Page 4 of If You Could See the Sun
Four, research Maine and closest public schools in Beijing and figure out which place offers highest probability of future success—if any—without breaking down and/or hitting something.
See? All completely doable.
“Are you sure you’re a student here?”
The security guard furrows his bushy eyebrows and stares me down from the other side of the wrought iron school gates.
I swallow my exasperation. We go through this every single time, never mind that I’m wearing the school uniform or that I checked in only earlier this morning to move my stuff back into my dorm. Maybe it wouldn’t bother me so much if I hadn’t personally witnessed the guard waving Henry Li inside with a broad grin, no questions asked. People like Henry probably don’t even need to carry an ID around; his face and name alone are verification enough.
“Yes,I’m sure,” I say, wiping at the sweat coating my forehead with my blazer sleeve. “If you could please let me in, shushu—”
“Name?” he interrupts, now taking out some kind of expensive-looking tablet to record my details. Ever since our school decided to go completely paper-free a few years back, there’s been no end to the amount of unnecessary technology they’ve brought in. Even the menus at our cafeteria are all digital now.
“Chinese name is Sun Yan. English name is Alice Sun.”
“Year level?”
“Year Twelve.”
“Student ID?” He must catch the look on my face, because his frown deepens. “Xiao pengyou, if you don’t have your student ID—”
“N-no, no, it’s not that—okay, look, I’m getting it,” I grumble, fishing my card out and holding it up for him to see. We took our student ID photos during exam season last year, and as a result, I look like something that just crawled out of a gutter in mine: my usually sleek black ponytail is an oily mess from a week of skipping hair washing to revise, my face is covered with stress blemishes, and there are giant dark circles sagging under my eyes.
I swear I see the security guard raise his eyebrows slightly at my photo, but at least the gates heave open a few moments later, creaking to a stop beside the two guardian stone lions facing the streets. Scooping up the last of my dignity, I thank him and hurry inside.
Whoever designed the Airington school campus clearly intended to create an artistic blend of Eastern and Western, old and modern architectural elements. It’s why the main entrance is paved with flat, wide tiles like those in the Forbidden City, and farther down are artificial Chinese gardens with koi ponds and tiered pagodas with slanting vermillion roofs, but the actual school buildings are built with polished floor-to-ceiling windows and glass bridges stretching over slices of green lawn.
If I’m being honest though, it looks more like someone started filming one of those ancient Chinese costume dramas here and forgot to clean up the set.
It doesn’t help that everything is so spread out. It takes me almost ten minutes to run across the courtyard, around the science building, and into the auditorium, and by then, the vast, brightly lit space is already packed with students.
Excited voices bounce off the walls like waves off a shore. The volume is even louder than usual as people launch into monologues on everything they did over the summer. I don’t even need to listen to know the details; it was all over Instagram, from Rainie Lam’s bikini pics at some villa the Kardashians once stayed in, to Chanel Cao’s many filtered selfies on her parents’ new yacht.
As the noise reaches a crescendo, I scan the auditorium for a place to sit—or, to be more accurate, people I can sit beside. I’m friendly enough with everybody, but the social divisions are still there, shaped by everything from your first language (English and Mandarin are most common, followed by Korean, Japanese, and Canto) to how many times you’ve achieved something impressive enough to be featured in the school’s monthly newsletter. I guess it’s the closest thing to a meritocracy you could expect to get in a place like this, except Henry Li’s been featured fifteen times in his four years here.
Not that I’m counting or anything.
“Alice!”
I glance up to see my roommate, Chanel, waving at me from the middle row. She’s pretty in that Taobao model kind of way: pointed chin, pale glass skin, air bangs kept deliberately messy, a waist the size of my thigh, and double eyelids that definitely weren’t there two summers ago. Her mum, Coco Cao, actuallyisa model—she did a shoot withVogue Chinajust last year, and you could spot her face on pretty much every magazine stand in the city—and her dad owns a chain of upscale nightclubs all over Beijing and Shanghai.
But that’s more or less the extent of everything I know about her. When we first moved into our dorms at the start of Year Seven, part of me had hoped we’d grow to become best friends. And for a while, it seemed like we would—we went to the cafeteria together for breakfast every morning and waited for each other at our lockers after class. But then she started asking me to go out shopping with her and her rich fuerdai friends at places like Sanlitun Village and Guomao, where the designer bags sold probably cost more than my parents’ entire flat. After I turned her down the third time with some vague, stammered excuse, she simply stopped asking.
Even so, it’s not like we’re on bad terms or anything, and there’s an empty seat right beside her...
I motion toward it, hoping I don’t look as awkward as I feel. “Can I sit here?”
She blinks at me, clearly a little taken aback. Her waving at me was out of politeness, not an invitation. But then, to my relief, she smiles, her perfect porcelain veneer teeth almost glowing as the auditorium lights begin to dim. “Yeah, sure.”
No sooner than I’ve sat down, our senior coordinator and history teacher, Mr. Murphy, strolls out onto the stage, microphone in hand. He’s one of the many American expats at our school: English degree from decent but non–Ivy League university, Chinese wife, two kids, probably came to China because of a semi midlife crisis but stayed because of the pay.
He taps the microphone twice, creating an awful screeching sound that makes everyone wince.
“Hello, hello,” he says into the resulting silence. “Welcome to our first assembly of the academic year—a very special assembly too, if you might recall...”
I sit up a little straighter in my seat, though I know the awards are coming only at the very end.
First, we have to get through a whole round of self-promotion.
