Chapter 163

I forgot to bring my phone charger and though there was over 20% battery left when I went to bed, I was scared it could die during the night and I wouldn’t hear my alarm. So I slept without my eye mask on and the curtain ajar. I was crashing in a dorm room again, and it was still 120 yuan, accommodation prices are rising in the big city.

I got awakened by the sun before 5:00, with less than four hours of sleep, and couldn’t fall asleep again due to the guy snoring across the aisle. Is there a more pathetic way to fail at life than being snorer?! You can’t even fucken breathe properly, something that our branch of the animal taxonomy has been doing for billions of years, and instead of inhaling and exhaling silently, you make RRRRRRRKKKKKKKHHHHHH shhhhhfffffuuuuuh RRRRRRRKKKKKKKHHHHHH shhhhhfffffuuuuuh RRRRRRRKKKKKKKHHHHHH shhhhhfffffuuuuuh disgusting gargling noises.

I took a shower and got on my merry way at 6, making it to the train station with one hour to spare. I made a beeline for the massage chairs, and every single one was occupied by an idiot not using the massage function. I awakened one of them and told him to scram, before scanning the code bar with my phone and getting the 35-minute program.

The train stopped at every damn station along the way but still got me to my destination in 1 hour 10 minutes. There was a maze of fences to walk through, with a bunch of bored cops enforcing some pandemic measures, I became quite used at navigating this nonsense, taking screenshots of all those green health codes to avoid opening those malfunctioning piece-of-shit bloatware tracking apps, and putting on my fayssah mursk only when absolutely necessary. I got my bicycle from the two-wheeled vehicles parking and rode home on a brand new boulevard, listening to albums I hadn’t listened to in a while: the Spaniards from Looking For An Answer and their groovy grindcore, and the all-female American rock band Sleater Kinney.

I was dead-ass tired from the heat, exercise and short night, so after a cold shower and a bowl of R n’ S made from the leftovers the girlfriend had ordered, I took a nap for an hour before putting on my suit and going to the graduation ceremony. The twelfth-graders were there in their gowns and goofy-looking square hats, along with their parents and their siblings (for the 5% of them who are not single kids), I got ushered to the front table and there was even a little placard with my name on it. There were speeches, songs, awards, it was mostly very boring and tacky and not a lot of English was spoken on stage, which usually annoys me slightly but now I kinda understood, as the parents were present. Some of the videos put by the students were pretty cool, though they were stretched horizontally to fit the large screen of the hotel banquet room the school had rented and everyone in them looked short and fat. Most of the time during the speeches I sat there reading my Kindle, time went by acceptably fast.

Then my school year ended for real, and I excitedly rode home. Two kids of about 10 waited at the red light, on their bikes. “Hello!” the fat one said in English. “Where are you from?” the skinny one asked in Chinese.

“You guess”

“Europe?”

“No”

“The USA?”

“North of there”

They looked puzzled and racked their brains for a while.

“Oh I know! Canada!”

“Smart kid”

I got home, changed into comfy clothes, finished packing and we got in the car. The girlfriend drove, technically I’m not supposed to drive on national highways for the first year of my drivers’ license, unless I have a co-pilot who’s had his/her license for three years, and now we had 400 km to cover. Soon it started raining, but the girlfriend managed pretty well. After a halfway stop to get the dog to walk a bit and for us to wolf down our BLT and grilled cheese sandwiches, we kept going, I fell asleep and woke up as we approached Hefei, her hometown and my old stomping grounds. It was around 11 when we got to her parents’ apartment, we had a bit of a chat and soon went to bed.