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墨書 Inktalez
"Shi Shi, take this to buy some candy."
In truth, I had long stopped enjoying candy.
With an eight-year age gap between us, my brother and I didn't spend much time together. Perhaps in his mind, I was still that little girl who secretly hoarded snacks.
Aunt would go around telling people that my brother could make money writing novels on the computer.
No one believed her.
"Can you really make money playing on the computer?"
"Of course! At least he's a vocational school graduate. My son graduated from middle school and can now earn over two thousand a month."
"Your eldest son is probably useless; he’ll likely end up a lifelong bachelor."
That year, during the second semester of my second year in middle school, my birth mother returned to her family home as usual. She secretly slipped me a hundred yuan:
"Here’s your New Year's money; don’t tell your Uncle Aunt."
"Go buy some nice clothes and get something good to eat."
I threw it back at her:
"No, besides, a hundred yuan can't buy that much."
My birth mother looked embarrassed.
Later, I overheard my biological father asking her:
"Why are you giving that loser New Year's money?"
My birth mother replied:
"You don't understand. If she gets into a good university and makes money in the future, won't she help Xiao Guang out?"
Listen to that—does that even make sense?
School started on the sixth day of the Lunar New Year, and the pressure of studying grew increasingly intense.
Looking back now, those one hundred days seemed to pass in the blink of an eye. But at the time, time felt infinitely long.
The endless piles of exam papers made me feel like the college entrance examination would never come.
Yet it did come.
In June, the weather was unusually oppressive. Outside the examination hall, the sound of cicadas filled the air. I recalled the summer when I was four, when my elder sister took me to collect cicada shells. Those shells could be used for medicine and exchanged for money. As we were gathering them, we got separated. The sky darkened, and the forest grew dim. I cried out while trying to find my way home, not knowing how many times I stumbled before finally emerging from the dense woods.
I staggered into the village and saw the lights of home in the distance. The light in the main room was on; my biological mother and two sisters were having dinner, each occupying one side of the table in perfect harmony. It felt as if I… had never existed at all.
It seemed that fate had dozed off, placing me in the wrong position with the wrong family. Fortunately, it corrected itself just in time and returned me to my uncle's house. For their sake, I had to achieve good results in my exams.
During those exam days, I felt like a reservoir filled to the brim, pouring out water relentlessly. By the time the four exams were over, the reservoir was empty. My body felt hollow, and my soul seemed to drift aimlessly in the air, an overwhelming emptiness engulfing me.
I walked out of the examination hall in a daze when I heard a familiar call: “Shi Shi…” I looked up and, among hundreds of parents, immediately spotted my aunt. The sun hung low in the west, casting light on her graying hair.
Sweat beaded on her forehead as she raised her arm and waved at me. My drifting soul suddenly landed back to reality. Ah. It turned out there was an invisible thread connecting us. No matter how far apart we were, there was always something to hold onto.
Aunt rode the motorcycle, taking me back to the village. She chattered on, saying, "Your uncle and I have endured so much gossip and hardship just to support your education." "If you are unfilial in the future, you will face divine retribution, do you understand?"
As the sun set, casting a brilliant glow, I wrapped my arms around Aunt's waist, my face gently resting against her back as I whispered, "I understand." Aunt fell silent. Only the summer breeze carried the scent of laundry detergent from her clothes.
On the day the results were released, Uncle took a day off to return to the village, and Aunt woke up early. From just after five in the morning until noon, she didn’t stop for a moment. Her voice droned on, repeating the same phrases over and over again.
Finally, it was time. My older brother opened the website to check the scores. After entering the identification information, those few seconds of waiting felt eerily quiet in the room.
Chinese: 125, Mathematics: 123, English: 139, Comprehensive Science: 251. Total score: 638. That year, the cutoff for science majors was 567. It was about what I usually scored—considered stable performance.
In that moment, Aunt's eyes turned red.
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