Chapter 5

It was getting on for midnight by the time Li Lan turned the light off and settled down. After the dark came, Li Cheng spoke quietly from the other side of the bed.

"Li Lan. What do we do if we don't get into high school?"

Li Cheng had only just lain down herself, and her thoughts had gone abruptly out of order, worrying for no clear reason about what would happen if neither of them got in.

She was young but she wasn't blind. Chen Ying and Li Quan never said it outright, but you couldn't miss how much they cared about marks, and Li Cheng was not stupid enough to miss what was expected. At fourteen she could hardly bear to imagine what life would look like if she failed.

Hearing the worry in it, Li Lan thought about the Li Cheng of later years, who deployed her sarcasm freely and had no particular respect for her elder sister — and then about this one, an ordinary middle-schooler fretting about an exam. She grinned in the dark without making a sound.

Then she summoned some elder-sisterly authority. "Don't worry. It's not the university exam. It isn't that hard. Have you ever actually heard of anyone who couldn't get into high school? Worst case you pay a bit extra and go to a fee-paying place."

"You can pay extra and go to a fee-paying place. I was tens of marks over the line in the last mock." Li Cheng bristled.

What Li Lan meant by paying extra was the fee-paying places: for students who cleared the general entry line but fell short of a better school's, you could buy the difference at a hundred yuan a mark and go where you wanted. Even that had limits, though. Fall too far short and money wouldn't help.

"You said it yourself, tens of marks over. So what are you frightened of? You'll get in. Revise properly and you might even manage a school in the city. Stop worrying and go to sleep."

"A school in the city, listen to you. And don't you go reading novels again. Mum and Dad have spent all this money sending us to school in the county town — if we don't get in, they've spent it for nothing." Li Cheng got that in before sleeping.

"Mm." Li Lan made a noise of agreement, thinking with some feeling that even at this stage her sister had no fear of her whatsoever.

Beside her, Li Cheng's breathing steadied and slowed. Li Lan lay with her eyes open a good while before she managed to drop off.

---

Minhe County No. 1 Junior Middle School stood directly opposite the flat, with one road between. It was an open campus, so lessons only started at seven, and the gates opened at ten to. Anyone early had to wait outside — but the girls could see the gates from their window, so there was no need to rush out.

Li Lan watched the parents and students gathering at the gate, glanced at the books in her cloth bag, and felt her heart pick up a little. She seemed to have become a pie chart: three parts anticipation, three parts excitement, four parts nostalgia.

When the gates opened she called to her sister and Zhao Xinxin, and the three of them set off with a cloth bag each.

For all that it was one of the best middle schools in the county, Minhe wasn't a prosperous place, so the best middle school amounted to three teaching blocks side by side and a sports ground. A dirt sports ground, at that.

The school was extended later and most of the buildings she knew disappeared, so Li Lan had never been back after she left. Walking in through the gate she'd expected to remember nothing at all — and then she saw the teaching blocks, and the sealed-up memories surfaced at once. She knew exactly where her classroom was.

Except—

Li Lan stood in the doorway, listening to the recitation going on inside, looking at Year 9 Class 3 on the door and hesitating. This was her class all right. Ground floor, next to the staffroom.

But which was her desk? Finding the classroom at all, she felt, was already a fair achievement. Asking her to find the seat was pushing it.

"Morning, deskmate. What are you standing in the doorway for? The bell's about to go — get in."

While she was loitering there trying to recall it, someone tapped her shoulder and a girl's voice came from behind her.

Li Lan turned and got a good look. No, no recollection at all. Having spent middle school either reading novels or asleep in lessons, she'd had few friends and remembered none of her classmates' faces — but going by that greeting, this was the person she sat with.

She gave the girl a brilliant smile and stepped aside to clear the way. "Morning. You first. You go on in." The girl found it slightly odd, but with the bell about to ring she didn't press it, and went in ahead of her.

Li Lan followed gratefully. The girl walked all the way to the fourth row from the back before turning and sitting down on the inner side. Li Lan looked at the places on either side of her. The one on the right was taken. The one on the left, next to the aisle, was empty.

She looked at the empty desk. There were a few books on it, held upright between bookends, and her eyes were good enough to make out her own name on a spine. So that was her seat.

She sat down, reassured, and the bell went not long after. The recitation in Year 9 Class 3 grew steadily louder as more students arrived, and Li Lan got out her Chinese textbook and started on the classical poetry.

Shortly after the bell, several teachers came past the room from the staffroom next door, talking and laughing. Li Lan had just opened the book, ready to attack the poems she'd almost entirely forgotten, when someone came in at the front door.

She couldn't have described the face beforehand, but she knew at a glance that this must be their form teacher, Meng Qinghua. Meng Qinghua looked around the room, pleased with the volume of the recitation, walked a couple of circuits, then stood at the front and clapped her hands. The reading dwindled and stopped.

Li Lan looked up with everyone else. Meng Qinghua leant both hands on the desk, swept her eyes round the room, cleared her throat, and began. "Right, everyone. Just a couple of things—"

Li Lan knew what was coming the moment she opened her mouth. It was the usual stuff, turned over and over: only a good high school leads to a good university; one more mark now is a hundred yuan you don't pay later; one more mark moves you up a hundred places in the county, in the whole city. Across two lifetimes she had heard a great deal of this and was long since immune.

Mercifully Meng Qinghua knew time was short, and after a few rousing minutes of it she stopped, and the sound of recitation started up again. Li Lan couldn't tell whether she was imagining it, but it seemed a good deal louder than before. So the pep talk did work, apparently.

---

Morning reading ended at ten to eight, with ten minutes' break, and the first lesson at eight was physics, taught by Meng Qinghua.

She began by outlining the plan for the final term. Being the last term of the third year there was nothing new to learn, so the emphasis would be on revision: back through the earlier material first, then two months of going over the important parts, then papers and more papers, worked and explained.

The other teachers' plans turned out to be much the same — a thoroughly conventional revision schedule. A bit dull, and exactly what Li Lan wanted.

Which was how the girl beside her came to discover, with some astonishment, that the deskmate who used to spend lessons asleep or reading comics and novels was today neither dozing nor reading, but listening. Actually listening.

So even she has the wind up in the last term, the girl thought — and then took a comic out of her desk drawer and started reading it. One Li Lan had lent her, as it happened. Her own marks wouldn't get her into high school anyway, and she'd already decided on a vocational school, so it made no difference whether she listened, and a comic passed the time.

---

Being a day school, Minhe No. 1 had no evening study period, and lessons finished at five.

After a full day of them Li Lan went back to the flat, dumped her bag on the sofa, and headed straight back out. She met Li Cheng coming up as she went down the stairs.

"Off to eat already? Aren't you waiting to go with Xinxin?"

"No, you two go. I've got something to do." Li Lan carried on down.

"What something? You're not off borrowing novels again?" Li Cheng looked down at her, suspicious.

"No." Li Lan said the one word and went out through the stairwell door, leaving her sister to unlock the flat muttering to herself. "Hmph. It had better not be."

She genuinely wasn't going to the bookshop. She was going to look for plants she hadn't collected. The county town was small, but it still had more species than the village did — flowers especially.

She'd only picked up two at school today: a silk tree planted in front of the teaching block, and one of the commonest bits of municipal greenery. A long way short of what she wanted, so she'd decided to spend the time after lessons seeing how many more she could gather, and build up her attribute points.

Her luck held. Small as the place was, there was a florist's on a corner — mostly stationery inside, but a glance took in a good dozen kinds of plant.

Li Lan spotted the shop, all fifteen square metres of it, and went in with her eyes lighting up. The owner was a woman in her thirties who glanced up lazily and didn't bother greeting her. A middle-schooler was obviously not going to buy much. A cactus, at the outside.

Sure enough, the woman's mouth turned down. What was there to keep touching? "What are you after, then? I'll find it for you. You go pawing at them like that and knock the leaves off, and I can't sell them."

Li Lan let go of the leaf she was holding and said, sheepishly, "Nothing. Just looking." Her soul might have come from twelve years hence, but she still felt bad about handling someone's stock for free — and buying anything was beyond her.

Under the woman's disapproving eye she held out a few more minutes, then couldn't face leaving empty-handed and bought a very small cactus on the way out.

Her pride had taken a small knock. But looking at the points balance on her personal information page, Li Lan hugged the cactus and smiled until her eyes were two happy lines.