Li Jing

"Mum! I'm home," Li Jing said, leading me to her house as if I were a puppy.

Although Li Jing's mother was only in her forties, her hair was quite white and she had many head lines, looking weathered.

"Little Jing .... Who is this? Is this your classmate?"

"No mum," Li Jing tugged my arm and said, "Mom, I just caught this kid by the moat, this kid is sneaky and not a good person, I suspect he is electrofishing."

"Electrofishing?" Li Jing's mother asked me suspiciously, "Young man, are you an electric fisherman?"

I explained that it was all a misunderstanding and that I was not an electric fisherman at all.

Li Jing's mother looked at me kindly, shook her head and laughed, "I don't think you look like an electric fisherman either, Xiao Jing, you've made a mistake this time, you've even caught people here, apologize to them quickly."

I later figured out the situation and understood why Li Jing wanted to catch the electrofishing.

It was because the Shunde Forestry Bureau had a reward for the serious damage to the water ecology of the Yangtze River at the time, with the Chinese sturgeon and Yangtze albino dolphins on the verge of extinction, and the big determination from above to protect the inland water environment, a wave of action that also reached Shunde.

Anyone who catches an electric fish fryer can go to the Forestry Bureau and receive a reward of 500 yuan for catching one!

That's why the girl Li Jing grabbed me, he treated me as an electro-fisher, and was trying to send me to the Forestry Bureau to exchange for the reward money ...

Because her family was short of money.

Under the compulsion of her mother, Li Jing reluctantly gave me an apology, she said, classmate, I'm sorry.

Li's mother was hospitable and to show her apology, she asked me to stay for a piece of lunch.

It was almost two o'clock, and I was hungry, so I agreed.

I ate rice for lunch, and Li's mother prepared three dishes, one with scrambled eggs and leeks, one with courgette and bean curd, and one with cold lotus root slices, a home-style stir-fry that was delicious.

I ate with my head in a bowl, while Li Jing looked at me coldly. She occasionally knocked the porcelain bowl hard with her chopsticks, deliberately making a lot of noise, which caused Li's mother to frown frequently.

She was disgusted that I had eaten her eggs.

Li's mother scolded her, "Little Jing, why are you so unruly, what did this little student do to you?"

Li Jing bit the tip of her chopsticks and said, "I'm not upset, but I just don't like this kid."

I was angry too.

Although I had no parents and was born into a humble family, and my family was a raggedy family with no one to care for them, I had a strong sense of self-respect.

I put down my dishes and got up to say goodbye to Li's mother.

"You girl, who cares to eat your eggs," I thought angrily in my heart.

As it turned out, I had only just reached the door when I was topped back by a large group of people.

There were six or seven of them, all young and strong men in their twenties and thirties, carrying buckets of paint and some with sticks in their hands.

"Where's Li Dequan? Li Dequan, come out!"

"If you don't come out, I'll beat your wife and children to death!"

They were all fierce and fierce, I had never seen such a scene before, so I was scared silly, Li Jing and her mother were not much better, their faces were pale.

The man walked into the house with a bucket of paint, and when he saw the meal on the table, the man laughed coldly.

"Fuck, there's still fucking money to eat eggs! You have money to eat eggs and not pay me back?"

"I'll let you eat!" The man directly lifted the paint bucket and poured a table of red paint.

The smell of paint was pungent and unpleasant, the dishes on the table were instantly glued with red paint, Li's mother's eyes were fearful, Li Jing lowered her head and did not speak.

"Hey ..." The man laughed : "Eating eggs, right? Don't have any money do you?"

He used a stick to stab the paint-stained scrambled eggs with leeks in front of Li Jing.

"Eat it, the eggs are delicious aren't they, as long as you eat this plate today, then we'll go, haha." A few other people echoed and laughed.

"What are you doing!" I couldn't stand to see it, this was not bullying!

"Yoo-hoo," the man looked at me and laughed, "Brother, may I ask which onion you are?"

I took a deep breath and said, "I'm Li Jing's classmate, if you guys dare to mess around, I'll call the police!"

"Huh? Call the police?"

At once, there was laughter around the room.

"It's only right to pay back what you owe! How dare you call the police, you little brat!"

He slammed the stick in his hand at my head.

I subconsciously raised my arm to block it, but I was too slow to do so, and I took a solid blow to the head.

My head was sticky, and when I reached out to feel it, I was bleeding from the stick.

All I could feel was a whirlwind in front of me.

"Don't hit it!"

"I'll eat! I'll eat!" Li Jing, who had been keeping her head down, suddenly raised her head and she cried out with red eyes.

Li's mother kept wiping tears from her eyes.

Li Jing grabbed the eggs on the plate with her hands, opened her mouth and shoved them into her mouth ....

There was paint all over those eggs and the taste was so irritatingly pungent that Li Jing took one bite and dry-heaved.

"Haha, you can't do that, eat them all! I said eat it all! Are you deaf?"

Li Jing grabbed the eggs again and shoved them into her mouth.

Five minutes later, the plate of eggs was gone.

"Oh, interesting, today was not a waste of time, the brothers watched a good show, besides you remember to tell Li Dequan, when we are coming over, if we still don't have the money, it won't be so simple."

The gang left a message, cursed and left.

I had my head broken and was bleeding quite a lot, and was lying on the ground very hard.

"How are you doing!" Li Jing wiped the paint off the side of her mouth and carefully helped me up.

Li's mother found gauze and simply wrapped my head, and I lay on their bed resting for over an hour before I got over it.

"Little student, I'm ..... I'm sorry for making you hurt," Li's mother said to me with a guilty look on her face.

"Auntie, what did those people do?" With my head still hurting a bit, I endured asking her.

"My dad failed in business and owes them a large sum of money," Li Jing said.

"Failed in business? How much money do you owe?"

"Hey ..." Li's mother couldn't help but shake her head, "Fifty thousand yuan ..."

"Fifty thousand yuan! That much!" I was shocked to hear this amount, so much money, even if I don't eat or drink, I won't be able to pay it back in two or three years.

"Little student do you live in school or go to the hospital, let's send you back, I'm really sorry for you," Li's mother apologized to me again.

"No no, I don't need to go to school, I'll just walk on my own, I can walk on my own now."

When I got out the door, Li Jing came out to see me off.

"Hey, I'm sorry about earlier," she apologised to me with her head down as she walked alongside me.

"It's okay, it's all in the past," I said with a generous wave of my hand and a smile.

"You're not from our school, are you? How many middle schools do you go to? I'll come and play with you later," Li Jing suddenly asked me.

"Huh? This, this ....."

I lied, "I'm in my second year of high school in the first middle school."

"First middle school, then you should be studying very well," Li Jing said with a smile.

I blushed and didn't dare to answer, my academic performance remained in the bottom three all year round, which was quite stable.

At that time, Xiaolingtong had just become popular and ordinary students could not afford to buy a mobile phone, so naturally they did not leave a phone number, but Li Jing said that I should come and play with him when I was free and asked me to tutor her in her homework.

When I got back to the hostel, Wang Zhuotou was drinking tea.

When he saw that I had a head of gauze wrapped around me, he almost spat out his tea.

He asked me loudly, "Yunfeng, what's wrong with you? Did you fall into a pit when you were scattering the soil?"

I said, somewhat embarrassed, "Head Handler, I let someone beat me up."