It felt like the first practice exam had been just a few days ago, but it was already time for the second one.
Lao-Xu stood on the balcony and watched as the students from his class filed into the testing room. He reminded each of them, “Try to relax. Read the questions carefully and plan your time well…”
Gu Fei walked into the classroom and looked around. They were seated yet again in a different arrangement than they had been for the first practice exam. It seemed they were going to change it up every time.
Everyone around him wore a solemn expression, with no significant variation between the good students and the slackers. When he swept his gaze across the room, it almost seemed like everyone was an overachiever right now. Nevertheless, the difference remained clear once the timer started. Even though everyone put their heads down immediately and started writing, you could still tell from their expression and bearing whether the student knew what they were doing.
Gu Fei always used to write answers on scraps of paper to pull at random as he went through each question, and he’d still had the energy to observe the people around him. It had been pretty great, truth be told, to feel like none of it had anything to do with him.
Now that he’d stopped drawing answers randomly, he felt a lot more pressure. The worst was when he knew something halfway but wasn’t totally sure about it—it was torturous. He relied mostly on his memory of Jiang Cheng’s mumbling chants of memorization. He didn’t know the material well enough to reproduce the whole passage onto the page. But if he was going to piece together the fragments in his mind instead, guessing as he went, there wasn’t quite enough time for that either. Moreover, the questions on the second practice exam were noticeably harder than on the first one. He wondered how his boyfriend was doing in the classroom next door.
Two days of sitting for tests didn’t sound like all that much effort, but when the bell rang to signal the end of the last exam, Gu Fei still felt an immense sense of relief. There hadn’t been much time left after he finished the questions—just barely enough to do a very cursory once-over.
When he rose to hand his pages in, he heard a sudden commotion in the first row—the sound of desks and chairs knocking together.
Gu Fei looked over in time to see that one row away from him, Yi Jing had collapsed on the ground. The solid thump of a head hitting the floor made everyone’s blood run cold—the students around her erupted into a frenzy.
Gu Fei dashed over in two strides, crouched down, and carefully rolled Yi Jing over. Her face was pale and her eyes were shut—she seemed to have fainted.
Next came the supervising teacher’s anxious voice: “What happened?”
“Someone passed out!” one student shouted.
“Yi Jing from Class Eight fainted!” yelled another.
“Quick, take her to the infirmary!” the supervisor ordered, squeezing into the crowd. “Someone go notify the teacher on patrol!”
“I’ll carry her,” Gu Fei volunteered. A few other students helped lift Yi Jing onto Gu Fei’s back, and he immediately took off running out the door.
The other teachers had all gathered outside the classroom, with Lao-Xu at the very front of the crowd. “What happened to her? Why did she faint?! Is she hurt?!”
“It’s probably not that serious,” Gu Fei said as he ran toward the stairs.
“What’s wrong?!” Wang Xu sprinted up to them.
Gu Fei glanced at him. The guy’s eyes were already red from anxiety, and his voice was hoarse. When he jumped to take Yi Jing from off his back, Gu Fei didn’t refuse; he helped to transfer her into his arms. With the adrenaline no doubt coursing through Wang Xu at that moment, he’d definitely get to the infirmary twice as fast as Gu Fei.
“Yi Jing! Yi Jing! Yi Jing!” Wang Xu called her name again and again. Forgoing the option of carrying her on his back, he picked her up in his arms. Despite the added weight, he raced down the stairs so fast that Gu Fei almost couldn’t catch up.
Everyone from Class Eight rushed to the infirmary after them, with Lao-Xu in the lead. The doctor on duty had received a phone call in advance, but she was still startled by this massive throng of people. As soon as Yi Jing was laid on the cot, she started clearing the room. “Get out, everyone out! And be quiet!”
Apart from Lao-Xu—and Wang Xu, who refused to leave—everyone was kicked out.
At Fourth High, if you gathered together all the students who genuinely treated the university entrance exams as a big deal, it wouldn’t even make up one class. But everyone felt the pressure that came with the exams nonetheless. A student from one class would fall sick one day, and someone from another class would call out the next. Now, a student had collapsed right in the classroom.
Everyone standing outside the door was frowning deeply.
“Did she hit her head?” Jiang Cheng asked quietly, behind Gu Fei.
“Yeah.” Gu Fei turned to him. “Pretty loudly, too. The chair broke her fall, though, so it’s probably not that serious.”
“Right.” Jiang Cheng sighed. “When I heard Wang Xu yelling like that, I… That scared me. I almost tripped over myself running here.”
“She should be fine. Probably just didn’t get enough sleep with all the stress,” Gu Fei said quietly. “That’s why I keep telling you not to stay up past two a.m.”
“I always go to sleep on time, don’t worry.” Jiang Cheng gave him a little smile.
It turned out that Yi Jing was all right. It was simply a case of lacking rest, being under too much pressure, and not having eaten breakfast that day before coming to school. She might’ve felt unwell during the exam, but she had managed to stick it out until the end, when she finally relaxed her tightly wound nerves and fainted.
Even so, she only spent one day resting at home before she was back at school.
“See, sometimes people can bear far more than they think,” Jiang Cheng said. “Take Yi Jing, for example. She looks like a gust of wind could knock her over, but see how much pressure she can take?”
Gu Fei frowned. “I honestly think it’s best if you don’t push yourself to that point.”
“I won’t. I have a great constitution.” Jiang Cheng curled his biceps. “So. Strong.”
Gu Fei laughed. “You haven’t worked out in, what, six months now? At least before you could do some exercising in bed, but now even that last bit of physical activity is canceled…”
“If you could please remember yourself, sir,” Jiang Cheng said, looking around. “We’re out in the middle of the street.”
“I’m just quietly protesting here,” Gu Fei said, lowering his voice. “And will I receive compensation after the exams?”
“Uh-huh.” Jiang Cheng threw his head back and laughed. “I’ve been thinking, we gotta go at least a few hundred rounds after exams are done. This summer, I won’t do anything else but you.”
“Yeah. It’s important to have dreams in life,” Gu Fei said, laughing along with him.