After dinner, the sky outside hadn’t completely darkened yet.
One by one, the campus streetlights flickered on. Their dim yellow glow spilled onto the asphalt road, attracting swarms of insects that flitted erratically around the lampshades.
Wang Dayong carried an empty aluminum lunchbox, fanning himself with his hand as he walked.
"How is September in Huizhou even muggier than the dog days of summer back in the Northeast?"
"I was sweating buckets the whole time we were eating in Cafeteria Three. But man, they really pile on the braised pork belly here. It’s all meat underneath, no potatoes as filler."
Chu Ge walked beside him, a toothpick dangling from his mouth.
"All you think about is food. I just asked around—the internet in our dorm building isn’t connected yet. They said we have to wait for a port to open up. This is unbearable."
Chu Ge irritably spat the toothpick into a trash can on the side of the road.
"My rig is just sitting there, and with no internet, I can’t even get on a BBS to look up info while I’m coding."
"It should be connected in the next couple of days,"
Chen Zhuo said with a smile.
"A few days off will give it a chance to get used to the new environment, too."
"I guess that’s the only way to look at it," Chu Ge sighed.
Up ahead was the red brick building for the Gifted Youth Program’s administrative committee.
It was a small, two-story red brick building partially hidden behind several large trees. Climbing ivy crept up from the base of the walls, reaching all the way to the second-floor windowsills.
Tonight at seven was the first class meeting for their Gifted Youth Program.
The notice said it would be held in the multimedia classroom on the second floor of the red brick building.
The three of them walked up the stairs, their footsteps making the old wooden floorboards CREAK.
They pushed open the heavy, wood-framed door at the end of the second-floor hallway.
A powerful blast of cold air hit them in the face.
Wang Dayong shivered in comfort.
"Whoa, this place has air conditioning. Nice."
The classroom wasn’t large.
It was completely different from the large, tiered lecture halls for regular departments that could hold hundreds of people.
Inside were about forty individual desks. The desks and chairs were all new, with clean, light-colored wooden tops.
Because the AC was cranked up, the room was exceptionally quiet, sealing away even the chirping of cicadas from outside the windows.
More than half of the students had already arrived.
No one was talking loudly. Some were reading with their heads down, while others conversed in hushed tones.
Chu Ge scanned the room and casually found a seat by the window in the back row.
Wang Dayong sat down right next to him and stuffed his lunchbox into the desk’s drawer. Chen Zhuo then took the seat beside Wang Dayong.
Su Wei, the girl they had met that afternoon, was sitting in a corner of the classroom.
On her desk were only a cheap black gel pen and a thin, single-lined notebook.
She sat with her head bowed quietly, her presence so minimal it was as if she had merged with the shadows in the corner.
Just as he settled in, Chen Zhuo noticed the boy sitting to his right.
Lu Jia.
The neurotic roommate Chu Ge had mentioned.
At that moment, Lu Jia was sitting in a strange posture.
His back wasn’t touching the back of his chair at all; instead, it was held ramrod straight.
He wore a white short-sleeved shirt, buttoned all the way to the top, which made him look very reserved.
On Lu Jia’s desk lay a thick, lined notebook. Its edge was perfectly aligned with the edge of the desk.
Above the notebook, a blue mechanical pencil and a white eraser were placed parallel to it, their positions so precise it was as if they had been measured with a ruler.
His hands rested flat on the desktop, and his gaze was fixed intently on the empty blackboard at the front of the room.
He was like a mainspring wound to its absolute limit.
The wall clock ticked away. TICK TOCK, TICK TOCK.
Two minutes to seven.
The door was pushed open.
A man in his fifties walked in.
The man had salt-and-pepper hair, cut in a very ordinary short style.
He was wearing a gray jacket and holding a stainless steel thermos with slightly chipped paint.
The classroom immediately fell silent.
The man walked to the front of the room but didn’t stand behind the lectern on the raised platform.
He pulled over a wooden chair and sat down in the open space to the side of the platform.
He placed his thermos on the corner of a nearby desk, unscrewed the lid, blew on the steam, and took a sip of water.
Then, he looked up, his gaze sweeping over the faces of the forty-odd new students below.
His eyes were calm, carrying the particular kind of unhurried quality common to people who spend their lives around books.
"Looks like everyone’s here."
He spoke. His voice wasn’t loud, and there was no microphone, but it carried clearly through the quiet classroom.
"My surname is Xue. My name is Xue Boyong. I’m the head teacher for your year in the Gifted Youth Program. If all goes as planned, I’ll be with you for the next few years."
Xue Boyong rested the thermos lid on top of the cup.
"Before you came here, you all probably heard a lot of rumors about the Gifted Youth Program."
He smiled.
"That this is a boot camp for geniuses, that the pressure is immense, that you have to pull all-nighters every day."
The classroom was dead silent.
In the back row, Chu Ge, who had been twirling his pen, stopped.
"For this first meeting, I’m not going to talk about school rules or discipline."
Xue Boyong leaned back in his chair, folding his hands over his stomach.
"I’m only going to talk about one thing: forgetting."
The smile vanished from his face, and his tone grew serious.
"I know that every one of you sitting in this classroom was a top student selected from your respective province. In your high schools, you probably never dropped out of the top three in your year."
"Your parents, your teachers—they measured your worth by your test scores every single day."
"But."
Xue Boyong extended a finger and tapped it on the desk.
"Once you walk through this door, I want you to forget all of it. Forget your provincial rankings, forget your past perfect test scores."

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