Fake Slackers

Chapter 58: You like to study, don't you

Whether it counted as meeting the parents or not, He Zhao had acted like it was. He did everything he could to gain Aunt Mei's favour, as if he, and not Xie Yu, were her godson.

"It counts." Xie Yu took two steps forward. "So remember to eat all the walnuts the family gave you."

He Zhao looked down at the bags in his hands, and it kind of dimmed the joy of his prior son-in-law visit.

Just now, at the dining table, they had not said much to each other, worried they'd let something out of the bag. Besides, they had been focusing on their little movements under the table. So, Xie Yu only complained now. "You looked the part of a leader this afternoon, Zhao-ge."

He Zhao said, "It was all right. When I walk down the street, I feel like the whole street belongs to me."

"You're taking my sarcasm for sincerity?"

The buses here ran every half an hour, and the previous bus had probably just left. The bus stop sign hung crooked and there were no seats in the waiting area. It looked very run-down.

He Zhao hadn't noticed when he had arrived. Now he looked for a place to sit and only saw four bare stumps. He could imagine what the seat that had previously been there looked like based on the stumps. "This place really has character..."

When Xie Yu had returned for summer vacation, the seat had already been like this. Zhou Dalei had even squatted on the side of the street, waiting for him.

"It was stolen a while ago. Then the police found it." Xie Yu briefly summarized the theft which had made waves in the community, then paused and said, "It was probably stolen again."

The chair of the neighborhood committee was always the busiest person on the street, running herself ragged to take care of the smallest of matters in the neighborhood. Every three or five days one would see the members of the neighborhood committee wearing red armbands, yelling through megaphones, "Where's the well cover?! —Which one of you stole the well cover?!"

"Who broke the bus station sign? And the bus station seat? What are you going to do with it after sawing it off?"

He Zhao was very entertained. "That really happened?"

But wait, there was more.

They had later discovered that the well cover had been stolen by a ruffian from the next street over. Of course, the residents of the next street weren't so altruistic as to admit it, so the people from the two neighborhoods had started quarrelling. It had gone on for so long they made the local news.

He Zhao asked, "Then you fought?"

Xie Yu said, "We didn't fight. Do we look like such hooligans?"

"Don't... you?"

"......"

It hadn't escalated into a fight, but in the middle of the night, some aunties from the Black Water Street Neighborhood Committee had gone to the next street over and stolen their well cover back.

The neighboring street had never imagined such a thing would happen, and everyone was slack-jawed the next morning.

Xie Yu finished his story, then noticed He Zhao was standing in a daze. He stopped and waved a hand in front of his face. "Hey."

Xie Yu waved twice, then got impatient and tried to slap him and be done with it. But He Zhao caught hold of his hand, his fingers weaving through Xie Yu's, then he said quietly, "...Before today, I'd only seen this place in your photos."

What He Zhao did not say was that now that he had come to visit for himself, those photos began to come alive... the animals that scurried from the grass, dirty from scuffling in the mud, the mud drying in patches on their fur as they lay, eyes closed, under the sun.