B19714-曦曦何熙
It was four fifty in the morning. Lao Dao crossed the overcrowded the sidewalk to find Peng Li.
After work from the dumpsite, Lao Dao returned home. He took a shower and changed his clothes. He put on a white shirt and a pair of brown pants – the only decent clothes he had. Since the cuffs were worn, he rolled them up to his elbows. Lao Dao was unmarried, and he was 48, had long past the age to care about his appearance. With no one to looking after him, he had kept this suit for many years. He worn them for only one day each time, and then took them off when he got home. As a sanitation worker, it was unnecessary for him to wear decent clothes. He put on this suit on occasion of weddings. But this time was an exception: he would not to meet the stranger with dirty clothes. Having worked for five hours, he was afraid that his body would smell.
The sidewalk was filled with people just after work. Men and women flocked at small stalls to buy the local specialties, bargaining loudly with the peddlers. There were also customers sitting around the plastic tables, their head buried in the steam of the hot and sour rice noodles. They wolfed the noodles, and the white steam veiled their faces. The street was filled with the flavor of fried food, and there were piles of wild jujubes and walnuts on the stalls and preserved meat swinging over the head. This was the busiest time of the day since most people had finished their work. Having been busy for several hours, they came here to have a good meal. The street was overflowing at the moment.
Lao Dao moved through the crowd with difficulty. A waiter, holding the dishes identified a path by yelling and pushing people blocking his way. Lao Dao followed him. Peng Li’s house was deep in the street. Lao Dao went upstairs, only to find that Peng Li was not in. Then he asked his neighbor about him and was told that Peng got home near the closing time and that he didn’t know the exact time.
A little worried, Lao Dao took a glance at his watch. It was five o’clock. He came back to the gate of the building to wait for Peng Li. There were wolfing teenagers surrounding him on both sides. He recognized two of them whom he had seen one or two times at Peng’s home. There was one plate of fried noodles or rice noodles before each of each, and they shared two dishes. The plates were a mess, with chopsticks stirring for minced meat in the pepper despairingly but persistently. Lao Dao smelled his forearms subconsciously, wondering whether the foul scents of the garbage still attached to him or not. Everything around him was noisy and mediocre as every morning before.
“Ah, do you know how much does a twice-cooked pork cost there?” the teenager named Xiao Li asked.
“Damn it! There is sand in the dish.” Another teenager named Xiao Ding yelled, covering his mother. There was black mud in his nails. “It’s cheating. We have to have our money back!”
A dish of twice-cooked pork costs three to four hundred yuan.” Xiao Li said, “It’s three to four hundred! And a dish of boiled beef costs four hundred and twenty yuan. ”
“What is it? It’s so expensive. ” Xiao Ding mumbled, clutching his cheeks.
With no interest in this dialogue, the other two teenagers were absorbed in eating their noodles. Xiao Li lowered his head, looking at them, but it seemed that he looked though them to some invisible place with eager.
