Chapter 17

Chapter 18: The fallen tiger

First Middle School was the finest school in Xiahai City. Just inside its entrance, a Golden Eagle sculpture spread its wings as if about to take flight. Beyond the gates, a broad stretch of trees, artfully spaced in dense and sparse clusters, surrounded the central office buildings. Then came rows of teachers' dormitories, a spacious square, a culture wall, school newspaper display cases, and rows of newly built classroom buildings stretching into the distance. By 1998, First Middle School's new classroom complex had already been completed, with a main building and a smaller companion building connected by a skybridge-a highly distinctive architectural design among schools at the time.

The enormous classroom building and even the square in front of it were utterly quiet, without the surging crowds from earlier. Only the areas cordoned off with red tape marked the school as anything out of the ordinary that day.

The first bell rang. Countless classrooms fell silent, and Su Can sat inside one of them. Everyone had a separate desk, with a white strip bearing an admission ticket number pasted across its front. Then there were the usual two invigilators, standing stern-faced and grim.

Su Can was playing something of an away game. Everyone had been shuffled around according to their admission ticket numbers, and only four or five allies from his former class were in this examination room. Most of the others were students from First Middle School itself. When they had entered fifteen minutes before the exam, these students had been rather dismissive upon learning that Su Can and the others were all from Third Middle School.

As soon as the first bell rang, everyone stopped talking. The invigilators were also from First Middle School and knew most of the students present; one was even the homeroom teacher of some of them. Only Su Can and the others looked unfamiliar, which prompted them to pay still closer attention to the students from No. 3 Middle School.

Reputation could be a formidable thing. Precisely because First Middle School bore the stamp of excellence, its students and teachers alike had developed an inflated sense of superiority. At its extreme, this meant believing that people from any middle school other than City First Middle School could not match its students in personal conduct. If cheating or peeking at someone else's answers occurred at City First Middle School, it was an outrageous incident that shook the entire school; students from other schools cheating, however, was nothing out of the ordinary.

And so the First Middle School invigilators kept their eyes peeled, making the No. 3 Middle School students their primary targets for surveillance. By comparison, several students who were usually quite unruly at First Middle School received far less scrutiny.

Beside Su Can sat a girl wearing glasses, with two braids hanging down from her neck. She caught his attention. She looked like the typical diligent student, though her thick lenses obscured her face. She wore a fitted tank top, casual trousers, and canvas shoes. Her skin was fair and soft, and her figure was well developed.

Su Can could not help sighing a little. First Middle School did have grounds for pride. Large numbers of local officials and upper-middle-class families sent their children there. Leaving aside how serious the competition over food, clothing, and possessions might be, the clothes worn by most of the First Middle School students present did not look particularly dated even to him, a man from the future. Many wore fashionable lines from somewhat well-known brands that had been among the first to enter the mainland at the time, offering a glimpse of the situation.

"Ahem! Ahem! Hm." An invigilator walked over beside Su Can, set an exam paper on his desk, then rapped the desktop with his knuckles and gave him a somewhat displeased look.

The girl beside him ranked among First Middle School's better students. Seeing Su Can, an examinee from Third Middle School, repeatedly sizing her up naturally put the invigilator on alert.

While handing out the papers, he made sure to give a few dry coughs to bring Su Can's attention back. This also meant that Su Can was very likely to become the object of his scrutiny from then on.

The girl beside him raised her thick lenses and glanced at him. Su Can returned an embarrassed smile and spread out the paper before him. The large heading, "Xiahai City 1998 Junior High School Entrance Examination: Mathematics," came into view.

At last!

Su Can first gave the paper a rough scan, then was overcome with delight. There was a fundamental gap between junior high and senior high mathematics. If junior high mathematics was only an introduction to the basics, no harder than riding an electric scooter, senior high mathematics was almost like piloting a glider-the leap was enormous. In his memory, that year's mathematics entrance exam had been quite difficult, leaving many outstanding students complaining. Yet why did it seem so simple now that it lay before him?

It was almost two levels easier than the mathematics practice problems circulated internally at No. 3 Middle School that he had reviewed over the past few days!

The second bell rang. The thin invigilator pushed up his glasses, a cold gleam sweeping across the room from their lenses. "You may begin!"

A flying pen could describe the speed at which someone wrote an essay, but applying that description to the speed at which Su Can was filling in his mathematics paper now seemed almost impossible.

The thin invigilator had brought a newspaper and poked two holes through the eyes of the person pictured on its front page. As he spread it open, he constantly scanned the room through those two holes. To him, an ordinary exam was like an obstacle course, with every question an obstacle along the way. Only those who completed the course within the time limit while setting off fewer land mines could ultimately distinguish themselves.

He eagerly hoped to see plenty of worried faces, particularly among the Third Middle School students present. Only then would First Middle School's superiority stand out. In a large examination room mixing students from several schools, the best students ought to be from First Middle School too.

Still, both invigilators could tell that this paper was somewhat difficult. Apparently, it came from the final question bank compiled by a teacher about to retire, who had even declared afterward that it would "truly distinguish the students' levels." As a result, even several First Middle School students they knew to be excellent were deep in thought over the problems.

Among them was the girl in glasses beside Su Can.

Hmm, something wasn't right.

The thin invigilator making his rounds was named Xiao Rihua. He was the homeroom teacher of a ninth-grade class at First Middle School and also taught mathematics. One quick look at the questions earlier had told him that this paper would be quite difficult even for First Middle School students at their current level. Several students who normally ranked in the school's top hundred for their grade had run into trouble. Yet while they struggled through the questions, that No. 3 Middle School boy he had just warned with a grunt not to look around was actually writing away fluently!

Xiao Rihua blinked. There was no mistake. Lu Yaoshun, Lingshan, and Yang Zhao, all students with recognizable names in their grade, were visibly frowning over several stumbling-block questions and repeatedly working through their calculations. Xiao Rihua understood that although this examination room contained none of First Middle School's very best students-the few who were clearly future Tsinghua or Peking University material-those students still counted as First Middle School's strongest contingent in the room.

They had all been stumped, yet that examinee from Third Middle School could keep working without any obstacles. That seemed a little too far-fetched.

He must be skipping the questions he can't solve for now and coming back to them later. Xiao Rihua smiled faintly to himself. It was certainly a method. Third-rate teachers like those at Third Middle School would naturally teach their students this approach to help them keep the overall picture in mind.

Xiao Rihua could not help giving a derisive chuckle.

An hour and twenty minutes passed. Several students had already finished and handed in their papers. The girl in glasses beside Su Can also put down her pen, checked her machine-readable answer sheet, packed up, and picked up her belongings. Without looking at anyone around her, she walked out of the classroom, proud and confident.

Only then did Su Can give his work one final check. Five minutes after the girl in glasses left, he stood up to hand in his paper.

In fact, he had completed the entire entrance examination paper barely ten minutes after the bell allowing students to submit their papers-around forty minutes into the exam. He simply still could not believe that these boss-level problems, now defeated beneath his densely written, complete solutions, were actually the entrance examination he remembered as so difficult, the one that had nearly cost him the chance to continue his education!

Su Can still could not believe what lay before him. He forced himself to keep patiently checking and checking, filling in the answer bubbles, growing bored, and drawing circles on his scrap paper for a full forty minutes.

Only then did he hand in his paper, his heart uneasy.

Someone who had found five million, brazenly tucked it into his coat, yet remained terrified and unsettled-that was Su Can's current state of mind.

The exam that marked the first great hurdle in his life, with mathematics its universally acknowledged stumbling block, had passed just like that, so easily. He still could not quite believe it.

In First Middle School's square, where only a very few students who had submitted their papers were leaving one after another, Su Can walked toward the school gates and out, somewhat dazed and at a loss.