Lin Sui didn't fall asleep until very late. She had many dreams intermittently, dreaming about things in the past.
She dreamed of her first parent-teacher meeting. The teacher required all the students' parents to attend. Lin Sui went to the office to plead with the teacher many times but it was useless. She had no choice but to harden her heart and call her father.
At that time, her father lived not far from her, in the next city. She heard from her father that the project he was working on was very large and he would not have to rest for the whole year. It was just that his salary was always delayed, but he never missed the time to pay Lin Sui's living expenses.
Lin Sui sat in his home and dialed the number. Beep...beep...beep...for a long time, just when Lin Sui thought no one would answer the call, his father's voice came from the other end of the line.
"Sui Sui, what's the matter?" The father's soft voice formed a great contrast with the noise in the background.
"Dad, our school is going to hold a parent-teacher meeting." Lin Sui tried his best to make his needs clear in one sentence to avoid wasting time.
"Oh..." The father paused for a moment, "Dad, can you not go?"
Lin Sui was already very annoyed about this matter, and when he heard that his father didn't want to go, he became even angrier, so his tone became bad.
"If you don't want to go, then don't go. I'll tell the teacher that I don't have a mother or a father. Are you satisfied now?"
"Sui Sui, don't be angry. Daddy is afraid. He's afraid of embarrassing you. You know Daddy has never seen the world..."
Lin Sui suddenly burst into tears. She pinched the flesh beside her thigh, hating her vanity and hating her father who was humbled because of her vanity.
"What's the big deal? Just dress neatly and cleanly. Not all my classmates' fathers are bosses." Lin Sui quickly wiped the tears from her face and comforted her father.
She is such a twisted person. While she is vain, she also has a lot of kindness in her heart. She knows that vanity is wrong, but she has no way to change. She always thinks that maybe she will go to college, or maybe she will work and make money on her own. Anyway, sooner or later, one day, she will be able to easily say that she has no mother and her father is an ordinary migrant worker.
But, definitely not now.
In order to save on train tickets, my father bought tickets for the day of the parent-teacher meeting and went back home after the meeting.
"One day's work is delayed, and hundreds of dollars are gone."
Lin Sui and Qin Chen were already together at that time. Qin Chen was quite excited about meeting his father-in-law and wanted to go up and say hello when Lin Sui's father came. However, this idea was nipped in the bud by Lin Sui before he could put it into practice.
The rhetoric she used also made sense.
"If a handsome boy greeted him out of nowhere, no matter how thick he was, he would definitely feel something was wrong!"
"I really want to see what your father looks like. I bet engineers must be very elegant!"
Qin Chen said to Lin Sui, and Lin Sui just nodded and said nothing.
Many parents came one after another. For the first time, Lin Sui discovered that the students in their class seemed to have good family backgrounds. Because she was standing next to the reception desk at the door, she saw with her own eyes that many parents filled in their occupations as civil servants, including Qin Chen's parents. His father had beautiful handwriting, but Qin Chen looked more like his mother. He stood between his respectable parents and winked at her. She smiled sadly.
Because his father still hadn't shown up, Lin Sui went to the school gate.
With five minutes left before the parent-teacher meeting started, she saw her father hurrying over from the other side of the road.
I don't know where he rented this cheap suit from, and he forgot to tuck a corner of his shirt into his pants. His leather shoes looked like they had been polished over and over again, and the worn-out areas on the front had been covered with a black marker. The bag he was carrying was probably lent to him by the contractor, and it looked like it was stolen from under my father's armpit.
Probably because he was in a hurry on the way here, my father's forehead was covered with sweat. His dark face and almost bald head, combined with his body crammed into his suit, made him look like a weird monster.
She probably hadn't had breakfast, as she was still holding two buns stuffed with leeks in her hand. She smiled at Lin Sui, revealing the vegetable leaves stuck on her teeth.
At this moment, Lin Sui collapsed.
She looked back and fortunately there were not many people on the playground. She dragged her father to the alley outside the school gate in a few steps and started scolding him.
"Do you know you're here for a parent-teacher conference? Can't you dress up? How am I supposed to go to school after you attend the conference dressed like this? Have you ever thought about me? You want to embarrass me, right?"
She screamed hysterically, tears streaming down her face, and asked a series of questions. In the end, she could no longer cry and had to squat down.
The father stuffed the buns into his bag and tucked his shirt into his pants in a panic. After hearing Lin Sui's last words, he stood there in a daze. He wanted to wipe Lin Sui's tears, but he didn't dare. He stretched his hands in the air, as if he had been acupunctured.
He comforted Lin Sui clumsily.
"Sui Sui, don't cry. Daddy won't go. Daddy won't go. Go tell the teacher that Daddy has something urgent to do, okay? It's all Daddy's fault. Daddy didn't rent this set of clothes. Hurry up and go back. Don't cry..."
Lin Sui cried so hard that it shook the world. Only she knew that she was not only crying for her father's dishonesty, but also for how she could be so vain as to scold a father who wanted to give her his heart out.
How can she be worthy of being a human being?
What happened later was that the father did not attend the parent-teacher meeting. Before leaving, he took out a handful of money from his pocket, some in small and some in whole. He kept the small amounts for himself and gave the whole amounts to Lin Sui.
Lin Sui held the money and watched his father struggling to catch the bus.
In a corner where no one was around, she slapped herself twice.
Back at school, everything went smoothly. Lin Sui, who was crying because her engineer father broke his promise at the last minute, looked at her classmates who came to comfort her and Qin Chen who was running around for her, and she breathed a sigh of relief.
Deep down, she was still thankful that she hadn't lost face. She knew then that human nature was complex, because she herself was.
Lin Sui woke up in tears. It was another early morning. She sat on the bed, looking at the exquisite decoration and furniture, feeling a little dazed for a moment.
It took her a long time to realize that what she had just experienced was a dream.
She took out her cell phone and saw that it was already past seven o'clock. She didn't have to go to work today, so she lay down again.
WeChat prompted that there was a message, and she guessed it might be from Qin Chen, so she quickly clicked on it.
It was indeed Qin Chen. She squinted her eyes as she looked at the words, thinking that everything might really be a dream, until she pinched herself hard and it hurt so much.
She sat up with a start and read the sentence aloud.
"Lin Sui, let's get back together."
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com
