If You Could See the Sun (44)

“Want a latiao?” she asks when she notices me, holding up one of the bags. Her fingers are red with chili oil.

“Um, no thank you.” I walk closer, careful not to step on her hair. “Is...everything okay here?”

“Yeah, of course,” she says. But she’s an even worse liar than I am, and terrible at holding things in. After only a few beats of silence, she throws up her hands like I’ve got her at gunpoint. “Okay, okay, fine. But you’re going to think it’s ridiculous.”

“I won’t,” I promise quickly.

“You’re going to think I’m ridiculous.”

I blink at her, confused.

She heaves a loud sigh, props herself up on one elbow, and says, “I failed my chem test.”

“Oh.”

I don’t know why I assumed it’d be something a lot more dramatic, less...normal. Maybe I’ve come to think of people like Chanel as living on a whole separate plane of existence, elevated from mundane struggles and concerns like getting a bad grade.

“See,” she says, groaning and falling back on the floor with a significant thud. “You’re judging me. I can feel it.”

“I’m not,” I say, trying to collect my thoughts. “And it’s not like... I mean, grades don’t matter that much anyway...” I wince. The words ring awfully false and hypocritical to my own ears. “Sorry. That was so obnoxious.”

Chanel snorts. “It was, a little.”

“So—okay, I do get why you’d be upset about it. It sucks. But also, if it helps... I genuinely don’t consider our academic records to be like, the ultimate indicator of human value or whatever.”

She looks up at me. “You really think that?”

I nod.

“Then why do you kill yourself studying all the time?”

“Well, it’s different for me...” I immediately cringe again, and hurry to explain, “Not in like a special snowflake sort of way but... I don’t know. I guess grades are the only thing I have power over. The only thing I have.”

The second I say this aloud, I realize how sad it sounds.

“That’s not true,” Chanel tells me, and I expect her to sprout some vague, corny line about how I still have so much untapped potential and my whole life ahead of me, but instead she simply says, “You have me. And you have Henry.”

I stare at her. “Henry?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“As in Henry Li? The one at our school?”

“The one and only.”

“Henry literally wouldn’t bat an eye if I dropped dead at his feet,” I say, half laughing now. “Or, no, he’d probably tell my corpse to not dirty his shoes.”

“You might think that,” Chanel says, stuffing three spicy strips into her mouth at once and speaking between chews. “But trust me, he cares a lot more than he lets on.” She arches an eyebrow at me. “He cares about you a lot more than he lets on.”

Heat rises up the back of my neck, followed by a sharp, inexplicable thrill of pleasure. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I say loudly, more to myself than to Chanel.

“I swear on my favorite LV bag I’m telling the truth,” she insists, raising one hand dramatically in the air. Then she pushes herself up into sitting position, her eyes suddenly serious. “I’ve known that kid and his family for—what? Seven years now? And, yeah, he’s always worked like he has a fire lit under his ass. Hell, he used to listen in on his dad’s business meetings and draw up all these solutions for SYS when he was a freaking ten-year-old. But I’ve never seen him this...devoted to a project before. Like, ever.”

“He’s only like that because we’re business partners,” I point out. “And he gets to make a profit out of it.”

“Sure.” She rolls her eyes. “Because we all know that’s the only thing missing from Henry Li’s life—money.”

I decide to ignore what she’s implying. “You don’t have to lack something to want it. And everyone wants money.”

“Not everyone,” Chanel protests. When she sees the look I’m giving her, she adds, “Like monks, for example. My uncle’s a monk, you know. Lives in a temple in Xiangshan and eats only lettuce and everything. He doesn’t want money at all.”

“That’s nice. Good for him.”

She snorts.

“Really.” I move over to sit down beside her. Before she can turn the topic to Henry again, I say, “But back to your chem results...”

“You sound like my mum,” she grumbles.

“I’m not going to lecture you, I promise.” I raise my hand, too, mimicking the oath she made just now. She shakes her head and laughs. “I was actually just thinking—and this isn’t directed at you personally or anything—but...if you had the opportunity, would you ever cheat on the next test? If it was a matter of pass or fail?”

She considers this for a moment. “I don’t think so,” she says finally. “But only because I’m not that desperate.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you know how it is.” She shrugs. “A lot of the kids here were born when the one-child policy was still around. They literally have their entire family—all their aunts and great-aunts and their grandpa’s cow—just counting on them to succeed, not to mention how many of them have parents who immigrated just so they could get a foreign passport, a better education, a better life, whatever. And with that kind of pressure weighing down on you all the time... It can push you to do extreme things. It makes failure a nonoption. Unthinkable. You know what I’m saying?”