Unrequited Love

The moment Sheng Huainan saw Zheng Wenrui appear at the door, what came to his mind were the jokes made by the high school buddies when they were frolicking in the cafeteria.

Every night before self-study, everyone made an appointment to play ball. There are always two or three people either sitting in the classroom to study, or chatting with ambiguous girls, forgetting everything about playing. So one day, Chen Yongle knocked on the side of the table with chopsticks in the cafeteria, and said loudly, "Fuck it for me to hear clearly. Tonight, I will play a practice game with a team. The basketball hoop in the innermost field of the stadium. , No one is allowed to be late. I repeat, no one is allowed to be late! Whoever doesn’t come will like Zheng Wenrui!"

After listening to the last sentence, the boys who had been waiting in a tight line all fell on the table with a smile and overturned a pot of braised eggplant, causing everyone in the cafeteria to look sideways.

The first boy who eased his breath struggled and said: "Chen Yongle, you **** off, you only like Zheng Wenrui. Your entire community likes Zheng Wenrui!"

Although Sheng Huainan knew that it was wrong to sarcasm a girl like this, he still couldn't help being amused by this mean joke. He could only restrain himself from laughing too loudly, and he could not even feel guilty or angry about this joke. .

No one paid attention to Zheng Wenrui when he was enrolled in high school. She is in the middle of the class, rarely speaks, dresses normally, and looks plain--even a little ugly. When Sheng Huainan was helping the teacher to hand out the physics papers for the first mid-term exam, he was taken aback by the strange name and turned to ask the classmates sitting in the first row. He was pointed to the corner by the window. As soon as he walked over, the girl who was eating in the seat immediately buttoned the lid of the lunch box, raised her head in a panic, but accidentally choked, covered her mouth and coughed for a long time, then stumbled out of the classroom towards the women's toilet.

He stood stupidly for a while, then found a clean place on the full table and put down her three papers. On the white paper next to the aluminum lunch box, the thorns of the octopus meat were vomited into a mess.

When he returned to his seat after sending out the papers, the girl lowered her head and walked in front of him with a panic smile and said to him, "Sorry, I choked just now."

"It's fine if you are fine, and you are not sorry for me..."

"Then you, you are looking for me... what are you looking for?"

"I..." Sheng Huainan laughed blankly, and said, "I just send papers."

The classmates in the first row who had just given him the direction turned around and laughed at him kindly and said, "Hey, can you do it? It's the class leader anyway. When the school started, you helped the teacher organize our files. Now our class The classmate’s name is still incomplete. Zheng Wenrui, I allow you to crush him!"

Sheng Huainan smiled embarrassedly at Zheng Wenrui, and said with emotion, how could this girl be like a transparent person?

Zheng Wenrui no longer maintained her brilliant and weird polite smile, the corners of her mouth collapsed, and she turned away without saying anything. Sheng Huainan sat in the seat, and the classmates in the front row kept apologizing, saying that he was just joking, but the girl was really angry. So much.

Sheng Huainan found her when she was out of school and apologized to her, but she just lowered her head and pressed her mouth stubbornly. Such a surprisingly introverted person, you can never tell whether she is angry or shy, there is no vivid expression on that face, only a pair of small eyes, occasionally looking up at him, they are scary.

He was helpless, so he had to apologize by caesarean section. Is it true that he really wanted his blood to be splashed on the spot? Most of Sheng Huainan's gestures were just pretends. He became a little impatient, shrugged, picked up his schoolbag and walked towards the door.

"Don't blame you... it's my fault."

Her flat voice seemed to suppress many turbulent feelings that he couldn't recognize, and she was drowned in the noise caused by the day-time students moving tables and chairs, laughing and playing. However, the moment she raised her eyes to stare at him, those almost fire-breathing eyes made him uncertain whether he was really forgiven.

"Much...what a big deal, what's wrong is not bad, anyway, I know you now, Zheng Wenrui, hello, my name is Sheng Huainan, please take care of-look, isn't this over? I I guess I will never forget you in my life."

He smiled helplessly, touched the back of his head, and then nodded indiscriminately, slipping out through the back door as if fleeing.

Sheng Huainan, who has always been praised by the adults for being steady, sometimes fled in confusion.

If the strangeness of this girl at that time was only manifested in the inward and stubborn gaze with her mouth pursed, then her changes could be called jaw-dropping. In this way, her name slowly entered everyone's field of vision, and even became Chen Yongle's harshest punishment for those who were late to play and missed the game.

When the Chinese teacher who likes to talk babbled is talking about her head, she would say something out loud: "Can you give a serious lecture? There is no end?"

In the inter-class exercises that everyone is doing so-so, the posture is standard, meticulous, and even too hard, so that everyone likes to stand behind her and do exercises, watching and laughing until their stomach hurts.

For another example, her grades have improved by leaps and bounds. When eating at noon, she also worked on the workbook while eating, holding a spoon in her left hand and a pen in her right hand, seizing the time to the frightening point.

Serious, eccentric, and mean.

The most important thing is ugliness.

Boys like to talk about her behind their backs, or they are far more than just "behind". A few girls in the front row like to go to Sheng Huainan and their boys' seats to chat. For a while, the topic that everyone couldn't touch was Zheng Wenrui. Whenever Chen Yongle and others took Zheng Wenrui to take a shower, a few girls always pretended to be surprised and said, "Where is it as serious as what you said, what, nonsense, where did people offend you? Oh, oh , You are so annoying..." However, his tone was full of approval, and in Chen Yongle's additional "Don't you? I was wrong, you see, her virtue...", everyone has gained a lot happy.

No one does not talk behind people. The existence of some people seems to be just for entertainment, simply helping to promote the harmonious development of classmate relationships.

In their daily conversation and laughter, Sheng Huainan only laughed at the venue occasionally, even though he often felt that they were a bit too much, he just quietly led the topic to other places and never accused them. His kindness made him sympathize with that strange girl; on the other hand, his cleverness made him understand that accusations with supreme morality above everyone else can't really help this girl get rid of these ridicules. You can only get yourself into a disadvantaged situation, and even bring a lot of unexpected troubles.

To put it bluntly, what Sheng Huainan pursues is to find a way to satisfy both a kind nature and a smooth way of life. He reluctantly participated in their boring conversations several times, diverting the topic for her, until one day he got bored and simply put on headphones to listen to music, shielding all the guilt.

Occasionally, he would turn his head to look at her. Zheng Wenrui sat by the left front window, squeezing his mouth and gritting his teeth until the cheekbone bulged slightly like a fish. She seemed to have supernatural powers, and she often turned her head to meet his gaze at the first moment, and Sheng Huainan was shocked without exception.

Those eyes were always full of inexplicable flames of anger, burning all the way towards him along the line of sight.

Are you so grudges? He couldn't figure it out, shook his head, turned the music volume up, and lowered his head to do the problem.

In the second year of high school, she had become a stable member of the top five in the class, but she was still terribly hardworking, and was often used by teachers as a progressive model to educate the whole class. In the sprint stage of high school, she was even transferred to the vicinity of Shenghuainan by her teacher to suppress these naughty boys. At that time, no one dared to speak blatantly about her-in a key high school like theirs, good grades meant the right to speak, and Zheng Wenrui gradually ceased to be an unknown person.

However, what Sheng Huainan remembers most clearly is not her rocket-like rise. In the cold early spring of the third year of high school, she wore cool clothes and did inter-class exercises that shocked the whole school. When they disbanded, Chen Yongle and the others said with a smile that she was Sister Furong from Zhenhua High School. Zheng Wenrui rushed from behind with a bullfighting posture, and slapped him in the face.

Everyone was stunned.

However, she did not reprimand Chen Yongle.

She turned her face, the blue veins on her cheeks trembled, and she almost gritted her teeth and looked at Sheng Huainan who was standing not far away. He even clearly saw two blobs of jumping blue flames in her pupils.

Sheng Huainan was standing in the crowd, so her direct gaze could not be confirmed as being directed at him alone, as if it were a silent accusation against everyone.

She turned around and strode away, her light green lace-up sandals banging on the floor tiles with a sonorous force.

Everyone was dumbfounded, only Sheng Huainan smiled silently.

interesting. he thinks.

However, what he never thought was that in the next semester, when the weeping willow shoots on the lakeside of the school had just been dyed in the spring, he unexpectedly received a call from Zheng Wenrui to meet him.

He arrived early and was wandering around the lake in a daze, when he suddenly heard an angry sentence behind him: "I like you!"

The phrase "I like you" was because the speaker was too nervous and direct, and the moment he blurted it out, the tone turned out to be very similar to "repay the money quickly".

Yes, he has always been right. This silent girl is a volcano with a lid.

Sheng Huainan was surprised, and only found his expression two seconds later, adjusted to a skilled smile, with a bit of understanding and a bit of alienation, and said, "I'm sorry."

The girl's eyes, which had deliberately drawn her eyeliner, lighted up again, and then suppressed the light, and left without saying a word.

Sheng Huainan spent a while at the lake. One or two rays of sunlight reflected from the sparkling lake occasionally stinged his eyes. He somehow remembered the back of his head in the stale air of the class, the old blackboard, the bald head teacher, the boy at the front desk piled up half-meter-high crumbling papers, and sat on a narrow strip. The girl who barely speaks on the left side of the aisle.

It seems that the past years have slipped away without paying attention. Many people around him like to remember, and like to write memorable diaries on space or blogs, but he has always lacked the intention of looking back.

The summer vacation after graduating from high school, he went to pick her up at the reunion of Ye Zhanyan's class. The drunk Ye Zhanyan leaned on his shoulder and shed tears, muttering to himself: "The old days will never come back. The school days will not come back. They will never come back."

"Huainan, will you come back?"

He said a little funny: "Why do you want to come back? Shouldn't people keep walking forward?"

Ye Zhanyan smiled bitterly and said, "You really don't understand. Because you have no regrets, you never look back."

He smiled and said nothing.

Everyone felt that he had a perfect life. Bystanders always retain arbitrary self-confidence.

However, as soon as he returned to the dormitory from the lakeside, he received a call from Chen Yongle.

The spread of gossip is extremely fast. The aura of "I like you" shocked a couple of "Mandarin ducks" by the lake. Neither of them noticed at the time. There was a man and a woman sitting on the bench behind the tree. The boys are also from Zhenhua High School, and even Chen Yongle's junior high school classmates. The fact that Chen Yongle was slapped by Zheng Wenrui became his great shame. From then on, sarcasm about Zheng Wenrui was no longer a pastime, but an obsession with dignity.

"Dude, I sympathize with you, there are risks under the aura of popular lovers."

Sheng Huainan smiled coldly, noncommittal.

Chen Yongle whispered over there, and he listened absently on the other side of the phone: "Hmm, no, nowhere, don't you, come on! Don't mention it, how are you doing recently..."

"Seriously, do I need to help you ask her, I asked her to list out why she likes you one by one, and then send it to you, you follow the list and change one by one." He was overjoyed on the phone. Sheng Huainan was lost for a long time.

He knew why girls liked him. Being liked is a proof of charm. However, what if the other person is only in love with your bright skin?

He thought of Luo Zhi again, when he talked about fans’ love for stars during dinner that day, he said disdainfully: “In fact, it’s no different from Liao Zhai, but it’s just the painting of a fairy.”

Luo Zhi shook his head, stretched out his hand to pinch the skin on the back of his hand, gently pulled upwards, and said: "Of course it is different. Our skin can't be peeled off, even if it is a hypocritical mask, it will still be flesh and blood after wearing it for a long time. Connected."

He was watching the girl opposite, and he felt warm water flowing through his heart again.

Connected with flesh and blood. Sheng Huainan raised his hand and looked at his warm and dry palm. The direction of the palm prints was clear and clean, with no extra branches or confusion. Through the gap between his five fingers, he saw Zheng Wenrui, who was standing in front of the iron gate, whose forehead was chased by the cold wind, finally covering her eyes that had never been extinguished for many years.