After Sleeping with My Childhood Friend/Arch-Nemesis - Chapter 1

Her head started spinning again.

The Chinese and English words on the laptop screen were densely packed, appearing blurry as if veiled in mist. Zhou Xiaqing habitually shook her head forcefully, and her vision finally cleared.

She leaned back in the hotel chair, silently reciting a long paragraph of translation she had just polished. It wasn’t until she realized she had chewed over the same sentence five times without moving forward that she helplessly gave up the struggle.

The focus she had once prided herself on seemed to have retreated lately.

Feeling incredibly agitated, she took the elevator down to the hotel’s smoking room. As she opened the door slightly, a thick, pungent smell of smoke drilled into her nostrils, and she couldn’t help but frown.

Xu Ling was leaning against the wall, smoking. Seeing the young woman’s face all scrunched up, she asked with feigned ignorance: “Is the medicine useful?”

Zhou Xiaqing shook her head in silence.

“I knew it wouldn’t be useful a long time ago. How can you cure a sickness of the heart with external objects?” Xu Ling looked at her, took a drag of her cigarette, and exhaled, her drawn-out tone carrying a hint of sarcasm. “Class Monitor Zhou, don’t hold yourself to such high standards. It’s just a small competition; is it worth being so tense even while on vacation? If you keep working yourself to the bone like this, careful you don’t ruin your own health.”

Xu Ling had always been flip with her words, but this bit actually sounded like some earnest, well-meaning advice.

But it wasn’t a “small competition.” It was a highly important, extremely difficult cultural tourism interpreting competition. Performing well would secure an internship opportunity at the Cultural Tourism Bureau something that was incredibly rare and hard to come by.

It wasn’t that she held herself to high standards; this competition usually only accepted applications from English majors in their third year and above. As one of only two sophomore students in the department, she had only managed to apply through the strong recommendation of her professor. She didn’t want to let her professor down, nor did she want to regret it later.

Zhou Xiaqing had a long internal rebuttal, but she knew Xu Ling didn’t want to hear it, and she couldn’t be bothered to explain. She rolled her eyes with great effort and looked listlessly at the dying ember between Xu Ling’s fingers. Her throat felt dry and unbearable as she asked: “Then what about smoking?”

Xu Ling turned her head, glanced at her, and listened as she finished the question: “Is smoking useful?”

“You’re not cut out for this,” Xu Ling immediately replied.

“Smoking is split into being ‘cut out for it’ or not now? How righteous of you,” Zhou Xiaqing laughed out of anger.

Xu Ling deliberately looked her up and down: “Class Monitor Zhou, just turn on your front-facing camera and take a look, you’ll know.”

Zhou Xiaqing actually did turn on her phone. The bulb emitted a trembling light, shining down from above her head—

Pitch-black hair reaching her chest, a deathly pale face, and dark circles under her eyes. At first glance, she looked exactly like a female ghost who had died with a grievance.

“Not bad,” Zhou Xiaqing forced out a stiff smile and nodded earnestly. “Added another way to make money.”

“…What way?”

“The side-hustle way of playing a female ghost in a haunted house.”

Xu Ling twitched her lips twice, pulling the topic back: “I mean, you have a face that doesn’t look like it belongs to a smoker. A good student like you, who doesn’t even dare to take shortcuts when running an 800-meter test, would you feel so guilty that you couldn’t sleep all night if you smoked?”

Zhou Xiaqing seamlessly followed up: “I’m already not sleeping all night, every night.”

This was a chronic problem.

Since she was a child, she had placed great importance on her grades. With a sharp mind and a serious attitude, she had been winning first place since she was small, living quite gloriously. But as the difficulty of her studies increased and the circles she moved in became filled with high achievers, by the second year of high school, she lost her initial ease. She often sacrificed sleep to redouble her efforts, gritting her teeth to maintain that number-one spot.

Once she reached a top-tier university, the situation became even worse. In a campus where throwing a brick was likely to hit a provincial top scholar, the place was crawling with gifted students who worked overtime. Maintaining her number-one glory was near impossible.

Fortunately, she rose to the challenge, her potential astonishing. Like a sponge, she crazily absorbed knowledge, barely maintaining a second-place standing among her cohort of translation majors.

But under the heavy pressure, her anxiety grew more severe. Especially during midterms, finals, and competition periods, her sleep was intermittent. In the dead of night, what she heard wasn’t her own breathing, but the abnormally clear sound of her heartbeat.

Thump, thump. The sound was right beside her ears, like a heavy, dull bell-ringing ceremony, as if declaring the passage of time. Her heart felt as if it were about to burst out of her chest the next second.

“You’re a tightly wound spring right now, holding on by a single breath,” Xu Ling looked at her exhausted state, ultimately feeling a bit of heartache. “Take it easy and rest well these few days. You walked the streets all day today, and you still had the energy to clutch a laptop and recite, recite, recite when you got back it’s too insane.”

She stubbed out her cigarette and walked toward the exit, not forgetting to leave Zhou Xiaqing with one last remark: “Don’t think about smoking; you’re not cut out for it.”

She emphasized it again.

Whether it was good or bad, emphasizing it once was enough why repeat something unimportant?

Zhou Xiaqing recalled that 800-meter physical education test. Judging by the P.E. teacher’s attitude, he probably just wanted them to run it casually and hand in a score to get it over with, so many girls chose to cut across the grass in the middle of the track. Even when the teacher saw it, he only gave a symbolic verbal warning without any other measures.

“Only our upright and honest Class Monitor Zhou ran the full four laps exactly, and even got third place. Too amazing!”

That was their evaluation of her.

“That test,” Zhou Xiaqing looked at Xu Ling by the sliding door, her clear, clean eyes blinking as her tone remained light and calm, “I actually skipped two laps.”

Two small objects were tossed over, one after the other.

Zhou Xiaqing caught them firmly with both hands, her movements smooth and agile.

A dash of crimson flickered between her fingers, and white smoke permeated the air. Zhou Xiaqing accidentally choked on it, falling into a fit of hacking coughs.

Tears streamed down her face.

It was just too pungent; she wasn’t used to it.

As expected, the cigarette Xu Ling smoked wasn’t suitable for a beginner like her.

She decisively threw away the half-smoked cigarette and took the elevator back to her room.

Xu Ling sent her a message from the neighboring room: “Sleep.”

Zhou Xiaqing replied briefly: “Sleep.”

Normally, it would be safer and cheaper for two girls to share a room while traveling abroad, but Xu Ling knew she had difficulty falling asleep and slept very lightly, so she specially booked two rooms so she could sleep as comfortably as possible.

Unfortunately… she still couldn’t sleep.

After washing up and lying in bed, she closed her eyes and forced herself to sleep. Time ticked by minute by minute; she didn’t know how many sheep she had counted, but her consciousness remained exceptionally clear.

For some reason, her state tonight was worse than ever before. Her body felt heavy, all her nerves were taut, her chest felt stuffy and breathless, and even the blood flowing through her veins felt agitated and uneasy.

In the end, she turned on her phone.

Seeing that it wasn’t even 11:00 PM, she changed out of her pajamas and headed out.