Chapter 1
The usually noisy cell had gone strangely quiet.
Blondie squatted at the edge of the communal sleeping platform and looked me up and down.
“When you say Beida, you don’t mean Hebei University, do you?”
I shook my head.
“Peking University.”
Everyone fell silent again.
After a long while, Dreads, who was crouching in a corner picking at her nails, suddenly sighed.
“Actually, I once had a chance at recommended admission to Peking right in front of me. But I didn’t go.”
She looked world-weary.
“First, I couldn’t stand how dry it is up north.
“Second… I wasn’t the one being recommended.”
Blondie had heard enough.
She went over, grabbed the hair Dreads had painstakingly tied up, and made as if to unravel it.
“Well, if we’re counting that, I only missed getting into Peking by a tiny little bit—
“The cutoff was 769. I got 76.9!”
Dreads covered her head and begged for mercy, pleading with the great warrior to spare her.
I sat at the edge of the sleeping platform and watched them wrestle.
Then I asked, quite seriously,
“You two… went to school?”
They stopped in unison, turned, and glared at me.
Blondie rolled her eyes.
“Obviously! You think street girls are born to street grannies?”
Dreads chimed in.
“You’ve got to learn this stuff, don’t you? Nobody comes out of the womb doing those hand-twirling dances.”
“Oh,” I said flatly.
So that was how it worked.
Blondie sat down again and brought us back to the subject.
“No, I still don’t get it.
“You got into Peking. Shouldn’t your parents be setting off firecrackers, slaughtering a pig for the feast?
“How could they refuse to pay your tuition?”
She was baffled.
“You hardly ever hear of anyone stealing money to go to school these days. Even your enemies would chip in two hundred if they heard about it.”
I lowered my eyes to my cheap market-stall canvas shoes, washed almost white.
It didn’t seem strange to me.
“Because I’m an adult.
“I should have earned my tuition with a summer job, instead of shamelessly asking my family for money.”
Dreads came closer, curious.
“So, if you got a job, what can you do?”
I thought about it.
“I can solve systems of linear equations in three variables. I understand conservation of momentum, balance complex redox equations, and use spatial vectors to prove that a line is perpendicular to a plane.”
Dreads stared, openmouthed.
Finally she blurted out,
“Three yuan for solving one set of equations? Bit of a rip-off, isn’t it?”
After I spent ages explaining what a system of linear equations in three variables was,
she waved a hand.
“All that useless stuff!
“You go to the market for vegetables, what good’s your algebra-and-geometry business going to do you?”
I considered this carefully.
“True. But—
“Doesn’t that also show I haven’t learned it well enough?
“My dad says if you master math, physics, and chemistry, you can go anywhere without fear.
“I haven’t mastered them. That’s why I couldn’t earn five thousand in two months for tuition. All that schooling was wasted on me.”
The corner of Blondie’s mouth twitched violently.
She turned aside and muttered,
“I can’t make that much in two months out there either…”
Then she thought again and brightened.
“Hey, but I didn’t get into Peking! Not earning it isn’t as embarrassing for me. Ha!”