Which One is a Dream?

Dora唐睿190160927

Everything is dark, the screen flashes, and the picture begins to appear.

This is the staff dormitory. Located remotely, it is the noisiest building in the hundred-year-old school grounds; the college sends mostly young teachers to live here. The red brick and white steps look beautiful outside, and the vines climb on the wall with their graceful branches and leaves stretching. No one can help but to look at it twice as they pass by, but if they are lucky enough to be a teacher, they will realize that this house has not been repaired for a very long time. The inner walls are mottled, like a tired face with too much makeup. There isn’t even a digital TV. Every room in the dormitory is allocated an antique cable TV.

"Torrential rains have occurred one after another in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River... "

As the teenager walked down the aisle entrance, there was the sound of TV programs coming from the windowpanes of the reception room. The old lady on duty used to stop him and shout:

"Hey, does the child know? This is the staff dormitory, where the teachers live. Don't always come here, you are just a student."

But today, the old lady did not cross-examine him; perhaps she was in a daze because her eyes were dim, and she was not aware of his passage though the dark.

He went straight to the top and knocked on the familiar iron door.

The door creaked open, and the woman said, "Is that you?"

The teenager whispered, "Ms. Yu…"

Although it was very late and the teenager was an uninvited guest, she was his teacher and the person closest to him at the school. After a brief moment of surprise, the woman welcomed him into the house.

She made a cup of tea and then sliced ginger and added it. It was raining outside. She could see that the boy was wet and cold, and hot ginger tea would ward off the cold.

The teacher put the steaming teacup on the tea table in front of him: "When did you come back?"

"I just got back today." The teenager stood awkwardly in front of the sofa.

Ms. Yu: "Have a seat."

Then he sat down, his hands curled up on his knees, and did not touch the teacup.

"Why didn't you tell me in advance when you came back? It's so late; there's still a bus to school? "

…… Mm-hmm. "

"How are things going at home?"

The teenager was quiet for a while, looking down and scratching at the hole in his jeans.

"My mother still wants me to drop out of school. "

Ms. Yu was silent.

He was already a college student, and the student chose to read; the school had no right to interfere. She had talked to the mother of the teenager and promised a tuition reduction for poor families, hoping that the mother would allow her child to complete the hard-work that he had begun with his college entrance examination.

But the mother sharply refused. “Learn Chinese? Who can't speak Chinese? You are trying to fool me!”

She patiently reasoned with the mother, "The child is very talented. You see, he is already a sophomore. Wouldn’t it be a pity to give up halfway? What's more, after two more years of study, it will be easy for him to find a job in society. I asked him, and he wants to be a teacher in the future. With his grades, there will no problem with the establishment of a teacher in the examination. This is the child's dream, and a teacher's job is stable.”

"He can't be a teacher! It's not like you haven’t seen his face! "

The mother's words were like a blunt knife chopping down, chopping an invisible electric current.

Ms. Yu felt angry, but she didn't know how to respond.

"I'm going to make him come home and work now! The family is out of money! Don't waste your time! That face! That face! What can he do? What school would want such a teacher!

What kind of face is that?”

She turned on an incandescent lamp, which looked drowsy with low wattage, but it still lit up the face of the teenager.

Ms. Yu was used to his face, but whoever saw it for the first time would be startled; half of his face was horribly bluish purple, and she didn't know what disease he had. The blue and purple marks covered his forehead to his neck like rotten sheath.

Shocking, naked, abnormal.

"Sick!"

"Don't go near him, it may be contagious."

"Hello Monster! "

With that face, he grew up with abuse and ridicule.

Because he was ill, because he was too ill to hide and too ugly to dodge, the teenager had suffered a lot of disdain since childhood.

No matter how hard he studied and how gently he got along with others, he was still like a mouse wandering under the blue sky, without any equal treatment.

A few people, like Ms. Yu, could find that the normal half of his face was very clever and gentle.

He was always gently and numbly subjected to everyone's ridicule, and sometimes he shyly smiled as if he had really done something wrong.

But what had he done wrong?

In the eyes of Ms. Yu, he was always the most serious in his studies and he always did the most work of the group silently. When others bullied him, he always suffered in a good temper and didn't say much.

"It's all right, teacher. I'm glad you can talk to me. In the past, when I was in the village, people walked around me when they saw me, and no one ever listened to me as attentively as you do. My classmates are very good; at least they didn’t hit me with bricks."

He spoke peacefully, but his head was always bent, with his shoulders bent; he had been burdened with heavy insults for a long time that they had made his spine deformed.

She said to him, "After the evening study, you can come to me for private tutoring if you want. If there's anything you don't understand, if you need my help, feel free to ask."

He smiled sheepishly,

Half normal face flushed with embarrassment.

She had known him for two years and was used to him knocking on her dormitory door with a slightly stooped back, bringing her essays and even poems he had written, and asking her for advice.

These days, few people like to write poems.

But he stubbornly wrote.

Students laughed at him, wrote ugly things like ‘sour to death, sourer than your rotten grape skin”.

He smiled and wrote his own work honestly.

But now, he didn’t even have that power.

Ms. Yu thought about what had happened before, sighing in her heart and looking at the boy in front of her with pity.

The boy said, "I've come to bid farewell to you this time. I'm leaving tomorrow. "

"Going back to your hometown?"

"Yeah, sort of. "

The teenager paused: "Teacher, if my illness was not in my face, but in a place that no one else could see, everyone would be a little more friendly to me. That would have been nice.”

Ms. Yu’s eyes finally could not0 help but to redden because things had come to this point. Everything has been done, but she was not his family, after all, she could not make the final decision and she could not save him. The family of the teenager was cramped day by day, and the mother regretted letting the child go out to study. After all, the family still had an able-bodied second son who was in high school. When the sick one went back, the healthy one could go out and make more money.

His mother felt that there was nothing wrong with her decision. As a mother, she also had to weigh her family's circumstances. She was very fair.

"It doesn't matter," he said, "but I wrote a final poem. Can I give it to you?"

She nodded hurriedly.

He showed it to her from his schoolbag. The paper was very thin, held in his hand as if it had no weight.

"It's a souvenir for you. I'm sorry, madam, but I really can't afford any presents for you."

"There's nothing better than this." She turned her back and choked up. "You, you eat something. I'll find you some refreshments."

After rummaging through the cabinets and controlling her emotions, Ms. Yu took a can of cream cookies and put them on the coffee table.

The teenager thanked her politely. Under the gaze of Ms. Yu, he finally touched the teacup but withdrew his hand and gently said, "It's very hot."

She touched it and said, "How could that be? Warm. " But she still added some cold water for him.

The teenager drank bit by bit with his favorite biscuits.

After eating and drinking, the night was still long.

She stayed up with him until the middle of the night. She was really sleepy and unwittingly went to sleep at her desk.

In obscurity, she heard the teenager suddenly say to her, "Ms. Yu.""

The wind blew into the window and blew the paper on the table

Flying, like a soul-awakening banner.

Then everything was quiet again. The tea on the table was getting cold.

When the teacher woke up the next morning, she found herself sleeping at her desk. The room was clean.

The boy was very polite, but on this day, he had packed up and left without waiting to say goodbye to the teacher. Inevitably, feeling a little blocked, she got up and went into the living room sleepily.

She looked down at the table---

Suddenly her eyes opened wide.

The tea she poured for the teenager yesterday had frozen; however, the room temperature was obviously twenty-seven or twenty-eight degrees! How could that be?

She searched the house, and more and more traces made her heart cool--the cream cookies in the iron box. She had obviously watched the teenager eat them yesterday, but now there didn’t seem to be any missing.

Finally, the paper was gone.

It was as if it had never been there at all.

She almost shuddered; suddenly, the phone vibrated, frightening her so that she jumped up and grabbed it. It was just spam. She breathed a sigh of relief, but then she thought of something as if she had awakened from a dream, so she quickly dialed the teenager's number.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Her heartbeat vibrated with the mechanical sound.

"Hello?"

It's through.

The person who had answered the phone was a familiar middle-aged woman's voice but it sounded rougher than usual.

Her heart fell into an invisible black hole.

She heard---

"It's you! It's you again! I haven't come to find you yet! You called first! "

The woman was yelling. Ms. Yu can't remember what she said before; her mind was almost blank, and she only heard the final mournful cry: "He's dead! Dead! "

Her blood flowed as ice.

Dead?

"It was all because by you! He quarreled with me and ran out. It was raining outside. The police said that there was a cable exposed. "

Ms. Yu was buzzing in her ears.

In the fierce abuse and grief, she could only barely hear two words.

The woman was on the other end of the phone spoke with a mournful voice: "What else are you looking for? What else are you looking for?!

"Yesterday was his first seven![1]"

[1] First seven: a funeral custom in China, it refers to the seventh day after a person’s death.