Chapter 19

  The professor looked at Du Shaotu with suspicion, hesitated for a moment, nodded his head and made a tick on the attendance sheet, then called out the next student.

  After taking attendance, class was dismissed. I originally wanted to quickly gather my things and rush out, but just as I stood up, Du Shaotou called out to me: "Hey, you, wait a minute."

  He walked up to me, tilted his head and asked: "Who are you?"

  I honestly admitted: "I'm a freshman from the School of Management, I came to audit this class."

  "So you're not from our class after all. No wonder I see you attending classes, but don't recognize you." He casually asked another question: "Hey, what's your name?"

  "Xǔ shēn shēn." = "Very deep."

  Du Shao narrowed his eyes and probed me: "Your name is far from Lu You, can you even hear that wrong?"

  Anyway, since it's come to this, might as well take advantage of the situation and ask: "I was absent-minded in class and answered incorrectly. I knew Lu You before. Why didn't he show up today?"

  "Oh——?" Du Shaotu dragged out the tail of his sentence, with an even more playful expression on his face. "He has something to do today and can't come, he's gone to pick someone up."

  "Oh, I'll go first then, senior brother", I said politely and walked away with a humble attitude.

  This matter was soon known to Lu You. In a later financial engineering class, I sat in the back row corner as usual, and soon after sitting down, I heard Du Shaotu calling me: "Xu Shenshen, do you want to sit here?"

  Lu You on his right glanced at me and didn't say a word.

  It would be a waste of such a good opportunity, and it would not do justice to the hardship I endured for over half a month, sleeping in the tiered classroom instead of my dorm. I smiled and agreed, hugging my book as I changed seats to sit on Du Shaotou's left side.

  "This class is really going by fast, I almost took off my right ear and put it between them to listen to what Luyu was saying. Du Shaotu smiled and said: "Didn't you say you knew Luyu last time? If you don't understand this lesson, just ask him, he's like a half-assistant teacher in our class. What the teacher knows, he knows too, and what the teacher doesn't know, he might also know."

  "I asked Lu You with eager anticipation: 'Thank you so much, senior brother. I'm Xu Shenshen, we met on the train during winter break.'"

  He smiled and said, "Hmm, how did you end up attending this class? It might be a bit challenging for freshmen like you."

  "This semester's classes are really relaxed, I'm just auditing for fun."

  Du Shao Tu sighed: "Now freshmen are so proactive. Why didn't I have this awareness when I was a freshman?"

  He had just finished speaking, and his phone rang. He walked out of the classroom to answer it. After a while, he came back and handed his homework to Lu You, then grabbed his backpack and rushed out: "Something's come up with my club, can you help me hand in my homework later? If the teacher wants us to sign in, just ask Xu Shen Shen to call out for me."

  I naturally sat down with Lu You.

  A 45-minute class, I asked for his email, MSN, QQ on the pretext of asking questions; Sneaked a peek at his student ID number on his homework paper; And in order to keep up with his pace, I copied down the professor's board writing word for word without missing a single character, which became my first draft notes for this class.

  Also, I wrote down all the elective courses he chose this semester and went back to the dormitory to draw a complete picture of them.

  There are four people in our dormitory, I, Yao Li, Shi Yufei and Zhao Tian. When I was boldly heading towards Lu You's direction, the three of them often helped me come up with plans and pointed out the way.

  When discussing topics of the two sexes while lying in bed, I asked everyone to clarify my target object. Everyone suggested that I first figure out an important premise: Does Lu You have a girlfriend?

  "I don't think so, I've attended their professional classes many times and never saw him with any girl together."

  Yao Li said: "That's not necessarily the case. What if he has a girlfriend at another school? Think about it, he originally studied for 4 years as an undergraduate at Central South University, maybe he had a girlfriend there?"

  "What can be done about it?"

  "The Coke in the neighboring dorm is also from Hunan, you can ask Coke to ask around in their hometown gathering. If it still can't be found out, we'll help you ask Du Shaotu directly, they're definitely in the same dorm."

  The night at university was spent in everyone's seven mouths and eight tongues discussing and guessing.

  The result of Kele's inquiry was satisfactory. She said that Lu You had been at B University for only half a year and wasn't very enthusiastic about attending alumni association events.