dragon raja

Destiny

Some roads seem ridiculously long when you walk with certain people, but when you walk with others, they are so short that you are reluctant to take a step.

The cobblestone road along the river that Lu Mingfei walked on after school was like this. This road was specially designated as a scenic pedestrian street by the municipal engineering project, and a lot of money was spent. On one side was the green and blue river, and on the other side were cafes, cinemas, flower shops and various specialty stores. Although the scenery was beautiful, it had nothing to do with Lu Mingfei, because he always walked alone.

But today is different, he is walking on this road side by side with Chen Wenwen.

"Lu Mingfei, which school do you want to apply to?" Chen Wenwen asked her.

The two of them had just booked a small hall at the cinema, where they had booked "Wall-E". Then he accompanied Chen Wenwen to buy a paper bag of bluebells. Chen Wenwen said her mother liked them. Lu Mingfei secretly looked at the price of roses. They were not for festivals, so they didn't seem expensive. He could still get the money to buy ninety-nine of them. Now Chen Wenwen was walking home with him, holding a paper bag of bluebells. This was the first time Lu Mingfei knew that Chen Wenwen's home was actually not far from his.

Lu Mingfei turned his head and glanced at Chen Wenwen. Chen Wenwen was wearing a white cotton dress. The setting sun shone on her skin, which seemed transparent.

"I can apply to any school as long as I can get in," Lu Mingfei said. He didn't tell anyone that he had received an admission letter from an American university.

"Well, will you go to school here at home?"

Lu Mingfei's heart moved, thinking that Chen Wenwen was secretly asking him where he would go for the exam.

"It doesn't matter where, a university with many classmates is best." Lu Mingfei said.

"Well, I want to go to Beijing. Zhao Menghua and Su Xiaoqiang are both applying to universities in Beijing." Chen Wenwen said in a low voice.

"Beijing is great." Lu Mingfei said.

“Do you like Beijing too?”

"Beijing has a big pot of lamb ribs!" Lu Mingfei said this, and he wanted to slap himself. What a good opportunity, as long as he was thicker-skinned, he could say something more affectionate like "Beijing is good because you are here." He thought he was too weak and didn't do what Nuonuo told him to do.

Chen Wenwen smiled silently and hummed softly.

The footsteps of the two people were particularly clear in the silence. Lu Mingfei counted his steps and did not dare to look at Chen Wenwen.

It was no use keeping silent like this. He looked up and was stunned for a moment. The person opposite him was also stunned for a moment, adjusted his huge sunglasses on his face, and pulled the brim of his baseball cap.

Chen Motong, or Nuonuo, was also strolling on this street, wearing a pair of purple dark-patterned running shoes, a pair of skinny jeans and a white vest, with a blue-striped short-sleeved shirt on the outside. She was stunned for a moment, then a malicious smile immediately appeared on her lips, and she waved at Lu Mingfei, "Hi! Hi!"

Lu Mingfei knew where her joyful feeling of meeting an old friend came from, and it was purely for Chen Wenwen to see. He had experienced the evil of this little witch.

"Your friend?" Chen Wenwen was a little embarrassed. She was also overwhelmed by the sharp aura of Nuonuo. Nuonuo didn't look like someone who grew up in this small southern city at all.

Lu Mingfei responded hesitantly, and Nuo Nuo had already jumped in front of them.

"Hi, hi! What a coincidence?" Nuonuo said, turning to Chen Wenwen, "Is this Chen Wenwen?"

"How do you know my name?" Chen Wenwen was a little surprised. She has always been shy in front of strangers.

"Listen to what he said, he said..." Nuonuo suddenly stopped and said, "By the way, you owe me ice cream, right?"

Blackmail, this is blatant blackmail!

But as long as Nuonuo doesn't talk nonsense at the moment and lets Lu Mingfei call her sister, it's fine. Lu Mingfei quickly took out his wallet and said, "I'll buy it for you. What flavor do you want?"

"It's topped with strawberry jam." Nuonuo took off her baseball cap and combed her long dark red hair with her hands.

Lu Mingfei could only spend money to buy three ice creams. He didn't have much money left in his pocket. He was generous in buying ice creams for Chen Wenwen, and he didn't regret buying one for Nuonuo. As long as this little witch shut up, he was a little reluctant to buy one for himself. The three of them strolled along the riverside while biting ice creams. The flowers of the locust tree fell on Chen Wenwen's white cloth circle and Nuonuo's baseball cap. Nuonuo kept complaining, and Chen Wenwen spoke to her in a soft voice. When the two girls were around, Lu Mingfei was like a huge light bulb, and he had nothing to do at all. Lu Mingfei couldn't help but send an annoyed look to Nuonuo, but Nuonuo acted as if he didn't see it.

"Did Lu Mingfei say a lot of bad things about me?" Chen Wenwen asked.

"No," Nono answered nonchalantly, "He said he likes literature very much, so he joined the literature club."

"Oh, I like reading, too." Chen Wenwen said, "Are you classmates in junior high school?"

"No, we were elementary school classmates, but I studied in the United States and just came back recently." Nuo Nuo turned to Lu Mingfei, "Do you remember the ivy on the wall of our teaching building? I went back to see it that day, and it had climbed to the top of the building!"

Lu Mingfei nodded vigorously, thinking that the ice cream was worth it. Nuonuo was a trustworthy businessman, and he spoke vividly. But he suddenly had an illusion that what Nuonuo said was true. He clearly didn't remember having a classmate named Nuonuo in elementary school, but he remembered the creeper. He was a little slow and his memory was always bad. He basically forgot all his elementary school classmates. He only remembered the light shining through the green leaves of the creeper on the wall. For a moment, he almost couldn't tell whether Nuonuo was telling the truth or his own memory was true.

"Is your family immigrating?" Chen Wenwen asked. Many people in their school were talking about their family immigrating.

"No, I hold a Chinese passport. I just go to school. I'm a freshman at Kassel College."

"Did you skip a grade? Lu Mingfei is only in his third year of high school."

"Oh, we are not classmates. I am his senior." Nuo Nuo lied quickly, "Lu Mingfei, right?"

"Oh, senior sister." Lu Mingfei knew why Nuo Nuo asked this.

Nuonuo's smile was as bright as a flower.

They finally parted at the fork in the road. Lu Mingfei and Chen Wenwen continued to walk forward, while Nuonuo went to the other side. Lu Mingfei looked at Nuonuo's back as she skipped away, and once again felt that she would disappear, along with another possibility in his life.

Uncle and aunt have been much nicer to Lu Mingfei these past two days. Auntie has been talking about asking Lu Mingfei to talk to his parents, whom he seems to never meet, and to get Lu Mingze to study in the United States. Lu Mingze was very resistant to this. At the dinner table, he said something like even if he wants to go abroad, he must rely on grades instead of connections. Lu Mingfei knows that his brother is a little bit upset about his bad luck. Moreover, Lu Mingze has been very unhappy these days because "The Mark of Sunset" is always offline, which makes him anxious, so he has been occupying the old notebook more and more, not giving Lu Mingfei a chance.

While Auntie was telling Lu Mingze not to surf the Internet all the time and that he should study more to have a bright future, she was still sending Lu Mingfei to buy milk for breakfast tomorrow. When Lu Mingfei walked out the door, he heard Lu Mingze suddenly getting anxious and arguing with Auntie.

He felt a mess in his heart, so he didn't go downstairs, but went up the stairs. There was no elevator in this building, and the highest floor was only seven floors. The rooftop was filled with humming air conditioners and crisscrossing pipes. The property management had set up an iron door in the corridor with the words "Rooftop Closed" written on it. In fact, no one would go up there if it wasn't closed. The stairs leading to the top floor felt a bit like a horror movie, filled with cardboard boxes, two broken motors, and some broken sofas and wooden coffee tables thrown away by the residents on the seventh floor. Everything was covered in dust, and the gaps were so small that you couldn't even step on them.

Lu Mingfei jumped in those small gaps like a light kangaroo. He remembered every foothold clearly, such as the two bricks covered in the cardboard box, the hard base of the broken motor and the only unbroken leg of the wooden coffee table. These footholds were like a series of islands, helping him to cross this ocean of garbage. Opposite him was the iron gate, and outside the iron gate were shadows and stars.

Lu Mingfei crawled out from the largest gap in the iron gate, stood in the starry sky, took a deep breath, and looked at the city under the night sky.

Now that he was free, every time he arrived here he felt like lying on the ground and enjoying the wind, the light of the sky and the different smells of the city from spring to autumn, sometimes it was locust flowers, sometimes it was leaves, and sometimes it was the sweet scent of pineapples sold on the street below.

He sat on the edge of the concrete platform and carefully stretched out his legs to hang outside, so that the ground was dozens of meters away from his feet. He felt both dangerous and light, like a bird flying high in the wind.

This was his secret territory. He would spend some time here every afternoon in the past few years, and then tell his aunt that he was doing his homework at the long table outside the post office.

Under the night sky, the lights of the entire city were lit up. The neon lights in the commercial district were pieced together, unreal and unreal. The solid skyline was hidden in the lights. From a distance, those business buildings looked like square cages woven with light. In the distance was a wide lake. Adjacent to the lake, the city’s busiest elevated road was surging with traffic. The elevated road passed by Lu Mingfei’s community. Looking from this position, Lu Mingfei felt that the car lights formed a stream of light. Every point of light in this stream was a living firefly. They were bound by this curved, slender elevated road and could only run forward hard to find an exit.

But there will never be an exit.

This city was like this for Lu Mingfei before, with no way out. But now there are suddenly two options: one is to go to the United States, and the other is Chen Wenwen.

After he broke up with Nuonuo in the afternoon, Chen Wenwen suddenly said she wanted to go to the river, so Lu Mingfei accompanied her to the river, where they saw dandelions blooming on the green grass, one after another, furry little balls. Chen Wenwen happily picked a lot of them, put them in a paper bag together with the bellflowers she bought, and then sat by the river with Lu Mingfei to talk, took off her shoes and soaked her feet in the clear water. Chen Wenwen said that everyone would separate when they went to college, and they might only see each other during the summer vacation, or they might not see each other for a long time. Many good friends slowly forget each other in this way.

When Chen Wenwen said this, her eyes were filled with sadness, even more so than when she read Duras's "The Lover" when she entered school.

Lu Mingfei sat beside her and looked into her eyes, watching the wind blow the dandelions in the paper bag in her arms into pieces, scattering them on the water like a light snow.

Lu Mingfei couldn't be sure whether this was a hint, but he felt like a little bird was jumping in his heart.

At this time, the cell phone in his arms vibrated. Lu Mingfei was a little surprised, because obviously only Professor Guderian knew this number and he had not told anyone else.

"Lu Mingfei?" It was Nuonuo's voice that came from the phone.

"It's me. If not me, who else could it be?" Lu Mingfei scratched his head.

"I just called to tell you that there is another person on the admission list besides you, but we will only admit one student from China. Professor Guderian said he will fly to Beijing tomorrow, so he asked me to call you so that you can make a decision tonight." Nono's tone was light and no emotion could be heard.

Lu Mingfei suddenly became anxious, "Can we wait until tomorrow? Tomorrow..."

He wanted to say that they would have a literary club activity tomorrow, and he would do something earth-shattering. Then he would know whether Chen Wenwen was willing to accept his confession. If she accepted, he would want to stay in China, because he would not be able to see his parents in the United States anyway. If she did not accept, he could follow Professor Guderian to the United States with the memory of failure, leaving a legend in his high school, a legend of a guy with average grades who got lucky and received an admission letter from an American university...

"No, Professor Guderian has booked a flight for tomorrow morning." Nono said firmly.

Lu Mingfei was silent for a long time, then scratched his head, "Then I understand."

"What do you mean you know?"

“That’s it.” Lu Mingfei said, “I have no interest in studying abroad anyway…”

"You are so cruel. Chen Wenwen is just that good-looking." Nuonuo said, "The door of Kassel College will only be opened once for each person."

“Just because you’re prettier than Chen Wenwen doesn’t mean I’ll like you…” Lu Mingfei said listlessly.

"Good man! I didn't expect you to be so ruthless!" Nuonuo seemed angry, "Okay! Goodbye!"

"What did he say?" In the presidential suite of the Regent Hotel, Professor Guderian stared at Nono nervously.

"He said forget it." Nono shrugged, "Professor, you can fly to Beijing as planned tomorrow."

"But..." Professor Guderian was really anxious.

"But I'm not Chen Wenwen. If I were Chen Wenwen, I would have dealt with him." Nuonuo frowned his beautiful eyebrows, "You can't deal with him even if you stay, professor."

"Who is Chen Wenwen?" Professor Guderian was confused.

"Professor, you look so anxious. If I tell you that she is a girl who can defeat the entire Kassel Academy, will you call the commando team of the Operations Department to wipe her out from the world?" Nono stuck out her tongue.

"I'm afraid I can't do it, but the principal can!" Professor Guderian widened his eyes.

After the call ended, Lu Mingfei stared at the gradually extinguishing screen of his phone for a long time, then he lowered his head listlessly. He looked out at the city under the night sky, thinking about the farewell party tomorrow when Chen Wenwen asked him to give a speech. Facing dozens of classmates from the literature club, he was going to do the most daring thing...

This listless guy remained like this throughout his extraordinary life. Usually he was as listless as a dried cucumber, but once he decided to do something, he would be as energetic as a celery soaked in water.

"I am a person who occasionally goes crazy." This was David Ricardo's later catchphrase.

There is only one destiny, but there are many choices in life.