Chapter 22

Back in the dormitory after the meeting, Li Lan found the stiff quiet of earlier had loosened considerably. The room had got noticeably livelier.

"We hardly said anything in class, and we weren't sitting together — shall we do introductions in here, so we know each other a bit?" Jiang Yun suggested it once everyone had washed and was accounted for, from the lower bunk.

She was plainly livelier and more outgoing than the rest; the early departure had been her idea too.

"I'll start. I'm Jiang Yun, I'm from Yu city and I was at middle school here, so I know the place — ask me anything, I've got plenty of friends here." She said it warmly.

"I'm from Yu city too. Zhang Qinxin." The speaker was in the top bunk opposite, a quiet, gentle girl with a thin voice to match.

Then Wang Jing, beside Li Lan, raised a hand. "Wang Jing. Also Yu city, but I was at No. 7."

The suggestion turned out to be a useful one; the eight of them were a good deal less distant afterwards, and Li Lan had a rough map of the room.

Deng Yi and Zhu Ranran, from the same school as Jiang Yun but different classes, were in the lower bunks opposite. Below Wang Jing was Xing Xiaozhen, who like Li Lan had come from a small county town.

And in the bunk beside Zhang Qinxin was Jiang Wenyan, the quietest in the room, whose introduction was her name and where she was from and nothing further.

Once round the room, and apart from Li Lan and Xing Xiaozhen, all six of the others were Yu city natives. Xing Xiaozhen wasn't, but she'd come up from a county town not far away.

She had, though, seemed to leave out where she was from, whether deliberately or not — and Wang Jing, plainly not noticing, asked her directly. "Xiaozhen, whereabouts is your home?"

Li Lan couldn't see her face, but Xing Xiaozhen was silent a moment before saying vaguely that it was a county town nearby.

After which she said nothing for a long while — and only rejoined the conversation once Li Lan had volunteered that she came from the countryside.

It was only a few sentences, but Li Lan had the distinct impression that Xing Xiaozhen was using her to recover some confidence. Having considered what she was after, Li Lan smiled to herself, amused.

Nobody else was thinking that hard, and nobody noticed the change in her. They turned to tomorrow's military training instead, Wang Jing and Jiang Yun batting it back and forth — whether it would be fun, whether a week was too short. Li Lan shook her head. Girls, so young. A week from now you'll know what it is to have a lifelong enemy.

The subject wandered, as subjects do, and after lights-out somebody in the dark said the name of a Korean boy band, and the room that had gone quiet erupted in agreement.

The Korean wave was just starting to blow, and Korean boy groups had swept up a great many girl fans. Listening, Li Lan counted the participants going from two to five — even soft-spoken Zhang Qinxin and silent Jiang Wenyan put in the occasional word.

Working off a hazy memory, Li Lan could contribute here and there. Young and foolish at the time, she'd followed them for a while herself, exactly like Jiang Yun, and bought plenty of magazines.

Down in her bunk, listening to the enthusiasm, Xing Xiaozhen turned over and over. She didn't recognise a single one of these Korean stars.

She might have come from a county town next to Yu city, but a county town is a county town. Her Mandarin wasn't good and she didn't dare say much, afraid the others would look down on her accent. Thinking of Li Lan, up from the countryside, made her feel a bit better. At least she was from a town — a girl from the countryside had probably scraped in on the line, and she could help her out when she had time.

A whole evening of talk also taught Li Lan a good deal about Yu No. 1. One thing was that although it hadn't been mentioned during admissions, the school inevitably had what people called fast classes — also known as experimental classes, or top classes. Classes 1 and 2 of the first year were the fast ones, made up of the hundred highest-scoring students in the intake, and reshuffled once a year on results.

Without the deduction Li Lan's mark would have put her in a fast class comfortably; with it she'd landed in an ordinary one. So had the others — but from the way several of them talked about getting into a fast class as their target, she guessed their marks were all fairly good.

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Military training at Yu No. 1 started with a roll-call and assembly at half past seven, followed not by training but by laps of the sports ground, then breakfast, with training proper from nine to eleven.

All of which the form teacher had covered at the meeting, so when the alarm went at half six Li Lan's eyes opened and she sat straight up.

Apart from a very few students, most had no phone and the school didn't allow them anyway, so alarms were the traditional bell sort — the kind that goes off like the end of the world.

The benefit of Spirit at a hundred showed itself immediately: half six in the morning and Li Lan was entirely alert. She got down, picked up her toothbrush and started brushing, and the rest of the room began hauling themselves out of bed looking exhausted. No surprise there: they'd talked until nearly midnight, and after a summer of lie-ins, six-thirty was a shock.

Coming back from washing, she found Wang Jing still lying down. She stood on a stool and patted the motionless bunk beside her own. "Wang Jing. Time to get up."

Wang Jing opened one eye, looked towards the balcony and muttered miserably. "Mm. Is there a queue at the taps? There'll be a queue. I'll get up when you've all finished."

"No." Li Lan was unmoved. "We're not waiting once we're done. You'll be walking over on your own."

Wang Jing's eyes opened properly. "Li Lan. You're heartless."

"You're the one who told me to wake you. Come on, sit up. Down you come."

Sufficiently harassed, Wang Jing gave up on sleep, rubbed her eyes, put on the glasses beside her pillow and went to wash.

At seven the residents of 205 walked to the sports ground together, and at half past, once the ranks were straight, a whistle went and military training began.

After nine, shouted commands rolled around every corner of the school. Attention. Left turn. Right turn.

Ten to five in the afternoon.

"Hands flat against your trouser seams. Chest out, head up, stomach in. Ten minutes at attention — begin." On the ground, under a hard sun, sweat fell drop by drop while students in training fatigues stood motionless — mostly because moving wasn't an option. Move once where the instructor could see and it was another ten minutes. Nobody could afford it.

Ten long minutes, and at the word stand easy the whole lot of them, who had been standing perfectly well a moment earlier, sagged as if something had been drained out of them.

At the bell Li Lan let out a breath. How was this still so tiring with Stamina up?

Back in the dormitory, the people who had been chattering cheerfully that morning came in one quieter than the next. The first day of training had plainly exceeded the imaginations of a thoroughly pampered set of students.

"Well, they weren't wrong about it. Military training is killing." In the canteen, Wang Jing sat on a stool and drank some water. By rights she should have been starving, and instead she had no appetite at all — and at the thought of six more days of it, she felt she'd have no appetite for tomorrow's meals either.

"You're sure you don't want anything?" Li Lan checked again. Being much the same height, the two of them had been near each other in the ranks, and after a day of that plus neighbouring bunks, Wang Jing had decided Li Lan was a friend — and friends go about together. Hearing Li Lan say she was going to the canteen, she'd come along despite having no appetite.

It wasn't only them; the others had all paired off for their own reasons, so only the two of them had come. Or rather, only Li Lan had.

Wang Jing shook her head. "I can't. If I'm hungry later I'll get something from the shop under the dormitory." High-schoolers then weren't like their successors; nobody had any concept of watching their figure. You ate when you wanted to.

"All right. I'm done, let's go." Li Lan cleared her tray and they walked to the classroom — because training or no training, the rules said evening study.

There she found students going back and forth carrying books, and from Jiang Yun learned that tonight's task was handing out textbooks.

Ninety-nine per cent of the class, Li Lan included, had bought a set over the summer, but there is still something about being issued new ones that buying your own doesn't provide.

Class 3 was slow about it, and the noise of the distribution meant nobody heard the bell — with the result that on the first day of term the class got a dressing-down from a black-faced Jiao Wenfu.

"All this noise over handing out books. Listen — is any other class talking? I walked the whole corridor and ours is the worst."

Wang Jing pulled a face at Li Lan under the desk, tore off a scrap of paper, wrote on it and passed it over.

Li Lan looked. In small round handwriting: our form teacher's very strict.

It had been a long time since she'd passed notes, and she wrote back, unable to help herself, adding an emoticon left over from a later decade: He is. QvQ

Wang Jing's reaction was immediate. She had never seen such a thing in her life and understood it instantly.

Lanlan, how did you think of QvQ? came back at once.

Faced with her look of pure discovery, and obscurely charmed, Li Lan silently returned: \(≧▽≦)/