Chapter 28

The seven days went quickly, and before they left Song Qiulan boiled an enormous pot of tea eggs for the girls to take. They tried several times to head her off and failed, and had to let her pack them, while she talked the whole time. "Nothing your canteen sells is as good as mine, and these are done properly with real tea. High school's hard work — eat plenty of eggs, they're good for the brain."

Looking at the bags stuffed full, the girls turned to their mother for help. Chen Ying wasn't in the habit of making things for them to take, and couldn't cook them anyway. But Song Qiulan loved feeding the three of them, and would sometimes send food back with them as well.

Li Lan remembered from last time taking a great many tea eggs and still having them four or five days later, and being unwilling to waste them, eating nothing but eggs for a whole day — after which she couldn't look at a tea egg for a long while.

Chen Ying was faintly at a loss herself. To her mind the school had a canteen and, failing that, a shop; nobody was going to starve. But it was kindly meant, and saying so outright would hurt her mother-in-law's feelings, so she put it obliquely. "Mother, don't give them so much. Look, they can't lift the bags as it is — and it's three hours on the road."

The girls nodded pitifully. Their grandmother's cooking was lovely, but the thought of hauling that weight onto a train, then a bus, then from the school gate to the dormitory was suffocating.

Afraid her grandmother would think they didn't want the eggs, Li Cheng put on some indignation. "This is Li Lan's fault. I said we needed to bring thick clothes this time and to pack light, and she wouldn't listen and brought all those books."

Song Qiulan looked at the bags and knew she'd overdone it, but not packing anything wasn't an option either.

In the end they got on the train to Yu city with ten eggs between them. Bags stowed, they set the tea eggs out on the little table between the seats and said, in unison, to Zhao Xinxin, "Here. Have a tea egg."

Zhao Xinxin said nothing.

I suspect you two of treating me as a human food-disposal unit.

---

Their tickets were for the noon train, which got them to Yu No. 1 at four. They unpacked and went to evening study.

Evening study started at six on the first day back, and walking past the other classrooms Li Lan found it noisier than usual — you could hear the talk from the corridor, Class 3 included. Everyone was busy saying where they'd been: those who'd stayed home envied those who'd travelled, those who'd travelled locally envied those who'd left the province, and those who'd left the province envied those who'd left the country.

As usual, Wang Jing came in at a run at nearly six. Why she would rather work up a sweat in October than arrive a few minutes early was a mystery.

She sat down, got her breath and fanned herself with a hand. "Nearly late. That was close."

Li Lan couldn't be bothered to say anything. She'd assumed at first it was occasional; it turned out that for any evening study after a weekend, Wang Jing arrived on the bell without fail. Several conversations had changed nothing, and whatever the attraction at home was, it kept her dawdling until the last possible minute.

Recovered, Wang Jing started on the holiday, and Li Lan glanced at the clock on the board. Evening study had started five minutes ago.

Nobody seemed to have noticed, or heard the bell — or perhaps they'd heard it, seen everyone else in full flow and joined in anyway. Wang Jing, for instance. At any rate, five minutes in, Class 3 was exactly as loud as before.

So when Jiao Wenfu appeared in the doorway looking thunderous, the students with quick eyes fell silent instantly and produced books to study industriously from.

Inside a minute the room was completely quiet, and a set of students who had been animated and full of themselves sat there meek as quails, heads down, writing busily, exchanging the occasional glance with a deskmate. This is bad.

Quail Wang was the first to go quiet. Li Lan had caught sight of a figure watching silently by the window the moment he arrived, and at her nudge Wang Jing had her book out and was making a show of writing before he'd even looked in. The others, a month into their first year, hadn't yet grasped how high school teachers materialise, and only quietened once he was standing in the doorway.

He named several of the loudest offenders from the front without ceremony, and under the lecture Wang Jing stuck her tongue out at Li Lan. She'd been fully as loud as any of them.

Individual examples weren't the end of it. He moved on to the lines every student hears at some point: theirs was the loudest class in the corridor, they should go and listen for themselves, they should learn from Classes 1 and 2, and they were the worst class he had ever taught.

Later they would learn that every teacher says all of this. A month into their first year, Class 3 believed it, and apart from his voice nobody dared move — every one of them a model student, wanting nothing more than to merge with the desk.

Then he undid it in a sentence. "Since you're all so relaxed, let's see how well you did before the holiday. Maths monitor, fetch the papers off my desk. Look at your own marks and then tell me whether you've still got the face to talk in class."

A girl in glasses with a bobbed cut got up and went out. What should have been an eruption stayed contained because he was standing right there, so the class propped books in front of their faces and communicated frantically by eye instead.

Papers. Papers are coming. Terrifying.

She came back shortly with a stack, and the quails uncurled, necks stretching to see.

He took them. "I'm going to hand these out one by one. Those of you who were shouting can have a good look at your marks and see whether you've the face for it."

Perhaps genuinely intending to make the lesson stick, he read out not only names but marks, which made the waiting considerably worse. Everyone regretted the shouting. Now the marks were public. You saw them anyway on the rankings, but written down and read aloud are not the same thing.

Though anyone confident was perfectly happy to have their mark read out and enjoy the envy. Xing Xiaozhen, for one.

She was all for it. She was confident in her maths; the paper hadn't been hard, and even short of full marks she'd surely be in the class's top three.

The papers were sorted by mark, lowest first — and expecting to be near the end, she instead heard her name somewhere in the hundred and thirties.

She looked at him in disbelief. That's not possible. Is that all I got?

She went up quickly, took it, and sat down with her first thought being that he'd added it up wrong. Several passes through the deductions and she had to concede, unwillingly, that the arithmetic was right. So had it been marked wrong?

Only then did she look properly at where the marks had gone. Multiple choice all correct, one blank wrong, two long answers with errors in the working and the answer — none of it hard, all of it things she could do but had never troubled with.

Which reminded her that she'd spent the run-up to the exam on Olympiad problems and hadn't looked at the textbook at all. And a few small slips had cost her that much.

Her hands closed. Bad luck, that was all.

While she was recalculating, the handing-out continued, and soon few were left. The class watched him closely, wanting to know who was still to come.

He picked up the last few. "There are three students in this class above a hundred and forty, which as your form teacher I find embarrassing. Never mind Classes 1 and 2 — compare us with Class 4, which I also teach, and they have four. And with results like that you had the face to sit there shouting."

The class was thoroughly ashamed, convinced they had let him down. What he didn't mention was that while Class 3 had few above a hundred and forty, it had more above a hundred and thirty than any class in the year, and the highest average. That simply wasn't useful to say at present.

The second paper left in his hand was Zhang Qinxin's — second in the class — and she took it under envious eyes and went straight to the deductions.

Having found them she looked thoroughly annoyed with herself. She shouldn't have got that wrong; she hadn't checked. She'd be doing that question five times over.

One paper left. The class looked at it. Second was a hundred and forty-seven. Surely first was full marks?

Amid the speculation he read the last name. "Li Lan. One hundred and fifty."

Li Lan stood up and felt the whole room's attention arrive on her. Unsure whether smiling was appropriate, she kept her face straight on the way up — though anyone who knew her would have noticed she was walking at a distinctly increased rate.

Watching her collect it last, Xing Xiaozhen transferred all her resentment of Zhang Qinxin onto her. Why should a girl from the countryside come first? She had worked hard too, and missed full marks only through carelessness. Li Lan had simply been lucky.

Well — at the provincial league she would leave this country girl far behind. Full marks on a monthly exam meant nothing; a small exam, and she hadn't been trying. If she'd tried she could have had full marks too. She pushed the envy down, shoved the maths paper into her desk, and got out her Olympiad book.

All of which meant the first period ended not long after the papers were handed back, and before Class 3 could get properly into discussing the maths, the other subject monitors were being summoned to collect theirs.

So much for discussion; better to wait until the rest of the executions were over. In a ten-minute break they received Chinese, English and combined sciences as well.

And so, after the National Day holiday, an evening's worth of marked papers hauled a great many unruly minds firmly back.

---

By the third period the whole of Class 3 was working in silence, resolving simultaneously to do better next month.

Wang Jing looked at Li Lan's papers — five marks off Chinese, full marks in English and the sciences — and didn't know what expression to make.

Was her deskmate human? Wasn't she preparing for the Olympiad? How had she done this well in the monthly exam too?

No. She was going to work properly, or she'd start being disgusted with herself even if Li Lan never was.