nostalgic

"You are Jiaman, right?" Lin Ling rubbed the top of Wei Jiaman's hat with a smile, and took the bag with one hand.

Wei Jiaman pulled his hat down awkwardly and nodded.

"I'm so hungry, I might die if I don't eat something right away." Lin Ling pressed his stomach that was losing his temper and made faces at Wei Jiaman.

Seeing this, Wei Jiaman raised the corners of his mouth without warning, revealing his snow-white teeth, and a big smile bloomed on his face.

Lin Ling was instantly infected by Wei Jiaman's clean and clear smile, and he took Wei Jiaman's arm and walked towards the exit together. The two seemed to have known each other for a long time.

The fast food restaurant near the train station was noisy and crowded. Lin Ling left Wei Jiaman at his seat and queued up to order food alone. The waiting line was a bit long. Lin Ling turned his head uneasily halfway, and his eyes happened to meet Wei Jiaman at the corner of the dining table line of sight collided.

Seven or eight minutes later, Lin Ling walked back to the dining table with hamburger, French fries, and Sprite sideways. When Wei Jiaman saw Lin Ling came back, he raised his hand and took off his black flat cap, letting down his shoulder-length black and thick hair.

"Jiaman, are you a girl?" It took Tang Yun a long time to recover.

Wei Jiaman was taken aback when he heard the sound, and gave Lin Ling an affirmative answer with his mouth.

"Your voice?" Lin Ling was a little surprised.

Wei Jiaman quickly gestured to Lin Ling with sign language.

Lin Ling tilted his head and struggled to analyze Wei Jiaman's sign language, looking anxious because he couldn't communicate smoothly.

"Sister Lin Ling." Wei Jiaman yelled out in a panic.

It was an extremely noisy sound, and it didn't even seem to come from a human mouth. When those few syllables jumped into his ears, Lin Ling's mind came up with the piercing ducks on the outskirts of the city, and he seemed to hear plastic bottle caps. Dry noise scraping across concrete.

Wei Jiaman lowered his head to get the notepad he was carrying in his pocket, and Lin Ling took advantage of Wei Jiaman's distraction to quickly sort out his collapsed expression from extreme surprise.

"I lost my voice after the age of eight." Wei Jiaman pushed the notepad to Lin Ling's eyes.

Consolation is obviously superfluous, and pity is really easy to hurt.

Lin Ling pursed his lips and looked at the blue ballpoint pen writing on the pale yellow paper, not knowing how to answer for a moment.

"I can already master some common sentences, but the pronunciation is not standard." Wei Jiaman quickly wrote on the paper.

"I'll take you to the hospital for an examination on the weekend." Lin Ling whispered to Wei Jiaman after reading the note.

"No." A broken syllable popped out of Wei Jiaman's mouth, as if a hard object was shattered.

"It's okay, my sister has saved a lot of money recently." Lin Ling patted his wallet and smiled.

Wei Jiaman shook his head and took a sip of Sprite, then frowned.

"What's wrong?" Lin Ling asked with concern.

Wei Jiaman raised his brows, waved his hands and smiled.

After getting acquainted with each other, Lin Ling realized that the Wei family was full of surprises at the soapy taste of the drink.

On the first rest day after Lucheng University officially started classes, Wei Jiaman came to Linling Bar to apply for a part-time waiter.

"I will always provide tuition fees, and you don't need to work part-time." Lin Ling immediately denied it.

"I need to get in touch with more people to practice speaking." Wei Jiaman took out the notepad he had prepared earlier in the morning and handed it to Lin Ling.

"Well, now that we have decided, we should use our spare time to work hard here. The prerequisite is not to delay our studies." Seeing Wei Jiaman's insistence, Lin Ling no longer objected.

"Can I wear my own clothes at work?" Wei Jiaman waved a ballpoint pen and made an extremely absurd and rude request in Lin Ling's eyes.

"Do you think it's plausible?" Lin Ling patiently asked the young man sitting across from him with his hands on his chest.

"It won't feel safe to change it." Wei Jia handed the answer to Lin Ling without confidence.

"The clothes must be changed, but the hat can be kept." Lin Ling ordered, looking at the black flat cap bought for Wei Jiaman with his first part-time salary many years ago.

"Boss, how can you keep that kind of disabled child as a waiter? It is clearly a burden, not to mention whether the job of serving customers can be done, but just the entrance training." The senior staff in the bar objected.

"How about setting up a special service area for the deaf?" The young waitress suggested.

"Maybe deaf-mute people don't like to be treated differently?" Aunt Clean objected.

"Give it a try, let's talk about it later." Lin Ling lit a cigarette and flicked his long hair aside.

The image of Wei Jiaman wearing white work clothes on the day he officially joined the bar made Lin Ling's eyes shine. On weekdays, Wei Jiaman's pure black dress often gives people a gloomy impression of carrying a dark cloud above his head.

"Brother, are you a new waiter? My name is Ah Ying, what's your name?" The young waiters chatted up Wei Jiaman curiously.

"I'm... Wei... Jiaman." Wei Jiaman uttered those five words with great difficulty as if he had made up his mind.

The intermittent sharp noise repeatedly scratched people's eardrums like a sharp knife, and the air was extremely quiet for a moment. Two seconds later, a burst of laughter erupted like gunpowder twisters, causing a burst of shoulder-shaking laughter, and the crowd dispersed in a blink of an eye.

"Don't pay attention to them, a group of stunned youths." Ah Ying scratched his head apologetically and patted Wei Jiaman's shoulder.

Lin Ling thought that after being ridiculed by the teacher, Wei Jiaman would retreat and study with peace of mind, but he didn't expect that the bar would become Wei Jiaman's second home not long after that, and a simple unused storage room at the corner became Wei Jiaman's after some cleaning. Accommodation outside the student dormitory.

Lin Ling often looked at Wei Jiaman who appeared around the bar from time to time as a bystander. When the freshman got up to work, he was as sick and bottomless as a binge eating disorder patient who kept adding food to his mouth.

One day, Lin Ling saw on the monitor that Wei Jiaman sent others away to close the bar alone after work. When there was only one person left in the bar, Wei Jiaman took off his hat and heaved a sigh of relief, his whole complexion brightened a lot After a while, Wei Jiaman began to practice talking loudly while carefully cleaning, checking, and counting. Finally, he sent the inventory list and picking list to the supervisor's office, and then trudged back to the temporary hut. Ling also saw Wei Jiaman appearing early in a white shirt and overalls.

"Are you working so hard to repay me?" Lin Ling asked Wei Jiaman seriously.

"No." Wei Jiaman wrinkled his brows together.

"Why? Explain your abnormality?" Lin Ling mixed a glass of wine and pushed it in front of Wei Jiaman.

"It's painful to stop, it's like dying, but it's very happy to be busy, like rebirth." Wei Jiaman wrote a paragraph with a pen.

"What a strange guy." Lin Ling raised the glass in his hand and touched Wei Jiaman's wine glass, then tilted his head to finish the wine in the glass.

Wei Jiaman also imitated Lin Ling's boldness, took a deep breath and drank the wine in the glass in one gulp.

"Drinking for the first time?" Lin Ling smiled and looked at Wei Jiaman's embarrassed look with his lips tightly pursed and his eyes flushed.

"Yeah." Wei Jiaman nodded repeatedly holding an empty glass in both hands.

"Go live at my place tonight. Don't stay in the bar alone. If you feel unwell, no one will take care of you." Lin Ling was a little worried when he thought that this was the first time Wei Jiaman had drunk.

"Okay." Wei Jiaman's expression froze for an instant, and then he uttered a very funny sound clearly because of the extra force in his enunciation.