Chapter 22
After Dai Yan left, Zhou Yue fell seriously ill. One reason was that he was too frightened, and the other was that he had studied too hard before and was exhausted. He couldn't hold on and had to lie in bed and take a year off from school.
Kang Xingxing never told her how much money the illness cost. Zhou Yue was sixteen that year, and Kang Xingxing was seventeen, and their prime years were wasted in the hospital.
After school every day, Kang Xingxing's first thing was to cook, then go to the hospital to keep the patient company overnight, and go to school again the next day. One time, he was so tired that he fell asleep on a chair in the kitchen. He took the lunch box to the bedside with a droopy head. When Zhou Yue asked him what was wrong, he didn't say anything. When she opened the lid of the lunch box, she was stunned.
"Huh? Didn't you say you were going to make fish soup? But you ended up grilling dried fish?" She blinked at him. He propped himself up on his knees, wiping the sweat from his palms with his washed-out school uniform pants. He smiled foolishly, avoiding her gaze, "I accidentally fell asleep."
Zhou Yue listened in silence, concentrating on finishing the box of dried fish. It was too dry, and she choked. She tilted her head back and drank half a glass of water. After wiping her mouth, she solemnly said to Kang Xingxing, "Don't come to see me from Monday to Friday. I have no appetite at night, and the hospital cafeteria serves dinner. The nurses will help me. If they are busy, I will just walk slowly on my own."
"But you just had surgery, and the hospital cafeteria is out of food..."
"You talk so much?"
After that, every time Kang Xingxing came to the hospital, she would peek in furtively at the door. She was startled when she saw her, and walked in quickly with a shamefaced look on her face. She hurriedly put her schoolbag on the ground and placed her lunch box on the small bedside table piled with pills. She would quickly take out the food like a special forces soldier in training, and before she could say anything, she would start rambling on: "School ended early today, and I finished my homework during evening study. I got home at six o'clock, cooked two dishes and a pot of rice, and it was only seven o'clock when I came out after eating..."
He dawdled for a long time before leaving in the evening. When Zhou Yue pretended to be asleep, he sat on a chair and looked at her, as if he could never get enough of looking at her, until she suddenly opened her eyes and shouted in a low voice: "Why don't you leave!" Then he stood up like a big black dog that was despised, with the corners of his narrow eyes drooping, his head lowered, and his hands fidgeting. It took him a long time to zip up his schoolbag, and he went out in a depressed mood, without talking to her, and without making any sound when he walked.
After that, he was quiet for a day, two days at the most, and then he came back on the third day with a shameless face, and proudly brought a folding steel bed he bought from the small supermarket near the hospital. "School ended early today, and I finished my homework during evening study..."
"Your brother is so good to you..." When Kang Xingxing was not around, the old lady in the next bed would chat with her, "There are few boys who are so sensible these days." She muttered with her eyes closed, sighing as she muttered. She was eighty years old, but none of her children came to see her.
There were six people living in the ward where Zhou Yue was staying. People came and went, but she and the old lady were the only "constant" patients. The old lady felt sorry for her and moved to her bedside on an iron frame. She put an apple, two bananas, or a box of chocolates at her bedside and told her not to eat too much.
Zhou Yue had no way to repay her grandmother, so she sang for her. She moved a chair to sit next to her bed and sang her favorite song, "Liuyang River". Every time, her grandmother held her hand and asked her to stop singing so as not to stretch the wound. "Grandma is happy, happy! Girl..." She sighed and patted the back of her hand, "Good girl, don't be so honest when you go out next time!"
There was a curtain between the beds. The middle of the night was when the disease was most rampant. Zhou Yue was wearing a hospital gown and curled up. The iron railings of the bed were chillingly cold, and all she could hear were painful groans coming from all directions.
She took off the urine bag, but every time she came back from the toilet and lay down on the bed, she would be hit by the high protruding railings. Why did they install such a cumbersome thing?
Until one night, the dull, tearing pain tortured her so much that sweat covered her forehead. She covered the bleeding wound with one hand and held the railing of the hospital bed with the other hand. Only then did she understand that this railing was for patients to hold when the pain was unbearable.
She held the railing tightly, her palms were sweaty, but she gritted her teeth to prevent herself from groaning like a dying animal.
She changed, and both Kang Xingxing and she noticed this change. She became taciturn, and every time she laughed heartlessly, there was a long silence.
Kang Xingxing, on the other hand, became more talkative. He acted funny in front of the bed and told her some very silly jokes. She would laugh foolishly, her eyes curved with laughter, and hold his hand, which was as rough as old tree bark, stroking it over and over again. "When will I grow up, gorilla?"
Kang Xingxing's dark face flushed red as she heard this, tears still welling up in her eyes as she smiled and said proudly, "I will grow up before Yueyue, become an adult, and protect Yueyue."
"Well, you should have gone to school before me. For me..." Zhou Yue turned over in the hospital bed, facing away from him. After enduring the heat in her eyes and the soreness in her nose, she smiled and said, "You should think more about yourself in the future and stop sacrificing so much for me."
Kang Xingxing behind her didn't speak for a long time, so long that she thought he had fallen asleep again. Then she heard him say, "Why do you say that?"
He rarely addressed Zhou Yue as "you." This was the first time. Zhou Yue quickly wiped away her tears with her back to him, then turned around and smiled at him, "I mean, I want to get better quickly and grow up well, so I won't hold you back."
“…holding back.”
He seemed not to understand, pursed his lips and looked at her, taking a deep breath. His eyes were originally bloodshot from overwork, and now his eyeballs were bloodshot. Zhou Yue was scared and quickly covered the back of his hand. His hand was shaking, but it didn't seem like a tremor caused by emotional excitement, but like an involuntary muscle twitch. She didn't think much of it at the time, and turned around to look at the patients taking a nap in the ward. She held his hand with both hands, rubbed her face against the calluses on his palm, and whispered, "I want to tell you that I feel sorry for you too."
"When I get out this time," she propped herself up and put her face on his knees, "I'm going to give you my most precious thing." The sunlight outside the ward made her eyes bright, and she was excited to the point of being a little morbid, but that excitement soon turned into tears, which slid from the corners of her red eyes and fell on his legs, forming a teardrop, "I'm afraid I can't keep it and give it to you." That experience destroyed a part of her, just like the aftershocks after an earthquake. The most despairing thing is not the magnitude, but how many more there are.
Kang Xingxing exhaled a deep breath and burst into laughter. "The most precious thing..." He repeated her words, looking at her with a desperate smile, "What could be more precious than you?"
He looked down at his hands, which were as rough as an old farmer's. "You really don't know anything."
It’s not that she doesn’t understand, on the contrary, they are one black and the other white, one silent and the other cheerful, one is afraid that the other doesn’t know how passionate his love is, while the other becomes more and more timid the more he loves, as if love, once spoken out, will be covered by the dust of this dirty world.
But there is one thing in common, that is, they both think that the other is more valuable than themselves. Later, Zhou Yue thought, if only one of them could be a little more selfish.
On the day of discharge, Zhou Yue sat beside the old lady's bed and sang the entire song "Liuyang River" to her.
That day was Saturday. Kang Xingxing had originally told her that he would come to complete her discharge procedures on Monday, but she wanted to give him a surprise, so she put her spare clothes and a jar of paper stars folded for her by her fellow patients into her black swimming bag early in the morning, sat on the hospital bed, looked at the empty small bedside table and the folded quilt, and took the bag home.
She hadn't been out for a long time, and the moment she walked out of the hospital, she was blinded by the scorching sun. She held up her hands to shield her eyes and endured the pain. Thinking of Kang Xingxing, who was alone at home on the weekend, reviewing her homework under the desk lamp with her brows furrowed like iron, she wanted to laugh, and as she laughed, she sneezed loudly.
But there was no one at home and nothing left.
Except for the bed, coffee table, sofa, dining table... everything was gone. The cabinet full of things Zhou Tiancheng brought back from all over the world, and the foreign liquor and Maotai hidden in the closet were all gone. Zhou Yue stood in the middle of the living room and for the first time had such a direct feeling of the bare walls of the house.
She stood there blankly, feeling unreal for a long time. The midday sun made the house so bright that it looked like a dream, a nightmare.
She didn't know how long she stood there until it was dark and her shadow disappeared. Warm lights were on in the Audit Office's family building. The adults had all gotten off work, and when they got home, they washed their hands and started preparing dinner. Their parents complained about the bad things at work, and one or two of their children were doing their homework in the bedroom with sad faces. Studying was probably the biggest pain for them, but for her and Kang Xingxing, it was their only happiness and dream, and now this happiness and dream was about to disappear.
The door opened, and she could smell the smell of coal slag in the air through the hallway, connecting all the abnormalities: his rough and trembling hands, his thin face, which was so dark that no traces of wind or sun could be seen.
Kang Xingxing came in, turned on the light, and was startled, "Yueyue?"
"Is this what you call becoming an adult?"
Zhou Yue said in the dark with her back to him, "I've been standing there for too long and I couldn't open my mouth. When I finally opened it with great difficulty, my voice was hoarse as if I had swallowed a handful of coal slag."
He was silent.
"You even wear your school uniform every day to deceive me." She laughed. She was so stupid. No wonder she was so bad at math. She couldn't even see that his deception was so crude. The lights of thousands of houses in front of her melted and flowed before her eyes.
"Do you also think I'm stupid? So easy to fool?" She turned around and saw him standing under the entrance light with his head down. She could see a mouthful of big white teeth, white eyeballs, and the color of his clothes couldn't be made out. He really was a chimpanzee.
"I don't have any." He raised his head and spat out a mouthful of black as he spoke. A broken military backpack was thrown limply on the ground, and the surrounding tile floor looked like a circle of coal balls in Hayao Miyazaki's animation "My Neighbor Totoro".
"I want you to recover in peace."
As soon as she finished speaking, Zhou Yue rushed to the balcony. The hem of her blue skirt was like butterfly wings. She usually couldn't even run 400 meters, but now she ran faster than anyone else. She ran to the balcony and sat down on the windowsill, holding the open window, looking at Kang Xingxing who had rushed into the living room, her hair flying wildly in the wind.
"Recuperate? If I see you doing this again, I'll jump from here. Anyway, the Zhou family has no descendants after me, so it doesn't matter if I die early or late. I'll just jump down and apologize to my father."
Kang Xingxing didn't move forward, nor did she stretch out her arms and tremble in fear, coaxing and begging for mercy as usual. This time, he looked at her calmly and said, "You think you're faster than me? I'll definitely land before you. You can try."
Zhou Yue grabbed the window frame in a daze, staring at him, and he looked at her. The two of them were deadlocked for a long time, and she admitted defeat and slipped down from the window quietly.
Kang Xingxing didn't say anything when he saw her coming down. He turned around and went to the entrance to take off his dirty T-shirt and threw it on the ground. He took the water from his bag, drank it all in one gulp, and went to the bathroom again.
Zhou Yue was unwilling to give up. With her hands clasped behind her back, her hands white from clenching, she followed him silently, following him back and forth until she reached the bathroom door. "How long have you not been to school?"
"It's been a long time." He washed his hands slowly, but no matter how he washed, the water was only black and it would never drain away.
"Why, why?" Zhou Yue stamped her feet anxiously, crying with her neck tilted back. She scratched her hands behind her back until they were broken. She went in and punched him with her fists, hitting him with a dull thud. She dragged him left and right, shaking him, and the blood on her hands smeared all over him.
He didn't respond, so she smiled again, wiped her tears, hugged him, and acted coquettishly with him, "I'm well now. Just think of this as you waiting for me for another year. Starting tomorrow, we can go to school together again!"
But he didn't even raise his head. He just said two words: "No money." Then he turned off the faucet. The room was silent in an instant.
Zhou Yue stood there with her mouth open. He gritted his teeth and continued, "If I go to school and you go too, in the end, neither of us can go to school. Education is the most important thing for girls, but for men..." He looked up at himself in the mirror. He had unknowingly grown so tall that the upward part of his forehead could not be seen in the mirror. "Whether a man goes to school or not, he can earn money to support the family. It makes no difference."
He turned around and gave his first reassuring smile of the day, "I'm so smart, I can do anything."
He no longer held her in his hands and in his mouth like a baby and coaxed her, nor did he follow her around like a little servant with a silly smile on his face and call her "Yueyue".
He seemed to have really become an adult all of a sudden. The time when she was sick was the first time they were separated for a short period of time. She didn't know what happened to him, who he met, or what he was thinking when he was lying alone in bed looking at the ceiling. She just knew that he had made up his mind and she had no way to stop him.
But the two stubborn guys finally gave in. The mine was too dangerous. Even though they were paid a lot, he decided not to go. He went to help out at the barbecue stall of his junior high school classmate Lin Peng. Not long after he arrived, he built an automatic conveyor belt for delivering food, so there was no need for people to run up and down the stairs to deliver food.
Later, Zhou Yue saw something similar in a large supermarket in Shenzhen. It slid past your head, slowed down at the end, and then delivered the goods to you. She looked up at it in the supermarket for a long time, and people passing by also looked up with her, "What are you looking at?"
Zhou Yue studied very hard and went home for lunch. When she got home, the house was filled with the aroma of food. Kang Xingxing came out while taking off her apron, "Are you back? Let's eat!" After lunch, she took a one-hour nap. In the afternoon, Kang Xingxing rode his bicycle to take her to school.
As the bicycle passed the Bridge of Sighs, she put her arms around his waist and buried her face in his back, listening to the chirping of birds and the rustling of ripples on the water as willow trees brushed against the surface. She shed tears all over his back, but he seemed not to feel anything.
Every time she jumped off her bike, said with swollen eyes that she had fallen asleep again and drooled a little, he would smile, say "listen to the class carefully", and then ride his bike back.
After school in the evening, she went to Lin Peng's barbecue stall to find Kang Xingxing. Their family was also having dinner, so she and Kang Xingxing joined the Lin family for dinner.
But when it came to big exams like monthly exams and final exams, Kang Xingxing would do nothing and just stay at home to accompany her. When she came back in the evening and sat down on her chair and refused to get up, Kang Xingxing would prepare dinner and bring it to her, then sit next to her and read.
She took two bites, then started calculating when she remembered something. She calculated so much that she didn't know what the heaven and the earth were. When she finished calculating, the food was still hot because Kang Xingxing had heated it up for her.
No matter how difficult those two years were, as long as she was at home, the air conditioner would be on all the time in the summer, the pages of the book would be blown by the wind, and there would be a peeled apple next to the food. He would look up from the book and look at her, and only then would a smile appear on his dark and cold face.
But when Zhou Yue ran to the chess and card room at night, the door was locked tightly. She knocked on the door and heard him say from inside: "Go to bed."
They never slept together again. The bunk bed became hers alone. She would sleep on the upper end today and the lower end tomorrow. She would knock on the wall and call out, "Orangutan?" but there was no sound.
As soon as Lin Peng's barbecue stall business was booming, Lin Peng's father became a little arrogant and started having affairs outside. He said that his mistress was pregnant. Later, he owed money from gambling and mortgaged the store.
That day, Zhou Yue, Lin Peng, and Kang Xingxing sat on the curb looking at the messy barbecue stall. Only two plastic stools were left after someone moved the stall away. Lin Peng cried so hard that his nose was all over the floor. He wiped his tears while tilting his head back to drink a can of beer.
Zhou Yue was also at a loss, with a wooden face, holding her schoolbag, feeling that life was really precarious. It was Kang Xingxing who first stood up and said, "As long as you are alive, you will find a way."
Zhou Yue and Lin Peng followed behind him, their shadows stretched long by the setting sun. He was always the backbone.
The barbecue stall was gone, so Kang Xingxing went to the construction site, moving bricks and cement. He had a steamed bun and a bottle of mineral water for lunch.
Because Lin Peng was not a good student and his family was in debt, he gradually dropped out of school and followed Kang Xingxing like a younger brother.
Later, Zhou Yue found that there were more and more willing younger brothers like him. Kang Xingxing, a migrant worker who had just turned 18, was followed by a group of people wherever he went.
During the summer vacation of his second year of high school, Zhou Yue applied sunburn medicine to Kang Xingxing every night. The skin on his neck and back was sunburned, and the black and red sunburns were in patches, like scabies. Zhou Yue used a cotton swab to peel off the sunburned skin bit by bit, and then applied medicine. The pain made his neck and back sweat all over, and he gritted his teeth and said nothing.
Before the college entrance examination, Kang Xingxing asked Zhou Yue where she wanted to take the exam, and she said Guangzhou.
"good."
He didn't ask why, but just held the application form and studied the admission scores of several first-tier universities in Guangzhou over the years under the desk lamp, holding his breath and concentrating, with beads of sweat on the tip of his nose. The book was densely covered with his notes, and the red and green arrows looked like a stock K-line chart.
"I want to visit your house."
"good."
During the summer vacation after the college entrance examination, Kang Xingxing still spent all day and night at the construction site. Zhou Yue went to find him, brought him food, and sat next to him, listening to his brothers' jokes and laughing along.
"That's great now! Yueyue has been admitted to university, and Kang Ge can now rest assured to find a girlfriend. Those girls are drooling over it! Kang Ge will also choose a concubine and pick the most beautiful one!"
Even though Kang Xingxing was wearing a safety helmet and was covered in dust and sweat, he still fascinated the young girls and wives passing by. Moreover, the less interested a man is in women and the more aloof and abstinent he is, the more women will want him. Some of the young men who were with Kang Xingxing had experienced sex and some had not, but when they talked about these dirty things, they laughed more obscenely than the other, laughing and playing together, and were more excited than Kang Xingxing.
Zhou Yue stopped smiling and lowered her head to pick at the rice in her lunch box. She felt like she couldn't swallow anything in her mouth. She ate two mouthfuls and stopped eating. She stood up and said to Kang Xingxing in a bad mood, "Have you finished eating, brother?"
Kang Xingxing tilted his neck and looked at her blankly, his cheeks puffed up. There was still half of the rice left in the lunch box. "I..." Before he could finish his words, the lunch box was taken away by her.
After that, she locked herself in the house for several days, reading and drawing, but sadly, she was so bad at drawing that everything she drew looked weird. She specifically drew Kang Xingxing, making him look like a chimpanzee with bared white fangs.
She only went out to go to the bathroom. Every time she passed the living room, she would catch Kang Xingxing's sight. She would squat on the balcony to brush her shoes or wash her clothes, and turn her head to look at her. When she noticed, she would quickly turn her face away.
"What are you looking at?" She stomped her feet and pointed at his back and cursed. He turned his back to her and spoke after a long while: "I didn't."
"I saw you looking at me!"
“…”
After she finished using the bathroom, she slammed the door open, then returned to the bedroom and slammed the door shut again. She started reading, and as she got deeper into her studies, she heard him knock on the door, "Yueyue."
"what!"
"I have something for you."
"What?"
"Come out and see."
Zhou Yue turned her head and looked at the door angrily. After hesitating for a while, she couldn't resist her curiosity and rushed over to open the door. She saw him with his hands behind his back, "What? Give it to me!" The two of them struggled for a while, and he finally gave her a box with Nokia written on it.
It was a brand new pink slider phone. When held up to the light, the fluorescent pink shimmered like flowing nail polish.
"This thing is so expensive! Why are you wasting it? Can't I just call you from a public phone booth when I get to school?" Zhou Yue felt bad about the money and asked him to return it, but he refused. He took out another black Nokia phone and said, "How can I answer a public phone at the construction site? Just call my cell phone and I'll answer it right away."
The two of them sat on the sofa in the living room, discussing with each other. Zhou Yue was still in a bad mood and looked fierce, so Kang Xingxing smiled, put the phone in her hand and asked her to call him.
That was their first phone call, and the "Hello?" that was so close seemed so far away.
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