[IMG] [https://i.imgur.com/N10LoQk.png?1]
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180 minutes of examiniation time passed by in a flash, and Lin Xiaorui sat blankly in her chair with her hands almost twitching in cold sweat.
Never in her life had she ever left so many questions blank on a test, even if it was just a single section on a practice mock exam.
It left a sour taste in her mouth.
Technically, this outcome shouldn't have been surprising since Lin Xiaorui hadn't even glanced at any classical Chinese for nearly the past nine years, and obviously couldn't remember any of the mandatory texts back from high school. Organic chemistry was only slightly better, as the general rules were vaguely more predictable, but Xiaorui struggled nonetheless with remembering the various differences amongst the numerous named reactions, Kolbe-Schmidt, Gattermann-Koch, Dieckmann condensation, or whatever.
Xiaorui felt sick to her stomach when she roughly calculated in her head the score she estimated she would receive -- somewhere between 78 to 83 percent, she figured -- which was an utter and absolute failure by her personal standards. She doubted she would even make it onto the ranking list this time, which would definitely raise eyebrows amongst her peers and teachers.
When Xiaorui was in high school, she had always been a top student, always placing among the first or second rank among her classmates.
Xiaorui attended the top preparatory school in the prefecture as well, so naturally it was a given that the coursework at her school was harder and more demanding than the curriculum of similarly aged youth in typical high schools across China. Zhejiang province was furthermore known for its competitive academics, and the cutoff for university admission was several points higher than the score required at other provinces. [1]
This was also the reason why virtually everyone at Xiaorui's high school attended cram school, even though it was summer vacation.
Every single one of Xiaorui's hyper-competitive classmates had their eyes set for one of the top universities in China.
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"Yo, Lin Xiaorui, I betchu ripped through that last problem from the morning session like it was a piece of cake, right?"
Xiaorui looked up from her head buried in her arms.
This was Wang Jinyun, one her "rival" classmates from high school, who was presently leaning on the side of Xiaorui's desk.
"Jinyun, I know you've got a total yandere-like obsession with Xiaorui's test scores, but let the dude rest. Can't you see the bags under his eyes?" Another voice called out from the side. This was Zhang Hongwei, another one of his classmates.
"He probably stayed up memorizing every last line of the textbook even though he would have scored a 97% without even studying in the first place. Seriously, man! Perfectionists!"
"Hmph! The morning session of the mock exam wasn't even hard this time anyways."
"Yeah, sure, sure~ I bet you didn't score any better than a 93, Jin, no matter what you say!" Hongwei called out.
Xiaorui sighed as she slowly straightened herself in her seat.
God, this was pain. She had almost forgotten about all the self-proclaimed "rivals" and "friends" she had during high school. They were such a headache to even listen to. Xiaorui hardly even remembered how she had managed to deal with such a crowd in the past.
What was it again?
Oh right, there was the "mask".
As long as Xiaorui wore that "mask", everything would be okay.
Nobody would ask any too many questions and nobody would bother her any more than the bare minimum necessary. With a mask, she deflect the attention away and have peace and quiet to herself.
Xiaorui felt slightly repugnant, but she forced the plastic mask onto her face nonetheless.
She initiated the escape sequence with a fabricated smile.
"Sorry guys, my stomach doesn't feel very good right now," Xiaorui started, and then paused. "I think both of you beat me on this exam this time for sure, since I left about a tenth of the questions blank too, so... please excuse me, I'm going to the bathroom."
Xiaorui abruptly stood up from his desk at this point.
A concerned look flashed through Zhang Hongwei's ever-perceptive eyes.
"Seriously?" He said. "Did you catch a stomach bug? You weren't looking like yourself this morning either. Do you need to go to the nurse's office? Maybe you can talk to the teacher to see if you can go home and maybe retake the exam another day? It's really unlike you to leave part of an exam blank. It's not like anybody doubts that you already know all the coursework by heart already."
Wang Jinyun cut in at this point, still antagonistic. "There's no way that's going to happen. If Xiaorui gets a retake, I want one too! All I need is to fake a stomach bug, right?"
Hongwei silenced Jinyun with a glare.
Xiaorui did not respond immediately, and only shook his head back in forth.
"Thanks Hongwei, I really appreciate it, but Jinyun is right. There aren't any excuses for doing poorly on an exam."
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Halfway on the route to the bathroom, Xiaorui heard the sound of quick footsteps approaching from behind him in the hallway.
"Rui!"
Xiaorui turned around.
A long-haired freckled girl wearing glasses was standing alone in the corridor with her eyes narrowed darkly.
A flicker of distaste passed through Xiaorui's pupils transiently, but they quickly reverted to their empty neutral expression in less than a heartbeat. The "mask" was absolutely indispensible in situations like these.
Especially when it came to dealing with the poisonous snake, Li Fenghua.
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There was a brief moment of silence.
"I heard what you said in the classroom. Is it really true that you left so many questions in the morning session blank?" The girl asked.
Lin Xiaorui slowed his footsteps, and then responded ambiguously.
"I have a lot of stuff going on. All of us have our bad days every once in a while. I just need take some time before I can return to my ordinary self."
The shadows under Fenghua's eyes darkened.
"There really is something weird about you today," she murmured, almost too quietly for Xiaorui to hear.
"I can't have my valedictorian boyfriend failing mock exams!"
Li Fenghua's tone of voice suddenly took an abrupt turn as she declared this aloud, almost in an exaggerated fashion.
Xiaorui froze then, realizing at that point that Fenghua had effectively announced her intentions on their figurative imaginary chess board.
After returning to high school from nine years in the future, he had essentially forgotten how delicately he had maintained his social relationships back in his youth.
He had gotten careless.
He had also underestimated the degree that the past could change from his own memories. The fact that Xiaorui had already done so poorly on the mock exam, which could have never possibly happened in Xiaorui's original past, had already completely derailed the course of the future. The takeaway lesson here was that Lin Xiaorui's present reality was clearly an entirely different world from his original one, and he couldn't count on his old memories to reliably predict the events of the future. Things had already changed in ways that were completely unrecognizable.
A conversation like this had never occurred in Lin Xiaorui's original past.
"Do we have to talk about this here?" He finally said after choosing his words slowly.
"Of course, this is an emergency. It requires immediate action." Fenghua said bluntly.
Xiaorui glanced left and right in the hallway, confirming that they were truly alone.
"Fenghua, I can't deal with all of your maddening schemes. Not right now. Not anymore. I have more than enough problems to deal with. Both of us know that this fake charade is meaningless." He whispered almost spitefully.
The freckled girl wordlessly grabbed Xiaorui's arm and silently pulled him into the men's restroom.
"I still have use for you," she said emotionlessly. "I still have leverage over you, and fully plan on taking advantage of it. You don't realize how inconvenient it would be for me if your academic rank dropped. This is business after all. You should thank me because it's good experience for the real world where the political schemes actually cut-throat, not little innocent fun and childish games like this."
"..."
"Right dear? My secretly homosexual fake 'boyfriend'? Your diaries really are the most adorably tragic things. I can share all the sentimental letters you hidden up to this point with your beloved Long Yangsun anytime you like, sweetie."
"I'm not gay."
Li Fenghua snorted. "If you're not gay, what are you, an eggplant?"
"My feelings are my feelings. It has nothing to do with gender, and it's my own private business."
Lin Xiaorui tightened his fists, trying to resist the emotions that had boiled up from sweeping him away from thinking rationally.
Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
He wasn't a 16-year-old child anymore. Xiaorui was a 25-year-old who had returned to the past, and he couldn't allow himself to make the same immature mistakes he had fallen into before.
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Li Fenghua was a strange girl. Malicious, precociously intelligent, undeniably selfish, the ultimate black-bellied drama queen, yet also the the single person whom Xiaorui was closest to in the past. He had practically grown up with her since elementary school, after all.
From an outside perspective, they might have seemed like flowery innocent childhood friends brought together by family circumstances, the ideal perfect children of their respective strict traditional families in the spotlight. However, only the two of them alone knew how truly bitter, poisonous, and toxic the true relationship was between them in private.
Fenghua's family was involved in local CCP [2] regulatory politics. They were heavily connected with investment in high-speed railways in Zhejiang province, which was inevitably going to lead to the opening of the highly successful Shanghai-Hangzhou high-speed railway by 2010. [3]
This incidentally also pit her family's sponsorship in direct competition with the proposed Shanghai-Hangzhou maglev line [4], a project that Lin Xiaorui's own father was involved with as a Japanese foreign engineer. In the past, both Xiaorui and Fenghua had been highly sensitive to the fact that technically Fenghua's parents held an uncomfortable amount of power over the career prospects of Lin Xiaorui's family, which naturally influenced the relationship dynamics between the two children.
It should also probably be mentioned that Li Fenghua's father was an especially over-protective helicopter parent, maintaining a strict curfew and closely monitoring everything Fenghua involved herself with. He even had access to the passwords of all of Fenghua's social media, QQ [5], and email accounts, and he regularly checked them to ensure that his daughter hadn't deviated from the "righteous path".
Being the slippery snake that Fenghua was though, she was inevitably bound to find her own creative ways to escape the confines of strict parental supervision sooner or later.
This was where Xiaorui's role came in.
A sequence of events back in middle school led to Fenghua discovering far too much personal information about Xiaorui, which she pragmatically used as ammunition to "politely ask" Xiaorui to become her "study buddy". Naturally her parents approved of it due to Xiaorui's spotlessly shiny academic record and studious reputation. It also helped that their families were close.
The excuse, "studying with Xiaorui" thus became Fenghua's primary ticket to freedom during middle school, which naturally evolved into a highly elaborate web of complicated lies as the years passed. Deceit was Fenghua's specialty after all, and after a certain point their relationship had evolved to the complicated status of "high school lovers but secretly hiding it from the parents" even though technically Fenghua's parents were tacitly aware of the fact even though they didn't think their daughter realized it, although in actuality Fenghua had masterminded everything from the beginning including the fact that the secret relationship was entirely fake in the first place, on top of the fact that Xiaorui and Fenghua actually hated each other.
Yes, it was complicated.
But complicated might as well have been Fenghua's last name.
She was a treacherous snake that wore the skin of a white rabbit.
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Li Fenghua dragged Xiaorui into a bathroom stall.
"I have no idea what's going on with you today, nor do I care, but you're going to take these two pills, and this deeply concerned 'girlfriend' will take her beloved 'boyfriend' back home since you were too sick to focus on today's exam properly."
She pulled out two boxes of pills from her bag and retrieved a single capsule from each.
"What's that?" Xiaorui asked.
"Medicine."
"That's a lie," Xiaorui said flatly.
"Suit yourself. The first is syrup of ipecac [6], which is an ordinary over-the-counter emetic derived from herbal rhizome. It will cause you to vomit. The second is a high dose of vitamin B3 (niacin) [7], which will cause your face to look flushed. Both are harmless. Take the emetic before the niacin. The nurse will definitely give you an sick note once she sees you. And of course I'll make sure to kick up the appropriate amount of gossip and commotion."
Xiaorui blinked several times, almost stunned. Somehow Fenghua never failed to amaze, even though in theory Xiaorui supposedly knew the future. A conversation like this never happened in the past that Xiaorui came from.
Did this girl just happen to carry this kind of stuff around in her bag?
Why was it that Xiaorui never knew this? Wasn't that slightly frightening in a sense?
Xiaorui stared at Fenghua for a few long moments.
"What?" Fenghua spoke up defensively. "If you're thinking that I'd poison you, you should know at this point that if I actually wanted to do that, I would have done it a long time ago already. Besides, I think of you as a kind of business investment. What kind of idiot damages their own investments? How many years have I been with you already?"
She paused.
"Also, please don't think that I have an eating disorder or something stupid like that. It's true that ipecac is fairly popular among our fellow bulimic classmates [8] who make themselves to vomit to lose weight, but I'm a perfectly normal person. There's no way that I'm messed up in the head like you are."
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Xiaorui closed her eyes wordlessly and rolled the pills in her fingertips.
Xiaorui breathed slowly in and out.
She thought carefully about the advantages and disadvantages, and in a few moments she came to the conclusion that she couldn't afford to burn the bridges with the hateful poisonous snake just yet.
They both had uses for each other still as of yet, and it was true that it would be inconvenient for Xiaorui if too many people started asking questions about why she had suddenly done so poorly on an exam.
What Xiaorui needed right now was time.
She needed to orient himself and find her feet.
Feigning an illness for a few days was a perfectly placed excuse to stay home to think things over and properly figure herself out.
Perhaps it would even be good timing to see a doctor. Xiaorui hadn't decided yet whether that was a smart thing to do yet, but it was something she needed to consider. She wanted to do more research on the Internet first though.
For now, the objectives between the two of them aligned.
Lin Xiaorui would find a different opportunity to burn bridges another day.
And thus Xiaorui took a gulp after closing her eyes and swallowed the first pill.
Moments later, she found herself retching into the toilet bowl.
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Author's Notes:
1. The primary determinant for a student's likelihood of admission to university is their score on the national standardized exam (the "Gaokao"). University admission in China is partially quota based, which is similar to the "Affirmative Action" of the United States. There are quotas based on geography and ethnicity. What this means is that certain provinces may have higher cutoff scores for university admission since the quota for the province is limited.
2. CCP: Chinese Communist Party.
3. Shanghai-Hangzhou high-speed railway: See wikipedia article.
4. Shanghai-Hangzhou maglev line: See wikipedia article.
5. QQ: One of the major social media applications in China, similar to AIM. Weixin ("Wechat") would later overtake QQ in popularity, but Wechat would not be released until 2011.
6. Syrup of ipecac: See wikipedia article. A historical emetic originally sold in the United States as an over-the-counter medication to induce vomiting in people who swallowed poisonous substances. Sale of the drug was stopped in the US in 2010 due to frequent abuse of the medication and limited evidence of efficacy in actual poisoning situations.
7. Niacin: See wikipedia article. Facial flushing is the most common side effect of taking vitamin B3. Typically lasts around 15 to 30 minutes. Flushing can can be prevented by taking aspirin prior to niacin.
8. Bulimia nervosa: See wikipedia article. An eating disorder related to anorexia, but is primarily characterized by frequent binging and purging after eating. An estimated 2-3% of American women are thought to have experienced the disorder.