Ms. Zhou thought for a moment. There was indeed a child who had just started at the kindergarten today.
But he wasn’t in her class. So the little boy who had made the entire class cry on his very first day was actually the little brother of the little devil standing before her!
Ms. Zhou didn’t let Lu Huaiyu go in to find his brother right away. Instead, she asked, “Lu, did you come here by yourself?”
“Where are your parents? Aren’t they with you?”
Lu Huaiyu was silent for two seconds before suddenly remembering what his parents had taught him: he mustn’t take advantage of being young and act recklessly, causing trouble for people in other professions.
So he answered Ms. Zhou honestly, “No. I skipped school to come here.”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Zhou. I’ve let you down after everything you taught me!”
He had missed his little brother, Xie Changyu, so much that he had acted impulsively and run away from school.
He knew he was in the wrong and had caused trouble for a lot of people.
Ms. Zhou patted him on the head and said gently, “All right, then let’s call your parents first, shall we?”
“And we’ll also need the phone number of your homeroom teacher. We have to let them know you’re safe, or they’ll worry.”
Lu Huaiyu cooperated obediently with Ms. Zhou and, as he had hoped, got to see young Xie Changyu.
The moment young Xie Changyu saw his big brother, his eyes filled with tears. Then he burst into sobs in his brother’s arms.
“Big Brother, I missed you so much! We’ve never been apart for this long before!”
“I don’t want to go to kindergarten! I can’t eat or sleep properly here, waah…”
Lu Huaiyu’s heart immediately broke for him. “Er Yu, don’t cry~ Did the other kids bully you?”
“Tell Big Brother. I used to be the boss around here, you know. I’ll go teach those clueless little brats a lesson!”
Teacher Yu, young Xie Changyu’s instructor, listened to the brothers’ completely backwards conversation and was left speechless.
Xie Changyu had been in kindergarten for less than two hours altogether. How could he possibly have been unable to eat or sleep?
And who had really bullied whom?
The truth was that, after introducing himself to the other children on his very first day, the little brat had inexplicably declared, “You’re all so pitiful. Your moms and dads must have abandoned you, which is why they sent you to this little prison!”
The entire class had burst into earth-shaking sobs at once.
After the teachers had finally managed to comfort the children, the little rascal added, “I miss Mommy so much! At this time of day, I’m usually in Mommy’s arms!”
The children, who had only just been calmed down less than two minutes earlier, broke down crying all over again.
The teachers had nearly started crying too.
And what was Xie Changyu doing during all this?
He was standing off to the side, watching with a blank expression while his eyes gleamed with sly amusement.
It was obvious that he had deliberately caused the whole prank.
His behavior was so atrocious that it was practically identical to his big brother’s!
So who, exactly, had bullied whom?
“Waaah… Big Brother, I want to go to elementary school with you! I don’t want us to be separated!”
It had to be said that young Xie Changyu had displayed a remarkable talent for singing and acting from an early age. His sobs were extraordinarily loud.
Yet beneath that volume was an overwhelming sorrow. His pitiful little face was enough to make anyone who saw him cry and anyone who heard him grieve.
Young Lu Huaiyu’s heart was practically shattered by his crying. He hugged his precious little brother and kept soothing him.
“Er Yu, stop crying. If you keep this up, you’ll hurt your throat!”
“Tomorrow, you can secretly come to elementary school with me. We won’t come back to kindergarten anymore, all right?”
Young Xie Changyu actually stopped crying and answered between hiccups, “Okay.”
Although he had stopped crying, he continued spouting nonsense.
“Big Brother, let me tell you, the teachers at our kindergarten hit the children too. Lots of kids have had red holes poked into their foreheads!”
“It’s really scary!”
A look of horror appeared in Lu Huaiyu’s eyes.
The truth, however, was that the teachers had been putting little red stars on the children’s foreheads as rewards.
“I’m telling the truth! The teacher won’t even let me eat pastries. He said that if I ate any more, he’d feed me chicken poop!”
“Waaah… Big Brother, kindergarten is terrifying! It’s nothing like the fun place you told me about!”
This time, the horror in Lu Huaiyu’s eyes nearly overflowed.
“What? They were going to feed you chicken poop?!”
His eyes widened in shock, as though he couldn’t believe that, after all these years since he had graduated, kindergartens had evolved to the point of feeding children chicken poop.
The teachers: For heaven’s sake, someone please tell right from wrong!
The truth was that this little brat had announced he was hungry just one hour after arriving at kindergarten and had then eaten five pastries in a row. The teachers had refused to give him any more only because he would have gotten indigestion.
Young Xie Changyu grew more and more aggrieved as he spoke. Before long, he started crying again, his sobs sounding unbearably pitiful.
Lu Huaiyu began soothing him once more and even started making wild declarations about secretly blowing up the kindergarten.
That way, young Xie Changyu wouldn’t have to come back and suffer there.
When Lu Qiwu and Xie Yanxun stepped into the kindergarten, this was exactly the scene they heard and saw.
The couple felt both angry and heartbroken. They were angry at the nonsense those two brothers had been spouting, and heartbroken for the teachers standing nearby with utterly defeated expressions.
The moment the teachers saw the two parents arrive, they opened their mouths to explain young Xie Changyu’s outrageous claims.
Lu Qiwu stopped them at once and said apologetically, “There’s no need to explain, teachers. Children don’t lie.”
“But they do spout nonsense, and our boys have caused you so much trouble. We’re truly sorry.”
Xie Yanxun also apologized beside her, afraid that their two little stinkers had left the teachers with lifelong psychological scars.
After discussing it, the couple ultimately decided to give every teacher at the kindergarten a raise.
The Xie family had invested in both this kindergarten and the elementary school attached to it. Asking the person in charge to raise everyone’s salary was well within their power.
After all, the teachers’ lives mattered too, especially after having to deal with two little devils in succession!
Once Lu Qiwu and Xie Yanxun had calmed all the teachers down, they called Lu Huaiyu’s homeroom teacher and asked for him to be excused for the day.
Only then did they take both children home to educate them.
One of them had single-handedly thrown his entire elementary school into chaos, while the other was a master of mishearing who had slandered every kindergarten teacher with his wild stories.
There was no way they could avoid teaching the boys a proper lesson.
And don’t get the wrong idea—they really did explain things reasonably.
The boys were young and didn’t know any better, so it was their parents’ responsibility to educate them.
After the two children returned home, they didn’t face a violent storm of parental anger.
Young Lu Huaiyu even received a round of praise for his abilities.
Escaping school without being noticed by all those teachers and security guards was no easy feat.
So Lu Qiwu and Xie Yanxun decided to praise him first.
But one thing had nothing to do with the other. He had still done something wrong, and he still needed to be taught a lesson.
After praising him, Xie Yanxun rubbed his little head and asked with a slightly serious expression, “Do you know what you did wrong today?”
Young Lu Huaiyu nodded earnestly. “Because I was being selfish and caused a lot of trouble for other people.”
“And someone might even lose their job because of me. I also made Mommy, Daddy, and the teachers worry.”
“I’m sorry. I know I was wrong…”
He reflected on his mistake word by word, his voice tinged with a hint of dejection.
He knew that because he had skipped class today, the first people likely to be held responsible would be the school security staff.
