If You Could See the Sun (38)

No. Focus, I urge myself. I look up at the ticking clock. Seven minutes have passed already, and my test paper is still blank.

Normally, by this point, I’d have written enough to cover two entire pages.

I attempt to answer the first question (“To what extent did the Warlord Era prove a turning point in the development of the revolution in China?”), but all that’s running through my head is fuck fuck I’m so fucked in a maddening, highly unhelpful loop.

When I check the time again, another minute has already passed. And all around me, people are writing, answering each question perfectly, scoring every mark, and I—

I can’t do this.

Oh god, I can’t do this.

I take a deep, shuddering breath that fails to fill my lungs. Another. It sounds like I’m hyperventilating. Fuck. Am I hyperventilating?

“Alice?” Mr. Murphy crouches down beside me. He’s whispering, but it’s pointless. Almost comical. With the whole room silent, everyone can hear him. “You look a little ill. Do you need to go to the nurse’s office again...?”

More eyes turn to me. Pin me down in place.

All while I’m trying to remember how to breathe like a normal person.

I don’t trust myself to speak—I’m not sure I’m even allowed to, under test conditions—so I just shake my head. Force myself to write a few sentences, slowly, shakily, over the printed lines.

It’s complete bullshit, of course. I have no dates memorized, no key events that I can recall. I’d turned invisible for half our class on the Warlord Era, and must’ve missed the important points.

After a few seconds of excruciating silence, in which Mr. Murphy seems to confirm that I’m not going to faint or throw up at his feet, he stands up and returns to the front of the room.

Meanwhile, the clock ticks on like a bomb.



* * *



“Please put your pens down.”

I glance up from my test paper, where my writing crawls over the page like spiders, nearly illegible in my frenzy. Evie Wu and I are the only people left in the class; the test was short enough that everyone else turned it in early. Henry left the classroom before half an hour had even passed, his stride confident, his face calm.

Evie’s face, on the other hand, must look a lot like mine: bright red and shiny with sweat, as if she’s just finished running a marathon. When she hands her test to Mr. Murphy, I notice that the entire back page is empty, save for one or two hastily scribbled words.

“Thank you very much, Evie,” Mr. Murphy says. Then pauses. “I hope you didn’t find this test too difficult. I’d hate to have to give your mother another call...”

Again, he’s whispering, and again, it serves absolutely no purpose when I’m sitting less than five feet away, close enough to catch every word.

Evie’s eyes dart to me, clearly mortified, and I feel a swell of sympathy. Evie is the only student at Airington who’s had to repeat a year, but it’s not her fault. Even though she has a Canadian passport, she was never actually taught any English growing up. Once, I caught a glance of Evie’s history textbook, and saw Chinese translations and annotations written in the margins for almost every word, little question marks drawn over certain phrases, entire blocks of text highlighted to mark out parts she didn’t understand. I could almost feel the frustration pulsing out of those carefully marked lines.

The worst part is that Evie’s a genius, and not just in math and physics, but languages too. She’s in the most advanced Chinese class, and Wei Laoshi always gushes over her poems and essays and suggests not-so-delicately how he’d be happy if we could write with a tiny fraction of her skill, even goes so far as to compare her to Lu Xun—one of the most famous writers in modern China.

So, really, it’s only the English that’s the issue.

Maybe that’s why Mr. Murphy is whispering so loudly now. Why he’s speaking at half his usual speed, enunciating every syllable. He used to speak to me like that, too, when I first came to Airington, despite my insistence that English was my first language. Only after I aced five tests in a row did he seem to believe me.

Evie mumbles something back that I can’t quite hear, rises from her chair and quickly gathers up her things.

Once she’s left, Mr. Murphy turns to me.

“Can I have your test, Alice?”

I realize I’ve been gripping the paper to my chest like a lifeline, my knuckles almost white. I drop it. The pages flutter out like wings.

“Y-yes. Of course,” I say, pushing it across the desk. I know the wise thing to do would be to just leave it at that, scrape up the little dignity and self-esteem I have and walk away, but instead I blurt out: “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry—it’s really bad, I know it is, but I swear I don’t usually—I’d never—”

“Don’t stress about it,” Mr. Murphy interrupts, with a little chuckle. “Besides, I’ve taught you for almost five years now, Alice. Your definition of ‘bad’ is rather different from that of your peers.”

But rather than reassure me, the kindness in his voice—so sincere, and so unearned—only makes something inside me fissure. To my absolute horror, a pressure begins to build in my chest, climb up to my throat. My eyes blur.

Mr. Murphy looks alarmed. “Hey—”