The most surprising thing was finding the bottle of handmade plastic stars from her house in the drawer!
How did Lu Xingzhi bring it here without her knowing was a mystery for another day.
Underneath the bottle was a few photographs. They were laid face down, so Jiang Yao could not see what they were. However, from the looks of it, they were recently developed, not longer than a couple of years.
Jiang Yao toyed around with the bottle filled with plastic stars and tried to imagine Lu Xingzhi's reasoning for bringing something boring like this from her schooling days over to the platoon before checking out the photographs.
It was a thick stack of photographs. The main character was a girl, her life recorded in these photographs.
Jiang Yao lightly caressed the photographs with her fingers. She looked at the familiar face staring back at her and suddenly felt teary-eyed, the girl was her.
Starting from the first picture when she was five years old until the picture she took for remembrance during her high-school graduation ceremony, sometimes it was her alone, some other times it was with her parents, her two brothers and her friends. The only constant was her; she was in each one of the photographs.
These were not the old pictures found in the Jiang family. Lu Xingzhi must have obtained the negatives from the Jiang family and developed them again.
Growing up, the Jiang family was not financially sound, but Mr. and Mrs. Jiang were famous in the village for spoiling their child.
At that time, plenty of children did not have enough to eat, only the Jiang family would bring their children on a vacation to the city every year and take pictures.
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