Nowhere to be found, only the heart of a young man

I thought about it and planned to go downstairs at noon today.

This year it was hot early, and before July or August, the two small electric fans at home had already started running day and night.

According to the weather forecast, a new round of high temperature is coming to my city.Simply, it was too hot to sleep at noon, so I did

Just take advantage of today's lunch break and go to the barber shop downstairs to cut your hair short.

The self I saw in the dressing mirror in the morning still reappears in my eyes from time to time.

The long black hair was loosely scattered on the shoulders.Inadvertently, it has been able to cover the entire back densely.On the freshly washed face, because of the heat, fine beads of sweat have begun to ooze from the forehead and temples.

People say that women cut their hair to break their relationship, but I am just a twelve or thirteen-year-old girl.Everyday life is almost completely surrounded by books and family, so it is really relentless.

Admittedly, the haircut was for the upcoming final exams.I have always had excellent academic performance, and this time I am determined to be No.1 in the class.

In the hot summer, long hair will only become a drag on exam preparation.

However, it is not only the girl's long hair that is a drag, the vegetable market downstairs is also one of them.

Since I was five years old, I moved here with my parents and my three-year-old sister.The four of us lived in a small house with an area of ​​[-] square meters in the staff dormitory.

Since the room facing the street has good lighting, my parents left it for me and my sister to live in.

Therefore, as long as we open the window, we can see the landmark market in our area - Wuyi Road Vegetable Market.

Disorganized decorations, streams of people entering and shouting non-stop from morning to night are the characteristics of every market.They accompany my life all the year round.Let me go from being troubled when I first came, to turning a blind eye later, and finally learning to enjoy its market energy.

Sometimes, it can even arouse my curiosity, for example: at the stalls, the old vendors moved away, in exchange for new traders with different living habits.

There was a new shop at the corner of the vegetable market. The original dark soy sauce shop was moved away and replaced by a barber shop with whitewashed walls.The business has changed from the deserted before, and it seems to be very good.

The shopkeeper was beyond my expectation, a fashionable woman in her thirties.The local dialect has a Cantonese accent.When I lie on the window and look down, I can always see her coming in and out, busy greeting a steady stream of guests.There is also a tape recorder in the store, which keeps repeating Su Rui's songs from morning to night: The same moonlight, please come with me, wine dry jar sells nothing, dear child, follow the feeling...

This small facade of only six or seven square meters, although I have run in and out countless times with soy sauce bottles in the past, the new decoration still makes me feel refreshed.

White, dazzling white!Half the volume of the room is covered with large white tiles.

For the barber shop, this has two advantages: one is to make the guests feel comfortable and clean, and the other is to facilitate the barber to clean up and clean the broken hair left by the customers at any time.

Two cast iron barber chairs that can be raised and lowered are placed firmly in front of two mirrors.The mirror was firmly attached to the wall, and one side of it was nailed to a row of hooks filled with heating hats, hair dryers and hairdressers' white coats.

There is a narrow table under each mirror, on which are piled the barber's daily tools: clippers, scissors, pomade, watering can, various hair clips, and yellow rubber bands scattered on the table.

The proprietress was busy and undisturbed, and two or three customers were sitting on the bench by the door and waiting.

"Little girl, do you want to cut your hair?"

Seeing me standing in front of the store in a daze, the female boss took the initiative to speak.She smiled at me while talking, and the work in her hands still didn't stop.

"Yes, Auntie."

I dealt with it quietly.

"Find a place to sit and wait, there are two more people ahead, it will be your turn in a while!"

In the air in the store, there is a pomade aroma that I have never smelled before.The fragrance carried a strong and flamboyant aura, which made me hesitate and dare not approach it easily.

In the age I live in, as a student, fashion and publicity are definitely things that teachers teach us to keep a distance.

I'm starting to regret coming here alone.

But soon I calmed down.

I think, even if I can't avoid it, I should learn to keep my own vigilance as the teacher said when facing it.So, I found a space at the end of the stool, sat down quietly, and waited.

At the barber shop at noon, the proprietress paused the loop playback on the tape recorder, perhaps because of the heat.She even locked the direction of the oscillating fan, stopped swinging, and only whined towards the guests waiting in line on the bench.

The only sounds left in the room are the clicking of scissors, the hum of pushing hands and the whirring of a hair dryer.In the monotonous and repeated voice, I sat on the stool and could only look around in boredom, thinking about the time for class in the afternoon.

On the sycamore tree outside the store, Cicadas were screaming endlessly.In such weather, two-thirds of the stalls in the afternoon vegetable market have already been closed.For the remaining third, shopkeepers could only sit idly on wooden square stools, or spread out on stained nylon recliners, with wet towels on their heads, and big cattail fans in their hands, watching the few people in the market. Not many guests.

Across the street, a woman in her early forties led a tall boy towards the barber shop.

The woman kept whispering something in the boy's ear, both as coaxing and threatening.The boy lowered his head and said nothing, his eyes just staring at his alternately moving feet.

The bangs on the boy's forehead were so long that they almost covered his eyes, so that I couldn't see the expression on his face clearly.But from far away, I can still notice his tightly pursed lips.

"Master Liu, look, I've been talking about it, but I finally brought him here today. Look at this kid's hair, it's almost as long as a little girl's picture!"

While pulling the boy by the hand, the woman yelled at the hostess, who was circling around the guests on the millstone chair with the clippers in her hand.

"Hey, this is your son? The young man is so handsome!"

The female shopkeeper hid the cunning of a businessman in her heart, and responded to the two girls with a smile on her lips.

"Sit down first, there are only three people in front, and I'll cut it for our son after a while."

However, the two of them had no place to sit. The bench was full of waiting guests, and the last seat was already taken by me.I looked at the mother and son, then at the busy proprietress, and moved in obediently and symbolically.

The mother and son seemed to have seen my unnatural movement.The boy who had been silent all this time raised his head slightly and peeked at me through the messy hair on his forehead.

"Oh, little girl, it's okay! Let's just stand and wait, and stand to cool off."

Time moves forward step by step, and the female boss is constantly busy.Her hands turned into butterflies, and after a while, the guests changed their appearances under her hands, from being uninterested at first to looking bright later.The moment they took off the cloths, they stood up from the barber chair, shaking the remaining hair dregs on their heads with their hands, and patted the broken hair on their shoulders alternately.I glanced at my new image in the mirror, handed over the money, and left satisfied.

The boy and his mother had already sat on a stool behind me.The woman raised her wrist to look at her watch from time to time, and looked at me strangely from time to time.The boy sits firmly and deeply, with his feet spread wide, his back arched, his elbows resting on his knees, his hands resting on his head, and his eyes are fixed on his own feet that are placed in a figure-splayed figure.

It was my turn to sit on the grindstone chair.

Suddenly, someone behind me spoke to me.

"Girl, listen to me, can you let this kid pay first? You see, Auntie is about to go to work. He is covered in sweat. After shaving, I have to boil water to wash him."

I froze for a moment, not knowing what to say.

"Mom, don't cut the line, I won't cut it if I cut the line!"

Unexpectedly, the boy spoke out of the blue, yelling at his mother in a low voice.

"Son, mom doesn't want to jump in the queue. But I go to work earlier than your school. Mom is going to be late soon, and the unit will deduct wages for being late and leaving early!"

The female boss didn't speak, she just held the barber tool in her hand and looked at me blankly.The room became quiet, as if everyone was waiting for my answer.

I was helpless and a little annoyed, regretting not insisting that my mother accompany me here.

Thinking about the school classes in the afternoon, thinking about the 10 minutes of waiting before, I regretted that I chose to come to this shop for a haircut on this scorching afternoon.

The boy was sitting with his back to me, his face turned to one side, facing the outside of the store.

"Auntie, let him cut it first, I'm not in a hurry."

In the end, I made a decision that surprised me a bit.