You're the Immortal

After the chemistry exam, there was a half-hour break, followed by English.

Although Yang Rui took a nap during every exam, the drawn-out ordeal still left him aching all over. The other students were worse off, every one of them looking ready to roll belly-up from overusing their brains.

But when the exam papers landed on their desks, even the weariest, laziest students perked up and began answering in earnest.

Yang Rui was a little surprised at first, but understood after a moment's thought. Here in 1982, simply having questions to work on was a blessing.

At present, there were no more than three systematic sets of practice college entrance exams on the market, and science papers organized by subject could be counted on one hand. Leaving aside their quality, one thing was certain: the teachers who set the college entrance exam would have seen these questions.

Thus, students who only practiced widely available questions would always perform somewhat worse on the day, unless they were top students who had already mastered everything.

The in-house questions produced by each school's teachers might not cover everything as thoroughly as published papers, but they could still shore up students' weaknesses, making them a crucial step on the road to the college entrance exam.

To the students, these questions were like moves fed to them by a sparring partner, exceptionally hard to come by. They represented their teachers' painstaking efforts, something money could not buy, so however exhausted they were, they would push through and work through them once.

Yang Rui had no choice. Propping his cheek on one hand and dragging his pen with the other, he spent one class period finishing the English paper. A rough tally put his guaranteed score above eighty. Checking it again would offer only limited improvement.

His English could only be called average. He had scored fifty-five on the postgraduate entrance exam, more than fifteen points above the subject-specific admission cutoff at most schools, but still far below the truly outstanding students who scored ninety-five. During graduate school, he had been forced to translate plenty of foreign literature to make it easier for his adviser to read. His own reading ability had improved, but he had fallen behind on compulsory exam topics such as grammar.

The early-eighties English college entrance exam obsessed over grammar the way women obsessed over their weight. It would not be easy for Yang Rui to sweep the field.

"Forget it. Full marks in math, physics, and chemistry will be enough." Yang Rui stopped bothering with the ambiguous grammar questions and left it at that.

In fact, an English score above eighty was already godlike to the students at Township Middle School. These students, who had only encountered English after entering high school, could hardly compare to children in later years who received bilingual instruction from kindergarten.

Back in the dormitory, the students fell asleep the moment their heads hit their pillows after an exhausting day. Over at the teachers' dormitories, however, the lights stayed on all night.

The school had assigned one additional teacher to each subject, requiring them to finish marking the papers that same day.

There were sixty-eight students in the science repeat-year class, neither a great many nor a small number. Even with two people dividing the marking, a late night was inevitable.

Their homeroom teacher, Teacher Lu, taught math, which had been tested that morning. After an hour's nap at noon, he had holed up in his room to mark the papers.

The school's teachers had no offices, but each had a separate dormitory room. Most used their rooms as offices, marking homework and lecturing students there as well.

Teacher Lu happened to live next door to Teacher Zhou, another math teacher. They agreed that one would mark the long-answer questions and the other the remaining short questions, then divided up the papers.

It was almost eight that evening before Teacher Lu finished marking the long-answer questions on his thirty-odd papers. After carefully writing comments on the final paper, he hurried over to knock on the door next door.

"Finished marking, Lu?" Teacher Zhou was in his thirties and a heavy smoker. Two of his fingers were smoke-stained like cured duck, and his clothes and trousers were riddled with burn holes.

"All done." Looking at the haze of smoke inside, Teacher Lu passed the papers over from across the threshold. "You're living like an immortal up in the clouds. I'll stay out."

"I'm no immortal. You're the immortal." Teacher Zhou grinned, exposing his yellow teeth, and set his cigarette in the ashtray. He clapped his hands, picked up a stack of papers from the windowsill, and handed it over. "Take a close look at the top one."

"At what?" Teacher Lu was baffled.

"You'll know when you see it. I don't know how to put it." Teacher Zhou snatched the papers from his hands, picked up his cigarette, and shut the door in one smooth sequence, then called through it, "I'll give you the papers tomorrow morning."

"All right." Teacher Lu shook his head and returned to his room, somewhat mystified, then turned on the light to look at the questions.

One look left him stunned.

A string of check marks ran from top to bottom, left to right, as neatly arranged as people standing in line.

Teacher Lu looked through it once, then again, before understanding what Zhou had meant.

Every short question on this paper was correct.

How is that possible? That was Teacher Lu's first thought.

He had set the paper himself, so naturally he knew exactly how difficult the questions were. Had the paper been given at the county middle school or the city's No. 1 Middle School, it would have been nothing unusual for a student to get all the short questions right.

But the students at Township Middle School were nowhere near that level. If they really were that good, why would they be repeating a year? They would already have taken their acceptance letters and trotted happily off to university.

Anger flared in Teacher Lu's heart. Someone must have come into my room and stolen the answers.

How brazen.

Teacher Lu snatched up the paper to see who had been so bold.

"Yang Rui... Yang Rui!" He read the name twice before connecting the Yang Rui on the paper with the Yang Rui he knew.

Once he confirmed the name, some of Teacher Lu's anger suddenly dissipated, giving way to a trace of doubt.

Yang Rui had left a deep impression on him, and the Yang Family, with its two generations of secretaries, was strict about bringing up its children. He felt that the introverted boy could not have done something so outrageously bold.

Could someone else have given him the answers?

At that thought, Teacher Lu began looking through the other students' papers.

He soon went through all thirty-four papers he had just brought back. Never mind getting everything right-hardly any had red check marks on even half their answers.

Recalling the other thirty-four papers he had just marked, their long-answer questions had been a mess, nowhere near the standard for full marks.

Unable to make sense of it, Teacher Lu unconsciously picked up Yang Rui's paper and turned to his long-answer questions.

"Correct, correct... correct... every step is right, not a single calculation missing..." The more Teacher Lu read, the stranger it seemed. Yang Rui's solutions were more detailed and clearer than his own answer key.

For the short questions, one could simply copy the final answers, but the detailed working for the long-answer questions was not in the answer key he had prepared.

In other words, the answers Yang Rui had used were not the ones he had prepared. To copy a paper like this, someone first had to be able to solve these long-answer questions.

That was no easy feat.

He dared say there was not a single person in the entire county who could score full marks on a math paper at college entrance exam difficulty. Even the few veteran university graduates had been away from high school math for so many years that they could not possibly have reviewed it especially for this. Besides, answering in such detail would have taken even more effort.

However he looked at it, this was strange.

If Yang Rui really had copied the exam paper, why not copy the answers along with it? Why go to all that trouble?

Unless...

Had Yang Rui solved the questions himself?

As soon as that thought surfaced, Teacher Lu could no longer sit still.

No wonder Zhou had refused to go into detail. There was simply no explaining this.

But without that explanation, how else could it be explained?

Full of doubts, Teacher Lu finished marking all the papers.

What he did not know was that the physics, chemistry, and English teachers were just as baffled.