all things

While thinking about taking a few steps back and forth with the phone in hand, the smile on his face remained undiminished.

When they came back this time, because they were running out of time, they went directly to his grandfather.Small villages, small villages and small places do not have the prosperity of the city, but are wrapped in a strong flavor of the New Year. Every household sells pancakes, steamed buns, and fried New Year’s goods. Early in the morning, there are children who can’t wait to come out to set off firecrackers.

Although his father bought a house for his grandfather in the city center, the old man was really not used to the indifferent and closed atmosphere in the commercial housing in the city, and moved back to the old house in the suburbs after only a few days. up.

"Tonight we will stay at Grandpa's place. Tomorrow, on the first day of the new year, we will go to my old wife's house." This seems to be unstoppable, "The old buddies want to get together, So it takes a day to pass.”

Yu Jinle recalled the story he heard on the night of New Year's Day, and asked hesitantly, "...that group of people who used to hang out with you?"

In his 17 years of life so far, he has always followed the rules and kept himself safe. At most, the scenes of group fights and beatings have only been seen in Hong Kong movies. Far away, but I never thought that I would just go back to my hometown, and I would run into each other and meet up, what is this for?

He wanted to persuade him to keep a distance from those people, it would be best not to even see each other again, it would be best if he never saw each other again; but he thought again, why should he persuade him like this while thinking?They are just classmates, and if you count the front and back desks, what is this?Talk lightly?Bian and his group of brothers, maybe it's still "living together and dying together"!

I thought about it, "Where do you want to go? He is the son of my father's former comrade-in-arms. He used to hang out with me, but it wasn't anything else. He was in the dormitory compound, the kind of gangster who bullied cats and dogs. They all What kind of identity? Where can I get mixed up? All of them are worthless, and the fathers of each family each have an armed belt, and they won't even blink when they are whipped."

In short, he is a gangster of a brat, not a gangster of society.

Yu Jinle said, "You are not afraid of your father's armed belt, are you?"

He wanted to laugh, "Yes, I'm the only one with thick skin."

There was a sound of opening the door, and Yu's father came back with the two children.

Yu Jinyao rushed to her elder brother first, "Brother, I'll give you the balloon."

Aluminum foil hydrogen balloons are a routine for children at home during the Chinese New Year.

When I was young, my family’s economic conditions were not up, and this kind of hydrogen balloon, which sold for 30 to [-] yuan, was not a toy they could easily afford.Once this habit of Yu's father was formed, he couldn't stop it anymore. So far, he has not considered that the child will not play much when he grows up. Yu Jinle is already in the first year of high school, and he still has his share.

Yu Jinle pulled Minnie's aluminum foil hydrogen balloon with a huge pink bow on her head and gritted her teeth, "You chose this, right?"

Yu Jinyao leaned on his lap and nodded, "Yes, yes, yes!"

I wanted to ask over there, "What did you choose?"

"Pink hydrogen balloon." Yu Jinle put the microphone next to Yu Jinyao's ear, "Come on, I want to say New Year's greetings to my brother, and wish him a better hair-tying technique next year."

When Yu Jinan heard that he was thinking about the phone, he also squeezed over. The two rushed to the microphone and shouted, "Thinking about my brother! Happy New Year!"

"Okay, okay!" Thinking like the Monkey King who has received filial piety from monkeys and grandchildren, he was so happy that he could see his teeth but not his eyes. "Happy New Year, happy new year, I'm waiting for my brother to go back and bring you delicious food!"

Yu Jinle put his younger siblings aside to play by himself, and said with the microphone, "I knew you would like this hydrogen balloon just by looking at it."

I wanted to ask, "Why?"

"After all, you're the one with the pink Hello Kitty—"

"Get out of here—" There was a loud roar from the other side, which was full of energy gathered in the dantian.

In this endless and unnutritive mutual poverty, neither of the two thought about hanging up the phone.

The weather tonight is very good. After a light snowfall, it stopped. The dry and cold in the north is much more comfortable than the wet and cold in the south. Although I was forced to wear long johns and cotton trousers, the dark blue in the clear night sky made me feel more comfortable. It is refreshing.

While thinking about standing in the yard, the smile on his face never faded.

Time passed quickly. He still remembered that he sneaked into the house after nine o'clock and made a phone call. He didn't realize that the time was approaching zero until the room behind him was buzzing with excitement.

There is a low wall behind the house. The thin snow on the top of the wall has long since melted away. A tree branch that has lost its leaves tremblingly protrudes from outside the wall, and only a little trace of snow leaks from the bright white on it. .Standing on tiptoe a little, he could look over the wall and see a child in red clothes running out of another house not far away, followed by an adult chasing him, who picked up the child and followed the neighbors to form a circle and light firecrackers.

"Happy New Year, little fish."

While pinching the countdown to the Spring Festival Gala coming from the other end of the phone, I wanted to say something.

The fireworks exploded in front of him with a "bang", and the abundant and rich colors burst into clusters of fiery trees and silver flowers in the night sky, reflecting a trace of warmth that inadvertently flowed between the young man's brows and eyes red——

Hanging up the phone and going back to the house, thinking that grandpa was helped back to sleep by his second uncle, and his second aunt was driving the two cousins ​​to sleep.

Thinking about looking around the room, he didn't see his father and Shen Yunjia.

"Just now they said they were going out for a walk, and they should be coming back soon." The second aunt said while dragging the two sons back by their collars.

He wanted to smile and went back to the house by himself.

It's freezing cold, there's no entertainment in the countryside, and I want to go out to set off firecrackers and play alone but have no company - those old classmates are all in the city; the two cousins ​​were caught by his second aunt and went to sleep again, isn't it? They have a very close relationship, even though I thought about it, I didn't bother to ask them to go out to play.

After thinking about it, I could only go to sleep directly, and stood outside the house for several hours, saying that it was not cold was a lie, but it was just a good mood that overwhelmed the word "cold", and adrenaline won the harsh environment again.

The kang quilt in the house has been laid, and it is warm and comfortable, but it is far less soft and comfortable than the 1.8-meter wide bed in the house in Tucheng. After all, I am used to the house in the south.

After a day of running around, the strange environment and strange neighbors and relatives made him a little exhausted.His grandfather is fine, the old man naturally likes the satisfaction of his children and grandchildren around his knees; his second uncle is a small supervisor in a local public unit, and if there is no accident, the trend will be almost the same until he retires; When he was in Quancheng before, he didn't see his second aunt and two cousins ​​a few times a year, so naturally he couldn't tell if they were familiar with each other, probably he could recognize each other and say hello when they met on the road.

When he left Quancheng a few years ago, he never imagined that he would be so unfamiliar with this place one day.

He has lived here for more than 13 years, and it has only been a little more than three years since he went to Dacheng. Could the changes in these three years be worth more than ten years?

Wrapped in the blanket, he thought in a daze.

After an unknown amount of time, there was movement from inside the room, it was his father and Shen Yunjia who had returned.

"...Hush, the child is asleep..." His father's voice seemed to reach his ears far away through a layer of mist that could not be dispelled.

"Old man, I still say the same thing, you can't get involved with Chen Wentong..." Shen Yunjia's voice also flickered from far to near, "...you have a bottom in your heart...this is really impossible..."

Chen Wentong...?

While thinking about it, his mind was in a mess, as if something was floating up and down in it, faintly visible, and he couldn't remember which character this name corresponded to for a long time.

His father seemed to sigh, "Got it... go to bed first, don't talk about it here..."

……

There was only a rustling in the room, and I thought that my consciousness would drift away completely in the half-asleep and half-awake...

Most of the anticipation and joy that the Spring Festival bestows on people is reflected in childhood.

It seems that there is such a tube of crackers, which was ignited and brewed quietly from the beginning of the twelfth lunar month. Accompanied by the sound of "Gong Xi Fa Cai" one after another in the high-pitched cannons and low-pitched sounds of the shops along the street, it exploded until the sky exploded on New Year's Eve. In the streets and alleys, their pockets are full of joyful red envelopes, and they still carry all kinds of bright candy that they can’t finish. As their parents and elders visit relatives and friends, there will be some new friends and new friends as they walk around. However, as they get older, these children's expectations for the Spring Festival will gradually decrease. This phenomenon is both realistic and helpless. Until they enter the society as adults, this expectation will drop to zero and move towards negative Running wildly in infinite directions.

New clothes, new year's money and candies mean spending money, and the gathering of friends who were once enthusiastic means a lot of meaningless entertainment.

So I often see adults sighing when the Chinese New Year is approaching.

Some things have actually never changed, it's just that when you change your position, the changes are highlighted.

Of course, for a group of seventeen and eighteen-year-old boys and girls, it is far from that point now.

The winter vacation is not long, and the start of school is approaching after the new year.After collecting the New Year's money, they began to feel desperate for the approaching school day. Adolescent children, no matter how close they are to their parents, can't escape the mentality of avoiding their parents' desire for independence. They will begin to refuse to be like children. Followed by parents walking around the streets and alleys to pay New Year's greetings, trying to imitate adults to manage and control their own interpersonal circles independently while eating and drinking, as if that would make them appear more mature.

On the fifth day of the Lunar New Year, the second class organized a dinner party. In the past, as the organizer of the event, Bian thought that he was still far away from his hometown and would not return until tomorrow afternoon. Due to the weak appeal of the deputy class leader, it finally became a way for small groups to invite each other .

Without a unified organizer, the most direct consequence is that the number of participants is uncertain, and the specific number of participants cannot be confirmed until the day of the dinner.

It was Zhang Hongkuan who came to look for Yu Jinle, and the voice on the phone sounded so natural: "Just after dinner, let's go shopping on Zhongshan Road in the afternoon. I want to change my schoolbag."

After hearing this, Yu Jinle's face wrinkled——

He was too afraid of Zhang Hongkuan. It seemed that this man was born to overwhelm him. He stabbed him with a gun in the open and in the dark. Usually he thought that if he couldn't offend him, he should be able to hide, but Zhang Hongkuan always used A gesture of close friendliness emerges.This kind of posture made him tangled up to the point of worry, the so-called stretching out his hand and not hitting the smiling face, he would be embarrassed if he refused too much, and it would be really painful to force himself to go to the meeting...

In the end, he decided to follow his inner choice and rejected Zhang Hongkuan's invitation.

"Sorry, there are still relatives going to visit that day, so have fun."

The excuses are bad and false.

Yu's mother sat next to him and listened to him talking on the phone, and said, "I don't have any plans to go to pay New Year's greetings today. If there is a party in the class, you can go! Walk around more with your classmates, so that you can take care of yourself when you leave the society."

Yu Jinle confessed, "I just don't want to go, that kind of occasion is not suitable for me."

It's that strong feeling of being out of place.

Yu's mother cast a reproachful look, "Is there anything that is suitable or not? Why is it not suitable between classmates? You were not asked to talk about a partner! It's because you didn't have a good mentality. Why don't you see that other people are not suitable?"

Yu Jinle pursed her lips, not knowing how to answer.

Yu's mother has her own set of theories about the adult world, and every time she moves out, she can smash Yu Jinle to the point where she can't find her way.

Parents are the first tutors of children. If Yu Jinle grew up in a family with deep nepotism like Zhang Hongkuan and others, then he would be able to understand this theory naturally and thoroughly without even asking his parents to mention it. Subconsciously put it into action; but Yu's family is different. Yu's father ran from the countryside to a small city to fight alone since he was a child. Yu Jinle has not been able to verify the words taught by his mouth from his parents. Before he has been exposed to practical issues, he naturally tends to subconsciously tend to his own preferences-because he doesn't like it, so he avoids it to the end.

But he is not blind, he can also see the difference between the people around him and himself, thinking, both Zhang Hongkuan and Wang Chao are the same.

I wanted to get closer to him, but it wasn't just him alone; Zhang Hongkuan would call him whenever he had activities, but it wasn't just him; Wang Chao was even more like this. He was a sports student. Grade student, he is well-known in the sports group.

Yeah, it seems like he's the only one who's at a loss in what to do.

The grades are not good, the popularity is not good, and I don't even have the courage to integrate into the group.

But what can he do?

He is a clownfish that has been mixed into a school of beautiful tropical fish. It looks bright and decent at first glance, but it cannot withstand careful scrutiny and observation.He lives in fear, fearing that one day someone will point at him through the glass outside the fish tank and say, "Look! This fish is so ugly, how can it have the face to stay here!"

He longs to be expected and is afraid of being expected.This kind of contradiction bothers him from time to time, making his high school life in Yuzhong miserable.

He sometimes thinks that maybe he is not that bad. Although his grades in the school are not satisfactory, it does not mean that his grades in the city are not good!Who are the people in the house?Can those ghosts and monsters in middle school compare?He is standing on the shoulders of giants, so he feels small. Maybe he will still be superior in the college entrance examination three years later?

However, his grades for entering the school were just right at the critical point of the admission score for school-choice students in the middle school, so sometimes he would think to himself that the students around him were regular students, relationship students, specialty students, and school-choice students. Among the students, he was ranked at the bottom of the school-choice students, so how could he be better?

For more than half a year, this contradiction has always impacted his ridiculous self-esteem as a young man, like a shadow.

He has no sense of belonging to Fuzhong, and this school makes him feel uncomfortable all the time.

Assessing the most important indicator of his student days-study performance made him lose his sense of security and direction.In junior high school, he was even one notch lower than the middle school, and he could be in the middle and upper reaches of the class. His grades after high school were the first time he had tasted the defeat of his own IQ powerlessness.

He still remembers that the first class on the first day of high school was chemistry, and the first thing the round-faced chemistry teacher said when he came to the podium was "Chapter 1, read the book by yourself, and do the after-class questions after reading-" At the end, he added One sentence: "He who can't understand is an idiot."

This young chemistry teacher who just graduated probably thinks that "mole" is a single concept, and no matter how knowledgeable he is, he can't say anything ugly, so he dropped that sentence in a simple, rude and humorous manner.

That sentence caused the whole class to burst into laughter, but he was the only one who couldn't laugh out of his face.

He really didn't understand it at the time.

The textbook can only summarize the content in two pages. It is obviously just a new concept, but my brain seems to have been poked by a shaft, and I can't get around it no matter what.

He suffered a fatal blow from his chemistry teacher on the first day, and never recovered from it.

This kind of inferiority complex caused by the gap, in the final analysis, is because he cares too much about that worthless face. He didn't even notice that how many of Zhang Hongkuan and the others got in by themselves in terms of grades alone? ?

Years later, every time he thought of this matter, he would have the urge to fold his fists and kneel down to his innocence back then.

How else could he be so young?He is far from having the mind and vision to ignore these insignificant contradictions, and even desperately grasping the little so-called precious self-esteem and treating it like life, living every day like walking on eggshells, which eventually leads to the whole life. In high school, I was out of the classmate group.If it wasn't for the thread of thinking, he would have completely disappeared from the sight of these students.