Chapter 9

"Come on, Lanlan, get up there and let's see what you weigh now."

The next day, being used to early rising, Li Lan ate and went over to the scrap station to find her parents.

Chen Ying had just taken in a load from one of the pedlars, and the different sorts lay sorted into heaps at her feet. Seeing her busy, Li Lan said hello and then, without waiting to be asked, bent to throw the loose plastic bottles into a big woven sack.

Chen Ying answered her and handed the pedlar his money. The man looked at Li Lan. "Is this your girl, Chen? She's a lot thinner."

He came often, and Li Lan having been on the plump side, he remembered her.

"That's right, my eldest. She's got the exam coming, hasn't she. She does look thinner." Chen Ying looked her daughter over, taking stock.

Li Lan threw the last bottle in and said she didn't mind. "Go on then, I'd like to know myself."

There'd been no chance to weigh herself in the county town and she was curious. Her mother had often had her stand on the scale in her last life too — only then the interest had been in how much she'd put on since the last visit.

Li Lan stood on the red platform scale and watched her work. Electronic scales weren't common yet and the station's was the manual kind. As soon as she stepped on, the empty beam swung up.

Chen Ying fetched a fifty-kilo weight and hung it at the end of the measuring arm, and the beam dropped back down with a clack. Then she bent and edged the sliding weight along, a little at a time, until the arm floated slowly level.

Li Lan bent to look, though she'd long forgotten how to read one of these and had only a vague impression. "That's over a hundred, isn't it? A hundred and what?"

Chen Ying checked the scale. "A hundred and two. You were a hundred and twenty when you left, weren't you. And now you're a hundred."

The pedlar, still there, was surprised. "That's twenty jin, Chen. That's a real difference."

"I know. Two months, that's all. Is the studying wearing you out?" There was real concern in it. She'd seen Li Lan yesterday and noticed the change, but a number landed differently.

"You hardly need to ask. Your girl's done that with studying — twenty jin in two months, think what that takes. That's too much off you, love. Studying matters, but so does your health," the pedlar said, turning to Li Lan.

"She and her sister are at school in the county town. Bound to be more pressure than the school here," said Chen Ying, with a thread of pride in it.

"True enough, I'd forgotten. The county schools must be hard going." The pedlar knew how to talk, and had caught her meaning off the back of her own sentence.

Li Lan listened to the pair of them with some resignation, though she was used to her mother's small vanities and knew she liked to hear nice things.

"You get on, Mum. I'll go and stack the beer bottles." Another pedlar was coming up behind with a three-wheeler, so Li Lan stepped off the scale.

"Hang on, don't rush off. Let me see whether you've grown." Chen Ying stepped back and looked her over carefully.

"Have I? Measure me, Mum." Height mattered to Li Lan almost as much as weight, and she couldn't help being curious.

Interest thoroughly caught, Chen Ying went in for a tape measure. "Stand up straight. Let's see."

Li Lan held the end of the tape down with her foot, and her mother straightened up and drew it to the top of her head. "One sixty-eight. That's taller, isn't it?"

Li Lan was delighted. "One sixty-eight? That's two centimetres."

Neither of her parents was short — Li Quan was getting on for one eighty, and even Chen Ying was a little over one seventy — so none of the three children had ever been small. But growing outwards through puberty had left Li Lan at one sixty-six last time. Not short by most standards, but the shortest of the three at home, since Li Cheng reached one seventy in high school and Li Jingyu was one eighty-three by the time he left.

Two extra centimetres was an unlooked-for bonus. If she'd started losing weight earlier, Li Lan reckoned, she might even have made one seventy.

With the measuring done, Chen Ying went back to taking in scrap and Li Lan started hauling things into the yard.

She'd shifted a load of plastic bottles and a load of cardboard before Li Cheng and Li Jingyu, who had got up rather later, drifted over. Chen Ying measured Li Cheng as well: one sixty-five, only three centimetres behind her sister — and Li Cheng was fourteen and still growing, so one seventy looked a certainty this time round.

After two thoroughly easy days at home, at five on the Sunday afternoon Li Lan and Li Cheng got on the bus back to Minhe with a great heap of food from their grandmother and mother.

Zhao Xinxin hadn't travelled with them because her parents ran a business in a different town, and there was no direct bus to it from the county town. So although she'd come back to Beiguan with them on the Friday, she'd gone on to the other town the next day, and had to take an earlier bus back.

Which is why Zhao Xinxin already had her things unpacked by the time the sisters reached the flat.

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"Two months to the exam, now the PE's out of the way." The three of them were sprawled on the sofa after dinner, talking, which they hadn't done in a while. Zhao Xinxin sighed as she said it.

Li Lan did the arithmetic. The date was fixed: the twenty-fifth of June. Two months exactly.

"How's your revision going?" They each studied in their own corner, so she had no idea.

"All right, I think. I'm twenty or thirty marks up on the mock papers," said Li Cheng, after thinking about it.

"Same. I think the way we're revising is working," Zhao Xinxin added.

Li Lan considered it with her head down. Neither of them had been doing badly to begin with — somewhere around five hundred and twenty or thirty, and on a good day five fifty, even five sixty. The key high school in Minhe had a line around four eighty, so by the standards of Minhe No. 1 that was comfortably upper tier, and both of them were pleased with it.

It wasn't enough for Li Lan. The high schools in Minhe were too poor, and Minhe had never been her target. Getting somewhere better, in the city, meant going higher still: five hundred and eighty at the very least before you could even apply.

She herself was in no real difficulty now. Barring accidents, she was confident of full marks. But the other two were still low — though she was a special case, and no use as a comparison.

And everyone knows how marks work: four hundred to five hundred is easy, and another twenty or thirty on top of five fifty is twice as hard, because by then the basics are all in place.

That was exactly where the two of them were. Which meant the next stretch needed to be aimed squarely at them.

"Let me have a look at a few of the papers you've done lately," she said.

"What do you want our papers for?" The two of them turned to look at her, puzzled.

"Mm — for reference. Two each that you've already done is fine." Li Lan kept it vague.

"All right, I'll dig some out in a bit." Zhao Xinxin agreed readily, without questioning it.

"I'll find you some too." Li Cheng thought nothing of it either, assuming simply that there were questions Li Lan couldn't do and wanted to compare.

"Although — Li Lan, two months and no novels, honestly? Don't you want to?" Zhao Xinxin gave her a teasing look.

"I do." Li Lan said it looking pointedly at her sister, and sure enough found Li Cheng glaring at her.

"But it's out of the question. The novels being written now are no good. I've seen through it."

Li Cheng huffed. "Even if they were good you're not reading them. If you do, I'm telling."

"Ha. Imagine if you'd given it up sooner," said Zhao Xinxin, who genuinely thought it a shame.

"It's not too late. My marks are going up fast lately," said Li Lan, praising herself without a blush.

"Studying that hard, they'd better be, or you'd be thick as a pig. Do you still sleep in lessons?" Li Cheng knew perfectly well how much work her sister had been putting in, and let the boast pass unusually, asking about lessons instead.

Li Lan's sleeping through lessons, back when she was reading novels, had never been a secret.

"Gave that up ages ago. I'm not up late, so why would I be tired in class?" said Li Lan, brazenly, having slept through two periods of Chinese only days earlier.

"Oh yes?" They weren't in the same class, so suspicion was all Li Cheng had.

"Look at you, never believing her. She's been working every single day, haven't you noticed?" Zhao Xinxin came in on Li Lan's side.

"That's because she's a famous champion sleeper. I'll tell you what — Dad says that once, at the end of primary, all the other children had gone home and she hadn't. Mum and Dad were frantic, they thought something had happened to her. And they went out looking and found her asleep hugging a tree, drooling." Li Cheng delivered it straight to Zhao Xinxin.

"Ha — really? Is that true?" Zhao Xinxin, hearing it for the first time, laughed without the slightest regard for the subject of the story sitting beside her.

The subject of the story felt nothing much about it. Even the embarrassment belonged to a previous life, and she'd now heard the anecdote across two of them. She had no recollection of it whatsoever — and as long as she didn't admit to it, the humiliation was somebody else's.