Chapter 5: School Enrollment

It turned out that Muze is the same age as him just a few months younger, since starting now they are about to go to the same school, same class level, different homeroom.

He didn’t know because the age difference was rarely even mentioned in book, damn Haojun was barely mentioned in the book except for some sickening flashback of their parents being sexist and haojun was used as a continous example. And that one time where Muze finally get his revenge and killed the ignorant Haojun.  Haojun, in his body back then, had to say that the scene was so exciting for him it was one of the only scene Haojun can bear reading without feeling his iq dropped, he even said “you go girl kick that brother’s ass of yours” but now that he was the one whose ass should be targeted and kicked he can only sighed.

And especially he can’t really tell because… it was alarming to be honest but his growth is really slow and concerning, he really looked like five years old. Six at most. And the 1 to 2 years different wouldn’t matter if it was an adult but child grew up fast and the fact that Muze’s growth was delayed from 1 to 2 years were highly concerning. It was a clear signs of abuse and neglect, how can something like this goes unreported and all the responsible adult just sit still witnessing this, he felt like he wanted to scream.

But really he couldn’t do anything now being a child himself.

The school supplies arrived in two separate orders.

Haojun noticed because he was paying attention, and because it was the kind of thing you didn't notice if you weren't. Two boxes, delivered on the same morning, both addressed to the estate. Aunt Chen signed for them. They sat side by side in the entrance hall until she carried them upstairs.

His box had a name-brand pencil case, the kind with a zip around three sides and a transparent front panel. New colored pencils in a tin. A ruler with a bubble level in it, which was pointless for a seven-year-old but looked good. A school bag that was stiff and structured and smelled like fresh canvas.

He didn't see what was in Muze's box.

He didn't have to. He'd gotten a brief look at the label before Aunt Chen took them up separately, and the font was different — a different shop, a different order, placed at a different time. Fine things, probably. Not the same things.

Haojun put his pencil case in his bag and didn't say anything and remembered.

Mingde Academy was exactly the kind of school it sounded like: old name, old money, the sort of institution that had portraits of its founders in the main hall and a motto in Latin that no one had translated in forty years because the translation wasn't as impressive as the Latin. The kind of school where the floors were always clean.

Haojun stood in front of it in his new uniform and thought: okay. This is where we are now.

His mother was next to him, pleased in the way she was pleased about things that felt like progress. Shen Guowei had come too, which Haojun was pretty sure was about being seen dropping children off at Mingde and only about thirty percent about the children specifically. He stood straight and looked important and said something to the head teacher who had come out to greet them, and the head teacher laughed at whatever it was.

Muze stood slightly behind all of them.

Different uniform — the junior division had a slightly different cut, the same colors but a smaller collar. He had his bag on both shoulders and his eyes on the middle distance, the particular look of someone who had been to this school before and was waiting for the adults to finish so the day could start. He wasn't nervous. He wasn't anything visible. He was just standing there, very still, in the way he stood places.

The head teacher said something to him — hello, good morning, something standard. Muze said good morning back, politely, complete sentence, and then went back to looking at the middle distance.

That was apparently sufficient because the head teacher turned back to Haojun, who was new and therefore interesting, and Muze ceased to be relevant to the conversation for the remainder of the goodbyes.

Haojun noted this. Filed it. Followed the teacher who'd been assigned to take him to his classroom, and did not look back, and started paying attention to where things were.

The class received him the way classes received new kids who were the right kind of new kid.

This was something Haojun had not fully accounted for, mostly because in his previous life he'd been the kind of person who entered rooms without anyone particularly rearranging around him. He was fine-looking — he knew that, objectively — but he'd been a tired postgraduate student with reading glasses and a caffeine dependency and the social presence of someone who was technically present. Not exactly magnetizing.

Apparently seven-year-old Ren Haojun was different.

He sat down and within four minutes there were two kids leaning over from adjacent desks asking his name. Within ten, someone had offered to show him where the bathroom was, which he didn't need, and someone else had told him his bag was nice. By lunch he had been informed, unprompted, that he smelled good — which was the omegaverse thing, he knew that, alpha pheromones or something, he'd skimmed that part of the novel — and had been invited to sit with a group he'd exchanged approximately fifteen words with.

He sat with them because refusing would have been strange. He ate his lunch. He answered questions about where he'd lived before and what his hobbies were and whether he'd ever been to the school's sports day, and he was pleasant and easy and said the right things, and the whole time he was thinking about how little of this he'd had to earn.

He hadn't done anything. He'd walked in and been an alpha and been seven years old and been a specific kind of face, and the table had opened up like it had been waiting for him.

He hated how frictionless it was. He hated it in a distant, simmering way, the way you hated systems that worked fine for you personally, which was its own specific guilt. He smiled at something someone said and thought: is this what it's always like.

Probably yes. The novel had implied yes. He'd read it at the time and thought social stratification, metaphor, classic and had now been inside it for less than a month and was already finding it exhausting in ways he hadn't predicted.

He drank his juice and smiled and said yes, he thought he might like sports day, and looked across the cafeteria.

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