If You Could See the Sun (42)



It takes everyone a while to figure out what the poster’s referring to.

“Maybe it means fifteen days left until my will to live runs out,” Vanessa Liu suggests as she crams a mountain of textbooks into her overhead locker, slamming it shut with a roundhouse kick that makes the walls tremble.

Someone behind me snorts. “Sounds about right.”

“Oh! Oh—I know!” Rainie says, her eyes widening, lips parting in a perfect O. Ever since the whole Jake incident, she’s been a lot more enthusiastic about everything. “Maybe it’s for the Experiencing China trip!”

“But, like, that usually happens in late November,” Chanel points out.

“Then what about—”

“Isn’t it obvious?” I say, louder than I mean to. Almost the entire year level goes quiet and turns to me, expectant. My face burns at the sudden attention. Still, I hold my ground and explain, “There are only fifteen days left until our first midterm exam. The teachers probably put the countdown up to remind us.”

Immediately, faces fall. Smiles fade.

“Well, trust the Study Machine to know,” someone says. It isn’t the first time I’ve heard this sort of joke, but there’s an awkward pause after the familiar words, and I know the people from my history class are still remembering what happened in our last test.

My face grows hotter with embarrassment. Shame.

Who knows how long it’ll take me to build up my reputation again?

As people finish cramming books and laptops into lockers and start heading outside for lunch, most of their conversations turning to revision and how far behind they are and how they haven’t even really read Macbeth yet for English, just the SparkNotes summaries, my phone buzzes.

Another Beijing Ghost notification.

I’ve already lost track of the number of requests I’ve gotten, but my heart still stutters in my chest as I find a dark, empty corner in the hall, turn with my back against the wall so that no one can see my screen, and read over the latest message:

Okay to call?

Surprise flutters inside me. This is definitely new.

It can be done, though. Henry’s been fine-tuning the app for weeks in his spare time, claiming it’s a great way to put the skills he’s learned at SYS into practice, and now there’s a call option that distorts the voices on both ends to ensure anonymity. I’ve only used it once before, in a brief test run with Henry and Chanel. Though I wasn’t a huge fan of how the feature made me sound like Darth Vader, everything else worked pretty well.

So I message back: Sure.

And almost instantly, the call comes in. I do a quick scan of the locker area before I pick up. The place is empty. Good.

“Hello?” I say, wedging the phone between my ear and shoulder.

“Wei?” The voice distortion feature works so well I can’t even tell if it’s a boy or girl speaking. But I can hear the slight hitch in their breathing, the nervousness in their tone when, in slow, carefully enunciated Mandarin, the person asks, “Do you speak Chinese?”

“Oh—um, yeah, no problem,” I say, switching to Mandarin too.

A sigh of relief. “Great. And...whatever I say next—you won’t tell...?”

“Of course not,” I reassure them. It’s what most users ask when they first start using the app: You promise this will stay private? You promise no one else will ever know? “Everything is strictly confidential.”

“Okay.” Another sigh, but this one is heavier, drawn out, as if they’re bracing themselves for what’s next. “Okay. What I want is...”

They trail off. Go silent for so long I pull the phone away from me, check to see if I’ve accidentally disconnected the call. I haven’t.

Then, in one desperate, breathless rush, they say: “I want answers.”

“Answers?” I repeat. “I’m afraid you’ll need to be more specific than that.”

“Exam answers. For the history midterm. Ideally a week before the actual exams so I can, you know...so I’d have time to memorize them.”

“Right.” I fight to keep my voice neutral, free of recognition, even though I can already guess who the user is. Can picture her vividly, with her head bowed over last week’s history test, frustration flushing her cheeks. “I see.”

One of the first things that shows up on Beijing Ghost’s homepage is that we have a no-judgment policy. Because, let’s be honest, if you’re hiring some anonymous person to carry out the kind of tasks you can’t get caught doing yourself, the last thing you want is moral scrutiny.

But this feels different from the previous jobs. If Beijing Ghost has a strict no-judgment policy, then Airington International Boarding School has a very strict no-cheating policy. A few years ago, a kid in Year Ten was found cheating on his final exams by copying his textbook out on toilet paper in the bathroom beside the exam hall. He was kicked out within weeks, and to everyone’s indignation, we haven’t been allowed toilet breaks in exams ever since.

But the worst part isn’t even that. The kid’s parents were so ashamed that they flew all the way over here from their company in Belgium, and bowed repeatedly to the principal, his teachers, and classmates, apologizing with every bend of their spine.

I’d die before I put my own parents through such a thing.

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