Chapter 55

After a few days at home, Li Lan travelled to Yu city with her parents on the eve of the exam. Her siblings had wanted to come, but only two rooms had been booked, so they were ruthlessly abandoned — a resistance was mounted and put down, and they stayed at home to wait. Li Lan suspected the deciding factor was their father's promise of a family holiday once they broke up.

The seventh of June. A particular sort of day.

Barely into June, and the morning cool vanished as soon as it was light. The traffic, ordinarily snarled by roadworks everywhere, was extraordinarily smooth, with traffic police at every busy junction and around the schools especially.

Look closely and the roads around the schools were nothing like normal: some cars were being turned back at the officers' direction, while others went through unimpeded.

Li Quan took back the exam pass he'd shown, drove in at the officer's signal, and glanced cheerfully at the cars being stopped. "I've driven for years and this is my first taste of special treatment. It's rather nice."

It was his first time accompanying anyone to the exam, and the journey had been an education in what candidates get: free bus travel, taxis with notices offering free rides, controlled streets waving you through on the strength of the pass, and now only candidates' vehicles allowed near the school, and no horns.

Chen Ying put the documents away, checked once more and handed the folder over. "Check again, Lanlan, make sure you haven't forgotten anything." She hadn't been nervous — Li Lan had a university place and the exam was optional — and the solemnity of the morning had made her inexplicably so.

Li Lan joked. "I've checked several times. I only have to not leave it behind."

Which reminded her of last time, when she'd checked everything exhaustively and then, having napped in the car before the second paper, left the entire folder in it. As luck had it her father had something to do and drove off once she was inside, and only at the door of the exam room did she realise, and had to borrow the invigilator's phone; the documents arrived before the exam ended.

She hadn't thought much of it at the time. By her father's account, the sight of them on the seat nearly took his soul out, and driving back he gave no thought whatever to speed limits and got a minibus moving like a sports car.

Back in the present, she stowed the folder carefully. Not this time.

To keep the gate clear, cars could only stop for a minute or two, so she and her mother got out and her father drove on as directed.

Li Lan felt some resignation at her mother getting out too. Beiguan to central Yu city is three hours all told; she'd have been content to sit the two days alone, and her parents wouldn't hear of it.

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By eight the crowd at the gate was growing and the noise with it. The sun wasn't harsh yet, but the ground around her allocated school was bare, which made it brilliant; the gate and everything near it stood fully exposed, and looked unbearable. Anyone who suffered in heat was already streaming, standing in what shade a shopfront gave and fanning with a hand.

The noise, the glare and a cicada somewhere combined into something fretful, particularly for the parents and candidates waiting for the gates. The weather was at least good for the people handing out leaflets, their sheets being ideal fans, however irritating it was to be advertised repeat courses on this of all mornings.

Chen Ying took two without a qualm, folded one and passed it over. "Wretched weather. It's June — why is it this hot? It won't be like this inside, will it?" She sounded worried.

Li Lan thought about it. "There were ceiling fans when I saw the room. It should be all right.

"And don't the two of you wait out here in this. Go back to the hotel."

"All right," said her mother. "Keep your phone. Ring us when you're finished and we'll come for you."

On the subject of hotels: last time her parents had also driven over in the minibus, and since that exam was in a small county town with the venues close together, she'd napped in the car at midday and slept in the school dormitory at night.

This time Yu No. 1 had long since given up her bed, and it was her first time booking a hotel for an exam, so she'd started ringing round two days after the passes came out. Naturally everything near the venue was gone, and they'd ended up with two rooms some distance away at a considerably inflated price.

Both parents were clearly aware of being fleeced and had no alternative, and privately resolved to spend as much of the day in the room as possible. Air conditioning one has paid for should be used.

At twenty past eight the gates opened, and a crowd of faces, nervous or expectant, went in under the hopeful and anxious eyes of their parents, towards the first turning point of their lives.

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Chinese first. Unlike other subjects it rarely produces disasters, though a high mark takes technique, particularly on the multiple choice and the composition. A multiple-choice question is worth three marks at least and five at most; one error costs a great deal and two rule out a high mark.

None of which concerned Li Lan. For somebody who retains what she reads, the questions were straightforward, and since she started sitting exams she had essentially never got one wrong. The composition was easier still: two years of writing novels had done whatever it had done for her literary cultivation, and her prose and her ability to say a thing were not in question. The single difficulty was that after writing novels, saying what she meant completely inside eight hundred characters took some doing.

She worked through in a single pass, and it was fifty minutes in when she started the composition. This year's was a picture prompt about a cat with fish to eat and whether it should still be catching mice.

The most important thing in a high school composition is the line you take. You may be unorthodox; you may not miss the point. Miss it, and no amount of style or fluency will save the mark, in that setting above all.

She wrote her line on the rough paper the moment she read it: duty is to be kept to, and private appetite kept at a distance, or one ends up like the cat in the picture — fat and useless. That settled, the rest was easy, and she moved on to the outline. Or rather, the structure.

Most candidates came out of Chinese looking reasonably relaxed; the afternoon's maths is the real divide. Working the last question, Li Lan could hear stifled crying from the desk in front. She guessed the girl had no tissues; from behind, she was wiping her eyes continuously, the backs of both hands wet, sniffing throughout — until the invigilator couldn't watch any longer and gave her one.

The papers had barely been collected before she gave up holding it in, packing her things and crying at the same time, and still crying when she borrowed a phone from the invigilator. On the way out Li Lan heard that candidates elsewhere had fainted, and that several had been taken away by ambulance.

Waiting outside, having heard a good many people complaining about the difficulty, her mother asked anxiously, "Lanlan, everyone's saying maths was terribly hard this year. How did you find it?"

Li Lan disliked dealing with strangers and was easily pleased with herself in front of people she knew, and produced a smile in vivid contrast to the desolation around her, and said something calculated to earn enemies. "Not hard. Full marks won't be a problem." She was a world champion in the subject; a year on, it hadn't gone anywhere, and the paper genuinely wasn't difficult.

A candidate being interviewed nearby, in the middle of a miserable account of the maths, turned to see who was talking like that. But he wasn't the one who took notice — the interviewer heard it, brightened, and moved to approach, and before she got there Li Lan and her mother had turned away laughing into the crowd, leaving her to watch them go.

She glanced at the camera and had a thought. "Did you get that?" A great many candidates were describing the maths as hellish; a student saying it wasn't hard, at that moment, would attract attention.

The cameraman was uncertain. "I think so." Li Lan had been standing behind the interviewee, who was short and Li Lan tall, so presumably she was in shot.

"We'll look at it back at the studio. If we have it, it's worth running."

Faces weren't blurred in those days, so that evening Li Lan received two photographs from Wang Jing, taken off a television screen. Even at that quality the first showed her grinning smugly at her mother in sharp contrast to the interviewee, with a caption helpfully explaining that one candidate had emerged looking thoroughly relaxed and said full marks in maths would not be difficult.

The second was a photograph taken at Yu No. 1 the previous year when she won the international maths competition, captioned to the effect that the student in question had been a world champion.

One after the other. Li Lan could imagine precisely how the candidates watching that felt.

She sent back a smiling face.

Wang Jing couldn't work out what that smile meant. It was a perfectly friendly expression. Why did it read as mockery?

She was imagining it, obviously. She shook it off and carried on. Thank goodness I'm not sitting it this year. Half the third-years on my feed are saying maths was impossible, and you've gone and rubbed it in — everyone's calling you a monster.

Having teased her a while, Wang Jing knew she had exams and considerately didn't keep her long — although she suspected, no, was certain, that Li Lan wouldn't be revising either way. Still, as a good friend, she signed off.

The sciences and English the next day produced the usual mixture of delight and despair, though no amount of regret about not having worked changes anything once it's over. Some resolved on repeating the year before they'd left the gate; others had decided that whatever the result they were finished with school. Either way, everyone let out a breath.

Li Lan saw her parents waiting at the gate and walked quickly over. As of today, her high school life was formally over.