Selling Peanuts

Every night, she went out on her broom and flew low over the ground, visiting nearly every peanut field in the surrounding villages.

She had packed all the peanuts on the roof into bags she had found around the house.

They were dry enough once she could grab a handful and hear them rattle when she shook them.

By Friday, she had piled thirty-eight bags of peanuts and five bags of rice into her old schoolbag.

Most of the rice had come from fields closer to the city. They used combine harvesters there, which spilled a lot of grain, and because the grains were loose, people gleaning rice stalks couldn't pick them up. That was how she had gotten so lucky.

The peanuts were what excited her. Her family only harvested that much after a whole year of growing them.

Peanuts were selling for around 1.8 yuan per jin. She had asked her grandmother about it just last week and gotten another complaint about how her parents never sent money home.

It went in one ear and out the other. Because her father carried hepatitis B, he couldn't get into a big factory, and what he earned at a small one was only enough to support himself.

Her mother earned five hundred yuan a month and sent five thousand home each year, but her grandmother didn't believe it. She always thought there was no way the two of them could earn only five thousand a year away from home.

Lin Er had listened to this for thirteen years. It wasn't until her second year of middle school, when she asked for money to order school milk and her grandmother refused, while the teacher insisted she had to order it, that Lin Er called her mother in tears for the first time and the truth finally came out.

So now she felt none of the guilt she once had. She only thought that her grandmother had yet to meet her aunt, and when the time came, she would really know what it was like to raise a child for nothing.

At 1.8 yuan per jin, the peanuts she had now could sell for at least six or seven thousand yuan.

That was about as much as her family made in a year.

By that calculation, her family ate quite a lot. Out of a harvest that size, they could only sell three or four thousand yuan's worth of peanuts; the rest had to be pressed into cooking oil.

But now she was worried about how to sell them. She was too young, and no one at a grain station would dare buy from her. Besides, the people buying peanuts and rice nearby were all relatives or acquaintances through one connection or another.

If she dared sell them today, tomorrow her grandmother could be beating her and scolding her for stealing the family's grain to sell.

Never mind whether any of the family's grain was actually missing. Where else could anything she brought out have come from?

Why wasn't there a spell that could change her appearance? She couldn't get her hands on Potions, either. And her pen pal-could anyone believe it? She had been fooled by a seven-year-old at first!

Yes, her pen pal was only seven, not even old enough to start school. The only reason he knew about magic was that the elders in his family were wizards. He knew even fewer spells than Lin Er, and all their previous conversations had been pure bluff on his part.

She no longer called him Xiao Wang. She felt there was nothing wrong with calling him Prince. Who hadn't imagined being a prince or princess as a child?

Otherwise, how could My Fair Princess have been so popular?

After leafing through her magic books, she found that there was a way after all. It was just a little unfair to some strangers.

Deep in the mountains, on a road they had to take, a tractor came rumbling along. Birds took flight and insects hid in the woods. A half-fallen pine tree made the driver stop and take a couple of looks. Then he cursed, got down with the man in the passenger seat, and went to push the tree aside.

Although they were in the mountains, the villages weren't far away. The tree had fallen at an awkward angle: it wasn't lying across the ground with an obvious intent to block the road, nor was it so low that people couldn't get past. It was only leaning, making it difficult for larger vehicles to pass.

The driver was experienced. Although he knew there was no custom of robbing travelers here, and he was a local himself, he and his companion each took a wrench when they got out.

They pushed the tree aside, and no one jumped out of the woods to rob them. The two exchanged a glance and breathed a sigh of relief. The crackdown on organized crime had started back in the nineties, and in all their years of traveling around, the brothers really had never run into robbers. They had only scared themselves today.

They turned around, but before they reached the doors, a muffled sound came from the pile of pine needles in the ditch, followed by two quick whispers. They fell straight to the ground without seeing a thing.

This was the third vehicle collecting peanuts that she had seen today.

She had picked them purely because their vehicle was big enough and wasn't full.

Lin Er crawled out of the pine needles, shook the needles off her cloak, and found a scale in the driver's seat to weigh a bag of peanuts. It came to only seventy jin, far less than she had estimated. She had thought it would be at least a hundred.

Still, it wasn't bad. She had gotten them for nothing anyway.

She had filled each bag about the same, and had specifically picked one of the lighter ones to weigh, so the others wouldn't be less than seventy jin each. She dragged the peanuts out and stacked them neatly on the vehicle, then took the corresponding number of new bags. Those were normally supplied by the buyer.

She then calculated the total at seventy jin per bag and checked the account book in the vehicle. The previous seller's peanuts had sold for 1.78 yuan per jin, so she took 4,734 yuan from the money pouches the two men carried.

It was less than she had estimated, but her monthly living allowance was only two hundred yuan, so it still seemed like a lot.

She got the men onto the vehicle, and after Stupefy wore off, she cast Obliviate on each of them.

She was very confident in magic now. As expected of a golden finger, there was no chance of it going out of control. As long as she didn't intend to erase all of the two men's memories and turn them into fools, the magic would work exactly as she intended.

She didn't do much to their memories, only erasing what they remembered after pushing the tree aside. Then she mounted her broom and plunged into the woods, leaving behind an unsolved mystery.

After the tractor left, Lin Er watched it from a distance. Good, it was driving steadily, so she went home reassured, completely unaware that when the brothers checked their accounts later, they were shocked to discover they had encountered a ghost. Still, they hadn't lost anything; they had actually made money.

Lin Er also didn't know that the purchase price of 1.78 yuan was because the previous seller's peanuts had gotten wet in the rain and been left to sit, making them poor quality. It had rained constantly while the peanuts were flowering that year, reducing the harvest considerably, and the normal purchase price was between 1.9 and 2 yuan.

And as for the buyers' scale, those who knew, knew. Her deal had earned the two men at least a thousand yuan or so, though it was a bit frightening. The brothers decided to stop buying for the year; they couldn't outcompete the others anyway.

Suddenly having money in hand, Lin Er felt rather unsure how to spend it.

In the end, she took a bus to the city. The fare was five yuan.

She had told her family that she was going to ask a classmate from the neighboring village about their homework because she hadn't had time to copy it from the blackboard. Grandma Lin asked whose child it was, then agreed to let her go out.

Of course she had a classmate in the neighboring village, but they hadn't met until their second year of middle school. Both were left-behind children whose parents worked away from home while they stayed with their grandparents.

Her classmate's family likewise didn't pay her much attention, and she looked very poor. Her hygiene was even worse than Lin Er's, because her grandmother really didn't take care of her.

Throughout elementary school, this classmate had been shunned and put down. Even in middle school, former classmates still talked about the hardships she had faced in elementary school.

But her grades soared in middle school. After their homeroom teacher visited her home twice, she was no different from an outstanding top student, and the gossip disappeared.

Lin Er hadn't met her until their second year. Because they went the same way after school, they got along well, even though they had never been in the same class.

It wasn't until high school that they went their separate ways.

Having said she wouldn't come home for lunch, Lin Er had the whole day to herself. Now that she had money, naturally she wanted to buy things.

The town wouldn't do. It was full of people she knew. If she handed someone a hundred-yuan note, someone might tell her grandmother at the very next market.

In the city, however, she didn't have a single acquaintance or relative, so she had nothing to fear even if she went on a major shopping trip.