Like other children in the world, David Foster first attended elementary school, then middle school, and then high school. Unlike other children, for most kids, going to school simply meant going to school—their biggest worries were about popsicles that cost two cents each or ice cream bricks for five yuan, or maybe fighting over the ping-pong table or playing with paper cards. But David Foster had to worry about picking up leftover popsicle sticks from the street, collecting discarded paper scraps that others didn’t want... Every day after school, he had to dig through trash heaps for things before he could return to his dark little room and cook a pot of vegetables for himself.

The vegetable leaves were scraps picked up at the market, the oil was rendered from fat sometimes given by the meat vendors, and the water was fetched from a neighbor’s outdoor faucet. However, that neighbor was very punctual and would always turn off the tap right at seven o’clock every evening. So sometimes, if David Foster came back late from scavenging, he had to grit his teeth and skip boiling water, instead carefully tossing in a few bits of leftover fat and eating them with the previous day’s leftover rice, making for a fragrant meal.

But this kind of “luxurious” life made him feel deeply pained.

Strangely enough, even eating like this, he still grew taller and stronger just like everyone else.

As for school? Ever since the one-child policy began, whose child wasn’t a precious treasure in their parents’ hands, cherished and protected? Who would want to play with a poor kid whose clothes always smelled no matter how much they were washed?

So David Foster’s school life, apart from thoroughly cleaning the trash cans after school every day, consisted only of reading books. But even reading had its problems—he always felt that it didn’t take him long to finish a book, whether it was Chinese, math, or workbooks... it seemed he could finish them all in just a few days.

And once he finished, he remembered everything.

He didn’t know that people with this kind of ability were called geniuses.

So when he saw other classmates sitting at their desks studying hard, he always felt that there must be something wrong with the way he was learning, and he felt deeply ashamed.

After third grade, when Chinese language exams began, the perfect double-hundred scores that used to seem ordinary now became unattainable for most students. That’s when David Foster’s genius began to show itself irresistibly, even though his essays were still full of the same old clichés like “Ah, my motherland.” But four consecutive double-hundred scores finally caught the attention of the school leadership.

He started to become the model student who was often called upon by teachers to read aloud in class, and began giving speeches at the school’s Young Pioneers assemblies. Fortunately, his background was too unusual, and his small face always wore a look of shyness, otherwise he might have become the most unique Young Pioneer captain in the history of Gaoyang Town Elementary School.

But his smell remained, his poverty remained, and his loneliness remained. Naturally, he still couldn’t play with the other kids, and when the stripes on his left sleeve multiplied like rockets, the way all the kids in school looked at him started to change. The few classmates who used to talk to him now stopped talking altogether.

He didn’t know this was the awe and fear that people have toward geniuses; he simply thought he had done something wrong again...

After entering the key middle school, things got a bit better. After all, everyone around him was older, and most importantly, after starting middle school, David Foster’s photographic memory seemed to vanish in an instant, his grades dropped rapidly, and he hovered around twenty-fifth place in the class.

The middle school teachers often sighed, wondering why this poor child’s genius phase had to be in elementary school and not in middle school.

Just as people thought this child would gradually become mediocre and no one knew what the future would hold, the high school entrance exam arrived.

Once again, David Foster shocked everyone—except, of course, those who were nearsighted.

He scored 539 points, a full sixty points higher than his mock exam, and just three points above the admission line for the key high school that year.

So the child who scavenged for a living entered the county’s key high school.

Chapter Three: Scavenging

David Foster pushed his old 28-inch bicycle out of the bike shed and glanced up at the pitch-black night sky above the campus, his brow twitching ever so slightly, unnoticed by anyone. He looked at the classmates passing by and greeted them warmly. Things weren’t like when he was a child anymore—he now knew how to keep himself looking neat, and no classmates avoided him because of his smell. High school students didn’t discriminate against someone for their family background, and even if they did, in a campus filled with scholarly atmosphere, no one dared to show such poor taste openly.

He pushed his overly large bicycle toward the school gate, the road on both sides dimly lit. He was slowly thinking about what books to borrow from the county library on Saturday, when suddenly someone swept past him like the wind, accompanied by a hand that ruffled his hair.

“Hey, you need to wash your hair. Come over for dinner tomorrow night.” Several bicycles whizzed past him, and among them, a short-haired girl turned back and made a funny face at him.

He smiled. That short-haired girl was Emily Sullivan, his deskmate. Unfortunately, they didn’t take the same route home—at least, not the same way back.