Hongmei was transferred to our school in the first year of junior high school, and dropped out of school in the second year of junior high school| Zhao Xia

Photo: Xinhua News Agency

Red Rose transferred to our school in the first grade of junior high school.

Their township originally had its own middle school, but because of the decline in the number of students, it was unified and merged into the town. A total of five or six junior high school students were assigned to our original two classes, and Hongmei was the most prominent one.

On the first day of registration, she stood in front of everyone and introduced herself generously, and her voice was gentle. Her eyes were a little thin, and she smiled and bent into two beautiful willow leaves, and the water in her eyes rippled. She doesn't speak the same way. When we first entered the school, the introduction ceremony between the students was to quickly report their names and hobbies according to the program and slip off the podium. Red Rose has the same calmness as an announcer to host the show. She tilted her head slightly, smiled, and spoke word for word, rather than a mess like most of us said. At the end of the introduction, she also added a sentence in a foreign way, "Please pay more attention to everyone." Wow, it's all stunned.

Hongmei and the other girl who came in the class were tall, and the teacher arranged for them to sit in the last row. After class, suddenly the boys all ran to the back of the classroom. Everyone knows what it is for, and they are embarrassed to say anything, and there are one ride after another. Hongmei was not annoyed, laughing and moaning with them, daring to talk about anything. She was generous, and the boys were also frank.

Our school has an informal tradition of friendship, where occasionally there is no regular class, and the teacher has students of different grades crammed into a classroom, and everyone improvises for entertainment. One day, we were in physical education class, and suddenly it rained heavily, and the physical education teacher instructed us to run to the porch to avoid the rain. I happened to have a class in the second grade of junior high school who also took physical education class. The two teachers were in total, and they couldn't go out anyway on rainy days, so they simply put the two classes together and had a small party. Everyone sat still in the classroom, and each shift flowed out of the program. A boy in the second grade sang "A Hill like a Golden Bottle", and at the end of the high note, everyone applauded in unison. When it was our turn in class, the teacher named me to sing first, probably because he knew I was the music class representative. I sang "Snow in the sky, quietly underground, there is a rag doll on the side of the road...". In the second round, Hongmei stood up from the back of the classroom with a smile and said, "I will sing a song of "Love" by the Little Tigers..." The words did not fall, and the boys all whistled. At that time, when we were in junior high school, we dared to mention whether we loved or not, and we even blushed when we thought about it. The whistle was still there, and The Red Rose had been singing earnestly. She sang more and more melodiously, and the smooth and rounded of each transliteration made the classroom quiet. After singing, we all applauded vigorously.

June Day is coming, according to the custom, each class has to produce one or two programs to participate in the township performances, but also to score the competition. Hongmei can sing and dance, and the teacher sent her the preparation of the program. When choosing the tracks, we still discussed children's songs such as "Let's Swing the Double Oar" and "Lu Binghua". Hongmei waved her hand, and it was Ye Qianwen's "Dashing Walk Back". She poured the tape on the tape recorder and taught us how to raise our heads and chests and walk in the rhythm of "heaven and earth". On the day of the show, we all wore white shirts and black pedal pants, and stepped out from both sides of the auditorium stage, and we felt that we couldn't look good.

The finale of the day was the solo dance of the red rose. These days, she spends all her fresh time out of school dancing for us. This solo dance, she had been practicing alone, we had never seen it. After the performance, the music sounded, and she dressed in a dress and danced softly. By then we had finished our performances and sat back in the audience, looking at the figure that was swirling lightly on the stage. The accompaniment music was unfamiliar to me: "I have traveled to many places, brought marmots with me, and in order to live, I wandered around, with marmots around. A little bit of inexplicable tenderness and sadness in the song lingered between her soft waist and arms. Many years later I learned that it was Goethe's poem, Beethoven's song, the faint rhythm and melody, I heard it, but it seemed that I could never forget it.

Red Rose was the only solo dancer in the audience that day, and finally won the second prize of the competition. After the performance, the whole school knew her name. During recess, from time to time, there will be boys from the second and third grades of the junior high school to swing outside our classroom, and some of them will whistle. Gradually, Hongmei became acquainted with these senior classmates.

In those days, we seem to have suddenly begun to grow up. The girls hummed "the feeling of bitter sand blowing on their faces". My table mates live near the school and have a lot of tapes of popular songs at home. She invited us to her house to listen to songs. Occasionally, she would pull out a blank tape and teach us to record our own songs. After recording, we played it back over and over again, listening to our own voice magically coming out of the tape recorder. I sat in the first row with Hongmei, and she sat in the last row, which was far away. Now because they sing and dance together, and listen to songs and record songs together, they are gradually becoming familiar.

One day, she pulled me into a corner and asked me a little nervously, "What to do, I've received a love letter!" ”

Her face was flushed, and her usual composure didn't know where it went. She unfolded the letter and showed it to me. The man was a boy in his second year of junior high school, and the letter was three pages long, confiding in how much he liked her.

I don't know what to do. It was the first time I'd seen a love letter look like this.

Do you want to tell the teacher? I asked her. She shook her head.

A few days later, she told me that the man had written to her again. This time she was obviously not so nervous. She repeated some of the contents of the letter to me, and as she spoke, her face turned red, but she smiled. "He's very good at writing!" She no longer called him "the man."

Soon, the girls in our class all knew that Hongmei had a boyfriend of the second grade. They meet secretly during recess. After school, I write a long letter to each other. On the playground, Hongmei pointed the boy far away to me. She told me that the man had made a "private life" with her. He also said that he was going to secretly bring me one of his mother's silver rings. What the ring means, you know! Her eyes were bright and her face was bright.

Words like "private life" are so shocking to me. I couldn't fully understand what it meant, and I thought it was a word that would never have anything to do with my life. Maybe it's because I don't understand anything that Hongmei will tell me about this?

The relationship ended quickly. We don't know what the cause is, but it seems that the boy has found a new girlfriend. Anyway, one day, Hongmei told us, "That person lied to me." I won't pay any more attention to him. She tore off all their previous letters and threw them away.

Soon, we were in the second year of junior high school, and our studies became tense, and we spent more and more time doing homework in the classroom, and less and less time playing and chatting. In order to make it easier to go to school, Hongmei rented a cottage near the school with three or four girls from the same village. After school, some classmates would go to the cottage to play with her. The boys suddenly began to pay attention to dressing up, and when they came to school in the morning, their hair was combed into the popular three or seven points, and there was no mousse, so they used water to press the hair in front of them neatly. On the way to school, they deliberately took a detour, passed in front of the hut where Red Rose lived, and deliberately made a loud noise.

However, Hongmei sat in the back of the classroom, looking more and more absent-minded. Her grades regressed very quickly. The teacher talked to her. When the conversation was over, she came back with a look of disdain on her face.

One day, she told me, "I don't want to study anymore, I'm going to Shanghai." ”

I was shocked.

"You don't know how big the outside world is. I'm going to break out and show you something. I can sing, I go to Shanghai to sing. You don't know, there are a lot of song halls in Shanghai, and a lot of people go to listen to songs. If I'm lucky, one day I'll become a singer. She said this to a few good female companions. This bold idea was completely beyond our imagination and courage. We tried to persuade her to think again. But she seemed to have made up her mind. Soon, she wrote farewell cards to several people and solemnly handed them to us.

One day, Hongmei did not come back to school. She really dropped out of school.

Without the figure and voice of the red rose, something seemed to be missing in the classroom. The girl who had been at the same table as her was now sitting alone, and it gradually became the corner of the classroom. Day by day, the days slipped away, leaving only nervous exam preparation questions.

One day in the third year of junior high school, we were burying our heads in self-study, and I don't know who walked in and excitedly reported: "Red Rose is back!" "We didn't study for ourselves anymore, we all ran out to see her. Through a small door on the west side of the playground, which was the only commissary in the school, Hongmei sat on a bench in the commissary, looking at us with a smile and a groan. She put on makeup and her face looked whiter because of the fat powder. Her eyes were still bright, her eyelashes curled up, and some thin black mascara fell on her eyelids. The recorder in the commissary plays "The Sound of the Waves Remains" Everyone looked at her, wanted to say something, and clearly felt the gap between the two worlds. In the midst of the noise, I heard her say that today she was just coming back, and she was going back to Shanghai again.

Coming out of the commissary, I remembered that I had forgotten to ask her what she was doing in Shanghai. I seemed to take it for granted that she must have been singing there. The song hall I imagined was a bright stage, with Red Rose standing in the center of the light, singing into a microphone. The light in her eyes swept over the crowd below the stage and drifted into the distance.

I never saw her again.

Author: Zhao Xia

Editor: Xie Juan