In the summer of 1998, the fate of three girls was hidden in the thick smoke from the factory chimney.
When Lin Wei was hiding in the corner of the playground while chewing dry steamed buns, he would not have thought that throwing the textbooks into the mud puddle was just the beginning; Su Xiao stood next to the punctured bicycle, looking at the group of girls covering their mouths and laughing, and saw for the first time how blurry their "friends" faces were; while Zhao Man threw the homework book on Li Ting's desk, perhaps forgetting that he had just heard the crisp sound of his mother smashing the vase last night.
In the iron cage of high school, they are the bully and the bullied, the hands tearing each other apart when drowning, the trapped beasts who use injury to transfer pain. They thought that the college entrance examination was the key, but in the autumn of 2000, they discovered that universities are just lakes covered with thin ice - Lin Wei was counting student loan bills in the dormitory of Northern Normal University, and Su Xiao was in the archives of Southern University of Technology, looking at the names of transfer majors in a daze.
Later, they went their separate ways during the 2008 financial crisis. Lin Wei's lesson plan was filled with "want to die", while Su Xiao's text message stopped at "if I hadn't resisted". Shadows dragging suitcases lived in the bridges of Shenzhen. In the offices of county middle schools, there were smashed mobile phones and unspoken replies.
The 2014 corpse search notice was posted on the bulletin board, and Lin Wei recognized the scar on Su Xiao's forehead. Among the relics, half a piece of crushed fruit candy was wrapped in the temperature of 1998, like a life they had never been caught.
The daily life of cutting flesh with a dull knife, without redemption or reversal. From the iron racks in the high school warehouse to the wine bottles in the Shenzhen partitions, they spent their lives proving that, somewhat sadly, the ending was already written from the beginning.
