Chapter 4 3.

3. Are they born bad kids?Sansan didn't know, she thought maybe things weren't so bad, maybe those things in the juvenile detention center were fabricated by the adults, maybe the sorrow, fear and disappointment were imposed on them.The time in Yan's house was so happy.The grandma downstairs in Astro Boy's house would often share a bowl of iced mung bean paste with too much white sugar for the two of them.Early summer evenings are full of screaming and running children, boys with pistols in their hands splashing water everywhere, girls moving up benches and sitting in the doorway eating a bowl of boiled peas while trying to use impatiens petals Come paint your nails.The entrances of the game console and the billiard room were crowded with smoking middle school students, but because she was walking with Astro Boy, Sansan didn't feel scared.Only here she has no worries.She followed Astro Boy through the dormer window and climbed to the roof by stepping on the eaves. The roof was full of gemstone flowers, which grew unscrupulously and vigorously without anyone taking care of them.

"When my father was young, he could walk along the roof of Yan's house." Astro Boy said. Of course, it is not possible now, because sheds have been set up on the roof, on the balcony, and on the balcony where sheds can be set up, and they are full of sundries.More and more things protruded from the dormer windows, intertwined with the lush vines, and the entire Yan family house looked like a pile of rubbish that was crumbling when viewed from the roof.But the smell of burning coal balls, the smell of mosquito coils and the aroma of fried chicken feathers are so unforgettable.In those evenings, the sun staggered down, and it was golden yellow as far as the eye could see, as if lost in time.So, maybe the world of adults is a conspiracy, and my mother's saying "don't fool around with the wild children in Yan's house" is itself a conspiracy.Sansan didn't understand why so many things were forbidden to her.She has no way to tell her mother that she is happy, because her happiness is trivial and a waste of time for adults.

Forget it, she won't let her mother know this, she won't let them share her happiness, only Astro Boy and Jewel Flower know. There is often an old man picking up plastic and glass bottles at the gate of the school. I can’t remember exactly how old he is. Anyway, he is a shriveled old man whose skin is sunburned like asphalt and smelly all over his body.He was wearing a hideous old man's shirt, and the drooping neckline had a large circle of yellow sweat stains that couldn't be washed off.Because of the thinness, both sides of the cheeks are sunken, and the cloudy eyeballs often protrude outward with bloodshot eyes.The eyebrows and hair are gray and white, but the hair is short and the eyebrows are long.He doesn't seem like the type to be friendly with children, and even threatens them with his fist if they provoke him.Sansan doesn't remember why she was inexplicably curious about this old man at first, probably because once she saw him pick up the butt of a peony brand cigarette that hadn't been completely extinguished from the roadside, and sit under a plane tree Sitting on the tattered wicker chair that was almost weathered, he narrowed his eyes and twitched.But because Sansan glanced at him more than once, he immediately glared back at her, and even pinched the cigarette butt off with his thick fingers, and grinned at her, with a rough look on his yellowish face. The look of laughing but not laughing.

"I think he is probably a lonely old man. I have never seen him walking with anyone." One day Sansan said to Astro Boy, "Probably he can only sleep in the vegetable market. There are many piles of cabbage in the vegetable market. He could sleep there without being too uncomfortable. Tell me, how much money can you make selling a bottle?" "I don't know, it must be very little. My father can only earn a little money working in the factory." Astro Boy said. "Once he waited for the customers in the noodle shop at the intersection to leave, then went in and ate all the remaining Yangchun noodles."

"Why do you care about so many shit?" Astro Boy was a little impatient. He also has a lot to worry about these days, because the final exam is coming soon, and if he fails all three subjects, he will repeat the grade.He is not afraid of repeating a grade, but he is very afraid of his father. If he repeats a grade, his father will beat him to death. "He's not going to be a good thing." "Then what if he dies in the cabbage pile? Shall we help him?" "I told you he wasn't a good guy." God knows where Sansan's imagination came from.She liked to read tragic stories since she was a child, and was worried about the fate of the characters in these stories. For example, in the Hans Christian Andersen story, the girl who stepped on bread across the swamp for fear of dirtying her new shoes, died when the bread sank.Below is the hell of starving ghosts who don't value food. They have delicious food in front of them, but they can never eat because they are tied to chairs.Or the poor man kept in the dungeon, and the devil made him stick out a finger every day to make sure he was fat enough to be boiled and eaten.So she couldn't help feeling sick when she thought that the old man would starve to death in the pile of cabbage in the vegetable market.The wet vegetable field all day long, with rotting vegetable leaves stuck to the floor and dead rats lying in the middle of the road, has become more and more a nightmare.On the second day, Sansan saved the peach shortcake and bagged strawberry soy milk during recess.Strawberry soy milk is her favorite drink, so she made up her mind and asked Astro Boy to help her deliver the pile of food to the old man when school was over.Of course she didn't dare, even going to the cigarette paper store to buy cold beer, she had to muster up a lot of courage, and she was very neatly dressed before she could speak to the aunt inside in front of the counter with a mosquito-like voice Let alone tell her to talk to a ferocious old man, not to mention that the old man is likely not to even look at the piece of peach shortbread that has been pinched a little bit, or a tramp like him Han didn't like drinking strawberry-flavored soy milk at all.She didn't know this at all, so she desperately held a large bunch of keys in her neck and hid in the door room, watching Astro Boy with his schoolbag on his back through the glass, and ran across the road to stuff the pile of shortbread and soy milk into the door. In the old man's hand.

"What did he say?" "Nothing, I didn't say thank you anyway." "How can there be nothing? Will he eat these? Does he like them?" "He asked if there were any cigarettes. Are you going to do it tomorrow?" "Of course. I don't like peach shortbread. I can't swallow it. Those crumbs make me sick." "Fool!" So for the next week, Sansan saved the lunch snacks, sometimes it was peach shortcake, sometimes it was fruit cake with raisins sticky.There are also butterflies sprinkled with sugar, the edges are burnt, which is her favorite.She packed them all carefully in plastic bags.Sometimes Astro Boy would stuff two cigarettes that were about to break off that he got from somewhere, but at least they were still whole, not cigarette butts.Astro Boy often sent it to him at noon, or waited until after school.The old man took them all as they were ordered, but it was not seen that he actually ate them all.He always stuffs it in the pocket of his dirty trousers.Sansan was very distressed, because she knew that those butterfly pastries would immediately turn into crumbs if stuffed in the pockets of her trousers.But the old man never cared. He lit the messy cigarette with a match and left.He smoked the cigarette very slowly, and Sansan always felt his fingers trembling silently while hiding in the door room, and couldn't help but feel even more convinced that he was an orphan abandoned by his children.At that time, there were already a lot of news like this: an old man who lived in a shantytown died suddenly one day, and no one knew about it. The newspapers were piled outside for three or four days, and all the cats he raised ran away until one day they rotted. Only when it stinks will the neighbors find out.And this old man doesn't even have a home, he can only spend the night under the canopy of the vegetable market or under the bridge piers of Suzhou Creek every day.What to do in winter?Will he freeze to death, like the story in "Mimi's Wandering Notes"?Oh, forget it, Sansan couldn't think so far.After all, time passed very slowly and in a trance at that time, and it was already impatient to stay up until school was over every day.She is still looking forward to the summer vacation of the fourth grade of elementary school, so she doesn't care about winter at all.All she knew was that the old man always sat on the broken rattan chair under the sycamore tree every day at noon or near the end of school, as if he was deliberately waiting for Astro Boy to run towards him with a plastic bag of food, and then immediately turned around and ran open.According to Astro Boy, the old man never asked why he was given these foods, or who brought them to him.He didn't know that there was a girl who watched other students drink chocolate milk during recess every day.

Astro Boy said: "The old man can only snort, he doesn't care at all. You stupid, he doesn't care at all." Sansan didn't want to talk about it with him anymore.She hated being looked down upon by Astro Boy, as if everything he did was right, while she, she simply had a completely wrong and upside-down world view.So when school was over, she mustered up the courage to go to the school gate to find the old man with a broken peach shortbread and a bag of bright chocolate milk.But there was no one on the wicker chair that day, and the jumbo bag he usually used to pick up plastic bottles was still there, tied to the wicker chair, and the bag bulged when the wind blew, and the old man seemed to disappear out of thin air. .Oh, he died.Sansan's heart was in such a mess that he died just like that.Although she had imagined him ten thousand times when he died, with his mouth pouted and his yellow bloodshot eyes wide open, when she was having a temper with Astro Boy and discussing whether he was a starving child When he was lonely and old, he died.She had absolutely no idea what to do, but was hungry.She was growing taller, and at night she often dreamed that she fell down the stairs on Wanhangdu Road with a kerosene lamp in her hand.In fact, she is very hungry every day, like a cloth bag that cannot be filled, so at this moment, she panickedly grabs the peach shortbread that has been completely broken, and stuffs it in her mouth, really choking .The crumbs filled her mouth and made her want to throw up.She bit open the bag of chocolate milk with her teeth and sucked a big mouthful. The result was a strange smell of bean curd residue.It turned out that on such a hot day, the milk was completely spoiled after being covered in the schoolbag for a whole day.Sansan spat out everything in her mouth at once, but her throat was still tight.She vomited until her eyes were red, but she couldn't help thinking, my God, these spoiled milk must have caused the old man a lot of trouble.She is a worry-free girl, she is always worried about dying, as if one day when she was taking a bath, she felt two small walnuts on her flat and flat chest, which were so hard that if she pressed hard, they would still fall back. Pain, she suddenly became afraid, as if the end of the world is coming, she is going to die.She's terrified of dying, isn't she?She was worried that if she died, she would not be able to wait for the next week's sports meeting.At that time, she waited a long time for the sports meeting, because the teacher actually selected her to join the girls' cheerleading team.Of course, all the girls in the class were selected except for the fattest girl who couldn't run and dance because of a heart problem.But no matter what, she could stand in the line wearing blue line pants and white running shoes, waving ribbons, and stood with Wu Xiaoyun and the others.The teacher also stipulated that every female student should tie a red bow on the braid.The bow that mom promised to accompany her to buy hasn't been bought yet, so she can't just die in the bathtub.

Wait until I finish buying the bows, and wait until the sports meeting is over.She was terrified, touching two small walnuts and talking nonsense to whom, as if there was someone who could hear her and save her. Of course, the old man who picked up the plastic bottles did not die. Everyone living in Yan's house seemed to be a tenacious weed, and they would not die so easily.The old man actually lived in Yan's house.This is what Astro Boy discovered. "Stupid, I knew he wasn't a lonely old man. He lived on the ground floor, which was many times bigger than our attic. And you know what? He has a TV, a color TV! Watching "Legend of the New White Snake"!" Astro Boy threw his schoolbag on the table as soon as he walked into the classroom one morning, and ran over aggressively to Sansan and said, "You idiot."

"He didn't die?" "Die a fart, live better than us." That day Astro Boy saw the old man buying cold beer in the cigarette paper shop of Yan's house.Astro Boy also came to buy beer for his father, only to find out that the old man bought Tsingtao beer.His father would only let him buy the cheapest one.The old man didn't feel embarrassed or anything when he saw Astro Boy, his expressionless face never showed embarrassment at all, he walked out holding two bottles of ping-pong cold beer indifferently, as if I don't even remember that the boy in front of me with a pointed chin and wearing a pair of ripped pants with a hole in his knee never took those peach shortcakes and broken bags of soy milk from him.After school, Astro Boy dragged Sansan to Yan's house to find the old man's house, but she refused to go.Didn't that old man sleep in the cabbage pile under the awning of the vegetable farm?He even has a son, and maybe his son will bring his grandson to visit him on Sundays.Sansan couldn't even imagine these things.She was dragged by Astro Boy and dragged into Yan's house.Along the way, the two of them walked in silence like a pair of siblings who have had a fight.At that time, Sansan was already half a head taller than Astro Boy, wearing a pair of trousers that were too short at the hem, revealing her vulnerable thin ankles.They did come to the door of a broken house.This is a typical shanty house of the Yan family house, with a flat spittoon painted with peony flowers at the door.Two of the windows were broken and had to be covered with a very old moss cloth.Two clothes-drying ropes were tied to the iron fence, and two tattered undershirts were hanging on them. They must have been worn for many years, and the cloths were almost washed.And the moth-eaten rotten door seemed to be tightly closed, and only intermittent voices from the TV could be vaguely heard inside.Astro Boy leaned over the window and looked in, then suddenly squatted down and pointed at Sansan who was hiding at the foot of the wall, saying, "He's inside."

Sansan dared not look inside.She felt ashamed, as if it was all her fault, something she had done wrong.She was afraid that if she was seen by the old man again, he would spread his spittle lips at her, or drive her away by waving his yellow fingers from smoking, as if to say triumphantly: "Hey, you self-righteous I’m not lonely, I’m not going to die.” So Sansan and Astro Boy squatted at the foot of the wall, not knowing what to do, because they couldn’t knock on the door, and then asked him why he accepted it without shame. He bought all the food and cigarettes, and even they gave him fifty cents, so he went to use the fifty cents to buy beer?They also don't want to just leave like this, just like nothing happened.In fact, Astro Boy felt very angry because he was cheated, cheated by an old man picking up plastic bottles.What made him even more angry was that the TV set in the old man's house was bigger than his own, and there was an old wind-up chicken that lay eggs on his chest of drawers.You must know that having such a tin hen in the family at that time was a very big deal.Is this also what he picked up plastic bottles in exchange for?

Finally, Astro Boy picked up two small bricks from the ground and stuffed them into Sansan. "Throw it, throw it after me!" Before Astro Boy finished speaking, he heard the crisp sound of glass shattering.So Sansan didn't even have time to think about it, so she also threw the broken brick in her hand. It didn't hit the glass, but just touched the window frame before it fell to the ground.She saw that Astro Boy was already bending over to pick up the second piece, so she followed suit.The hands couldn't stop, the bricks and small stones kept being picked up, and the sound of glass being shattered was so delightful that I wanted to scream.It was the evening when the sun was setting and the sky was full of huge cotton candy floating. The adults hadn't gotten off work yet, so Yan's house was a paradise for wild children running wild.She heard sharp whistles coming from the opposite dormer window, groups of passing boys slapped their mouths and made "vomit" sounds, and the ivy around the house swayed in the early summer breeze into a wavy.In just one minute, she left those unpleasant times behind her, and she was not afraid.And Astro Boy pursed his lips tightly, his body was tense like a short bow, and a scar at the corner of his eyebrows was shining in the sun.They smashed all the glass they could see, and more broken bricks fell into the room, bouncing off the cement floor with an exciting plop.Suddenly, there was a loud sound of footsteps on the stairs, as if a monster rolled down from the attic, making the whole house creak, and at the same time, the old man cried hysterically: "Which little red man, See if I don't beat you to death! See if I don't beat you to death, bastard who was born but not taught!" "Run! Idiot, run, run!" Sansan took a step back, she was still standing there in a daze.She has never done this kind of thing before, even ringing the doorbell of the neighbor's house indiscriminately and then quickly hiding in the shadow of the tree to watch the adults get angry and swear, so she was completely frightened by the noise from inside the house , at a loss, my heart was about to jump out, and I only thought in my mind: I'm dead now, I'm going to die, I'm going to die, I'm going to die.Until the dilapidated door slammed open in front of her, the old man's hair was covered with foam, exuding a smell of medicinal soap, his naked ribs were clearly visible, and there were large bruises left by cupping on his shoulders. Qing, obviously just crawled out from under the faucet, before she even had time to put on her slippers, she was dripping water crazily on the ground.Oh, and his slippers are in his hand.When a slipper flew towards Sansan's head and face, she screamed and was dragged by Astro Boy to run, her eyes were black and her legs were weak, she only knew to run forward blindly.This scene seemed to have only appeared in a dream.In her dreams, she often dreamed that she was running along Wanhangdu Road or the alleys in Yanjiazhai Quli, with invisible enemies behind her, surrounded by early summer plants full of sweet smell, everything was fresh, but she was terrified up.In fact, she doesn't run fast. Although she can rely on the explosive power of her strong calves when she sprints, but now she feels that her lungs have become like a piece of thin paper, and every breath she takes in feels a tingling pain. And the house can't be seen at all.She was so frightened that the last thing she saw was the old man covering his forehead with his hand.Is his brow bleeding?The last broken brick thrown by Astro Boy when he was dragging her to run just now hit the old man on the forehead.She heard him yelling hysterically: "I want the police station to arrest you! Tell the police station to arrest you!" She believed that the old man had just seen her face clearly, because she was staring at his face so clearly, even The hairy mole on his lip was also clearly visible.The old man would remember her in a white crew-neck shirt and blue linen trousers, with a bunch of big, cumbersome keys hanging around her neck.When she was dragged into a hidden alley by Astro Boy, she almost squatted on the ground and cried.She was exhausted, and genuinely scared to be exhausted. "Will people from the police station come to arrest us tomorrow?" "I have no idea." "Do you know what it's like in the juvenile prison?" "I have no idea." "I saw him bleeding. Will he die?" "Bad guys don't die so easily." But why do they always seem to be running?It's an adult world they'll never figure out, isn't it?They didn't understand why the old man accepted their food and cigarettes so frankly, and they didn't know if the old man would really bring the police to the school to identify people the next day.Oh, it's not that such a thing has never happened.Teachers often talk about such cases.They don't know what a work-study school is. Do the girls in it have to shave their hair short?Are you going to wear striped clothes?Do you have to peel a basket of potatoes every day?Can I still read novels?Can you still grow up?Can you still get married?Lying on the sofa bed in the middle of the night, looking at the red flight indicator light on the roof of the Hilton Hotel across the building flickering in the sky like ink blobs, thinking, if there is no tomorrow, it will be fine, and the time will always stay before falling asleep This moment is fine.She was so afraid of falling headfirst into sleep, all her dreams were as fleeting and fleeting as she couldn't remember them at all, and when she opened her eyes, it would already be tomorrow.Tomorrow her name will be on the blackboard again, the parent contact booklet will be unsigned, and she will probably be kicked out of the classroom to stand in the corner of the office again.She is always dragged to the office by the teacher by the arm.She didn't understand, in fact, if they didn't drag her, she would follow obediently, and then consciously stand in the corner.Because she was afraid, she always vomited when she drank milk in the morning. She thought that vomiting would save her from going to school, but it never worked.Vomiting has become a habit. Vomiting after drinking milk, and vomiting after brushing teeth and smelling mint, this is really disgusting.Will the old man bring people from the police station to recognize her tomorrow morning?Will he remember her face?He will definitely remember her face.Sansan covered herself with the quilt vigorously so as not to cry out in despair.If only the night was infinitely long, if only tomorrow never came.She wanted to always sleep on the sofa bed, nestled in the safe quilt, listen to the sound of her father grinding his teeth from the other end of the room, look at the flashing flight lights on the top of the Hilton Hotel opposite through the skylight, and slowly get up. upper eyelid.Alas, if only there was no tomorrow.I hope that this dark night is infinitely long, and I hope that I will fight hard in my dream and never wake up. The old man did not show up at the school with the police the next day, nor will he in the future.If only all the fears of childhood were groundless.In fact, if she grew up to become an ignorant, fearless and numb adult, she would not know it, but at that time Sansan was worried every day. "Is there a place for you in the juvenile management office too?" The head teacher's words seemed to be like a curse on her head.She was afraid that the old man would be crushed to death by Astro Boy's bricks, she was the real accomplice, she was the bad girl who went further and further away, she was terrified.Later, Sansan met the old man several times in the cigarette paper shop, and every time she was so nervous that she couldn't breathe, she turned her head and ran away.But the old man was always so calm, as if he didn't care when he stuffed Sansan's peach shortbread into his trouser pocket.He bought cheap cigarettes and cold beer with crumpled banknotes, and spit a mouthful of thick phlegm on the manhole cover.There is no scar on his forehead at all, as if what happened that day was a complete nightmare. Only Sansan cares about these things, only Sansan cares about them, and only Sansan is the one who ran away.