In the red brick wall of Yunshui County No. 1 Middle School, Lin Sui threw his faded canvas schoolbag into the desk, and the chalk dust of the new semester and the chirping of cicadas fell at the same time.
This five-story teaching building with falling tiles houses two-thirds of the county's high school students. The boiling water room at the end of the corridor is always covered with yellow-brown scale.
The tofu stall set up by his mother in the vegetable market, his father's three-wheeled motorcycle that was always leaking air, and the monthly exam ranking list pressed under the glass plate formed the coordinate system of Lin Sui's high school life.
She used to go around to the back alley to buy 50-cent scallion pancakes before reading in the morning, and watch the oil slowly smear through the draft paper, dyeing the mathematical formulas into a smokey smell.
The ceiling fan in the key class was spinning hard. Tang Xiaoning, who was at the same table, was always knitting woolen gloves under the desk. Zhou Yuanyuan, who was sitting in front of her, hid romance novels and plum candy.
When the English teacher from the provincial capital walked into the classroom on stiletto heels, the smell of Parisian perfume suddenly rose from the chalk dust, causing the boys in the back row to cough one after another.
The dean's old-fashioned radio plays eye exercises on time every day, and the crooked-neck locust tree in the southwest corner of the playground has witnessed countless secrets.
Lin Sui was up and down in the monthly exam rankings, reciting vocabulary words under the street lamp after evening self-study, and listening to ghost stories told by the upper bunk in the dormitory after the lights were turned off.
She saved three months of breakfast money to buy the hardcover "The Birds", but on the day of the art performance, she found a strange note tucked into the pages of the book.
The spring in the small county town always brings poplar catkins, which fall on the blue and white school uniforms like snow that will not melt.
When the college entrance examination countdown card turned to single digits, Lin Sui finally understood that the real life test questions were never in the exercise books - just like the withered vines of the ivy on the outer wall of the teaching building, they always sprouted green shoots after heavy rains.
Purpose: high school life