Those Steps We Walked Together

"Hey, Croissant, get out of class is over."

Simon put down the paintbrush in his hand, stepped forward and patted Cheng Kesong's shoulder: "Want to have a cup of coffee?"

Cheng Kesong added two touches to his homework, turned around and said with a smile, "Here we go."

There is a self-service coffee machine in the small restaurant next to the school gate all year round, and you can buy a small cup of black coffee for [-] euro cents.The small plastic cup is held in the hand, and it only takes one mouthful, which is really ridiculously expensive.

But Cheng Kesong still threw a coin in, and waited for a long time before the machine started to pick up the coffee.

This private art school is located in the [-]th arrondissement of Paris, close to the Montparnasse Tower, which can be regarded as a very expensive land boundary, so the area of ​​the school is very compact.With two coffee makers, two microwave ovens, and a high table and chairs by the window, there isn't much room left in this small dining room.

Saying this is a school, in Cheng Kesong's view, it is equivalent to a two-story teaching building.The studios and computer classrooms where the students attend classes, plus the teachers' offices, plus the restrooms and the small dining room, are all that this school has.As for libraries and playgrounds, there are none.

During the recess, students from more than a dozen classes lined up at the entrance of the restaurant to buy coffee.

Cheng Kesong took his small cup out of the machine, gestured to Simon, and walked out of the school gate with the coffee.

The gate of the school faces the street, and there are five short steps outside the gate.

A sidewalk that is only one meter wide runs across the steps, and there is a dark street lamp post in the middle, and the asphalt road for driving is below.A row of small cars parked on the side of the road with a distance of no more than twenty centimeters.

In such a small open space, there are many students standing at this time, chatting together in twos and threes.Some people held plastic coffee cups of the same style as Cheng Kesong, some held cigarettes, and some held the rim of the coffee cup with the remaining three fingers holding the cigarettes.

Paris prohibits smoking in any public place with a roof. Taking advantage of the class break, these eighteen and nineteen-year-old children hurried out to have a good time.

There is nothing wrong with it.

After chatting with Cheng Kesong for a few words, Simon jumped into the middle of the three boys next to him and chatted with them about last night's game.

Cheng Kesong doesn't smoke, he leans on the stone pier of the flower bed next to the steps, sipping hot and bitter black coffee in small sips.

He didn't want to drink it too soon.

In early summer in Paris, the sun is bright and the temperature is pleasant. There are also bursts of cool breeze, sending the aroma of roses blooming somewhere in the distance, gently blowing on people's faces, very comfortable and cozy.

Such a good early summer, of course you have to enjoy it for a while.

What's more, that boy hasn't appeared yet.

This cup of coffee can't be finished too soon.

After a few minutes, there was only one cup of coffee left in Cheng Kesong's hand.He looked down at the thin layer of coffee that was almost showing the color of the bottom of the cup, and shook the cup lightly, letting the liquid with a bitter aroma swirl along the side of the cup.

The school door was pushed open again, and a big boy with golden-brown half-length curly hair came out, a small drill nail on the tip of his brow gleamed against the sun.

Cheng Kesong immediately relaxed his eyes.

"Hugo!"

The boy followed the sound, saw that it was Cheng Kesong, immediately turned around and walked to his side, and stood on the steps higher than him, leaning on the stone pier of the flower bed.

"This class in your class is still life sketching?" Hugo asked.

He took out a small paper bag from his pocket, pulled out a small piece of translucent paper, twisted out a pinch of shredded tobacco from the paper bag, straightened the small sponge filter, and rolled a cigarette skillfully.

His fingers are beautiful, slender and nimble, with small joints, but they don't look too weak.The nails are neatly manicured, revealing a beautiful flesh pink color, reflecting the typical fair skin of Europeans, making them look particularly immature.He rolled cigarettes proficiently, and he quickly picked up his fingertips lightly, and his movements were too beautiful.

Cheng Kesong moved his eyes away from those skillful hands, and replied: "Yes, I just changed a set of still lifes."

"I saw that group of still lifes. It's not very easy to draw."

After Hugo finished speaking with a smile, he held the thin cigarette between his lips and lit it with his eyes narrowed.

There is also a diamond stud under the edge of his lower lip. With the slight force of his lips, it reflects the bright light in the sun.

Cheng Kesong didn't like this kind of guy with nails all over his face at first. He thought this kind of guy was too feminine, or he was gothic or non-mainstream. In short, it didn't match his aesthetics at all.

Until he saw Hugo for the first time.

Hugo is a big boy with exquisite appearance.His forehead is fuller than that of ordinary boys, and his eyebrows are stretched out. A pair of golden brown eyebrows start straight, the peaks of the eyebrows are slightly raised, and the tails of the eyebrows are slightly drooped, and they are thinly gathered into a tip.His eyebrows are well-shaped, so the drill nail at the tip of his eyebrows will not look abrupt at all, but it adds a lot to this pair of eyebrows.

Likewise, he has just the right pair of lips, not too thick, but not too thin.The center of the lower lip is sunken in slightly, forming a delicate dimple at the edge of the lip—just enough to accommodate a small drill nail.

There are three such drill nails on Hugo's face, one on the right eyebrow, the bottom of the lip and the left ear.

Each one is just right, neither too ostentatious nor too vulgar. It is almost invisible when you are far away and behind the light, but when you walk into the sun, it will sparkle and catch people's eyes.

Cheng Kesong fell in love with it the first time he saw it.

"However, it may not be too difficult for you." Hugo smiled, "Your paintings are always perfect."

"I just draw likeness, Mr. Fran said, there are only techniques in my paintings, but no aura." Cheng Kesong said.

"You didn't put your emotions into it." Hugo flicked the cigarette ash, and looked at Cheng Kesong with a smile, "You always give people the impression of being mysterious, you don't talk much, and you don't have many expressions on your face, as if nothing happened As if something can move you."

Cheng Kesong looked at Hugo's almost dazzling smile under the sun, and blinked innocently.

Of course there are things that move him, like this man standing in front of him.

But maybe the Chinese express their emotions more implicitly than Westerners, and Cheng Kesong can't express any emotion on his face.He quietly likes this big boy with a strange temperament, and chats with him every day during recess on the five steps outside the school gate. After returning home, he may occasionally browse his homepage on Facebook to see him What paintings did you draw again?

But he didn't even ask for the mobile phone number of this big boy who was in a different class from him.

Hugo snuffed out the cigarette that was about to burn out, looked down at the time, and reached out to pat Cheng Kesong's shoulder.

"Class is over, let's go back."

Cheng Kesong gulped down the last sip of coffee in the cup that had already cooled down, and followed Hugo into the school gate.

After the day's class ended, Cheng Kesong's class teacher, Mr. Fran, left the students in the classroom.

"Ladies and gentlemen, it's June."

Mr. Fran stroked his well-trimmed beard, and blinked playfully: "We will have a long-awaited event in June—"

"Weekly challenge?!"

Immediately there were students screaming underneath.

"Miss, please don't take away my chance to unveil the event?"

Mr. Fran sighed heavily pretending to be disappointed, and put on a serious face when he heard the laughter of the students in the audience: "That's right, we will have a week-long creative challenge!"

There was a burst of cheers from the audience.

"Please, don't tell me that the reason you are cheering is because we don't have classes during the week-long challenge time." Mr. Fran pretended to be very aggrieved.

"Of course not, sir!" Simon shouted, throwing up his hands. "We cheer because we love a challenge!"

"Oh, this is good news." Mr. Fran smiled and tapped Simon with his fingers, leaned over and sat on the table next to him, and continued to issue weekly challenge tasks.

"You will be disrupted in class, and with classmates you have never worked with, create a story around a topic - including research reports, storyboards, and three completed drawings of at least octavo size. Your topic And the teams are all randomly selected, and you only have one week to complete this challenge. Isn't it exciting?"

This time, instead of cheering, the audience was filled with mourning.

"What? Still want to write a research report?"

"Storyboard? Is it the kind of storyboard where every storyboard needs to be clearly drawn?"

"my God!"

Simon put his arms around Croissant's shoulder and shouted, "Mr. Fran, please let me and Croissant be in a group! Almighty Croissant!"

Mr. Fran raised a finger and shook it: "No, no, no, Simon, there will be no classmates in your team, and your almighty croissant will be in other people's teams. And if you go to the corridor hall now , you can probably see who those lucky kids are."

"What? The group has already come out?"

"Yes, you can check your groups now." Mr. Fran clapped his hands and signaled the end of the meeting.

The students immediately jumped up from their seats and flocked outside to the already crowded corridors.

Cheng Kesong didn't want to watch the grouping so early, because no matter what the grouping is, it doesn't make any difference to him.His familiarity with his classmates is actually not much different from that of other classmates-except for Simon, an optimist who knows everyone by himself, he doesn't have very good friends here.

But Simon grabbed his shoulders and pushed him into the flow of people in the corridor, so he had to be dragged to the display board with the group information.

Cheng Kesong stood several heads away from the exhibition board, looking up his name and photo on the exhibition board.

In the densely packed forms on the entire display board, before he had time to find his own information, he was the first to see a photo of a delicate face.Looking down the photo, it was Hugo's name, and "Captain" was also marked after the name.

Cheng Kesong's eyes suddenly brightened - he saw his name in the team member list under Captain Hugo.