Sweet Romance13 min read
Rain, Red Bean Buns, and a Score of 666
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1
"You bought red bean buns for him again?"
"Yes." I pushed the damp hair from my face. "Why?"
Sophie Brooks snorted. "Because you like him, that's why. You still don't get it."
"I don't like him like that," I lied and smiled too big.
"Then why did you buy them?" Sophie repeated.
"I—" The bell cut me off. "Because he asked me to. Because I wanted to help."
"You always want to help." Sophie shook her head. "Natalia, don't make a fool of yourself."
I laughed too quickly. "I'm not making a fool."
Sophie watched me walk into the corridor with that ten-yuan bill left in my pocket and said under her breath, "Good luck, Red-Bun Girl."
They called me "Red-Bun Girl" before they called me "Tsinghua Girl." Names stick depending on who has the loudest voice.
2
"Your book was stolen again?" Hugh Bloom said with the slow smile of a man who loved letting someone else squirm.
"Yes." I kept my voice neutral. "I'll buy another."
Hugh's eyes slid to the class. "Please, don't make trouble. And Natalia—try to keep your belongings safe. We can't spend all day rescuing every student who loses their books."
A few students tittered. The phrase "rescuing" sounded like a verdict.
"New books have been bought," Hugh said, tossing a neat stack onto my desk like a judge placing a sentence. "Natalia Ramirez—don't lose these. You have a future, don't you? Don't ruin it."
"Don't call attention to me," I thought. We all laughed because it was easier than answering.
My mother, Harper Cabrera, did not think it was funny. She came into the school the next day like a storm in sensible shoes.
"Mr. Bloom!" she said, voiceing raw. "You hurt my daughter. You humiliate her in front of everyone. Do your job properly."
"Harper, please—" I started, but she didn't stop. Her hand closed on the collar of his jacket, then he rubbed his face where a palm had landed.
The whole floor stopped teaching. Heads turned like a chorus. I wanted to sink into my chair.
After that, I had a new nickname and a new place in people's minds. "Tsinghua Girl," they said, calling me a clown who dreamed of palace gates. They joked until my teeth ached.
"I won't go," I told myself. "No one pays attention enough to remember I'm breathing." I learned to disappear.
3
"You're support," Luke Rahman said in the game chat like it was a gentle fact.
He had a voice that didn't try to be warm. He had a voice that simply was. We matched in a summer online lobby, and I was the clumsy support and he was the precise shooter who saved the rounds. For weeks he was a name and a calm that soothed me.
"You were terrible last round," he said once over voice. "Don't let others insult you."
"Thanks," I said.
"I play badly sometimes. It's not your fault," he replied. "Also—if you ever want help with school, tell me. You don't have to stay behind."
I thought he was a man in another city who cared more about strategy than feelings. Then we met.
He stood tall in school uniform that somehow made him look like a magazine photo gone live. He was quieter than his voice in the game. He had a face that made girls stop and breathe.
We walked around the track, talking about nothing and everything. He said, "You can come to the court whenever. Anytime." Then, suddenly later, he didn't message me for a week.
"I probably bored him," I told myself. I imagined him as someone who wrote poetry in margins and whose life didn't have room for me.
4
"Why didn't you message me for a week?" I typed into my phone one afternoon and then hid it.
He answered, "Were you busy?"
"I wasn't—" My fingers trembled. I tapped Send. "No, I wasn't."
He sent three lines, then another one. "If I did something wrong, tell me, okay?" A few hours later in the rain he stood at the corner of the street, a small umbrella, a deliberate silhouette.
"Why didn't you reply?" he asked without sounding accusatory.
"You didn't tell me—" I said, words clumsy.
He looked at me as if the whole world narrowed to my face. "I waited. I thought maybe I was pathetic. You didn't message me."
I went red and tried to make a joke. He laughed softly. "Are you free to walk home? My house is your way."
He took my sleeve and tugged me into the shelter of his umbrella. The close air smelled like rain and an old string of soap. My chest fluttered.
"Do you have a girlfriend?" I blurted.
"No," he said. "Do you want one?"
My heart did something funny and dumb. "Do you mean—"
"Yes. But keep it a secret," he said quickly, like a conspirator giving me a map. "It's between us."
That night I went home and dreamed of being an honest, loud heroine. I woke up dizzy with a happiness I didn't know how to own.
5
"Why can't you tell anyone?" I asked that same week when he walked away with Katalina Sommer speaking to him in pretty tones.
Luke's eyes slipped to me with a shadow, "My mother..." He didn't say more.
"Your mother?" The word packed a wallop in my chest. "She won't like me?"
"It's complicated," he said. "But it's nothing you do."
He refused to laugh and wink publicly. He refused to sit next to me in places where people might watch. Once, when I tripped in the amusement park and grabbed for him, he pulled a hand away.
"Don't make a scene," he murmured.
"Don't make a scene?" I repeated. "We are already a secret!"
It's hard to be small when the person you like asks you to be smaller. So I threw myself into school instead. I did because Luke told me I could, and because the word "Tsinghua" had become ammunition in a fight I'd let them wage.
6
"You can do the last problem," Luke said, handing me a physics problem like handing me a key. "Try it."
"I've never done one of these," I admitted.
He bent over my notebook and scrawled formulas. "Start here. Follow the steps."
When I got it right, he looked like he had swallowed a secret delight. "You did it."
"You lied," I told him. "You said I couldn't."
"I said you hid yourself," he corrected. "You weren't trying."
For the first time, someone treated me like a person who might be more than the sum of jokes about my family and my past tests. We structured nights of study. He left little outlines and past papers. He nagged when I made excuses and he celebrated when I wrote full solutions.
"You must fill every test," he told me. "Write everything you can. Even if you're shaky, do the work."
So I worked. I learned to write full answers. I learned to stop assuming that a small start meant a small finish.
7
"The top scores are posted," Sophie said, voice low. "Luke Rahman—705."
"Again?" I whispered, stunned. The numbers on the paper felt like a secret I understood.
"Then your name could be anywhere," she said, staring at me like I was a new species. "Try."
I tried. I studied like someone building a raft. Two months of late nights, math pages like scaffolding. I tracked every weak point. I replaced laughter with work.
"The teacher called you out," someone said in the corridor on a Monday. "You scored five-hundred something. Top ten."
I felt the ground loosen. "This is not the timeline," Hugh Bloom said when he saw me with my scores in hand. "Either there is trickery, or someone helped you cheat. Teachers know when students change overnight."
Linda Evans—the chemistry teacher—stood up for me. "I have my eyes open," she said, and then, with a gentleness that surprised me, "I saw Natalia in the library every night. I know where effort goes."
Hugh Bloom's mouth made a new shape. He was the man who mocked, and now he had to swallow a small, bitter silence. People began to talk.
8
"That's not all," a tear in my chest insisted. "This can't be only for me."
I kept working. The next mock, the one everyone said would separate the wheat from the chaff, came. I answered like my hands finally had purpose.
"You did this," Luke told me after the exam. "You did the homework, you stayed, you wrote the problems, you asked for help."
"But you taught me." I tried to hand him the credit. He wouldn't take it.
"You did the work." He smiled like a secret protector. He called his mother, Linda Evans, to recommend a small tweak for my method one afternoon—her voice dry with rules and care.
"Don't overpraise," she warned. "Praise means pressure; pressure breaks kids who don't yet understand their own strength. Natalia can shoulder it. Let her."
9
"You're in the finals for the city e-sports contest," Luke said one summer night. "Do you want to try? The prize could pay for school."
My stomach swung with the possibility of three thousand—or even thirty thousand. I loved games enough that I trusted they wouldn't let me down.
"Do you think I can win?" I asked.
"You can," he said. "I believe it."
We trained, not like lovers training for romance but like conspirators building a surprise. My hands relearned the game of support—I learned angles and patience. The team grew into a unit.
"Give me the line," our captain told me during the semifinal. "We need focus."
I took the focus and let everything else fall away. When the final came, when the clock burned at midnight and cameras showed us on the big screen, I played as if the arena had been built for me.
On stage, the host shouted our victory. "Champion! The prize is three thousand each!" People cheered. Luke waved a big sign that said "Natalia! 666!"
"666?" I laughed. "That's my score!"
He blinked. "You scored 666 on your final exam."
The host's voice dropped to a hush. Then a new announcement: "And our sponsor will award the champion an additional three hundred thousand toward college and living expenses."
I held the giant check and tried to breathe. My mother's face in the crowd was a sun.
10
"Why didn't you stand up for us at the amusement park?" I asked later, because secrets have a habit of accumulating into a weight.
He looked at me, tired. "My mother—" He hesitated. "She doesn't want me to get involved. She thinks my studies come first. She told me discretion is a kind of armor."
"Discretion used as armor can become a cage," I said. "If you always hide, you teach me to hide, too."
He held my hand—a full hand this time—and said, "No more hiding."
We kept that promise mostly. We kept it until something else broke.
11
"Photos everywhere," Sophie said into the phone. "Someone plastered the school with pictures of you and Luke holding hands."
I went numb. I found one photo and it looked like a trap. I looked smaller than I felt. I thought Katalina had done it—her eyes on Luke at the amusement park had been sharp.
"You did this?" I asked Katalina when we faced each other.
She smirked. "If I did, so what? You climbed from nothing and people suddenly worship you. I won't have a clown at the center of stage."
"You changed the exam pen," I said later when I saw her. "You sabotaged my writing so my answers might vanish."
She leaned close. "And I would gain what? A little victory to watch you fall."
"You swapped a pen," I told the class later. "You tried to make me fail."
Someone brought it to the administration. The principal called us. Linda Evans walked into the room and the air changed.
"You're Luke's mother?" Katalina said, astonished. "I thought—"
"Yes, and I am a teacher first," Linda said. "I don't favor my son, not in school. I see hard work. I see Natalia every night. I will not let gossip determine a student's fate."
Katalina blushed. Her pride had been punished by truth. She knew what it meant to be exposed.
12
"One more test," they said. Seven-school exam. "Prove your work."
I sat in the hall with desks that used to look like someone else's destiny. Fingers on paper, heart on task. When the results came, I had a number that felt like a small promise: 660. Luke had a number that felt like air—first in the grade.
"You did well," he whispered. "You made it into the four-school list."
"Because I didn't quit," I said. "Because I kept writing."
13
Months later, my mother insisted on an entrance celebration. "You need a decent dinner," she said, cooking like she single-handedly made the world bearable.
We invited teachers. We invited reporters because the e-sports win had made my name something more. Hugh Bloom sat stiff at a long table, face red with forced calm.
I stood at the microphone with my prepared speech in my hand. Cameras clicked. My palms sweated. Then I did what I'd rehearsed only in private.
"First," I said, and the tone of my voice was quiet so that only those very close could feel it, "thank you to the teachers who helped. Mrs. Linda Evans, for believing. She is the reason I did the work."
The applause was real and warm. People stood.
"Second," I said, looking right at Hugh Bloom, standing like a parrot with a heap of insult in his face, "I thank the teacher who taught me the other way." I held up my cup. "Thank you, Mr. Hugh Bloom, for making me see that not all authority is right, and for giving me a taste of the world's small cruelties."
Hugh's face blanched. He sputtered under breath. "You can't—"
My voice slid across the microphones like sun across tiles. "You told my mother and me that I was ruining my future. You mocked my dream of studying further. You publicly shamed me for losing textbooks. Those words taught me to hide. But they also taught me to rise."
People in the room murmured. A reporter leaned forward.
"I have proof," I said. "You said you would celebrate if I reached 211. You said you'd 'stand on your head' if I did it." Laughter rippled. "You told the class that my ambitions were ridiculous."
"You are lying!" Hugh exploded.
"Am I? Or are you so certain people won't remember?" I continued. "Because Mr. Bloom, after all your words, you taught me endurance. You taught me to carry slights like armor. You made me stronger."
Hugh's mouth opened. He tried to gather a retort. He looked around. No one flinched to his defense. Teachers who had once watched his crack jokes now looked at him as a man who had been unkind.
"You're a disgrace," he said, and his voice cracked like an old bridge.
"I asked for your reward," I said. "You promised to invert yourself if I showed you my worth. So now..." I lifted my glass and poured its clear liquid—tea—on the polished floor at his feet.
A silence so loud fell it felt like a struck bell.
People started to lean in. A microphone caught Hugh's sputtering, "That's obscene! This is a child's party!"
"Your insults were public," I said. "This is public, too."
The cameras moved. The reporters quickened. Someone in the back took out a phone and started a live feed.
"Take it away," Hugh snapped. "You can't—"
I waved to the head teacher, Griffin Cook, who had been watching with an expression like someone who had heard too many unfair stories. "Mr. Cook, you are a witness to county policy. Public humiliation is wrong when inflicted by a teacher. But public accountability is proper when there is a pattern of harm. Do what you must."
Hugh's face went through stages like rapid weather. Shock first, then anger, then an attempt at denial.
"I didn't—" he started. "I acted for the class!" He gestured wildly. His hands trembled. "I made rules, I kept standards, you—"
"You humiliated a child in front of classmates," Linda said quietly, and the room listened because Linda was the kind of still center that drew attention. "You made a target of someone who was already falling. You owe an apology."
Hugh's jaw moved. He tried to salvage authority by roaring. "I will not be—"
"Then we shall act," Griffin said. "Mr. Bloom, you will be reported to the district. An investigation will begin. You will lose your class assignment pending review. Any further harassment will be grounds for immediate removal."
Hugh's eyes bulged. "You can't."
"Watch me," Griffin said.
Around the table, the crowd's reaction shifted. Students who had borne his barbs as inevitability now saw the man as mortal. Phones flashed. Someone recorded the humiliation he had sown years ago—his inability to command genuine respect. "I am so glad," murmur rose, "that she stood up."
Hugh's face crumpled into something fierce and sad. He tried to bluster once more. "You will pay for this!" he shouted, but it sounded like a child trying to hold thunder.
He left quickly, pacing, shoved out by the reality he had created for himself. People whispered. Some teachers followed him out, murmuring "discipline," "investigation."
Outside, the rare silence after a storm hung heavy. I felt something strange and bright unfold inside: relief mingled with sorrow. He had given us all a lesson—just not the one he'd meant.
14
After that, the school press asked for interviews. The local paper wrote a profile: "From Mockery to Champion: How Natalia Ramirez Rewrote Her Story." My mother cried, and Sophie hugged me until my shoulders loosened.
Katalina's petty acts were exposed too. When surveillance footage showed her swapping a pen, her face went white in front of a school committee. She tried to deny it, tried to say it was a joke, but the footage looped mercilessly. Her father called and scolded. Her status crumbled. She did not react like someone who would fight; she shrank instead, sliding away from the cameras.
At the banquet, Hugh Bloom's dismissal was public. The school issued a rebuke. He was moved from his leadership post. The students recorded the meeting and shared it widely; his reputation, once a sturdy thing, cracked. He begged and sputtered, then finally left the stage with a sound like a footstep in a closed room.
Katalina's fall was quieter but real—parents didn't want the trouble. She watched me shake hands with reporters and looked smaller than even before.
15
"Did it feel good?" Sophie asked weeks later. "When you poured the tea?"
"It did," I admitted slowly. "But I didn't do it for amusement. I did it because people should see that words matter when they wound. I did it because we deserve to be defended, not bullied."
"And Luke?" Sophie smiled.
He sat across from me on a bus to Beijing, a small suitcase between his legs. "You did it well," he said, and took my hand without thinking of secrets.
"You didn't have to hide," I said.
"I learned to stop," he said. "It wasn't easy."
"Good," I said, and we both laughed because the world had suddenly become a little wider.
16
"Do you regret anything?" someone on the stage asked me at a small televised interview after my e-sports victory.
"I regret hiding," I said. "I regret letting a sneer define me for a long time. But I don't regret the nights I worked. I don't regret the friends who stuck by me."
"You said something to Mr. Bloom at your party," the interviewer pressed. "Would you do the same again?"
I looked at the cup of tea left drying on the stage floor in my memory. "Yes. Words can cut. Words can free. Public accountability is not revenge; it's a record that what you say has consequences."
17
We flew to Beijing together. Luke at Peking University; me at another fine school. We sat by the window on the plane and watched clouds.
"Look out," he said.
I looked, expecting city, rain, a sign. There was nothing. He smiled and kissed my cheek.
"That's new," I said, delighted.
"No one knows that," he said. "We know."
"Good," I said. "Keep knowing."
In the months ahead, I studied. I played. I learned that glory could be a loud headline and a quiet answer sheet filled with work. I learned that humiliation could be turned into a lens through which we saw what to fix.
At the end of July, before classes started, my mother baked us a cake with a silly little icing that said, "666." We laughed until sugar crumbed on our wrists.
I kept the giant check and the medal and the photo of a small umbrella. I kept the memory of a single red bean bun I had once bought for a girl who liked boys who were quiet.
When someone asked me what had mattered most, I would say quietly, "The umbrella in the rain. The red bean bun that went to the wrong girl. The teacher who believed. And the night the score read 666 on a board while I stood under hot lights holding a check for college."
Those were the things that let me build a life I could be proud of.
The End
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