For the past few nights, Mai Ding had been staying up late cramming. These were the final days before exams, so he had to make one last push—especially since he still had his heart set on becoming the academic representative. What irritated him beyond belief, however, was that while he sat there desperately burying himself in books, An Zi Yan was barely a step away playing computer games. Not that An Zi Yan was actually disturbing him. From beginning to end, the bastard had not said a single word.
“Hey, don’t you need to review?”
“Don’t distract me.”
“I’m distracting you? What could I possibly interfere with while you’re playing a game?”
“My boss fight.”
Mai Ding’s book flew straight at An Zi Yan. An Zi Yan caught it with one hand, flipped through it, then tossed it back. “You got question three wrong.”
“Seriously? I was so sure about that one.” Mai Ding picked up the book again and continued studying. An Zi Yan checked the time. It was already two in the morning. He stood and nudged Mai Ding with his foot. “Go to bed.”
“Okay. Good night.” Mai Ding did not even look up.
An Zi Yan frowned. “The rule in this house is that when I sleep, you sleep.”
“When did we make that rule? How come I didn’t know?”
An Zi Yan bent down and hoisted Mai Ding over his shoulder. “Just now.”
“What are you doing? Put me down! Let me finish that question first.”
“Finish what? I’ll help you cheat when the time comes.” An Zi Yan said it as if cheating were the most natural thing in the world. Somehow, that did not sound morally correct at all.
“W-who wants to cheat? I refuse to use such underhanded methods.” In certain matters, Mai Ding was annoyingly upright.
An Zi Yan tossed him onto the bed. “Try moving again.”
Mai Ding had been about to struggle back up, but he immediately lay obediently on the mattress and squeezed his eyes shut. An Zi Yan lay beside him and turned off the light. The room went completely dark. After an unknown amount of time, Mai Ding heard An Zi Yan’s breathing become steady and assumed he had fallen asleep. He opened his eyes and had only just begun to sit up when—
“Do you want to walk into the exam room tomorrow, or be wheeled into the morgue?”
Every hair on Mai Ding’s body stood on end. He immediately abandoned all further ideas and obediently went to sleep.
The next morning, Mai Ding crawled out of bed with dark circles under his eyes. An Zi Yan looked at him with disgust. “Look at the state of you.”
“You already despise me because I have dark circles? What would you do if I got a spare tire around my waist?”
“Put you in a box and sink you in the ocean. If I threw you in directly, you probably wouldn’t sink.”
“AN ZI YAN!”
Unable to win the argument, Mai Ding angrily went to gather his books and prepare for school. The moment he arrived, he eagerly opened them again. He had no idea whether he was naturally stupid or simply so nervous that everything vanished from his memory. He had known the material perfectly well yesterday, yet today his brain had become a mess of corrupted code, with one concept attaching itself to an entirely different question. Mai Ding grabbed his hair and began banging his head against the desk.
An Zi Yan watched coldly from beside him. “Don’t get blood everywhere.”
“You’re heartless. Can’t you see I’m suffering?”
“It’s not your graduation thesis. Why do you care this much?”
“How can you say that so casually? We’re students! Aren’t students supposed to put their studies first?”
“No matter how much you talk around it, you just want to become academic representative.”
One sentence struck the target perfectly. Mai Ding had not worked nearly this hard the previous semester. This semester, however, he was charging toward that academic-representative position with burning ambition.
“I heard that if you wait until the very end of the exam before writing your name on the paper, you usually score better.”
“You actually believe superstitions like that?” Mai Ding eyed An Zi Yan suspiciously. Whenever An Zi Yan said something like this, either a trap or a scheme was waiting for him. Is he trying to mess with me again using some new trick?
Although Mai Ding claimed not to believe him, he silently remembered the advice anyway. Didn’t older people always say it was better to believe something might be true than dismiss it completely?
The more anxious you became, the easier it was for things to go wrong. By the day of the exam, Mai Ding’s brain had completely failed him. He had studied seriously, but he had reviewed so much that everything was now tangled together inside his head. He sat blankly in the exam room, fortunate at least that An Zi Yan had been assigned to the same room, which gave him a little reassurance. Only when the exam papers were handed out did Mai Ding finally snap awake. He picked up his pen and skimmed through the questions first. I’m finished. I don’t know how to answer so many of these. I didn’t review this stuff at all.
The students who knew the answers finished early and sat there wishing time would pass faster. How irritating.
The students who did not know the answers were frantic, wishing time would slow down. How pitiful.
Mai Ding belonged firmly to the second group. Faced with questions he simply could not answer, he spent ages without managing to squeeze out even a single word. His mind was blank, and no matter how hard he thought, it remained blank—not even a scrap remained. One moment he checked the clock; the next, cold sweat broke out across his forehead. None of it helped.
He looked toward An Zi Yan, who appeared thoroughly bored. Their eyes happened to meet, and Mai Ding pulled an ugly face at him. An Zi Yan pretended not to see and went right back to being bored. It was bad enough that Mai Ding’s exam was doomed; now even his own man was ignoring him. This was tragedy piled on top of tragedy.
The bell Mai Ding least wanted to hear finally rang. He sighed. Apparently waiting until the end to write his name had brought him absolutely no luck. Just as he prepared to write it, the other students stood to hand in their papers. At that moment, An Zi Yan suddenly walked over with astonishing speed, took his pen, wrote An Zi Yan on Mai Ding’s paper, then grabbed Mai Ding and dragged him away.
“What did you just do?”
“Consider it your New Year’s present.”
“W-what kind of present is that? That’s blatant cheating! What if they catch us?”
“It’s not the gaokao. They’re not that strict.”
Elio’s Notes: The gaokao is China’s highly competitive national college entrance examination, conducted under much stricter controls than an ordinary university exam.
“But you still shouldn’t cheat! How am I supposed to face people after this?”
“And what about the time you stood on my car and pissed on it?”
“That was completely different.” The moment Mai Ding remembered that drunken incident, he wanted the ground to swallow him. How had he ever done something that humiliating? He was just about to defend himself when An Zi Yan interrupted.
“Shut up.”
“If I stay with you much longer, it’ll be impossible not to turn bad. But what about your grade?”
“Who cares about something that boring?”
Mai Ding wanted to be angry, yet somehow could not manage it. All he could do was look reproachfully at An Zi Yan. After all this time, the bastard remained just as willful and domineering as ever. Maybe being with him really did make it impossible not to learn a few bad habits.
Forget it. Exams were over now. It was time to relax. Why worry about so much? If a string inside your head stayed stretched too tightly for too long, sooner or later it would snap. Every once in a while, maybe Mai Ding ought to learn from An Zi Yan and live a little more freely, even if only once—just let himself go. Mai Ding threw all his books and practice papers into the trash. The feeling was unbelievably satisfying. No need to think about tomorrow. All he needed to do was properly enjoy the present, this very moment, and the time that belonged to the two of them.
“What? Finally gone insane?”
“Bullshit. Once in a while, I should try looking at the world through your eyes.” Mai Ding looked straight into An Zi Yan’s eyes.
“What do you see?”
“Me.”
“That’s my world.”
An Zi Yan, then can you see what’s shining inside my eyes? Do you know what it is? It’s being moved, it’s happiness, it’s sweetness—it’s all the love I could never finish putting into words.
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