Time passed quickly.
Chen Zhuo crossed off the days on the calendar one by one with a red pen.
One day in early May.
Late at night.
11:30 PM.
The scene shifted to Chen Zhuo’s room.
Compared to the spacious and luxurious living room at Zhang Qiang’s house, Chen Zhuo’s room felt a bit cramped.
A single bed was pushed against the wall.
Next to the bed was a yellow wooden desk, its lacquer peeling in places.
The desk was piled high with all sorts of reference books, scratch paper, and an old-fashioned desk lamp that cast a dim, yellow glow.
There was no air conditioning.
In the corner stood a green floor fan.
The fan was oscillating.
When it turned to its leftmost point, the base would make a soft CLICK before slowly turning back.
The air blowing from it was hot.
A mosquito coil was burning in the room.
The cheap, green spiral kind.
It sat in a small metal dish, covered in grayish-white ash.
A strong, slightly pungent smell of wormwood filled the room.
Zhang Qiang was sitting at the desk.
He was wearing a black tank top.
His arms were resting on the desktop.
He was reciting a language arts text.
A required passage from his sixth-grade textbook.
"...Swallows go, but they will return; willows wither, but they will turn green again; peach blossoms fall, but they will bloom again..."
Zhang Qiang’s voice was mumbled and indistinct, as if he were sleepwalking.
His eyelids kept drooping.
His head bobbed up and down like a chicken pecking at grain.
Several times, his chin nearly hit the dog-eared language arts textbook on the desk.
But he would force himself to stay awake, shaking his head and trying to pry his eyes open.
"But, you who are wise, tell me, why do our days leave, never to return..."
Chen Zhuo wasn’t at the desk.
He was sitting on the single bed next to it.
Leaning against the wall.
A black backpack rested on his lap.
He was stuffing several thick physics competition lab manuals into the bag.
In two days, he was heading to the Provincial City for a closed training camp with the provincial physics team.
The training would be held at Shida Affiliated Middle School.
Chen Zhuo stuffed a copy of *University Physics Experiments* into the bottom of the bag.
He then folded two short-sleeved shirts for changes of clothes and placed them on top.
He zipped it halfway shut.
"...never to return..."
Over at the desk.
Zhang Qiang’s recitation stopped completely.
Chen Zhuo turned his head.
Zhang Qiang was slumped over the desk, his face pillowed on his arms, eyes closed.
His breathing grew even and deep.
A faint, glistening trail of something trickled from the corner of his mouth, dripping onto a page of the language arts textbook.
He was asleep.
He was just too tired.
For the past half-month, Zhang Qiang had been coming to Chen Zhuo’s place after school every day to grind away at his studies until midnight.
The chubby kid who used to go home and immediately play Contra or watch cartoons had been forced to become a machine that stayed up all night doing practice problems.
Chen Zhuo watched him.
He put down his backpack.
He stood up.
He walked over to a hook on the back of the door and took down an old, long-sleeved autumn school uniform jacket.
He walked to the desk.
He gently draped the jacket over Zhang Qiang’s broad back.
Even though the fan’s breeze was warm, you could still catch a cold if it blew on you all night.
Just as Chen Zhuo was about to pull his hand back,
Zhang Qiang suddenly stirred.
He didn’t open his eyes, just turned his face, still buried in his arms.
He mumbled something.
His voice was muffled, but in the quiet of the night, Chen Zhuo heard it clearly.
"Xiaozhuo... slow down..."
"I... I’m afraid I can’t keep up..."
Zhang Qiang’s brows were knitted tightly together.
His chubby face showed a vulnerability and sense of grievance that seemed completely at odds with his size.
Even in his sleep, his hand was desperately clutching the edge of the language arts textbook.
His nails dug into the paper.
Chen Zhuo’s hand froze in mid-air.
He looked at the sleeping Zhang Qiang.
He knew what Zhang Qiang was afraid of.
He was afraid he wouldn’t get into City No.1 Middle School.
Afraid that they would no longer be at the same school.
But what he feared most was that Chen Zhuo—the boy who had skipped a grade at nine, won first place in the province at ten, and was now about to face off against monstrously talented geniuses on a national stage—would shoot off like a rocket into a world he could never reach.
And he, Zhang Qiang, would be left standing on the ground, without even the right to block the wind for him or save him a seat in the cafeteria.
Chen Zhuo pulled his hand back.
He looked at Zhang Qiang’s fingers clutching the page.
He was silent for a long time.
Then,
Chen Zhuo turned around.
He didn’t go back to the bed to continue packing.
He walked to the other side of the desk, pulled out a chair, and sat down.
From the very bottom of the drawer, he took out a brand-new gridded notebook.
It had a dark blue cover.
He had bought it specifically yesterday afternoon on his way home from a stationery store.
He picked up the gel pen on the desk.
He switched the desk lamp to its second, brighter setting.
He opened the notebook to the first page.
The pen touched the paper.
Making an extremely faint scratching sound.
Chen Zhuo didn’t write any profound formulas.
He knew Zhang Qiang too well.
He knew where Zhang Qiang’s brain tended to get stuck, and he knew all the bad habits he couldn’t seem to break when solving problems.
At the very top of the first page, he wrote a heading:
[A Guide to Avoiding Pitfalls in the City No.1 Middle School Entrance Exam Math Section (Zhang Qiang’s Personal Edition)]
Every single point was tailor-made for Zhang Qiang.
1. For the last two multiple-choice questions, if you don’t have a clue after two minutes, just pick C. Don’t waste time calculating. Your luck is more reliable than your calculation skills.
2. For word problems, you MUST draw the diagrams with a ruler. Even you can’t understand the diagrams you freehand. After drawing the diagram, label all the given information on it.
3. For travel problems, if you get confused, draw a line segment diagram. Pay attention to the directions of Car A and Car B. Don’t draw them going in the same direction when they’re supposed to be moving toward each other again. Are you a pig-brain or what?
4. For geometry problems, if you really can’t figure out how to draw an auxiliary line, just use a protractor and ruler to measure it! Write down whatever you measure. For the big problems, write "therefore" as the first step and copy all the given conditions. You can get two free points that way.
5. For fill-in-the-blank questions, double-check the units at the end! Units! UNITS! Every time you get the value right but forget the unit, you lose a point. You might not care about losing that point, but I do.
Chen Zhuo wrote quickly.
And with intense focus.
The oscillating fan rustled the corners of the notebook.
He held the pages down and continued writing.
After finishing the math section,
he turned to a new page and started on language arts.
For the language arts essay, write bigger. Your handwriting is already ugly, and if you write too small, the grader won’t be able to read it and will just give you a low score. It’s better to not fill the whole box than to write small.
If you come across an idiom you don’t know how to write, just use plain language instead. Don’t make up your own words.
For reading comprehension, find the keywords from the question in the original passage and copy the sentence. Don’t try to summarize it yourself. Your summaries are usually wrong.
Line after line.
Densely packed.
In the dead of night, in a room thick with the smell of mosquito coils,
Chen Zhuo used that gel pen to write down every single trick he could think of that might help Zhang Qiang score even one extra point on the exam.
This wasn’t a study guide.
This was a walkthrough, a cheat sheet, tailor-made by Chen Zhuo for his childhood friend, his best friend.
The night grew deeper.
The streetlights outside flickered.
Zhang Qiang was still fast asleep on the desk, his breathing a little heavy.
Chen Zhuo finished the last page.
He set down the gel pen.
He rubbed his slightly sore wrist.
He pushed up the glasses that had slipped to the tip of his nose.
He looked at the densely packed words in the notebook.
He closed the notebook.
Chen Zhuo stood up.
He switched off the lamp’s second setting, leaving only a faint sliver of light.

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