Chapter 84

Back at the dormitory after saying goodbye to Zhao Qi, packing, Li Lan took a call from her mother. Li Cheng's result was in: Tongji had taken her. After a good deal of agonising last month she'd put Tongji's School of Software as her first choice, and by luck this year's average intake mark matched last year's while the lowest was a few marks below hers — so she'd landed exactly on the bottom of the range. Now they waited for the letter.

On the train, Li Lan opened her QQ space and read her old classmates' posts about their offers. By late July the results were all online, and those who'd done well weren't hiding it. Zhao Xinxin had put Shanghai International Studies first and had evidently got in, which put her in the same city as Li Cheng again. She was about to scroll on when the phone rang.

"Hello? Wang Jing." Her old deskmate.

"Lanlan, where are you?" Wang Jing sounded delighted.

Li Lan smiled at the voice. "On the train home." A year as deskmates and they'd unexpectedly never lost touch; they'd talked when the marks came out, and Wang Jing had done well and had reportedly put down the Communication University of China. Whether she'd got in, Li Lan didn't know.

"I've got good news. Guess."

Li Lan laughed at the barely-suppressed grin in it. "You got into Communication?"

An extravagant laugh came back. "Correct. I'm so happy I could die. You've no idea what my heart was doing this morning when I checked."

Wang Jing went on at length about her morning, and Li Lan caught the mood. "I told you your marks were fine. They weren't far off previous years. There was no need to worry."

Where Li Lan couldn't see it, Wang Jing pulled a face. "I'm not you. Until the result comes out I can't rest for a day. Anyway, this is wonderful — we'll both be in Beijing and we can see each other all the time."

Which pleased Li Lan too. "Good. I'll take you round Beijing."

Wang Jing described what she meant to do there, and then, mid-sentence, dropped her voice. "Listen — a lot of people from our old class are repeating the year."

Which is normal after every entrance exam. Yu No. 1 is one of the province's key schools with a decent record, and it still doesn't stop people repeating: some whose marks disappointed them, who decided the moment they saw them and didn't apply anywhere at all; some who slipped through the tiers, missed the university they wanted, were reassigned somewhere remote and gave it up. Nothing to be done — the entrance exam in a province that size is always brutal.

As though afraid of being overheard, Wang Jing went quieter still. "I hear three people from our old room are repeating. They started tutoring last month.

"Xing Xiaozhen — the one who was always at you — apparently slipped through and says she's repeating. And Deng Yi and Zhu Ranran didn't do themselves justice, so they're repeating too."

At the names, faint impressions surfaced. She hadn't been in that room long and, Wang Jing apart, had lost contact with all of them.

Sensing the lack of interest, Wang Jing changed tack quickly. "You've forgotten everybody from first year, haven't you? Never mind. Tell me how university differs from school. Anything I should watch out for?"

They talked for over half an hour, and afterwards Li Lan looked at the feed a while longer and liked Zhao Xinxin's post and Wang Jing's.

Repeating or moving on, the feed was busy. With applications submitted, anybody who was going anywhere had gone; even Li Cheng had spent a fortnight travelling and posted a great many photographs. Li Lan opened a few, and whether it was her imagination or not, her sister looked considerably darker in the later ones.

---

"God, Li Cheng, have you been to Africa? Look at the colour of you." Coming out of the station and seeing her in the car, Li Lan delivered a warm greeting. It hadn't been her imagination; against the real thing the photographs had been flattering. Li Cheng was several shades down, and grinning made her teeth remarkably bright.

Watching her laugh without a shred of feeling, Li Cheng shut her mouth and rolled her eyes. "You've been to Africa."

Chen Ying turned round from the front. "Don't. She gets angry the moment anyone mentions it. Don't bring it up."

Li Lan carried on cackling, entirely without sympathy. "I sent you several bottles of sunscreen. How did you get this brown?"

When Li Cheng had said she was going travelling, Li Lan had posted her several bottles of Cerulean's. Since launch, between Feng Jiang's heavy marketing and an obvious effect, it had sold hard and was now among the top few online.

Finding Li Lan unstoppable, Chen Ying gave up and turned to talk to her husband. The two of them wouldn't come to blows, and a few words traded were nothing.

Li Cheng pulled a face. "I used it a few times at the start and then couldn't be bothered." With the result that everybody who saw her afterwards remarked on it, her parents worst of all — commenting every time and sniggering, and thinking she couldn't see the looks they exchanged. If they hadn't been her parents she'd have lost her temper long ago, and she hadn't been out of the house since; if Li Lan hadn't been arriving she'd have gone on hiding.

"Serves you right. Lazy." Li Lan wasn't surprised she wasn't used to sunscreen. In the countryside there's no such notion.

Getting brown used to be nothing. It was different now: she'd just left school, was about to start university and was full of expectations of it, and going that dark and being laughed at made a person self-conscious.

"Don't. I regret it enough. Zhao Xinxin went brown too, just not as badly as me." Li Cheng sighed. They'd gone together, nobody had used sunscreen, and she'd come off worst.

"And they say there's military training at university. I thought I'd get as pale as I can in the month I've got, so I don't come out of it black." Attending to her appearance for the first time in her life, she was worried about it.

Seeing genuine distress, Li Lan swallowed the laugh and patted her. "All right, stop worrying. I'll buy you some whitening skincare and some make-up, and you look after it this month."

Li Cheng nodded like a pecking chicken. She'd meant to buy something herself, but had searched online, found far too much and bought nothing. Then her eyes lit up, and she leaned in and studied Li Lan's face and said brightly, "Li Lan, can you do make-up? Teach me. On television people put make-up on and they don't look dark any more."

Faced with those shining eyes in that brown face, Li Lan laughed out loud again. "Ha — yes. Ha—

"When we're back — ha — when we're back I'll teach you—"

"Stop laughing. What's funny?"

"Ha — stop looking at me—"

"I shall be cross in a minute."

And the car pulled away on Li Lan's laughter and Li Cheng's mortified protests.

---

"God, that's a lot of things."

In their bedroom, Li Cheng looked at the row laid out in front of her.

"Well, you wanted to learn make-up. This is what it takes." Li Lan sat her down on a stool and began.

She pointed along the table. "I'm saying this once, so remember it. Toner, serum, lotion, this one's the whitening one — those are every day. Then for make-up, sunscreen, concealer, foundation—"

Li Cheng watched the finger move along the bottles and felt dizzy. "Stop, stop. Slower. I'll — I'll write it down."

She sat obediently with a pen and a notebook, and wrote a line for every item indicated, and looked at the table at the end. "It's far too much." Several things for skincare alone, never mind the make-up; concealer, foundation — it was a fog.

Li Lan held her still. "Sit there. I'll do a little on you. You're dark at the moment so I bought the darkest foundation; in a few months when you're paler you can go lighter."

Li Cheng sat still and let herself be worked on, and only when Li Lan said "done", an hour later, did the two of them look at the mirror together.

"Goodness, why do I look this good?" She couldn't help it. Li Lan seemed to have put false lashes on her and done something with eyeshadow, and it worked — her eyes were bigger, her brows better, her skin looked good. Dark, and none of that got in the way of her admiring herself.

Watching her hold the mirror as though she couldn't put it down: "That's all I can do, mind."

Nothing beside the beauty creators, though a great many videos last time round hadn't been watched for nothing, and she'd practised on her own face when there was nothing else to do. Basic make-up she could manage.

Basic to Li Lan was extremely advanced to Li Cheng — her face looked smaller, her nose straighter — and the more she looked the better she liked it, and she took Li Lan's hand and pleaded. "Li Lan, Li Lan, dear sister, teach me. I want to learn."

Sister brought Li Lan out in gooseflesh, and she knocked the hand away. "Learn, then. It isn't hard. There are videos online."

The trauma having evidently been severe, Li Cheng was still at it when Li Lan left. Beyond practising along with videos, she'd bought a book on making up like a Korean make-up artist, and studied it with total devotion.

With that kind of concentration she picked up the basics quickly — and then it was her mother and sister who suffered, because doing her own face wasn't enough and she needed subjects. Chen Ying was willing at first; who doesn't want to look nice? A week of it and she gave up. It looked well and it took far too long, and afterwards she took long routes round her daughter and refused flatly.

As for Li Lan, she packed up after a fortnight and went back — partly to escape, and partly because the visit had served its purpose and there was a paper to write.