Nagasaki Middle School has a total of ten classes in the third year. Li Xiao is in Class Four. Among the ten classes, three are considered excellent: Class One, Class Two, and Class Three. At the beginning of each school year, students are divided into classes based on their performance in the end-of-term mock exams. The top one hundred students in the school are mostly in the top three classes, while those ranked beyond one hundred are randomly assigned to the remaining seven classes. Li Xiao remembers that in the recent monthly exam, she ranked eighty-fourth, showing significant improvement.
At Nagasaki Middle School, there is a widely known default rule that only students who rank in the top one hundred in the third year have a good chance of being admitted to the best local high school, Changqi First High School. Therefore, in everyone's eyes, students in the excellent classes generally have no worries about further education. This crucial and tense final stage of education is undoubtedly the greatest happiness for them. On the other hand, students in regular classes can only grit their teeth and give it their all. Of course, there are also some students who only realize the anxiety about further education in the third year and quietly work hard in their own classes, like Li Xiao. That's why Li Xiao only moved to the excellent class this year. Most of her former classmates are still in the regular class, so everyone around her is new to her. She knows that she had to work hard and push herself to move up, and she dare not slack off easily.
At Nagasaki Middle School, students in the excellent and regular classes are competing against each other in their hearts, and no one wants to be outdone by anyone else.
But at this critical stage of entering school, there are some "alternative" classes - Class Six of the third grade. It is said that their class is the most loosely managed in the whole school, and is the envy of all the third grade graduating classes in the school. They envy their class teacher's democracy and openness, not occupying their physical education classes for math and English tutoring, not opposing their enjoyment of so-called "entertainment time," not treating "as long as you don't die, you should study to death" as a mantra or a declaration hanging on their lips. Their class generally does not participate much in school competitions, but they are stable leaders in sports competitions, and are even teased as the class with the highest happiness index in the whole school.
Every day, there are waves of boys on the basketball court, but there are always some seemingly fixed personnel, including Jiang Yan and Gu Zhan. In Li Xiao's view, they seem to spend most of their time on the basketball court every day, not even skipping the long break between classes. Every day, you can see them carrying a basketball through the stairs many times.
And every day, the corner staircase on the second floor leading to the third floor seems to be their fixed place to catch some air, almost every lunch break they dry off their sweat and chat about the day's game on the court, who has made rapid progress in basketball skills, who has shown off a new shooting posture, and who has made several perfect three-pointers. And Li Xiao, sitting by the window in the second row of the classroom door, can almost see their figures every time he looks up at lunchtime.
Standing at the stairway, wearing the simplest white T-shirt, the boy with tousled bangs in the memory of Li Xiao is so vibrant and beautiful. More dazzling than the hottest summer sun. She has never intentionally gone to the playground to watch a basketball game, but she always knows from her classmates' words who is the most outstanding today, and the most heard name is Jiang Yan.
Comment 0 Comment Count