"Hey, Croissant, get out of class is over."
Simon put down the paintbrush in his hand, stepped forward and patted Cheng Kesong on the shoulder: "Go for a cup of coffee?"
Cheng Kesong added two tones to his homework, turned around and said with a smile, "Here comes."
There is a self-service coffee machine in the small restaurant next to the school gate all the year round, and fifty cents can buy a small cup of black coffee. Holding a small plastic cup in your hand, it is just a mouthful, which is really ridiculously expensive.
But Cheng Kesong still put a coin in, and after waiting for a long time, the machine clucked the coffee.
This private art school is located in the 14th arrondissement of Paris, close to the Montparnasse Tower. With two coffee makers, two microwave ovens, and a high table and chairs by the window, this small dining room doesn't have much room left.
Saying this is a school, in Cheng Kesong's opinion, is equivalent to a teaching building with only two floors. The studio and computer classroom where students take classes, plus the teachers' offices, plus toilets and a small cafeteria, are all of this school. As for libraries and playgrounds, there is absolutely no such thing.
During recess, students from more than a dozen classes lined up to buy coffee at the entrance of the restaurant.
Cheng Kesong took his small cup out of the machine, gestured to Simon, and walked outside the school gate with coffee.
The gate of the school faces the street, and there are five short steps outside the gate.
Under the steps, there is a sidewalk that is only one meter wide, and there is a black lamp post in the middle, and then there is the asphalt road for driving. A row of cars, with a distance of only twenty centimeters, parked on the side of the road, one after another.
In such a small space, there were many students standing there, chatting together in twos and threes. Some people are holding plastic coffee cups of the same style as Cheng Kesong, some people are holding cigarettes, and some people are holding the rim of the coffee cup with the remaining three fingers of the cigarette.
Smoking is prohibited in any public places with roofs in Paris, and these 18- and 19-year-olds hurried out to enjoy themselves during recess.
It's not unreasonable.
Simon and Cheng Kesong chatted for a few words, then plunged into the middle of the three boys next to them, and chatted with them about the game last night.
Cheng Kesong does not smoke. He leaned against the stone pier of the flower bed next to the steps, sipping sips of hot and bitter black coffee.
He didn't want to finish drinking too soon.
In the early summer of Paris, the sun is shining, the temperature is pleasant, and there are bursts of cool breeze, which brings the fragrance of roses that are blooming somewhere in the distance.
Such a good early summer, of course, have to enjoy it for a while.
What's more, the boy hasn't appeared yet.
This cup of coffee can't be finished too soon.
After a few minutes, Cheng Kesong only had the bottom of a cup of coffee in his hand. He looked down at the thin layer of coffee that could almost reveal the color of the bottom of the cup, and shook the cup gently, letting the liquid with a bitter aroma swirl along the wall of the cup.
The door of the school was pushed open again, and a big boy with golden brown semi-long curly hair came out from inside, a small drill stud on the tip of his brow flashed against the sun.
Cheng Kesong's eyebrows widened immediately.
"Hugo!"
The boy followed the sound and saw that it was Cheng Kesong, and immediately turned around and walked a few steps to his side, and stood on the stone pier of the flower bed on the steps higher than him.
"This class in your class is still life painting?" Hugo asked.
He took out a small paper package from his pocket, pulled out a small translucent piece of paper, and twisted a small pinch of shredded tobacco from the paper package, straightened the small sponge filter, and skillfully rolled out a cigarette.
His fingers are good-looking, slender and dexterous, with small knuckles, but they don't look too weak. The nails were neatly trimmed and had a beautiful flesh pink color, which reflected on the typical fair skin of Europeans and looked particularly immature. He rolled a cigarette proficiently, and his fingertips quickly picked up and tapped, and his movements were too beautiful.
Cheng Kesong removed his eyes 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."
Hugo finished with a smile, put the thin cigarette between his lips, and lit it with narrowed eyes.
There was also a diamond nail under the edge of his lower lip, and with the slight force of his lips, it reflected a dazzling light in the sun.
Cheng Kesong didn't like this kind of boy with nails all over his face. He felt that this kind of person was too girly, or it was gothic, non-mainstream, etc. In short, it was completely inconsistent with his aesthetics.
Until he saw Hugo for the first time.
Hugo is a handsome boy. His forehead is fuller than that of ordinary boys, the curve of the brow bone is stretched, a pair of golden brown eyebrows are drawn straight, the peak of the eyebrow is slightly raised, the end of the eyebrow is slightly lowered, and it is narrowed to a point. His eyebrows are very beautiful, so the drill nail on the tip of his eyebrows will not look abrupt at all, but instead adds a lot of color to this pair of eyebrows.
Likewise, he has a pair of lips that are just right, not thick, but not thin. The center of the lower lip sinks slightly inward, forming a delicate pocket on the edge of the lip—just enough to accommodate a small drill nail.
There are three such drill nails on Hugo's face, which are on the right eyebrow, the bottom of the lip and the left ear.
Each one is just right, not too flamboyant or too vulgar, almost invisible when it is far away and with the light behind its back, but when it comes to the sun, it will sparkle and catch the eye.
Cheng Kesong fell in love with it the first time he saw it.
"However, it may not be difficult for you." Hugo smiled. "Your paintings are always perfect."
"I'm just like painting, Mr. Fran said, my paintings only have skills, not spirit." Cheng Kesong said.
"You didn't put your feelings into it." Hugo flicked the soot and looked at Cheng Kesong with a smile, "You always feel very mysterious, you don't talk much, and the expressions on your face don't seem to be much. It's like something can move you."
Cheng Ke Song looked at Hugo's almost dazzling smile in the sun, and blinked innocently.
Of course there are things that move him, like this man standing in front of him.
But maybe Chinese people's emotional expressions are always more subtle than Westerners, and Cheng Kesong can't put any mood on his face. He quietly likes this big boy with a strange temperament. Every day between classes, he stands on the five steps outside the school gate and chats with him. After returning home, he may occasionally flip through his homepage on Facebook to see him. What other paintings did you draw
But he hadn't even asked for the 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 patted Cheng Kesong on the shoulder.
"Class is over, go back."
Cheng Kesong drank the last sip of coffee that had been cold in the cup, and followed Hugo into the school gate.
After the day's class, Mr. Fran, Cheng Kesong's head teacher, left the students in the classroom.
"Ladies and gentlemen, it's June."
Mr. Fran stroked his well-trimmed beard and winked playfully: "In June we'll have a long-awaited event—"
"Weekly Challenge?!"
Immediately below, there were students screaming.
"Miss, please don't take away my chance to unveil the event, okay?"
Mr. Fran pretended to be disappointed and sighed heavily, and when he heard the laughter of the students in the audience, he put on a serious face: "Yes, we will usher in a week-long creative challenge!"
There was cheers from the audience.
"Please, don't tell me that you cheered because we didn't have classes during this week-long challenge time." Mr. Fran pretended to be very aggrieved.
"Of course not, sir!" cried Simon, raising his hands. "We cheer because we like challenges!"
"Oh, this is good news." Mr. Fran smiled and tapped Simon with his fingers in the air, then sat on the table beside him, and continued to release the weekly challenge task.
"You'll be disrupting the class, working with classmates you've never worked with to create a story around a topic - including a research report, a storyboard, and three completed drawings at least octofold size. Your topic and Teams are all drawn at random, and you only have a week to complete this challenge. Isn't it exciting?"
This time, instead of cheering, the audience turned into mourning.
"What? Do you want to write a research report?"
"Storyboard? Is it the kind of storyboard that every storyboard needs to be clearly drawn?"
"my God!"
Simon put his arms around Cheng Ke Song's shoulder and shouted, "Mr. Fran, please let me and Ke Song be in a group! Almighty Ke Song!"
Mr. Fran raised a finger and shook it: "No no no, Simon, there will be no classmates in your team, your almighty crocus will be in someone else's team. And if you go to the hallway now , you can probably see who those lucky children are."
"What? The group has come out?"
"Yes, you can go and check your group now." Mr. Fran clapped his hands and signaled the meeting to end.
The students immediately jumped from their seats and flocked to the already crowded corridor outside.
Cheng Kesong didn't want to see the group so early, because no matter what the group was, it was no different to him. The familiarity between him and his classmates is actually not much the same as that of other classmates—except for Simon, an optimist who knows everyone by himself, he doesn't have very good friends here.
But Simon took him by the shoulders and pushed him into the flow of people in the corridor, and he had to be carried to the display board with the group information posted.
Cheng Kesong stood several heads away from the display board and looked up to find his name and photo on the display board.
In the densely packed form on the entire display board, before he could find his own information, he was the first to see a photo with a delicate face. Looking down the photo, it is Hugo's name, and "Captain" is also marked after the name.
Cheng Kesong's eyes suddenly lit up - he saw his name in the list of team members under Captain Hugo.