Chapter 125: P.E. Class
On Friday afternoon during P.E. class, Li Mu received the notes from Wang Ruoyan.
He treated them like a treasure. After looking through them for a moment and confirming that her handwriting was easy to read, he finally relaxed.
“I’ve already made plans with Yu Fan to hang out on Saturday. You’ll come with us.”
“With you guys? Just like that?” Wang Ruoyan asked, a little unhappy.
Li Mu nodded with a straight face. “I’ll find an excuse to leave when the time comes, so you can have time alone with him.”
“That’s more like it,” Wang Ruoyan smiled again. “Alright, go get in line. The teacher’s almost here.”
Li Mu put the notebook in the inner pocket of his jacket and returned to the line of students, which looked more like a bunch of scattered sand. He couldn’t hide the excitement in his eyes.
Aside from worrying about his body, his parents, and Xiao Jing, the thing that had been stressing him out most was his school grades.
He still had a good goal, to make up for his past mistakes by doing well on the spring college entrance exam.
Because of his height, he stood near the front of the line in P.E. class.
On his right was his deskmate, Wu Lei. On his left was a student he had never spoken to before. Even though they’d never interacted, Li Mu could feel the other student’s eyes on him.
Curious, he turned to look.
This classmate had eyes shaped like upside-down triangles and a face that was narrow with a pointy chin.
If he remembered correctly, this student often ran to the bathroom to smoke between classes and had been caught many times by the teachers, yet never seemed to learn his lesson.
And with a face that didn’t exactly look friendly, Li Mu quickly turned his eyes away.
The P.E. teacher arrived.
The messy line of students became much more orderly within seconds.
Although the teacher was middle-aged, his strong, muscular build still looked very intimidating.
Most of the strong boys in the class still couldn’t match his fitness.
So naturally, everyone behaved extra well in front of him.
“Today’s physical test. Yu Fan, you’re in charge of the boys’ side. Wang Ruoyan, you take care of the girls,” the teacher shouted. “Go to the equipment room and bring out the measuring tools. We’ll start with height and weight.”
After giving instructions, he sat down on the edge of a flowerbed.
The equipment was a machine that could measure both height and weight. It wasn’t very heavy. Yu Fan called over the chubby guy, Xu Ze, and together they carried out two machines and placed them at the door of the equipment room.
Then, they started calling names one by one based on seat number.
Li Mu’s seat number wasn’t at the front, so after waiting for a bit, he started to feel bored and looked for a place to sit.
But when he looked back, he saw that the whole flowerbed area was full of students. Only the two spots beside the teacher were still open, so he simply went and sat next to the P.E. teacher.
If it were Yang Ye, he would’ve stayed far away to avoid being nagged. But Li Mu had never talked to this teacher before, they weren’t familiar.
Around the flowerbed, over twenty students had gathered in little groups to chat. Li Mu could faintly hear some of them talking about him.
“Is Li Mu a guy or a girl? He’s looking more and more girly.”
“How come we never noticed he was this good-looking before?”
“Looks like the school beauty has changed~”
“Does he have… breasts?”
Ever since his face started looking almost the same as a girl’s, he sometimes overheard people whispering things like this.
He tried his best not to listen to those comments, but even in the dorms, he would sometimes hear his roommates questioning his gender.
It was starting to feel like explaining that he was a guy didn’t work anymore.
He pulled his jacket tighter around himself, but his increasingly obvious chest was getting harder to hide.
He thought to himself, when will the weather get colder? Thicker clothes would help cover things up better.
Li Mu stood up and walked toward the bathroom not far away.
He walked into the boys' bathroom and went over to the urinals. Just as he was about to pull down his pants to show off a bit of his “manliness,” a classmate next to him suddenly whispered.
“Um… Li Mu?”
“Huh?”
Li Mu turned to look and saw it was Zhao Yu, a fellow dormmate and an anime otaku.
“Can you… go in there instead?” Zhao Yu pointed at the toilet stall behind them, his face turning red. “I can’t pee with you standing here.”
“......”
Li Mu replied with a blank face, “Kidney problems?”
Even though he said that, he still quietly turned around and went into the stall.
He didn’t really like using the stalls at school, there was always the chance of opening the door and finding something really gross and smelly inside.
Some students just had no manners and didn’t flush after using the toilet.
Luckily, the stall was fairly clean this time, probably just cleaned by the janitor.
After coming out of the bathroom, Li Mu felt like he could confidently say he was a man again.
Look! Little Li Mu was still there!
“Li Mu! Where did you run off to?” As soon as he returned to the equipment room, Yu Fan waved him over and urged him, “Come on, it’s your turn to check height and weight.”
Maybe from calling out too many names and dealing with students wandering off, Yu Fan sounded a little impatient now.
Li Mu walked over with a blank face, feeling a bit wronged inside. He took off his shoes and stepped onto the machine.
Yu Fan looked down at the screen and wrote, “52.5 kg.”
“Height… 1.7 meters.”
“It’s 1.75,” Li Mu turned his head and corrected him.
“It says 1.7 on the screen.”
Li Mu’s breath caught in his throat. So now even turning more like a girl made him five centimeters shorter?
“You’re done. Go ahead,” Yu Fan waved him off. “Want me to walk you home after school?”
“I’ll take the bus myself.”
Yu Fan looked up at Li Mu’s face, which showed no emotion, and suddenly laughed. “What's wrong? You seem upset.”
“No.”
Yu Fan smiled helplessly. After calling out the next classmate, he quietly asked again, “Are you feeling down?”
“I’m not.” Li Mu turned and walked to the side.
Yu Fan scratched his head and handed the measurement form to Xu Ze, the chubby guy next to him. “Can you handle this for me? I’m going to hang out with Li Mu.”
Xu Ze nodded right away. “You owe me a bottle of soda later.”
“Deal!”
After passing over the form, Yu Fan happily ran after Li Mu.
Even though Li Mu hid his feelings well, Yu Fan had spent enough time with him to sense the emotion in his voice.
He caught up to Li Mu and grinned. “What’s wrong? Was I too harsh just now when I called you?”
Li Mu kept his head down and walked forward. “No.”
“Then… are you jealous because I’m going on a date with Wang Ruoyan?”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Ah! I got it! Someone probably said something about your size in the bathroom, right? I told you, you should’ve gone to the girls’ room.”
“Mine is big,” Li Mu muttered.
They reached the grassy area by the sports field and sat down. Yu Fan sat beside him.
Unlike Li Mu, who usually had no expression, Yu Fan almost always had a sunny smile on his face.
He leaned back on his hands, tilted his head slightly, and watched Li Mu’s expression.
After a while, he mumbled, “Your personality’s almost like a girl’s now, huh?”
“......”
“If it were Xu Ze, he would’ve just said what was bothering him right away.” Yu Fan lay down on the grass and crossed his legs. “But look at you, holding everything in like you're going to settle the score later. What did I even do to upset you?”
Li Mu knew that, yeah, he was being a little dramatic right now. If it were the old him, he'd have just ignored these little things.
But the problem was, even a slightly annoyed tone from someone made him take it personally.
Expressing that just made it sound like he was being overly sensitive.