The campus singing competition got under way just after Qingming.
After a full week of open auditions, it had finally moved on to the official elimination rounds.
Tonight the first of those rounds was being held on the sports field. The student union’s organization department had already put up a stage in the center, and hundreds upon hundreds of people were out there before it had even started.
It was early April, and the temperature had come up.
College students have their evenings free, so tonight was guaranteed to draw a big crowd.
Xu Ye and his three roommates had also come down to the field entrance early, handing out free fans and glow sticks to students on their way in.
Because they were giveaways, almost nobody turned them down the way people turn down flyers.
Xu Ye stayed at the entrance until the competition started and then left. Zhang Xinzhou and Li Tongwen had no interest in it either — one of them went to the fruit shop, the other to driving school to practice night driving. Yang Fei was the only one who stuck around, presumably to see whether Li Lulu was there.
He had been chatting with Li Lulu regularly, and she had never once shown the slightest impatience, which left Yang Fei firmly convinced he had a real chance of winning her over.
Back at the dorm, Xu Ye video-called Chen Qingqing straight away. She answered, propped the phone up in its stand, and sat down in her chair with both feet up on the seat, working her way through a mini cucumber.
Xu Ye: “Have you eaten?”
Chen Qingqing held up the cucumber, a little under half of it gone, and laughed. “What do you call this?”
Xu Ye: “One cucumber? That’s your dinner?”
Chen Qingqing: “Yep.”
Xu Ye: “Hold on. I’m calling your mom right now.”
Xu Ye had barely picked up his phone when Chen Qingqing said quickly, “There’s something wrong with you. I already ate in the canteen.”
Xu Ye: “Really?”
Chen Qingqing: “Really. I don’t go around lying all the time like you do.”
Xu Ye: “From now on I’m bringing a scale with me every week when I come over. If you’ve lost weight, I’m calling your mom and telling on you.”
Chen Qingqing: “Don’t you know everybody hates a tattletale?”
Zhang Ruowei came back in from picking up a package, and the moment she opened the door she saw Chen Qingqing grinning at her phone like an idiot. She started right back in with that pointed tone. “Xu Ye, you are unbelievable. You’re seeing each other on the weekend anyway. Do you have to video-call every single day? Don’t you get sick of it?”
Xu Ye: “I’m not calling you, am I.”
Zhang Ruowei: “Don’t you realize what a blow it is to me and Jiang Yu, you two showing off in the dorm every day?”
Jiang Yu was playing Plants vs. Zombies on the computer. Dragged into it out of nowhere, she shot straight back, “It’s a blow to you. I’m used to it.”
Zhang Ruowei walked around behind her and rested a hand on her shoulder. “Jiang Yu. You and I need a united front here.”
Jiang Yu was about to answer when Xu Ye gave Zhang Ruowei a taste of her own medicine, in exactly the same pointed tone. “Oh? Has Miss Zhang bought herself new clothes again?”
“What do you think? Nice, isn’t it? Qingqing’s got a dress like this one too. I only bought it because it looked good on her.”
“Nice enough, but you’re no match for my Qingqing. Don’t you know the saying — diàn dà qī kè?” [TL: 店大欺客, “a big shop bullies its customers” — a well-established business can afford to treat its customers badly. Xu Ye swaps the first character for its homophone 垫, “padding,” so his version means the padding is what’s cheating the customer.]
“Diàn dà qī kè?”
Even an old hand like Zhang Ruowei didn’t catch what he meant right away. She had to think about it for a good while before she worked out that Xu Ye was making fun of how small her chest was. Furious, she stormed over next to Chen Qingqing. “Xu Ye, I’m going to rip that mouth of yours off.”
Xu Ye burst out laughing, that smug, punchable look all over his face.
There was nothing Zhang Ruowei could do about him. She suddenly tipped Chen Qingqing’s chin up with a finger and planted kisses all over her face.
“Mwah~”
“Mwah~”
“Mwah~”
Xu Ye stared. “Zhang Ruowei, have you lost your mind?”
Zhang Ruowei wiped her mouth like some dirty old man and gave a cold snort. “How about that? Jealous? I’ll kiss your girlfriend any way I like.”
Chen Qingqing’s head was in a fog.
Her boyfriend was a pervert, sure.
But how come her roommate was turning into one too?
…
Early the next morning a big prize wheel went up outside Qingqing Fruit Shop, with a roll-up sign beside it laying out the rules of the promotion.
Li Tongwen had classes, so Xu Wanying was minding the shop alone that morning.
As a rule, mornings were slow at the fruit shop. There’d be a small peak once lunch was over, and the heaviest foot traffic came toward evening.
Today was different. Xu Wanying hadn’t been in the shop long when two female students came in, picked out their fruit, and then pointed at the big wheel by the door. “Senior, the promotion starts today, doesn’t it?”
“That’s right.”
“So we can do the draw now?”
“Mm-hm.”
The two of them had the wheel spinning in no time, and both had decent luck — one landed on “−¥5,” the other on “−¥6.” They had bought only fifty yuan of fruit between them, and eleven came straight off the total. They walked off happy, a bag of fruit each.
Bear in mind that Pinduoduo would not go live until September that year, so a promotion like this looked genuinely new at the time. Between the advertising fans handed out the day before and the plug Xu Ye put in the group chat that morning, business picked up sharply on a morning that would ordinarily have been dead.
Customers kept coming in, one after another, and some of them knew nothing about the promotion at all — they were passing by outside, saw the crowd in front of the fruit shop, and wandered over out of curiosity.
That’s how it goes in China. Two identical shops, one with plenty of customers and one with hardly any, and the overwhelming majority of people will pick the busy one.
Xu Wanying was struggling to keep up on her own that morning, and the moment the bell rang for the end of class she called Xu Ye. As soon as he heard what was going on at the shop, he drove straight over with his three roommates to help.
By midday, “packed to bursting” was the only way to describe the shop.
Seeing that, Xu Ye called Chen Jianjun right away and told him a truckload of fresh fruit had to come over that afternoon.
And just as Xu Ye was making that call —
Diagonally across the street, Luo Wenbing, the owner of Kangyuan Fruit Shop, was staring in shock at the crush outside Qingqing Fruit Shop.
He hadn’t seen this coming at all. Qingqing Fruit Shop’s business had suddenly gone through the roof!
What the hell were those kids up to now?
Once he’d hung up, Xu Ye spotted Luo Wenbing across the street too. He smiled, turned, and went back inside to keep order. “Everybody, no need to rush, we’ll take you one at a time. The promotion runs for two weeks — and don’t forget to spread the word for me when you get back.”
For the next few days business at the fruit shop stayed red-hot.
It made for a very strange sight. Same street, both of them fruit shops — and one was doing catastrophically badly while the other did impossibly well.
Luo Wenbing figured that if this kept up, his shop would sooner or later be running at a loss, so that evening he stopped Li Tongwen on his way from the canteen to his shift at the fruit shop.
(End of Chapter 221)