Chapter 19 5.

5. On the day of the final exam, the temperature dropped sharply. The small puddles on the playground were covered with thin ice, and the dull evergreen leaves were covered with a layer of frost.In my memory, Shanghai has never been so cold. Although I have applied thick clam cream, the wind still seems to cut the skin.She hated the misty wetness, even though the sky was so clear, the blue seemed to be washed out to white by time.She misses those lush hot days, although the air is always dirty with black smoke from those mopeds, but in the evening the sun will be rimmed with gold, and the palm-sized sycamore leaves will cover the sky.And once the heavy rain is over, the sky will suddenly light up again.She wants to wear a dress, and she wants to run along the trail of roses in sandals.But now she has the damn report card stashed in her bag.Her sneakers stepped in a puddle, and after a while, the bone-chilling water seeped in, and then even the bottom of her trousers were wet.The report card was neither good nor bad. When the head teacher handed it to her, he said lightly: "Work hard during the winter vacation, and I hope to be admitted to a key university." He never really remembered her name clearly. Always calling another girl's name at her.That girl's name has a word like hers, and now he's calling it wrong again.But it didn't matter, she didn't even bother to correct him.Her hopes had been frostbitten this winter.Cycling home along the already familiar road, the car repair shops, fruit stalls and grocery stores are always there intact, but they are also covered with a layer of frostbite in winter.She has been away from Wanhangdu Road for so many years, and she can finally recite silently with her eyes closed all the small branches near Shaanxi North Road, barber shop, hot pot shop, fabric shop and disc shop.The bike rides so fast, it's so easy to get home.But these are all fake, these are all things that can be forgotten if you forget them, just like getting into a key university, finding a good job, getting married, these are all fake to Sansan, and it doesn't matter.But what does she care about?If she knew that the familiar and numb street scene in front of her would be erased one day, would she look at it more and remember more in the winter when she was eighteen?But what she thought at the time was how to explain those achievements to her parents, how to give them hope and not break their hearts.

In Sansan's schoolbag was Helen's report card that the teacher in charge told her to send home.After Helen finished the last English test, she never showed up at school again, and no one answered her phone calls.Sansan hated her sudden disappearance.She hated everyone's sudden disappearance, as if they were really free to come and go, and they could leave everything here and leave regardless.Helen said that she would go diving with her father in Hainan during the winter vacation. Maybe she is eating whole fresh coconuts on a tropical island right now, or maybe her hair is still dripping with water.

Helen's home is next door to the toothpaste factory, and Sansan has been there many times, and she can smell the peppermint smell coming from the factory next door when she walks in the corridor.She likes that the heating is turned on all day in Helen's house in winter, and the room always exudes a very warm smell.The two of them often nestled on the carpet in the small room and listened to the tapes given to her by Helen's college cousin.Helen's walls are pasted with many photos and movie posters cut from magazines, and there is also a guitar that has never been played.Her parents like Sansan very much, and they always bring all kinds of fruits and snacks wrapped in colorful plastic paper.Sansan likes this place, her mother never allowed her to stick anything on the walls of the house, she was not allowed to plant plants in the yard, she was not allowed to sit on the floor and watch TV, and she was not allowed to put dusty decorations on the table.In fact, Sansan never really felt that the new public house on Shaanxi North Road was like her own home.The walls there are so neat, there are no skylights, no plane trees for shade, no window frames that rattle during typhoon season.All this is as dazzling and awkward as a pair of white running shoes that I put on my feet for the first day.

"Helen isn't at home." Helen's father opened the door. Usually he is always on business trips and rarely at home. When Sansan was frantically looking for the report card from her schoolbag, she suddenly heard the sound of a glass smashing on the ground from the room, and then Helen, in gray cotton pajamas, walked out of the corridor with her unkempt hair. She rushed out and yelled hysterically at her father: "Why don't you let me out? Why don't you let me out?" Her thin body slammed into her father's body desperately, as if she could break free from all the obstacles just by knocking him away. unhappy.But her father firmly supported the door frame with his hands, and said calmly and coldly: "Go back to your room quickly, don't embarrass yourself in front of your classmates." Sansan was so frightened by this sudden scene that she couldn't speak, He could only continue to look for the report card in his schoolbag blankly with his head down.She had never seen Helen so sad, so she was so frightened that she just wanted to run away.

"I'll never be with him again, please." Helen held her father's arm and wiped away her tears desperately, and those heartbroken tears kept falling like raindrops, "Xu Jialiang, tell my father , I have nothing to do with Xiaowu. He doesn't believe me, no matter what I say, he doesn't believe me." She firmly grasped Sansan's arm, and almost fell to her knees on the floor as if she had lost all her strength: "He can't shut me up, he has no right to shut me up. Xu Jialiang, tell him!" Helen said weakly murmured. Sansan was afraid of seeing other girls cry, because she didn't know how to comfort others, and would only be infected by their sadness and shed tears herself.She really wanted to kneel on the ground like Helen and beg her father to let her out, but it was useless to adults.

Helen was kissing under the sycamore tree in front of the house with Xiao Wu who was taking her home that day, but was caught by her father who was about to fly to a business trip.Her father was a ruthless character. At that time, a boy from the class next door followed Helen home on a bicycle every day. Her father took him off the bicycle while waiting for him to pass by at the intersection that he had to pass, and severely educated him. A pass.Later, that boy ran away as soon as he saw Helen in school, which was really dumbfounding.But this time he didn't look at Xiao Wu at all, he directly grabbed her by the arm and shut Helen, who was completely stunned, into the room.

"Do you know what kind of guy that boy is? I can tell what kind of family he came from at a glance, and I can tell what kind of place he can only stay in the future. You are going to the United States in the future! I have already told your aunt and aunt that they are already connecting you with schools in Chicago. Don't make any mistakes for me at this time. I watch this kind of thing on TV too much, it's all about you A girl of this age is dizzy!" Not allowed to go to school, not allowed to go out, not allowed to answer the phone, not allowed to make calls, not allowed to contact anyone, confiscated the mobile phone just bought for her, and Helen's father even turned off all the jobs and stayed at home to watch her every day.The father and daughter sat face to face in the same room every day without saying a word at all.When Sansan knew this, Helen had already started college in Chicago.The winter there was very cold, Helen said in the letter that when it snowed, the cars on the whole road were buried in snow.

"I won't go to America. Why do you want me to hate you? I hate you." Those were the last words Sansan heard when she came out of Helen's house and yelled at her father.Her voice was completely out of tune, shrill and piercing.And when he walked out of the porch, there was another tangy smell of mint toothpaste outside.After a week of rain finally stopped, the air was cold and dry.The report card of Helen in Sansan's schoolbag has not been sent out yet.The above grades are really good, good enough to be admitted to the best majors in any major university.She stood in front of the porch holding the report card in a daze. Why are they still not satisfied?It's like the bamboo pole that keeps rising when jumping high. No matter how hard they try, there will always be a limit where the bamboo pole will hit their ankles hard, and they will fall heavily on the sponge cushion.It's useless for them to cry and fight, they will always be sad because they are all growing up.How unforgivable it is to grow up.This is grown-ups.The adults seem to be in a league, and at some point they all act so consistently brutal.They always think they can protect them.But this is ridiculous, they have no way of knowing the injuries imposed on them, and their protection is always fragile and broken.When Sansan was twenty-five years old, when Sansan talked to his father about her boyfriend on the phone for the first time, his father said in a hesitant and deep voice on the other end of the phone: "No matter who it is in the future, as long as he bullies you Tell me if you want to, I will definitely make him look good." After hearing this sentence, she held the phone tightly and cried until she could no longer speak.Now she no longer needs his protection.He said it was too late, and he never knew about those injuries.She didn't want to make him sad, let him down, let him be confused, but it was really too late for him to say this now.

The next day was the last winter vacation in middle school.Mr. Sansan still remembers that in the winter of early 2000, the world was not destroyed when it disappeared in 1999.She still grew up unknowingly on the gray and lonely viaduct, wearing woolen gloves and old sneakers that soaked in water.All the days before this were slow as if they were full of water, and the days after this suddenly became a runaway train, rushing forward blindly and only the wheels and chains could be heard. click.When Sansan pedaled her bicycle desperately along the Suzhou River embankment on the first day of winter vacation, trying to find Xiao Wu in those dilapidated game machine rooms, she never thought that she would never see Helen again.In the last semester of high school, Helen dropped out of school and went to the United States. In the eyes of all the teachers and classmates, it was an incredible thing.She doesn't appear in the commemorative handbook.A long time later, one year at Christmas, Sansan received a long-distance call from a coin-operated telephone at home. Helen’s voice was so far apart, and each sentence was always delayed by one second because of line problems.That day her sneakers were stolen in the university gymnasium. She ran out barefoot and called a public phone to find someone to drive to pick her up.It had just snowed heavily in Chicago that day, and she ran barefoot across a long stretch of snow-covered road.

"I should call my aunt to ask her to pick me up, but I don't know why I just dialed your number. I haven't dialed your number for so long, but I won't forget it at all. Looking at the keyboard, I can Press it." The two of them said something that would be far-fetched, as if those times had never been cut off, and they were just ordinary phone calls when they habitually sat on the sofa watching TV and eating snacks after school. Fei Er yelled on the phone until Helen hurriedly said on the other end, "I have last-minute money left in my card. Did you see Xiao Wu later?"

Sansan said no, but it was cut off soon.She didn't know whether this sentence was delayed by Helen or not.Then the world suddenly entered the Internet age. The two of them had added MSN to each other, but they had never really spoken online.She sent a photo of her on the road to Colorado, wearing a gray tank top and jeans, tanned and fat.What a girl Helen used to be who was afraid of the sun!She has a mole on the tip of her nose that her doctor mother kept telling her would grow bigger if she got too much sun because it absorbed the UV rays.Helen used to be as white as a piece of paper, and even held a parasol stubbornly during the spring outing. All this made Sansan feel that the whole period of adolescence was like a complete dream.In fact, those people have never appeared in real life at all, those people have nothing to do with her, and those people have passed by in a hurry.She would always think of them, Number Nine and Helen in purple gym shorts, in the rainy and silent season of winter.Helen was sitting right in front of her across the corridor. During class, she put her feet in black Nike sneakers on the iron bars of the chair and slowly swayed.The seven years in middle school seemed to have taken a very, very long time, and she seemed to have had days when she was not lonely at all, but these were really dreams.When she sat in the cold classroom again after the winter vacation that year, there was a thick fog outside, and they had all disappeared when it was warm and cold.They simply didn't have the patience to accompany her to see the end, and she became nothing and lonely again like she was twelve years old in the summer. On the first day of the winter vacation that year, Sansan rode a bicycle along the Suzhou River embankment and searched all the game computer rooms and old bookstalls around the school in order to find Xiao Wu.Helen said that Xiao Wu's favorite place was to go to these places, playing the game of "Samurai Soul" and reading comic books all afternoon on the broken stools of the second-hand book stall.Sansan wanted to tell Xiao Wu that if he didn't go to Helen again, he might never find her again.She didn't know why this matter suddenly worried her so much, and she couldn't remember what Xiao Wu looked like at all.The boys at the school gate all liked to wear Nike running shoes and zippered sweatshirts. She was so shy that she never dared to raise her head to see what they looked like.But this day she walked into the noisy game room, and the flickering pictures on the screen made her dizzy.She didn't know where the courage came from, because the collar of her school uniform was exposed under her down jacket, and she didn't even have time to take off the silly hat and glasses.She didn't wear a school badge, but even the proprietress who was smoking a cigarette and knitting a sweater could tell at a glance that she didn't fit in here, so she didn't come to sell game coins to her at all, but raised her raised eyebrows and said lightly: "Little Check out the wallet, girl." So Sansan subconsciously hugged her schoolbag tightly.She hates those top students, but at this moment, she has that silly air of top students all over her body.Those shoulder-to-shoulder girls with thick mascara look good, and she'll never look that good again.She should run away from here quickly.She only felt that every gaze cast on her was killing her remaining self-esteem, and those curious, teasing, mocking and teasing eyes were about to kill her, and only then did she feel Helen's fearlessness.Helen is so obsessed with the Young and Dangerous series of movies, her favorite is a man like Li Cansen.Shouldn't it be like this before the age of eighteen?Shouldn't we try our best to go beyond the limits when we can?As for Sansan, she was so cowardly that nothing would change at all.She felt that everyone's eyes were on her, but in fact, she was just the most unusual girl in the liberal arts class of a key middle school who didn't attract much attention.Her past was gone, and those bad marks were finally nowhere to be found on her body.She was like a moth emerging from a cocoon, becoming so ugly, losing all vigor, it was terrible.Gradually, she became an ordinary girl who looked like them as she wished, but this, this, it was like memory failure, as if her heart couldn't beat. In the end, when it was getting dark, Sansan did not find Xiao Wu.Exhausted, she stood beside the railing on the side of the road and squatted to unlock the ring lock on the bicycle.Everyone in this world disappears for a reason, she thought sadly, but the person who was left behind may never know the answer.She hated the lantern riddles that hung in the summer garden party when she was a child, and she hated the adults pointing at those difficult riddles and asking her to guess the answer.She couldn't guess, she wasn't interested in people and didn't want to act like a precocious kid, so why force her to guess?She will never know the mystery behind those paper lanterns strung up with wires.Until one summer when the park caught fire during the garden party and burned down the entire osmanthus grove and a pergola, the adults never took her to guess any lantern riddles.Now there is another person like her in the world.Will Xiao Wu be worried about Helen's sudden disappearance?If he knew the answer, he would definitely forgive her, he would forgive all the hurts of leaving without saying goodbye, and he would gradually forget her.Only those who are kept in the dark will never know how to forgive, and will always remember all the details.She was terribly sad because of things that had nothing to do with her, she was tired, her calves were sore from walking, and she wanted to bend down and cry aloud for her death without a disease. When Sansan got on her bicycle, she saw a figure suddenly standing out from the door of the game machine room with a tree across the ceiling, lighting a cigarette with a tap fire.She knew the man was looking straight at her.In the game room just now, she felt that unscrupulous gaze, unrelenting, trying to probe her and see her face clearly.Now she was even more frightened, but when she was about to pedal in a hurry, she found that the damn chain had come loose. "Xu Sansan." Although the voice was strange as hell, all the forgotten things seemed to be lit up instantly.She firmly held the brake with her hand, but she didn't dare to turn her head to look at it.The only person in this world who called her Xu Sansan has died, a hundred times, a thousand times, ten thousand times, and those things in her body have died together with him. "Xu Sansan!" She can't walk anymore.She had never heard his grown-up voice.When he grows up, his voice has nothing to do with what it used to be. It seems that the process of developing wisdom teeth and changing voice during puberty can really kill a person completely. "Hey, don't run away, I'm Astro Boy." She can't escape at all.She stepped on the pedal again and again and all of them missed.She thought that if her bicycle hadn't had a problem at this point, she would have run away without looking back, but now it's like those early mornings awakened from nightmares, sometimes she feels that a foot is still sticking out of the quilt, but she dare not Withdrawing it, it seemed as if there were spectators quietly surrounding her, waiting for her body to move even a little to kill her.Two empty buses from the terminal rumbled between them, and he stamped out the butt of his newly lit cigarette under his shoe and walked across the road toward her.His face was strange, his lanky figure was strange, the way he walked was strange, but even if he had grown into a complete stranger it didn't matter to her, she could recognize him anywhere in any age.Afraid, confused, nervous, unable to move, numb, almost passed out, heart can no longer beat.Help. "Hey, don't remember me." She watched him unable to speak.She can't let him see her biting her lower lip tightly, she can't let him know that she remembers him, she remembers him fiercely, she forgets many things and many people, but she remembers him.She looked at him pretending to be puzzled, and the shadows of the sycamore trees under the street lamp cast on his face.She seemed to have never looked at him so closely, and could almost smell the strange sweet smoke in his breath. what am i nowDo I look bad? Can he still recognize me?Why is he still wearing his school uniform like he's a goddamn top student?Will he laugh at me viciously in his heart?I'm not ready to meet him yet, and I'd rather never meet him.Shouldn't he be dead already? "I went to wait for you at the gate of your school as soon as I came out. I saw you coming out but didn't dare to call you. I think you probably still hate me, but why do you look exactly the same as seven years ago! Oh, hair It's long." He reached out and stroked her hair. Does he remember the way she used to cry because of chewing gum in her hair?He must still remember that even though the man standing in front of him had grown a manly face with a razor-cut razor on his chin.He was wearing a brown ski jacket, but he was still holding a ripped denim backpack in his hand, which looked like the one he had thrown on the playground in the snow.She couldn't even hear him while he was talking, and she only felt that the strange things on his body were peeling off little by little between the words, like the door in the old house on Wanhangdu Road that was shaken by him so that the wall fell to the ground. The door, peeling off and peeling away to reveal the fierce face of the twelve-year-old boy.He was still so lonely, fierce and indifferent, but he turned out to be a boy who was prettier than any gangster at the school gate.His long hair, the silver earrings on his ears, the corners of his mouth that seemed to have been carved out by a knife, his scar that looked like a straw mat that had just woken up, his strong knuckles, his grown-up appearance. "Do you still live on Wanhangdu Road? I wrote you a letter, did you receive it?" He looked at her and suddenly waved his hand and said, "Forget it, don't tell me if you have received it. Inside At that time, my greatest hope was the day when I sent letters every week, but the longer I waited, the more I felt cold. I think you must have moved away for a long time, and the Yan family house is gone." He kept talking, all It's all about him. Then he stopped suddenly, rubbed his sneakers on the floor with his hands in his trouser pockets, and said seriously: "Do you really not remember me?" "Astro Boy." She laughed. Had she ever smiled in front of him?She can't remember, she just remembers those crazy things, and she can't remember whether they had a good conversation.At this time, the pager in Astro Boy's pocket rang crazily. It was a Motorola brand that was not very popular at that time.At that time, some wealthy students in the class started to use Ericsson mobile phones.He looked down at the phone number on it, and the expression on his face suddenly became tense and anxious. He said, "I'll write you my number. If you remember something, you must copy me." Sansan lowered her head and took out a ballpoint pen and exercise book from her schoolbag to record numbers, yet she still looked so clumsy and flustered.He took the torn piece of paper and scribbled a number on it, but the ballpoint pen pierced the white paper with such excessive force.She folded and folded the paper repeatedly until she couldn't make it any smaller.Before she could fully react, Astro Boy had already disappeared on those half-drilled potholed roads, in such a hurry that it seemed that someone was chasing him, as if he was also eager to get rid of those familiar and identical horrors. dream.All of this should be a dream, but she was standing in the bare and rapidly cooling winter holding the number paper.