Chapter 95: The last grand feast
Autumn in this city was sometimes as brazenly hot as midsummer, and sometimes brought clear skies, thin clouds, and gentle, cool breezes. For a while that autumn, Su Can sometimes wore short sleeves and shorts, and at other times had no choice but to throw on a cotton shirt and jacket.
This created two extremes in their lives. When the autumn rain lingered and the weather turned chilly, Su Can and his friends holed up in their dorm rooms to read, play games, watch movies, drink tea, shoot the breeze, and chat. On nights when the heat began to subside, they went to the snack street behind the southern dorms for seafood, barbecue, stir-fried river snails, and rice noodles at the food stalls, drinking a few beers with friends against a backdrop of sizzling steam and ladles clanging against iron woks.
Yet it was often scenes like these that formed their most vivid memories of university years later: days spent laughing and talking with buddies beside them, with a girl on their minds.
But because of the clash Su Can and his friends had been involved in here at the end of the previous semester, in which even the other parties-well-known figures around campus-had been put in their place, quite a few people had been shaken. Reportedly, department leaders had even come afterward, yet the whole affair had somehow been played down and then quietly dropped.
So Su Can and the others were clearly no longer as anonymous on the snack street as before. Groups of students from different departments often watched them warily, and talked about them in private even more, evidently treating them as dangerous characters. Su Can even wondered whether the stall owners who had spent years around Nanjing University would