Choose a path that suits you, to be your most authentic self

Teresa Teng sang: If I hadn't met you, where would I be?

　　I think if I hadn't met Luo Yi Zhou, I would probably still be studying at a university in B City where the seasons are like spring, instead of being far away from home in S City where the winters can freeze to death.

　　I was only fifteen years old when I met Luo Yizhou. I was busy studying and working hard while the girls in my class were busy falling in love and having boyfriends, and he was busy being a good student in the eyes of the teachers and the ideal object in the eyes of the girls.

　　At fifteen, Luo Yi Zhou was not as tall as he is now, and his silhouette was more youthful than now, but he was still a scourge. His grades were good, he was good-looking, he had a proud family background, and he was the standard male lead in idol dramas.

　　Fifteen-year-old me short and thin, thrown in the crowd will be drowned by the crowd. I love to dream, I love to fantasize, but I know that television and reality are still different, I am not the life of the heroine, I am just a passerby.

　　If I hadn't been punished by the teacher to clean the whole building because I failed the exam, I don't think I would have crossed paths with Luo Yi Zhou.

　　Even after so much time had passed, I still remember that summer evening when the afterglow of the sunset spilled over the empty corridors and most of the students in the whole school had already left, leaving me alone waving the broom with great resentment, and when I cleaned the stairwell on the top floor of the school building, I couldn't believe my eyes at all.

　　I saw Luo Yizhou, the standard good student that the teachers and classmates talked about, sitting with the school's famous delinquent boys smoking together. I even saw the boys with yellow-orange dyed hair lighting Luo Yizhou's cigarette and heard smilingly calling him the boss.

　　My head was struck by lightning and I stood there dumbfounded as a yellow-haired boy with pierced ears shouted at me, "Silly girl, why are you still standing there? Go sweep the floor!"

　　Smoke filled the air and I saw the prince Anja spoke of laughing with the group of punks.

　　And later, I even saw Luo Yi Zhou fighting with someone on the street outside the school. I saw him smashing a beer bottle on someone's head and still laughing, which was a far cry from his bright and shiny image at school.

　　Later on, on the way to school, when my tablemate An Ya was talking to me as usual about how good that schoolboy Luo Yi Zhou was, I couldn't help but snicker: "That Luo Yi Zhou is a two-faced person, I don't know why you guys think he's so good!"

　　"Huh? How can you say that he's good at his studies and good-looking!" Anya retorted me.

　　In the end, I could only tell her helplessly what I had seen and heard the iceberg prince Luo Yi Zhou was very grumpy in their minds, and he would lose his temper at every turn.

　　My voice was loud, but Anya never gave me a response, I turned my head to look at her but found her face ugly as hell, then I heard a somewhat angry but deliberately suppressed voice: "So you say, how bad is my true face!"

　　I looked up and saw the two-faced tiger standing in front of me, smiling incomparably demonic.

　　I suddenly felt that the air around me was several degrees colder.

　　After that, I started to live a humiliating life of being oppressed by Luo Yi Zhou.

　　My chair would suddenly be missing a nail and I would fall on all fours while sitting down; my peers would always take off during my duty, either because they were sick or because someone died in the family, so I always had to clean the whole building by myself; I somehow found a turtle on the glossy upper of my running shoes in gym class; my test papers would often be handed out with a few more ghosts and I often found a few more ghosts and ugly letters on my papers.

　　Luo Yi Zhou was like a childish child who kept playing pranks on me and then still had an innocent image on the surface. I pulled Anya's sleeve countless times and told her that only Luo Yizhou, that fool, could do such a childish act, but she didn't believe me at all.

　　The childish behavior of the fifteen-year-old Luo Yizhou continued, and at one point I thought his IQ might only be ten years old. I went to confront him in anger, but he smiled brightly and asked me, "Classmate, who are you? I don't know you."

　　This made me hate him, but there was nothing I could do about it.

　　I still remember the day of my mom's birthday, I smashed my piggy and bought a big cake at the cake store outside the school when school was over, ready to take it back to surprise her, but when I carried the cake out of the cake store I was tripped hard by Luo Yi Zhou and fell to the ground, and my cake ended up in a mess of paste.

　　He said to me with a slight frown, "I'm sorry!"

　　I didn't know where I got the courage to get up from the ground, but I pushed Luo Yi Zhou, who was a head taller than me, to the ground and smashed the cake at him, cursing, "You son of a bitch! You son of a bitch! Stupid! I bought this for mommy, you son of a bitch, you are childish! You don't have a brain ......"

　　I can't remember exactly what I cursed him with at that point, I just tried to squeeze out the words I could think of and greeted him over and over again. I cursed until my throat was hoarse and I cried so much that I didn't stop, I was like a clown spilling my guts, but strangely at that time Luo Yizhou didn't laugh at me, but looked at me with his mouth wide open and said, "Don't cry."

　　But I cried anyway, and after that, I stopped looking at him and left him and the cake and ran home.

　　I didn't expect that the next day Luo Yizhou would come to my class with the cake, and when he stood at the door of the class and called out my name, I even thought he was calling someone else.

　　His brow furrowed again and he shouted, "Li Huan, get out of here!"

　　This time I walked out slowly and he shoved the cake into my arms, saying, "It's for you."

　　He ran away with red ears amidst the noise of the classmates and I was still frozen in place, how come today Luo Yi Zhou didn't wear his pretty skin anymore and started to show his real face?

　　The big cake that was twice as big and five times more expensive than the one I bought for my mom ended up in my stomach and Anya's. When Anya and I were sitting in the hallway resting on our stomachs after settling half of the cake, I saw the face of Luo Yi Zhou, who covered the sunlight above my head and pointed to the leftover soup with a blue face and asked, "You ate it?"

　　Anya was scared away by him, and I was still lying there stupidly without getting up, while he asked again, "You ate it?"

　　I said, "Yes, didn't you buy it for me to eat?"

　　He stared at me viciously, his gaze as fierce as a wolf's, and slapped me on the top of the head: "Didn't you buy it for your mother?"

　　I was so frightened by his horrible face that tears came to my eyes and said, "But my mother's birthday has already passed! It was yesterday, not today, not to mention that mom ate cake last night!"

　　I thought of yesterday's grievances and started to cry again, while he rubbed his temples, looked at me overwhelmed, and yelled, "Don't cry, don't cry, it hurts my head."

　　I vaguely remembered that Luo Yi Zhou's palm was very thick, his shoulder was very warm, and his arm was very firm, so much so that I was so dumbfounded by his hug that I forgot to struggle.

　　One moonlit night six months later, a drunken Luo Yizhou told me that his mother had passed away four years ago because his father had a woman outside and wanted a divorce, so he was driven crazy and finally committed suicide in a mental hospital. His father got married to that woman and brought back a tow-boy who was a year younger than him, and he even suspected that the tow-boy was his father's child.

　　The moonlight was cool, and Luo Yi Zhou's tears dripped on my shoulder, which was also bone-chillingly cold.