Chapter 10

Before bed, Li Cheng and Zhao Xinxin dug out two recent sets of papers each and handed them over. In Chinese the next morning, Li Lan got her sister's out and read through them.

Having gone over them once, she summed it up: Li Cheng was strong on the arts side — Chinese, politics, history. Maths, physics and chemistry were weaker by comparison.

Beyond that, her foundations were solid. Anything she could get, she got, apart from careless slips — but anything harder, anything a step up, defeated her.

That wasn't really Li Cheng's fault. It was the common problem of most students there. Minhe was too small and too far behind, and there wasn't enough to go round.

Nothing to be done about it, either. Right up to the point Li Lan was reborn, the teaching in Minhe never did improve, and tutoring classes weren't yet a thing, so the three of them had always taught themselves — with nobody to ask when they got stuck.

The teachers said more than once that they could come with questions, but middle-schoolers at that age are thin-skinned, and taking a problem up to the front of the room, let alone into the staffroom, took a certain amount of nerve.

Li Cheng and Zhao Xinxin didn't have it, so they rarely asked, and the harder questions simply stayed unanswered.

Li Lan, on the other hand, had spent the last two months trotting up to the front or into the staffroom whenever she had a question, and a good few teachers had revised their opinion of her. They had, in fact, always seen exactly what she was up to from where they stood; they had simply not always said so.

Meng Qinghua in particular had noticed that since term began Li Lan's attitude had become entirely serious — no more outside reading in lessons, and diligent about asking.

To her mind, what Li Lan urgently needed was to revise the basics rather than reaching over her head for hard problems. But as a conscientious teacher she was more than happy to have a student come to her, and hoped Li Lan would make something of this last term.

Having established where her sister needed work, Li Lan took out a notebook and started organising Li Cheng's recurring mistakes by subject, meaning to add similar practice questions and make her a full set of revision notes.

She had barely finished the contents page for maths when a commotion went up in the room. She looked up and found that Chinese had ended at some point and this was the break.

Break or not, hardly anyone had gone out; they were huddled together talking loudly about something. Li Lan, having been absorbed in the notes and never easy to interrupt once she was, turned to her deskmate, who looked thoroughly fed up. "What's going on? Everyone's very excited."

The girl spoke with an air of deep grievance. "Old Ban just came in and said the PE exam's done, so PE lessons are all study periods from now on. And there's a mock exam next Friday. Ugh."

Old Ban was short for form teacher. Nobody knew when it started, but practically every student called theirs that in private, which was a curious phenomenon in itself.

"Ah." Li Lan made a noise of understanding. So that was it. PE becoming study periods was no surprise — it had only been a matter of time — and she'd been expecting a mock too.

Term was nearly two months in and May was almost here. Her own class had finished revising the basics the week before, and while she didn't know how the other classes were doing, it couldn't be far off, so a mock made perfect sense.

And the two months from here to the exam would be papers, going over papers, more papers, going over those.

---

Back at the flat, Li Cheng and Zhao Xinxin were discussing next week's mock too. Li Lan had meant to finish the notes and hand them over at the weekend, but seeing the state of the pair of them, she'd have to wait until the exam was done.

An exam sprung on them like that had both of them braced as if for a siege, while Li Lan carried on with the notes quite unbothered. It sounded a complicated job, but she had the knack of it now: three days later Li Cheng's notes were done, and she started on Zhao Xinxin's with practised ease.

On the Thursday evening a week later, the day before the mock, she finished the second set. Looking at a week's work in front of her, she nodded, satisfied. Done the day before the exam. Not bad going.

With the mock in the morning, she decided to hand them over afterwards. Whether the two of them would actually read her notes did not appear to have crossed her mind.

The next morning Li Cheng and Zhao Xinxin were up half an hour earlier than usual, reading a bit, working a question or two, then going to the window to see whether the school gates were open.

It was the first school-wide mock, and Li Lan had some sympathy for the state they were in — though watching them was still faintly exasperating. She leant on the door frame of Zhao Xinxin's room. "The two of you are this nervous about a mock. What are you going to be like for the real thing?"

"Nervous, obviously." Zhao Xinxin glanced back from the window and returned immediately to watching the gate.

Li Lan was about to say something else when Zhao Xinxin cut in, excited. "They're open. They're open."

Li Cheng came out of the other room at speed. "Open? Right, let's go."

Li Lan followed the pair of them in through the gates. Unlike an ordinary day, the mock ran from morning study right through to the end of afternoon lessons; apart from the overall timing it followed the real exam's durations and order exactly.

Only on the way back afterwards did the two of them relax, and in the course of the walk Li Lan learned that the results would be out on Monday.

---

Monday. Morning reading had just finished and the first English lesson hadn't started when the English teacher came in carrying a stack of papers.

The talking stopped at the sight of her. Li Lan's eyes went to the papers in her arms and she had a fair guess.

"Right, everyone. These are Friday's mock papers. Come up when I call your name."

She began calling names and handing them out. Out of consideration for most of the class she didn't read out the marks, and the bell went just as she finished. She cleared her throat. "Before we go through the paper, a couple of things.

"This was only a small mock, but in format and in difficulty it's much like the real exam, so you can take your mark as a guide and know where you stand. The school rankings are out as well — total and by subject, they'll go up on the noticeboard after lunch, so anyone interested can look for their own place."

She carried on over the murmur that followed. "Let me start with English in this class. We've done rather well. Three of the school's top ten are ours — first, third and seventh."

Some of the class were reading their own papers, but marks and rankings interested everybody, and they watched her for more.

"There's been a good deal of movement in the school rankings this time. A lot of you have improved, and a fair few have slipped. This is where it shows who's been working and who's been idling. Same in this class — plenty of you are well up, and some are down. When you get your results, I want you paying attention to that.

"Third in English in this class and seventh in the school: Guo Yingying." Every envious eye in the room went to a girl with ear-length hair sitting in the middle.

"Guo Yingying is consistent, and this is about where she usually is. I'd like to see you hold that and then push past it."

She looked at Guo Yingying with real satisfaction, encouraged her a while, and then said much the same about the second-placed student, a tall thin boy who nodded seriously.

And then she came to the one everybody was waiting for.

Those two had been trading first and second between them for as long as anyone could remember, and now neither was first? Given what she'd said about the rankings shifting, they'd shifted a good deal.

Some of them wondered whether the one who was usually third had put on a burst and taken it. The girl who was usually third, feeling the eyes on her, looked distinctly uncomfortable. She hadn't done well; English had been hard this time and she'd only got a hundred and ten. It certainly wasn't her.

"And now first in the school, and first in this class as well." The teacher paused, then said it straight out. "That's Li Lan."

"Li Lan did extremely well. Full marks in English — the only student in the school with full marks."

Li Lan had only discovered that on receiving the paper. She'd expected a decent mark but assumed a point or two would go somewhere. As it turned out the marking had been generous — full marks even on the composition — and she was the only one.

The teacher was still going, praising how hard she'd worked lately and telling everyone to follow her example. Teachers love this sort of thing: an ordinary student who works and improves fast.

This one had also taught Li Lan back in the first year, when having studied English ahead of time kept her in the top three — until the novels started and the head start ran out, and she was scraping by on old advantage.

So seeing full marks again, the praise was entirely sincere. Mature soul or not, between that and the sidelong looks from her classmates — supposedly discreet and in fact perfectly obvious — Li Lan kept her face composed while feeling as though she might catch fire.

She held it until the teacher stopped talking and started on the paper itself, and then let out a small breath. Reborn or not, if you're bad with people you stay bad with people, and this was the worst kind of situation.

Today, however, was not going to let her off, because every teacher who taught her after that — whether by arrangement or not — held her up as an example and praised her at length.

They could hardly help it. Apart from three marks lost across Chinese and politics, she had taken first in the school on a total not far off perfect.

After the rankings went up, the class's chemistry teacher remarked in the staffroom, apropos of nothing, "That Li Lan. Last term her chemistry barely scraped a pass, as I recall. These last two months she's been in here asking questions constantly, and now she's got full marks. She really has been working."

Which is how the rest of them learned that the school's newly minted top student was the girl who had been coming to the staffroom with questions for two months. Behaviour like that, plus a result like this — the thing practically writes itself. The classic bad-student-turned-good, exactly what teachers like best. And so Li Lan became the newest inspirational example in the pep talks of a great many Minhe No. 1 teachers.

While she sat holding out under her own classmates' increasingly keen attention, in places she knew nothing about her story was being retold — with embellishments — by teachers in other classes.