\n\n\nWith one click everything went from darkness to light, the screen blinked and the image began to appear.
It is a dormitory for the staff, one of the most remote of the century-old school. So far away that the school sends its youngest teachers to live there. The house has a beautiful appearance from the outside, with its red bricks and white steps, and ivy climbing up the old building with a thousand delicate vines, so anyone who passes by will not be able to avoid looking twice.
The bedroom is equipped with an old cable TV in each room.\n"Rains from forts to torrentials in the middle and lower sections of the Yangtze River one after the other ......"
When the teenager passed through the entrance of the building, the sound of the television programs filtered through the window glass of the reception room, and the old woman on duty used to stop and shout at him.
"Hey, you know, young student? This is the staff bedroom, where the teachers live, so you can't come here all the time."
But today, the old woman has not questioned him, perhaps because she was stunned and dizzy and has not realized when she passed by in the dark.\nHe went up directly to the third floor and knocked on the well-known iron gate.
The door opened with a squeak and the woman inside polled: "Is it you?"
The teenager whispered: "Professor Xie."
Although it was late and the teenager was an unexpected guest, she was his teacher and the closest person to him at school, and after a brief moment of surprise, the woman welcomed him inside.
He made a cup of tea and cut slices of ginger to add them to him. It was raining outside and it seemed to him that the teenager was wet and cold, and hot ginger tea could keep the cold away.
Professor Xie placed the steaming cup of tea on the tea table in front of him, "When did you come back?"
"I just came back today." The young man stood in front of the sofa shyly.
Professor Xie: "Sit down quickly."
Only then did he sit, with his hands curled on his lap, restrained, without touching the cup of tea.
"Why didn't you let me know in advance when you came back? Is there a bus to school so late?"
"...... Hmm."
"How are things at home?"
The teenager remained silent for a moment, looking down and rummaging through the broken hole of his jeans.
"My mother still wants me to drop out of school..."
Professor Xie was silent.
He had previously spoken to the mother of the teenager in front of him and promised that he would give a tuition exemption to families with special difficulties, in the hope that the mother would allow her son to finish the university where he had worked so hard to enter.
But the mother flatly refused -
"Study what? Studying Chinese? Who doesn't speak Chinese? They're just scammers."
She patiently reasoned with the mother: "The child is very talented, look, he is already in his second year, isn't it a shame to leave him halfway? In addition, if you finish your studies in two years, you will be able to find a job in society. With your grades, it is not a problem to get a teacher's job, it's a child's dream, and teaching is a stable job ......"
"He won't be a teacher! Haven't you seen his face?!"
The mother's words were like a sharp knife cutting between invisible currents.
Professor Xie felt angry, but she didn't know what to answer.
"I want him to go home and work now! There is no money in the family! Don't waste your time. That face - that face ...... reads books, so what?! What school would a teacher like that want?"
What kind of face was that?
In Miss Xie's room there was an incandescent lamp lit, of low power and apparently dim, but that continued to illuminate the teenager's face.
He had a face that Professor Xie was used to seeing, but that anyone who saw it for the first time would have taken a breath: a half-dark face, with bruises that covered him from the forehead to the neck, like rotten skin.
Surprising, blatantly abnormal.
"Sick!"
"Don't go near him, it could be contagious."
"Hey! Yin-Yang man!"
He grew up with this face, and with a shadow of abuse and ridicule.
Because of his illness, because he was too sick to hide it, too ugly to hide, the young man grew up with a lot of contempt. Although he studied a lot and was kind to others, he was still like an evil dragon wandering under the blue sky, who was denied any equal treatment.
Few people, like Ms. Xie, could find the normal half of her face pleasant and gentle.
He always endured the teasing of everyone with sweetness and numbness, and sometimes smiled at the same time as they, as if he had really done something wrong.
But what had he done wrong?
He was always the most serious in his studies, honest, and he was always the one who worked the most in his group. When others intimidated him, he always took it in a good mood and didn't say much.
"It's okay, teacher, I'm already happy that you can talk to me. In the past, when I was in town, people went around when they saw me, and no one listened to me as attentively as you did."
"The students were all very kind too, at least they didn't hit me with a brick."
He spoke calmly, but his head was always inclined and his shoulders bent, since his spine had been deformed and bent by the heavy insults he had carried for so long.
Later he said to him: "You can come and see me to take private lessons after evening classes whenever you want, and if you don't understand something and need my help, you just have to ask me for it."
He smiled shyly, his average normal face showed some embarrassed blush.
In the two years I knew him, he was used to coming, slightly bent over, to knock on the door of his bedroom, to bring him essays, essays and even poems that he himself had written, asking for guidance.\n
Nowadays, many people like to curse, but few like to write poetry.
However, he persisted in writing.
His companions laughed at him: "The ugly write ugly things, he is sour, more sour than your rotten grape skin.
He laughed and wrote again, sincerely.
But now, I no longer had that power.
Professor Xie thought about what had happened before and sighed in her heart, looking at the boy in front of her with pity.\n
The teenager said: "This time I came to say goodbye to you, teacher. I'm leaving tomorrow."
"Back home?"
"...... Well, more or less"
The teenager paused: "Teacher, if my illness were not on my face, but where others could not see it, people would be kinder to me. That would be very nice."
Professor Xie's eyes finally could not help but turn red, things had reached this point, every effort had been made, but unfortunately she was not her family. After all, I couldn't make the final decision, nor could I save it. The mother regretted letting the child go to school, but in the end, there was a second healthy child who was only in high school, and the sick could be sacrificed so that the healthy person could leave.
She also considered that she had done nothing wrong and that, as a mother, she also had to weigh the family situation. It was being fair.
-"The paper that ...... left me last time and asked me to review it for you, I haven't finished correcting it yet-"
Professor Xie felt that she was on the verge of tears and abruptly changed her subject.
"But I have read the obverse very carefully, do you want to go and do the check-out procedures, to leave after I have reviewed them all ......?"
"No." He smiled and shook his head: "I'll leave first thing in the morning."
I was sorry, why did I always think there was still time? Why didn't you stay up all night?
And why, among all things, shopping, gossip and having long and useless meetings, could not make room for this?
Here was the dream of a student who was about to break, and a heart that was about to let dd beat, and she, like her last teacher, could not give her a bouquet of flowers to say goodbye.
"I'm sorry..."
"It's okay." He said to him, "But I have written one last poem, can I give it to you?"
He nodded anxiously with his head.
Then he took it out of his bag of books and showed it to him, the pages were so thin that they seemed weightless in his hands.
He read it word for word, a poem of candorous, ardent and passionate but careful love. The kind of love I had seen written by many teachers. I had read many love poems written by the great masters, since ancient times.\n"When do I lean on a false facade and dry my tears in the double light?"\nBut at the moment, none of them seemed to be as good as the young man's page.
He didn't say anything, as if doing it were a lack of rhyme.
The teenager was a poet, and he knew that without the help of poetry, a love of such a disparate condition would be nothing more than a shame.
"I want to leave it as a souvenir for you."
Tenderness was written on the ugly face and on the normal one.
"I'm sorry, teacher, I can't afford any gifts for you."
"There is nothing better than this." He turned his back on him, repressing a drowned sobbing: "You better eat something, I will bring you something delicious."
Stopping rummaging through the closet to control her emotions, Ms. Xie took a can of butter cookies and placed it on the coffee table.
The teenager kindly thanked him and, under the watchful eye of teacher Xie, finally touched the cup of tea carefully, then removed his hand and said quietly: "It's hot."
He touched her, "How is that? Of course it's hot."
But even so, he returned some cold water to refill it.
The young man drank it little by little with his favorite cookie.
When he finished eating and drinking, the night was still long.
He said, "Teacher, can I read instead for a while longer?"
"Of course."
The teenager smiled again, with some helplessness: "I'm about to leave, and in the end I keep bothering you so much."
"Okay, you can stay a little longer ...... When you get back, give me your address. I'll send you a copy of all the good books I see. You are so intelligent, that even if you study on your own ...... it won't be so bad."
Professor Xie could only speak as a consolation: "If you need help, you can look for me on WeChat."
The teenager looked at him: "Thank you."
There was a pause.
"If everyone were like you, then maybe..."
He lowered his head and said nothing else.
What she had most in her bedroom were books, and since he was ugly, sick and his illness was totally visible, he ended up being the center of attention every time he went to the library, she invited him to come to the staff premises and lent him his collection for him to read.
Thus, the young man spent the whole night reading on the staff premises, as if he were going to take all these words that he read that night to his homeland.
It was rare for him to feel so comfortable; before he did not stay until very late, always fearing that he could disturb his teacher's normal routine. But today has been an exception.
Professor Xie did not reproach him for this last whim, except that she stayed awake with him until the last part of the night and was a little sleepy, falling asleep on the desk without realizing it.
In a nebula, he heard the teenager say again: "Professor Xie."
She replied vaguely.
"There is one more thing I would like to apologize for."
"The robbery of the students of the previous class ...... always lost things and did not know how, which caused them to criticize you. I really took those things."
She woke up stunned and startled, but her body was too tired and heavy to get up.
The teenager said, slightly sad, "But I didn't keep those things, I didn't keep a penny. They laughed at me that way, and I actually had resentment in my heart ...... I threw all his bags in the haystack and later burned them all. At that moment they suspected me, but you didn't even come to ask me, so they excused me. The truth is that it was I who did it."
"I didn't have the courage to admit that I have only been a normal person or even a good person in the eyes of a person."
"And that person was you."
"Teacher, I'm vain, right? ...... But if even you are disappointed with me, I don't know what I'm going to do. You are the only recognition I have had in my life."
His voice softened as he spoke.
But his eyes were clear, almost transparent, as if relieved.
"What I'm most sorry I did is that...... Miss. Xie, I'm very sorry. My illness seems to have moved from my face, to my heart. If I had another life, I would like to be a normal person...... I don't want to be so sick that I don't even have the ability to love anymore."
"Thank you teacher..."
The wind entered through the window with a roar, blowing up the pages that lay on the table in circles, again and again, as if they were sacred flags that call souls.
And then everything was calm again.
The tea on the table was cold.
The next morning, teacher Xie woke up early and discovered that she had slept at her desk all night, the house was clean. The teenager was a very polite person, but that day he had packed his bags and left without waiting to say goodbye to his teacher.
Inevitably, she got up and went sleepy to the room.
He looked at the coffee table and saw...
He looked at the coffee table, but his eyes were wide open as if he had soaked in ice water.
The tea I had served yesterday to the teenager had turned into ice, but ......
The ambient temperature was 27 or 28 degrees.
How can that be? How can it be?
He looked in the room with his eyes wide open, and there were more and more traces that froze his heart: the butter cookies from the can, which yesterday had clearly seen how the teenager ate, but which now seemed as if not a single piece was missing. The water in the cup of tea had frozen to become ice, but it hadn't gone down either, and the last...
In the end, a subtle love poetry, the content of which still lay in his heart, which he gave him as a farewell.
But whose writing has disappeared.
Or rather, there was never a writing to begin with.......
She was almost shaking when her phone vibrated with a ding, making her jump and snatching her. It was a spam call. She was relieved, but then she woke up like a dream and quickly dialed the number of the teenager.
Bip. Bip. Bip.
The heartbeat and mechanical tones were shaken together.
"Hello?"
It was already done.
The person who answered the phone was the familiar voice of a middle-aged woman, rude, but with a slightly sobbing tone at the moment. He exchanged a few words with the teenager's mother on the other side of the line.
His heart fell hard into a black hole that he could not see or avoid.
As soon as she heard her -
"......"
"It's you! It's you again!!! I haven't even had the opportunity to call them and you had to call first!"
The woman complained, she didn't remember what she had told her before that, her mind was almost blank, she only heard the last scream hard like a blow: "He's dead! Dead."
His blood froze like ice.
Dead?
"It's all your fault!!! He argued with me, ran away, it was raining heavily outside, the police said that there was a stretch of cable exposed and there ......"
Professor Xie's ears buzzed.
In the fierce diatribe of insults and lamentations, he could barely hear two more phrases, like a ghost, like a chimera, like a farewell that does not belong to this world.
On the other side of the line, the woman's pitiful voice burst into her ears.
"What else are you looking for? What else do you want from me?"\n--
"Yesterday was the seventh day since his death!"
__________________'\nThe author has something to say.\nGood morning, update time, between 9:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m., probably 9:30 p.m.\nThe characters are somewhat different from what I said before, because I felt dissatisfied, so again I did the thing of deleting and rewriting all the chapters that were written a lot ...... so don't pay much attention to the previous settings hahahaha. In addition, I love reading and responding to criticisms that focus on the plot itself, it used to be what I liked to do the most when I wrote a story, but then reading the reviews always gives me a huge headache and really affects my mood, and I have not yet finished saving my manuscript, so I am just a relentless update bot that only updates online and disconnects later\nI am writing because I like to write books, believe it or not, so although I know that the most popular thing is the plot of ordinary novels, the gong and the one that shou are the first loves, without a third, the whole sweet and pampered plot, which shows the face. Many authors and readers really like this type of text, or they want to make their way and try it. But I don't like it. I'm not one of them, and I'm not going to try this genre at the moment.
I like to write about crazy psychopaths, about hard and cold beauties, about dead rogues, about big dogs, about great emotional scenes in which you hit me and I hit you, so I will continue writing like this, and I am willing to write for readers who like that type of writing, and it does not matter if there are fewer people who like it, at least I am happy with the process of writing and I can please myself.
Now that I have lost the interaction with the normal readers that made me so happy, I find more and more restrictions when it comes to writing, so much so that it is tedious, so I no longer want to face the chaos of the Internet, so I can only connect tirelessly to publish the text, and disconnect quietly to write, not to be indifferent and not respond, Thank you for understanding and joining hands.
Translator's note
All I can say is that it has already made us cry.
If you read Erha, you already know, for Chinese culture the dead return to earth on the seventh day after his death.
In the future I will be part of a translation group, but I get ahead because asssassdds emotion.
And about the kid, they didn't even tell us the name.