Chapter 11

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After school the next day, I broke routine by not playing basketball and instead sat in the classroom reading. Chen Ruobing didn’t return to the classroom until the clamor outside subsided and the students who lived on campus had already come back for evening study. She walked back to her seat with her head down, then rested her head sideways on her arm.

I walked over, sat down in the seat in front of her, and turned to look at her.

Unexpectedly, glistening tears hung on Chen Ruobing’s eyelashes.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

Chen Ruobing startled and lifted her head. Seeing it was me, she seemed to calm down and laid her head back down. Two streams of tears spilled from her eyes onto her arms.

“I did badly on the Haidian mock exam.”

“How bad?”

“My total score is probably only in Haidian’s top fifty.”

After our district’s mock exam, the teachers continuously gave us practice exam questions from each district to do. Haidian’s citywide top fifty could still enter the top 100, and it was the standard all the schools selected. But for Chen Ruobing, this result meant she had failed.

I didn’t know how to comfort her, and it was then that I knew how much pressure she was under. At the time, I thought the teachers were too cruel. Thinking about it now, I think what they did probably can’t be considered a bad thing. After all, everyone needs dreams and expectations. Even if it’s ten or twenty years later, you will realize that many things are out of your control. Whether you call it luck or opportunity, you have to acknowledge the uncertainty of fate.

From this angle, I could only see her smooth forehead. I reached out and gently touched the top of her head as I offered in a whisper, “Why don’t you come to my house tonight?”

That night, Chen Ruobing and I laid in bed and talked a lot in the darkness. I asked her what she wanted to major in, and she said that she wanted to study medicine and become a surgeon. I was quite surprised and lifted her arm to see if such a slender girl could hold a scalpel.

I smiled and said, “You don’t need to be a top scorer to be a doctor.”

She said, “Yeah, you don’t.”

I asked, “Then do you not want to write novels anymore?”

She said, “You need a diploma to be a doctor, not to write a novel.”

We were silent for a moment, then Chen Ruobing asked, “Why haven’t you been paying attention to your studies lately? You only play around now.”

I blurted out, “Even if I don’t play around, I can’t get into the same school as you.”

There was another moment of silence as Chen Ruobing laid on her side facing me. In the darkness, that curvaceous figure didn’t move a muscle, then a very small voice said, “Just don’t leave Beijing, then we can still see each other often.”

I froze for a moment before saying, “Yeah, I won’t leave Beijing.”

After saying this, we both shifted our bodies until we were lying on our backs.

“What does it feel like to be in love?” In this position, it made Chen Ruobing’s voice sound indistinct, as if it were coming from far away.

I said, “Pretty nice.”

She seemed as if she was waiting for me to continue, but I only said these two words about my relationship with Liu Yufei. After a while, Chen Ruobing said, “There are some things you can only understand once you experience it yourself.”

I echoed, “Yeah, you can only understand once you experience it.”

I didn’t tell her, I have experienced it, and the kisses I’ve had with boys were not as sweet as with you.

The questions on that year’s gaokao were a bit strange, causing the scores to seem to deviate a bit from usual. During the period after the test when the scores hadn’t come out yet, the teacher organized a trip. We had the happiest day of our schooldays that day. I sang karaoke with a few girls for a while then played some poker.

At night, Chen Ruobing and I ran outside the hotel. The resort had a vast lake that was full of lotus flowers, and the moon was so bright that the mountains and ravines ahead could be seen clearly.

Chen Ruobing and I sat by the lake and chatted for a while, then simply sat without speaking. We merely sat there, and as if our hearts were connected, we knew that this may be the most carefree night of our lives.

For some reason, the gaokao results were available early the next day. Consequently, the pleasant atmosphere of our trip ended early. Everyone began making phone calls to get their gaokao scores, and I later heard a girl crying. With this atmosphere, the people who did well held their tongues.

Some people laughed and some people were sad, but it was just too cruel to announce our results gathered together like this.

When Chen Ruobing checked her score, she already knew that she didn’t get the top spot and was far from it, but she wasn’t sad, as if she had long ago foreseen the result

That year, Chen Ruobing was number one in our school and had gotten into Peking Union Medical College as she had hoped, while I followed the norm and got into a Project 211 school in Haidian.

Translator’s Notes

1. Project 211 was a project launched in the 1990s in China in which about 100 colleges were strengthened with the purpose of elevating them to international academic standards by the end of the 21st century and also aimed to support universities in their research standards and capacity.

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