Maintaining the Dignity of the Female Supporting Character

Chapter 12

Wen Shuangmu barely managed to stand steady, watching as the motorcycle drove away and stopped under the big banyan tree at the entrance of No. 13 High School.

After Zhou Yu picked up that pretty girl, he drove into the school grounds.

Wen Shuangmu's ears were still in a state of being stung, and she asked Xia Zhili, "Is that guy many years older than you? Why did he call you 'kid'?"

Xia Zhili replied awkwardly, "I don't know either."

Questions slowly popped out of Wen Shuangmu's mouth one after another: "He's a student from No. 13 High School next door, right? Is he of legal age? Does he have a driver's license?"

"Don't you have to be at least eighteen to ride a motorcycle?"

"He wasn't wearing a helmet just now, won't he get caught by the traffic police when he goes out?"

Xia Zhili was stunned by Wen Shuangmu's barrage of questions and stammered, "He's a student. I'm not sure about the rest."

Alright then.

Wen Shuangmu and Xia Zhili walked side by side towards the school, their faces still wearing indescribable expressions.

Wu Xiaoqi said, "Why has the host gone quiet?"

Wen Shuangmu replied, "I'm still processing."

Wu Xiaoqi: "?"

Wu Xiaoqi: "Processing what? Do you think Xia Zhili is too popular?"

"No," Wen Shuangmu quickly clarified her stance, "I wouldn't want Zhou Yu even if he was given to me for free."

Wu Xiaoqi found it strange: "Why not? Zhou Yu is a popular supporting male character in the novel, youthful and rebellious, full of boyish charm. Apart from being a bit of a playboy, he's flawless in other aspects."

"I think you might have some misunderstanding about the term 'boyish charm'," Wen Shuangmu said. "He's a high school student, at most three years older than Xia Zhili. Have you ever seen a young man call a girl of almost the same age 'kid'?"

Wu Xiaoqi: "What's strange about the word 'kid'? In romance novels, male leads not only use 'kid', but they also like to call the female lead 'little one'. I think it's all fine. Has the host not read enough novels?"

Wen Shuangmu: "...Yes, I guess I haven't read enough."

It took Wen Shuangmu a long time to recover. Seeing Xia Zhili constantly replying to text messages on her phone, she asked, "How did you get to know that motorcycle guy?"

Xia Zhili thought for a moment and said, "A friend of mine studies at No. 13 High School. She said there's a senior who, just two days into the new semester, started harassing her by sending classmates to give her snacks and milk tea, and even asked her to meet in an alley outside the school to confess. My friend was scared, so she asked me to come and help her reject him."

Wen Shuangmu nodded.

It was quite a standard Mary Sue plot.

Confessing to the female lead's friend, but ending up being attracted by the female lead's looks and falling in love with her instead.

Thinking of the clichéd twists in TV dramas, Wen Shuangmu said, "This kind of friend will probably turn evil later on."

Xia Zhili had just finished reporting the last message to her friend and didn't hear clearly, "Huh? What?"

Wen Shuangmu felt no obligation to repeat herself and changed the subject, "Nothing."

"Oh." Xia Zhili nodded, and after a while, she took the initiative to ask, "What about you? How did you happen to pass by there?"

Xia Zhili remembered that when she left the classroom, Wen Shuangmu was still sitting at her desk explaining questions to other classmates.

Wen Shuangmu replied with a straight face, "Just passing by."

The atmosphere cooled, and the two didn't speak anymore.

Walking into the teaching building, the corridor was quiet, with the sound of teachers lecturing coming from the classrooms along the way, indicating that the preparatory bell had long since rung.

"Oh no, we're late."

Xia Zhili grabbed Wen Shuangmu's wrist and started running towards the third floor.

Wen Shuangmu was instantly startled, "Why are you grabbing my hand!"

Xia Zhili was also taken aback by her intense reaction, "Class has already started, we'll be too late if we don't hurry."

"That may be true, but..."

Why do you have to get physical?

Wen Shuangmu didn't have time to finish the second half of her sentence before she heard the voice of the head teacher coming from the skybridge.

"You two students over there, what's going on? Why are you still wandering in the corridor when class has started?"

Wen Shuangmu watched helplessly as they both emerged from the stairwell with Class 2's classroom right in front of them. However, Xia Zhili, not knowing how to adapt, transformed into a rule-abiding good student, came to a sudden stop, and obediently looked at the head teacher, lowering her head to apologize, "Sorry, teacher, we came back late due to some business."

"Which class are you from?" The head teacher frowned as he approached. "You, the girl on the side, turn around. What are you doing, trying to sneak away right in front of me?"

Wen Shuangmu very reluctantly turned to stand shoulder to shoulder with Xia Zhili: "No, teacher, we weren't."

Xia Zhili explained the reason for their tardiness, of course not mentioning that she had gone out to reject a confession on behalf of her friend from another school. She only said that they had miscalculated their time during the lunch break.

When the head teacher heard they were students from Class 2, his expression softened considerably: "Even new students need to have discipline, especially you two from the top class. Stand here as punishment for fifteen minutes. I'll inform your subject teacher."

As Wen Shuangmu watched the head teacher walk away, she said, "You could have just said our homeroom teacher called us to the office for something."

Xia Zhili seemed to realize this option only now: "Oh, right."

Wen Shuangmu saw Xia Zhili smile, revealing two deep dimples, and silently looked away.

Wen Shuangmu called out to Wu Xiaoqi and said, "...Didn't readers say Xia Zhili wasn't a soft girl?"

Wu Xiaoqi: "A thousand readers, a thousand Hamlets."

Wen Shuangmu: "...That's quite a stretch for 'Hamlet'."

Wu Xiaoqi: "It's about character contrast. The unexpected smile of an ice beauty is the most captivating."

The location where Wen Shuangmu and Xia Zhili were punished to stand was quite awkward.

Just out of the stairwell—

Directly facing the main door of the spring semester class.

Originally, during summer, all classes would close their doors and windows and turn on the air conditioning. However, this particular math class taught by Zhou Quan had a habit of opening doors and windows for ventilation, as part of his middle-aged health regimen. As a result, the scene of the two being punished was ignominiously nailed to the pillar of shame.

Even Zhou Quan couldn't resist coming out to tease the two a bit while the other students were doing example problems.

"Qi-ge, Shuang-jie is being punished to stand outside," Li Maozhen was the first to discover Wen Shuangmu standing outside and transmitted the message to Su Qiyan.

Su Qiyan raised his eyes and glanced outside.

Two girls stood side by side, one with a collapsed expression, seemingly devoid of life, while the other wore a soft smile, her eyes curved like crescent moons.

A warm breeze gently blew, lifting the girls' hair tips and skirt hems. The air inside and outside the classroom was permeated with the fragrance of jasmine from outside the building.

The girl's smile faded rather quickly.

Su Qiyan focused on a small, floating circle of light under the sky, his fingertips imperceptibly rubbing against the pen shaft.

In front, Lin Sen burst out laughing: "Wen Shuangmu's expression is so funny."

The boy sitting next to him whispered, "Isn't she the Wen Shuangmu who's already started self-studying advanced mathematics? Then who's the one next to her, also from Class 2?"

Li Maozhen, sitting behind, teased, "You don't know this one, do you? The first place in Class 2's placement test, Xia Zhili."

The boy was surprised: "The girls in their class are impressive, good grades and good looks."

The boys and girls at the surrounding desks couldn't help but join in: "What? What? Which one is Xia Zhili, the one on the left?"

"What kind of eyesight do you have? It's the one on the right."

"Li Maozhen told me yesterday that Xia Zhili from Class 2 is very beautiful, but aren't they both pretty? I thought it was the one on the left."

"..."

Everyone was chattering, but they were soon silenced by Zhou Quan, who had returned to the classroom and slapped his desk.

When Wen Shuangmu and Xia Zhili returned to their classroom, the English teacher was having everyone prepare for group dialogues. Seeing the two enter, and because they had both scored near-perfect high scores on the placement test, they had a good student halo, so the teacher didn't say much and just told them to return to their seats.

There were forty-one people in the class, and with pairs being formed, there was bound to be one person left out.

Wen Shuangmu had calculated a thousand times but never thought that the odd one out would be herself.

Lu Jing, as the one squeezed into the class through the back door, was quite self-aware. After practicing a scene dialogue with Wang Chengshuo, he lightly nodded and suggested, "Shall we add her to our group?"

"Sure," Wang Chengshuo agreed readily, naturally having a good impression of Wen Shuangmu due to her knowledge of Lagrange's theorem.

Wen Shuangmu moved a chair to sit next to Lu Jing's desk.

Lu Jing saw her flipping through the book, not yet finding the content on the projector, so he helped her turn the oral practice booklet forward a page: "It's on the third page."

Wen Shuangmu looked up at him, lightly "hmm"-ed, and then dropped her gaze back to the book.

Because there was an extra person, they couldn't follow the "A, B" characters in the book for dialogue, so the three of them improvised based on the given phrases.

Lu Jing's English pronunciation was neither American nor British; it was immediately clear that he was a homegrown child raised in his motherland's embrace.

After Lu Jing finished his part of the content, he noticed Wen Shuangmu didn't continue and asked her, "What's wrong?"

Wen Shuangmu said, "Your spoken English is so good."

Lu Jing was flattered and surprised, "Really? It's not bad, I guess. Thank you."

Wen Shuangmu continued with the English mock dialogue from earlier.

During her university years, she had spent a year preparing for IELTS and TOEFL. At that time, she had turned down the school's offer for postgraduate recommendation, planning to study abroad. But later, Su Qiyan chose to pursue a Ph.D. in China without even meeting her, which resulted in her not going abroad and having to prepare for the postgraduate entrance exam English test again.

Listening to Wen Shuangmu's British English, as fluent and standard as the female voice in listening tests, Lu Jing leaned towards Wang Chengshuo and whispered, "I think she was just subtly mocking me."

Wang Chengshuo looked at him sympathetically, "You just realized that?"

Lu Jing: "..."

After the dialogue simulation ended, Wen Shuangmu sat back in her seat and listened as the teacher called on other groups to present. Finally, she came to a conclusion:

Well, the spoken English level of Class 2 students was really quite good overall.

Wen Shuangmu couldn't help but complain to Wu Xiaoqi, "How can Lu Jing's spoken English be so terrible? Su Qiyan's English is so good, how are these two going to compete?"

As Lu Jing was a minor character in the original story, Wu Xiaoqi didn't have much relevant information and could only offer a guess: "In most novels, even if the male protagonist isn't good at other subjects, he can always speak very pure English. Maybe Lu Jing is just taking the road less traveled - he's good at everything except spoken English."

Wen Shuangmu reluctantly accepted this explanation, "Fine, anyway, the college entrance exam doesn't test spoken English."

After school in the afternoon.

As usual, Wen Shuangmu shouldered her backpack and waited at the classroom door for Su Qiyan and Li Maozhen to go home together.

Seeing Liu Yiheng coming up with a ball again, she teased, "You've been coming to the third floor quite often lately."

Liu Yiheng rubbed his nose and smiled, "Just coming to hang out with my buddy."

Wen Shuangmu didn't expose him. Thinking of Lu Jing's 40% villain value and the possibility of the two brothers becoming enemies in the future, she felt a wave of pity.

Something occurred to her, and she pulled Liu Yiheng to a corner, "Give me the inside scoop, how capable is Lu Jing really?"

Liu Yiheng cooperatively lowered his head to whisper, "What kind of capability are you referring to?"

"I mean his academic performance."

"Then you have no idea how strong Jing-bro is at studying."

Liu Yiheng's tone suddenly raised a notch, sounding just like a girl gossiping.

Looking around to make sure no one was nearby, Liu Yiheng put on a secretive air and told her, "Sister Shuang, you're a top student, so you should understand without me explaining too much. Top students control their scores, but academic gods control their rankings. Jing-bro previously worked so hard to get to 41st place just to study with us in the regular class. But he was just that little bit short, accidentally tying with the 40th place student, which is why he ended up in your Class 2. Can you imagine how amazing he is?"

Wen Shuangmu was shocked, "Is he really that strong?"

Liu Yiheng nodded with certainty, "Yep."

When Lu Jing walked out of the classroom, he saw Wen Shuangmu looking at him with a strange expression, turning her head back three times as she walked towards the stairwell with Su Qiyan from Class 1.

Lu Jing tapped Liu Yiheng on the back with his hand and asked, "What did you just tell her?"

Liu Yiheng spoke with a tone as if telling a horror story, "You don't know how dangerous it was just now. Wen Shuangmu seemed to have discovered that you're actually a slacker in Class 2. Thanks to my quick wit, I saved the situation. From now on, even if you perform poorly, Wen Shuangmu will just think you're doing it on purpose to transfer to Class 7 and be with us."

After listening to Liu Yiheng explain the whole story, Lu Jing laughed and gave him a push, "What's wrong with you?"