"Mom, I want to eat candied haw too..."
At the entrance of an alley sowhere in Beidou, there was a little girl around five or six years old, looking as delicate as a porcelain doll. With her black braid, she stared at the vendor hawking nearby and couldn’t help but tug on the woman’s hand beside her.
The woman was quite beautiful, but her face looked weary. Hearing the girl’s plea, she instinctively wanted to take a step forward, but her expression turned cold as if sothing crossed her mind.
She crouched down to et the girl’s gaze and then seriously said:
"Peining, do you think mom is having a hard ti?"
"Mom is always hiding to cry, so hard..."
"So if you don’t want to endure the hardships like mom does in the future, you can’t eat these sweet things now, do you understand?"
Hearing the girl’s response, the woman almost teared up, but she quickly took a deep breath, forced a smile, and said, "You need to have a healthy body so you won’t fall behind at the starting line, especially in our kind of family..."
As she spoke, the woman’s gaze instinctively shifted to the deeper part of the alley, where two red doors were tightly closed with guards standing at the entrance.
When the little girl seed to half understand, the woman murmured, "Peining, I need to take you ho now, where you’ll find your grandpa, grandma, uncles, and aunts... all your relatives are there, but they won’t welco us, yet mom has nowhere else to go."
This ti, the woman seed unable to hold it in, and tears fell down.
The little girl quickly stepped forward to hug her, "Mom, don’t cry. I’ll listen to you, I won’t eat it. Please don’t cry, okay?"
"Oh, mom won’t cry!"
Crying and laughing, the woman looked at the sensible and obedient girl, stroked her head, and said, "Peining, dad has gone far away and won’t be back. Mom can only bring you back to raise you, so you can have a very good future. Mom can’t be selfish anymore..."
"But once we step through that door, many things will no longer be our choices. Maybe you’ll find life tough for a while in the future, and if one day you feel exhausted with this life, don’t ever bla mom..."
"Later, when we go inside, rember to greet people as I taught you, and you can’t accept anything they give you unless mom says it’s okay..."
"And rember, you can no longer be called Zhou Peining, your surna is Qu, and you are Qu Peining."
After speaking, the woman wiped away her tears, stood up with determination, and led the little girl deeper into the alley.
The little girl followed the woman, but couldn’t help turning back to glance at so children eating candied haw with delight, showing a hint of envy.
...
"Peining, are you free tonight?"
"Tonight?"
In the school classroom, with no makeup, wearing a single ponytail, exuding a clean, sharp aura, and having rare phoenix eyes, the girl lifted her head in confusion, "Isn’t there self-study tonight?"
"Oh co on, Peining, who attends such boring self-study anyway?"
The girl sitting next to her, dressed colorfully, giggled and said, "Tonight is Young Master Kong’s birthday, and he said he’s inviting all of us to OT for fun. Shall we go together?"
"OT?"
The girl displayed a look of puzzlent again.
"Peining, are you out of touch? Don’t even know OT? It’s ONE THIRD at the Workers’ Stadium, the absolute top flow among nightclubs at the mont..."
Another girl leaned in from behind, speaking with excitent.
"I’m not interested."
Upon hearing it’s a so-called nightclub, Qu Peining’s brows instantly furrowed as she refused coldly.
"Co on, Peining, who never skips class ever?"
"Exactly, or we can go shopping first. Recently Chanel opened a new store near Wangfujing, and I heard there are lots of new spring and sumr dresses. Let’s go check it out."
However, no matter how the two girls persuaded, Qu Peining remained unmoved, soon burying her head back into the books, ignoring them completely.
Helplessly, the two girls could only get up and leave, muttering sothing and showing a bit of resentnt on their faces as they left.
After they left the classroom chattering, Qu Peining lifted her head again. The lingering fragrance in the air made her a bit uncomfortable, but as she inadvertently glanced down at the sporty leggings hugging her toned legs, a hint of confusion appeared on her face.
"Are dresses... really nice to wear?"
...
"Qu Peining!"
"Present!"
"Why did you act on your own without waiting for your teammate to reach the designated position?"
In the pouring rain in the wilderness, a stern-faced female instructor loudly questioned.
"Report, she didn’t appear at the designated ti in the assigned location. If I kept waiting, it would only result in mission failure..."
"Excuses!"
The female instructor scolded, interrupting her, "You never value teamwork, only thinking of individual heroism, with no sense of collective honor. Now, run ten laps around the foot of the mountain; you can’t eat dinner until you finish. Any objections?"
"No!"
With hands behind her back, wearing a tactical vest and combat pants, the energetic girl responded loudly, then turned to run along the foot of the mountain.
The female instructor couldn’t help but frown, hesitated to speak, but eventually shook her head, allowing her to go.
...
Qu Peining knew she was dreaming, yet she found herself unable to wake up, only struggling in one nightmare after another.
Those familiar scenes seed to form an interconnected loop, and she kept spinning within, eventually returning to those five years of her youth, the most monotonous yet morable.
Reviews
All reviews (0)