So on that summer night, the laughter of the children and the shouts of the adults playing cards all seemed very far away. Benny was led, still confused and innocent, into Zoe Young’s world, watching her eyes sparkle like gems, listening to her passionately say, “Your Highness, go quickly, I’m here!”

From beginning to end, the Benny version of Athena only knew how to be silent, letting Zoe Young clutch her popsicle stick and battle the surrounding weeds in a chaotic mess, with Pegasus Meteor Fists flying everywhere. He really wanted to ask her, when would that invisible yet omnipresent great demon king finally be defeated.

The battle was too long, and he was already getting sleepy. Benny didn’t know that fate was not something that could be solved by a Pegasus Meteor Fist.

------------

3. Little Flying Insect

The fastest updates for Hello, Old Times’ latest chapters!

Zoe Young often said that the name Benny was very nice.

The car, flat and cute as if it had been blown up like a balloon. That little car was also called Benny. The little car and a boy traveled together through many, many places in the world, searching for his mother.

Zoe Young didn’t know how muddleheaded a mother had to be to lose her own child, so she felt very sorry for Benny. That was almost the first time she thought cartoons could really be nonsense.

She looked at her mother, who was sewing a button for her, and thought, see, mom will always be by my side. Thinking this, she patted her chest in relief, cherishing her happiness as if she had survived a disaster.

But later she really met a Benny, a boy who had been deliberately abandoned by his own mother. When that cartoon finally had a happy ending, she happily ran to tell Benny, “You’ll find your mom too, definitely.”

When she was little, Zoe Young always thought that the sad things in cartoons were all nonsense, like Benny being lost by his mom; but the good things must all be true—like Benny finally finding his mom and laughing brightly in a sea of flowers.

When she grew up, she realized that this understanding was only correct if you turned it upside down. Those sad and disappointed people always made up lots of beautiful things to fool others.

Benny was always very discouraged. He thought he might never escape his alcoholic father for his whole life. Zoe Young laughed at him, asking how he could know how long a lifetime was.

Is a lifetime really that long? A world-weary, bitter smile appeared on Benny’s face, one that didn’t match his age at all. In that moment, Zoe Young was stunned. She couldn’t say why, but she liked that smile of his—it seemed so responsible, so grown-up. But thinking about it, she felt that Benny was better off crying—crying like a child.

“A lifetime isn’t that long, right? He pushed me, and my thigh hit the corner of the table. The next day it was all purple, a few days later it turned black, then after a few more days it was purplish-red, and finally it slowly faded to light yellow, and then it was gone.”

Zoe Young didn’t understand: “What do you mean?” “I mean, I count the days by watching my bruises slowly disappear. Before I finish counting one batch, the next batch is already on me. I just count the days like this, and I find that time passes pretty quickly. Is a lifetime really that long?” Later, Zoe Young almost forgot what Benny looked like, but she always remembered that a boy once told her that the passage of time isn’t just measured by calendars and planners.

Time can also be marked by the healing cycle of a scar.

Zoe Young looked at Benny, and thought a little sadly—if she had understood at the time that her feeling was called sadness—how wonderful cartoons were. The car Benny wanted to find his mom, and could set off right away, travel the world, have friends, never worry about food or gas, never worry about the long journey, never need to take a train (because he was a car himself)… She once heard her cousin Qiao say something like “life is a blurry sheet,” which Zoe Young didn’t really understand, but at that moment, looking up at the thin spider web in the corner of the eaves, she thought, if life is a spider, then what are they? Are they little bugs stuck there, unable to move, just waiting to be eaten? “My mom and dad always fight too, really fiercely, even throwing things at each other, even ink bottles at my head. Mm.” Zoe Young blurted out this story for no reason. In fact, she had only seen her dad two or three times, and only once were both her parents there at the same time, and that was when they fought. The two of them fought as if they were going to tear the house down. She didn’t know that her quiet, gentle mother could have so much strength. When she was little, she learned two words from TV, one was “hysteria,” the other was “madness.” She thought she could give those words to her mom and dad for that day.

Zoe Young was never actually hit by an ink bottle, otherwise she wouldn’t be alive now. But she said it seriously, even a little proudly and loudly, just to comfort Benny.

The best comfort in the world isn’t telling someone “everything will be okay,” but rather saying with a bitter face, “What are you crying for? Look, I’m worse off than you.”

So, successfully comforted, Benny said sincerely, “Zoe, I don’t want a mom, I want you.” The two pure, innocent six-year-olds naturally didn’t realize how awkward that sounded. Zoe Young continued to pat his shoulder with heroic righteousness, vowing, “I’ll always be by your side.” This line was also learned from cartoons. They were both moved by themselves and each other, their friendship at its peak, the atmosphere almost too good to be true.

I’ll never leave you—what a beautiful and sad lie that is.

Zoe Young only realized later that the very first lie of her life was thanks to cartoons. She believed in so many wrong things, and believed in them deeply.

Life in the big courtyard passed by peacefully, day after day. Zoe Young still stayed at home obediently every day, and every evening from six to seven was always cartoon time. On weekends she went to her grandma’s house, and sometimes, on nights when her mom was home, she would go out to play wildly with the other kids.

The rest of the time, she lived in the little theater inside her own mind. Sometimes, when she fantasized so much her head hurt and ran out of material, she would quickly read a few stories to gather new inspiration—her family only had three sets: The Complete Works of Andersen, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and Aesop’s Fables.

Full text, no illustrations. Zoe Young recognized many characters just by following the subtitles on TV, mostly just getting familiar with their shapes. When she read stories, she guessed a lot, skimming through, but she was very happy reading them.

The lack of illustrations actually helped her imagination. Without the constraints of others’ drawings, she diligently studied the long descriptions of scenery in “Dreams Under the Willow” and “Little Ida’s Flowers,” giving those plants and foods she’d never heard of images that belonged only to Zoe Young…

So, in sixth grade, when Andrew Lane generously invited her to his house to watch Disney’s “Snow White,” she stared at the short-haired, blue-dressed, bright-eyed Snow White on the screen and said in a daze, “No, that’s not right.”

“What’s not right?” Andrew Lane asked, munching on an apple, raising his eyebrows. “She doesn’t look like Snow White.” “Ha,” Andrew Lane laughed, “have you ever seen a real one?”

She stopped talking to him, just stared at the screen, a girl not yet thirteen, with a helplessly tired look on her face. Anyway, the Snow White in her heart wasn’t like that. Andrew Lane crunched his apple like a little mouse. There was a little mouse in her heart too, gnawing away at her secret garden. The biggest crisis six-year-old Zoe Young ever faced was when the city TV station and the provincial TV station both aired cartoons she liked at six o’clock. She had no choice but to keep switching channels with the remote, and it was torture. When she grew up and heard about friends “having a foot in two boats,” the first thing she thought of was the TV screen she kept switching at age six.

The good life ended that autumn.

The youngest daughter of the family on the far west side died. The body was found by the ditch not far from the big courtyard, said to have been strangled—of course, she also heard the women whispering, their expressions strange, saying that when she died she was naked, tsk tsk, tsk tsk… Zoe Young didn’t understand why the bad person had to take her clothes. The last thing she remembered about that little auntie was just a few days before, when that very beautiful woman wore newly bought flared jeans, had her hair permed, and when she walked past Zoe Young’s door, she smiled at her mom. Mom said, you look really pretty. She didn’t pretend to be modest, just smiled, her bright red lips sparkling in the sunlight.

She really was beautiful, Zoe Young thought. By then, Zoe Young already knew how to appreciate other beautiful women. When she was very little, whenever she heard her mom and aunt praise a stylish, pretty woman passing by, she would wriggle in front of them, pretending to be a passerby too, then turn her head, point at herself, and say to her mom, “Mom, mom, say it, this woman is really pretty.”