Living Only For Myself: Make Those Who Hate Me Regret It-Chapter 25: "Having Trouble Adjusting to the New School?

Chapter 25: Chapter 25: "Having Trouble Adjusting to the New School?

With several pairs of eyes on her, Xu Su thought for a moment. She really couldn’t figure out what her type was.

"Smart, rational, with a good personality. He can’t be ugly. He has to be at least 1.8 meters tall, not too fat, but not too skinny either." Xu Su gave a general description, then added, "His grades can’t be too bad—at least not worse than mine. He has to be smart and ambitious."

As soon as she listed these requirements, Qian Jia gasped, "The class monitor fits your criteria perfectly!"

Qiu Dandan said, "There are only three boys in our school with better grades than you. The other two aren’t 1.8 meters tall. The class monitor looks pretty tall, but I don’t know if he meets your height requirement."

The girls all looked at her, their eyes full of curiosity.

"Shhh!"

Xu Su jumped. She quickly turned to look behind her. Xi Zirong was a day student and had returned to the classroom after lunch, just like them. He was sitting only two rows away.

Fortunately, he didn’t seem to have heard their discussion. He was resting with his head on his desk.

"I don’t like anyone," Xu Su said, lightly tapping Qian Jia. "Don’t spread rumors. I just want to focus on studying and hopefully get the scholarship this semester. I’m not thinking about anything else."

Xu Su asked them, "Do you guys know how the scholarships work at our school?"

Huang Feng knew the rules of First High School like the back of her hand. "It’s based on the final exam scores each semester. I remember the top three in the entire grade get 1,500 yuan, the top ten get 1,000, the top twenty get 800, and the top fifty get a 500-yuan reward."

Everyone gasped in unison.

"That’s so much!"

"What do you mean, ’so much’? There are almost two thousand students in our grade. Getting into the top fifty out of two thousand... that scholarship is not easy to get."

"Don’t just look at how our honors class had better entrance scores than the other classes. The student roster for the honors class changes quite a bit every year, and it’s not always the honors students who win the scholarships."

As she spoke, Huang Feng looked at Xu Su encouragingly. "But our Susu was the top scorer on the high school entrance exam in Kang County. Winning a scholarship will be no problem for her. It’s just a matter of which tier she’ll get."

Huang Feng knew that Xu Su’s family wasn’t well-off. She kept her meal expenses under 1.5 yuan and didn’t even have extra money for study materials.

If she could really get the scholarship, it would provide some much-needed relief.

After learning how generous First High School’s scholarships were, Xu Su’s motivation to study grew even stronger.

In the third week of school, the teachers of every subject seemed to have coordinated to spring a diagnostic test on them.

There was no advance notice. Each teacher simply walked into the classroom with the exam papers and announced that the test was starting.

During the math test, Teacher Wu said, "This is a diagnostic test before the monthly exam. Just treat it like the real thing. The questions on the paper are all from what you’ve learned these past two weeks. Let’s see if you’ve actually absorbed it. Do your best."

The moment she got the paper, Xu Su sighed internally. ’Teacher Wu said the questions were from the last two weeks, but every single one was probably written by him personally. Several of the major problems even required using three or more formulas to solve.’

It was much, much harder than a standard test paper.

Luckily, Xu Su had been genuinely focused on nothing but her studies lately. She was especially passionate about math—as the class math representative, she loved it dearly.

Three days after the tests, the graded papers were handed back one by one. Xu Su’s best score was in English. There were three perfect scores in the class, and she was one of them.

She ranked third in the class for math. For Chinese, thanks to her solid memory and a beautifully written essay, she also placed third.

What dragged her down were politics, physics, and chemistry. Her overall rank dropped from fifth in the class at the start of school to eleventh.

She accepted it calmly. Although she had been cramming recently, she had forgotten much of the foundational knowledge from middle school. Achieving this rank was already the result of her best efforts.

During the evening self-study session on the day the results came out, Teacher Wu called several students to his office for a "chat," one after another.

The student called in before Xu Su was Zhou Dongdong, who had the second-highest entrance score and was the Chinese class representative. He had placed ninth in the class this time. When he returned to the classroom, he passed by Xu Su’s desk and told her to go to Teacher Wu’s office.

As the head of the grade level, Teacher Wu had his own private office. Seeing Xu Su enter, he pointed to the empty chair opposite him. "Have a seat."

Xu Su felt a little anxious. Back at sixteen, back to being a student, she was just as afraid of teachers as ever.

"Before you enrolled, I looked at your middle school records. Your grades in every subject were stable. You have a very strong foundation."

Teacher Wu got straight to the point. "But on this test, your mistakes were in very basic areas. Logically, with your middle school foundation, you shouldn’t be making these kinds of errors."

After the papers were returned, Xu Su had noticed this problem too. She lowered her head and remained silent.

’I can’t exactly tell him I was reborn and have only just started cramming to relearn all my middle school knowledge, can I?’

"Are you having trouble adjusting to the new school?"

Xu Su shook her head. "No, Teacher. I really like the learning environment at our school."

Seeing that she didn’t want to say more, Teacher Wu didn’t press her. He encouraged her, "All the teachers have seen your attitude toward your studies. Although your grades slipped a little this time, I’m confident you’ll catch up soon."

He took out a thick, rolled-up stack of papers from his drawer. It looked like twenty or thirty sheets. "These are some test papers I got from the teachers in the middle school department. They cover all subjects. Work on them when you have time."

"You can go. On your way out, tell Xi Zirong to come see me."

Xu Su took the test papers and gave a slight bow. "Thank you, Teacher."

Back in the classroom, she placed the papers on her desk and walked over to Xi Zirong’s seat. He was looking down at an English book, one without a Chinese translation.

"..." Xu Su reached out and knocked on his desk. "Class Monitor, Teacher Wu wants you to go to his office."

The classroom was quiet. Xi Zirong looked up and saw it was her. He paused for a second, then said, "Okay."

This was their first interaction since the rumors about them started. In front of the whole class, they both acted poised and natural.

National Day was just around the corner. The first monthly exam was scheduled for after the holiday. Unlike the sophomores and seniors, the freshmen still got a break for National Day.

They had a three-day holiday.

A few days in advance, Xu Su told Chen Shulan and her husband that she planned to use the National Day holiday to go back to Kang County and see her grandma.

Thinking of her own mother, who had helped raise her child for over a decade, Chen Shulan was generous for once. After giving Xu Su money for the round-trip fare, she pulled out another 200 yuan and told her to give it to her grandmother to buy herself something nice to eat.

Xu Su took the same bus back to Kang County with a few of her middle school classmates. After arriving in the county town, she transferred to another bus heading to the countryside.

The journey took a total of four hours. She left Chang City in the morning, and with the transfer time, it wasn’t until after one in the afternoon that she arrived back at the place where she had been reborn.

Grandma Xu didn’t have a phone line installed, so Xu Su couldn’t call ahead. When she arrived, the main gate was locked tight. Her grandma wasn’t home.

She familiarly made her way to her eldest uncle’s house next door.