Never Meeting Again In Our Next Life

Chapter 17: Letter

At lunchtime in the canteen, Song Yan was sitting face to face with Xia Lin as usual, but he kept looking around absentmindedly.

Xia Lin knew he was looking for Yu Luotong and raised his chin expressionlessly, “He’s over there.”

Song Yan turned his head to look and saw Yu Luotong a few metres away, carrying his plate and looking for an empty seat in the crowd, so he stood up and waved at him, “Luotong, come here.”

Yu Luotong immediately came over with a smile on his face.

“It’s nice to have someone I know,” Yu Luotong said, “I thought it would be too hard to change schools in the last semester of my senior year. It’s difficult, but thankfully I’ve met you guys.”

Xia Lin glanced up and curled his lips politely at him without speaking.

In his previous life, because he had been following Song Yan, Xia Lin had a fairly good relationship with Yu Luotong-at least on the surface. But in this life, Xia Lin did not intend to force a smile at his love rival anymore, and would keep his distance whenever possible.

Song Yan looked at Yu Luotong’s plate and exclaimed in a fuss: “Luotong, why are you eating so little, and it’s all vegetarian!”

Yu Luotong was a little embarrassed: “That…is because all the money earned from part-time jobs went to buy concert tickets, so the living expenses are a little…”

Song Yan said, “Then you should have said so, I will lend you my meal card, you can buy whatever you want to eat!”

“No no,” Yu Luotong hurriedly waved her hand, “I don’t want your money, eat people with short mouths… ”  (T/N: This come from a saying 吃人嘴短，拿人手软 which literally translates to eat people with short mouths, take people with soft hands. This means greed for food and money will ignore principles.)

“What eat people with short mouths, we’ll all be good brothers from now on. What does it mean to lend you a meal card?”

Yu Luotong, however, banged his chopsticks and abruptly sang softly, “You can laugh at my poverty, but you can’t trample on my dignity.

These are the lyrics of the repeatedly sung chorus of ET’s hit song ‘Faith’, which almost every ET fan can sing a few lines of.

This song has a supreme status in the hearts of ET fans, and is almost held as a holy verse, sacred and unquestionable.

When Song Yan heard him sing these two lines, he suddenly fell silent, and after a moment of silence, he said with a shameful look on his face, “You’re right, we ET fans all have dignity.”

Xia Lin pursed his lips at the side and tried desperately not to laugh out loud.

He didn’t feel anything when he used to accompany Song Yan to follow the stars, but now when he looks back at Song Yan from ten years ago, he can see how pathetic he was.

But when he thought about it, the kind of devotion that Song Yan and Yu Luotong had towards their favourite band as if it were their moral philosophy was something he would never be able to experience in his lifetime.

This was the impenetrable gap between him and them.

During the afternoon activity session, their class ran the usual two laps of the playground and then started to roam freely.

If it was in the past, Song Yan would have asked Xia Lin to go to the table tennis table and tear up a few games, but nowadays, Xia Lin, who was determined to follow the path of a scholar, naturally chose to go back to the classroom to do mock questions.

Song Yan felt bored by himself, so he accompanied Xia Lin back to the classroom.
At the entrance to the classroom, they saw Yu Luotong chasing after the class teacher and begging for something, while the class teacher kept shaking her head with a stern face.

After the class teacher left, Song Yan went over to him and asked, “Luotong, what’s going on?”

Yu Luotong cried and complained, “Your school is too strict, my old school wasn’t like this!”

Song Yan laughed, “This is your school now too, okay. What the hell is going on?”

“Well,” Yu Luotong stretched out her hands, “I wanted to ask the class teacher for permission not to come to evening study every night, but he wouldn’t agree, saying that I couldn’t do that unless my parents wrote a request in person. My mother died long ago, and my father does not care about me at all, so why would he make a special trip to school for such a thing?

Song Yan was puzzled, “What are you going to do if you don’t come to evening study?”

Yu Luotong looked around, then came up to Song Yan’s ear and whispered a few words, followed by a complicated look on Song Yan’s face.