Page 44 of If You Could See the Sun
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 ahugefan 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 averystrict 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.
Maybe Evie Wu can sense my hesitation through the phone, because she hurries to explain, “I know it’s bad. Trust me, I don’t want to be doing this either. But... I don’t have any other choice. If I fail this exam again, my mother...” A shaky breath. “No. No, Ihaveto pass. I must. And I can’t without the answers...” Her voice drops to a whisper. “I can’t do it on my own.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay, you’ll do it?”
The hope in her voice—the strain of guilt in it, too—kills me a little. Makes my resolve weaken. But still, I correct, “Okay, I’llthinkabout it.”
My neck is starting to ache from holding the phone in place for so long—or maybe it’s from stress. I shift position, press the phone to my other ear, just in time to hear her say, “...can pay you more. Double your usual rates, if that’s the issue.”
It’s not theissue, but I make a note of it anyway. “Look, I want to help you, I do. I just need to consider—well, everything. The logistics. The risk.” The fact that if I procure the answers,I’llbe cheating too. “How about I get back to you in a day or two?”
“Yeah.” She sounds disappointed. “Yeah, okay. Wait—before you go. Can I ask you something? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to,” she adds quickly.
I pause, alert. “What is it?”
“So I heard about this app from a friend. A few people, actually. I’ve also read all the reviews. And a lot of them are curious—me, included... How do you manage to do it? All of these tasks without being seen? You’re not—” She breaks off for a second, laughs, the sound quiet and nervous. It makes me feel intimidating in a way I never imagined I could be before. “You’re not actually a ghost, are you?”
She says this like a joke, but there’s a trace of genuine fear in her voice. I wonder, briefly, what would scare her more: me being a ghost, or me being a human girl with the inexplicable power to turn invisible. I wonder what would sound more believable.
“Why not?” I say in the end. “Anything is possible.”
