destiny."

  "Are you intentionally making me have a bad lunch?! Alright, seeing how tired you look, I've decided to treat you today. What do you want to eat? I'll pay." Yu Jing said with a smile, dangling her meal card in front of me, her expression and movements extremely cute.

  "As a rising star in the Chinese modeling world, isn't it a bit beneath your status to eat with me in the cafeteria? What if some nosy reporter digs up this scene someday and I become infamous for it? Your fans won't let me off either. So, considering your future prospects, shouldn't we choose somewhere more upscale?"

  "Come on, eat something, what's with all the nonsense? Stop being so annoying. You're not having a good day today, I have a show to get to soon and don't have time for this, like it or not!"

  "Eat! Of course eat! We must give face to Guo's beautiful wife."

  After some bargaining, we decided to go upstairs to have noodles. I always think that only the noodle window on the second floor still has a little conscience, feeling that we are all struggling outside, so the seasoning is still satisfactory, and the eggs and meat shreds are not reduced to an unacceptable level.

  Guo Cheng claims to be a feminist and also believes in the British gentleman theory, so it's very tiring for me as a man to have dinner with him. There was once an experiment conducted by a scientist where a group of monkeys were put in an iron cage, and inside the cage, there was a bunch of bananas hanging from the ceiling. However, if anyone tried to pull the bananas down, the mechanism on top of the cage would be triggered, and hot water would pour down. After being scalded several times, none of the monkeys dared to touch the bananas again, and they wouldn't let any other monkey touch them either. If any monkey tried to touch the bananas, it would be beaten up by the others. Later on, a new monkey was introduced into the cage, replacing one of the original ones. As expected, after being beaten up several times, this new monkey also stopped trying to touch the bananas and even started beating other monkeys who tried to do so. Eventually, all the original monkeys were replaced, and the mechanism on top of the cage had been turned off long ago, but the habit of beating each other for touching the bananas remained. None of the monkeys knew why they were being beaten; this explains how many human customs and habits are formed. Many habits can't be explained with reason, people just mechanically follow them without thinking, just like the monkeys. As I walked carefully with two bowls of beef noodles, Guo Cheng was surprisingly calm and didn't offer to help me at all. Maybe in his eyes, I'm just a stupid monkey right now. The cafeteria lady seemed to know that I had to carry both bowls as well, and the amount of soup in each bowl was unusually large.

  Although I was extremely careful, the thing I worried about still happened. The soup in the bowl at my right hand spilled accurately onto a girl who came face to face with me. If heaven insisted on arranging for me to spill the soup on someone today, I would rather have spilled it on a boy, because most girls will shout loudly like a shrew, which is very damaging to the image of a campus public figure like me, but heaven often goes against human wishes.

  But what comforted me was that it splashed onto a beautiful girl, so this bowl of soup wasn't wasted in vain. I mustered up the courage to take a closer look at the beauty in front of me and had to admit that she was the most beautiful girl I'd seen in 22 years and over 100 days. Although Tong Chen is a relatively perfect girl in my heart, objectively speaking, this girl in front of me is even more beautiful than Tong Chen... She was wearing a white off-the-shoulder jacket, dark blue jeans, and canvas shoes (fortunately not a skirt), with long hair and a uniquely patterned hairband on her head, giving off a very fashionable vibe.