Since she started sharing a desk with Zhou Mo, Zhou Yiyi realized she was miserably outclassed. She would struggle with problems for half a day, while he would solve them in a minute, his methods clear and simple, far superior to her convoluted, inconclusive approaches. Whenever she despondently rested her chin on her hands and asked him, "Were you born just to torture others?" he would simply bow his head and solve a few more problems.
Her notebooks, full of wrong answers, were peppered with his red ink comments. Sometimes, when there wasn't enough space and things got messy, he would flip to the end and rewrite it for her. Later, when copying problems, she would deliberately leave space for his annotations.
The problems that took her so much effort to copy were now shared by them both. He always asked curiously, "Where did you find this problem?"
"Oh, I just copied it from a bookstore on Sunday."
