Chapter 112: Graduation
Countless people had imagined how they might make the second semester of their final year pass more slowly, slower still, so that this last stretch of one of the most meaningful and unforgettable periods of their lives would linger. Or perhaps Su Can and the other school celebrities might produce one more unexpected incident after another, leaving everyone with endless memories, milestones towering in their minds that would make them miss all this after they left.
But one thing was beyond doubt: life was life, after all. It could not offer so many heart-stopping moments.
Even if what many people wanted to remember were the boys running beneath the great, canopy-like trees beside the courts, those sweat-drenched figures, and the girls rustling drawing paper in the Arts Building or appearing in graceful outfits at arts celebrations, setting hearts racing despite themselves.
All these things would be substituted away amid solving functions, theorems on conic sections, aromatic hydrocarbon equations, and electromotive potential calculations, temporarily set aside as everyone prepared for the exams, for the holy war of Normandy on the world's united anti-fascist front.
Time jumped ahead to the final thirty days, the last month before the exams. Large-scale truancy began appearing in the classes. Aside from certain classes where admission rates to key undergraduate universities reached seventy percent, attendance in some ordinary classes dropped sharply.
Sometimes only twenty or thirty students remained in a class of seventy. The outstanding teachers at No. 27 Middle School continued teaching at the blackboard without batting an eye, ignoring the anxious atmosphere and the truancy. Having already sent off one graduating class after another, these teachers might even have been comparing them inwardly: this year's students were not bad, better than last year's.
The magic of approaching graduation began weakening the