Page 19 of Never Thought I'd End Up Here
To his credit, Wang Laoshi finishes marking our tests before we’ve passed the Oriental Pearl Tower, cutting short the life cycle for my dread. After ushering everyone back to their seats, he stands up at the front of the ferry, holding the papers in his hand like they’re criminal evidence.
“A few of you didexceptionallywell on this test,” he says, putting his grimace on hold to smile down at Cyrus, before switching back to it in a blink. “There were, however, some shocking answers—or rather, a lack of answers.” He doesn’t look my way directly, but I can feel his disapproval blowing toward me like the cold breeze off the river. “In the interest of fairness for the upcoming competition, I will be pairing you off into teams based on your scores. Those who received high marks will be put together with those who are struggling. With someone to help you, and your natural immersion in the environment, my hope is that by the end of the trip, you will all see remarkable improvement in your Chinese—even if you’re practically illiterate at present …”
Hedefinitelylooks right at me this time.
“As for the specifics of the competition,” Wang Laoshi continues, “it’ll be running throughout the trip in every place we visit: first in Shanghai, then in Anhui, then in Guilin. Based on previous student feedback and lively discussions among the coordinators behind Journey to the East, we’re changing it up a little this year to encourage more participation. You won’t just be sightseeing—you’ll be engaging, interacting, cooperating, absorbing. The first activity will officially begin tomorrow.”
“Excuse me, Wang Laoshi?” Lydia—the same girl who looked ready to perform happy cartwheels when the teacher handed out the tests—raises her hand high in the air, her voice climbing an octave with excitement. “Will there be a prize for the winners?”
“The ultimate prize, of course, is knowledge,” Wang Laoshi says very seriously.
Oliver lets out an audible snort.
“In addition,” Wang Laoshi says, “there’ll be a small prize for the winners of each activity. At the end of the competition, the team who performs the best overall will be selected to deliver a presentation about the trip at a special afternoon tea event held by Jiu Yin He. There, they’ll have the opportunity to meet Dr. Linda Shen, a renowned Stanford professor who’s helping oversee this year’s program. I’ll be emailing her updates for each activity, as well as the test scores from today so she can see where you’re at.”
At the mention of my aunt’s name, my stomach drops. If my goal is to impress her, I’m off to a horrible start. I can only pray Wang Laoshi doesn’t plan on sending her our testanswerstoo; she might actually burn my name off the family tree if she reads my horse-and-mother series.
Beside me, Cyrus sits up straighter, and a faint suspicion stirs inside me.
“Don’t tell me you joined this program just for another chance to kiss up to my aunt,” I mutter to him out of the corner of my mouth.
“I was never planning on kissing up to her,” he mutters back, but I notice he doesn’t deny his motive. “I don’t need to. She just needs to speak to me to be impressed by me, and since her mood was ruined bysomeoneat the wedding, this is my only other chance before our college apps are due. My last chance.”
“Seriously?” I realize I’m probably staring at him the way Daisy was staring at me earlier when I described my lengthy, multistep morning beauty routine. “You want a letter of recommendation from her that badly? You couldn’t just ask someone else?”
“You don’t understand. Ithasto be from her,” Cyrus says, his eyes blazing with rare emotion. Then, as if catching himself, he pauses. Dials back the intensity in his tone. “It’s just that a letter of recommendation from her would basically guarantee me a spot in Stanford’s Chinese Literature program—”
“You’re set on studying literature?” I ask. “What about piano?”
“I’d thought about it,” he says slowly. “I love both—I was actually really torn between the two, and all my teachers were trying to persuade me to do one or the other. But I don’tneedto study piano the way that I need to study literature.”
What a nice problem to have, I think to myself, biting back a surge of jealousy.I’m just too talented at too many things, god help me.No matter which option he ended up choosing, he would have a dazzling career to look forward to.
Still, I have to admit that literature suits him. Actually, a program on ruining other people’s lives would suit him best. Second to that, though, he belongs in a world of quiet libraries and gold-soaked classrooms, tea steaming in his hands, books piled up on desks, the margins inhabited by scribbled epiphanies.
“I can’t imagine doing anything else,” he’s saying. “I don’t believe that books are the cure to everything, necessarily, but it’s like—when you’re feeling unwell, and you receive a diagnosis, and you’re so relieved because now you realize that it wasn’t all in your head, that there’s a name for what you’re experiencing. On a bad day, books offer a language for your pain, and on a good day, books remind you just how precious your life is. A program devoted entirely to books feels almost like the stuff of dreams …” He trails off, a hint of self-consciousness creeping into his voice. But there’s no uncertainty, no doubt. Thatishis future. It’s clear, tangible, achievable. He can see it lit up ahead of him, like the shining banks of the river, and now he just needs to take the necessary steps to reach it.
Meanwhile, I have zero idea what school I should be applying to, much less what program I want to do. The career counselor recommended that I try a process of elimination until I found the pathway thatspoke to me, but I’d made my way down an entire list of possible degrees, and none of them spoke at all. None of them even spluttered at me. And at the end of the day it just felt pointless, silly, what with my horrible academic record, as if I were inspecting million-dollar castles and debating which one to move into when I couldn’t even afford to rent half a bathroom.
“What about you?” Cyrus murmurs. “I would’ve thought that with all the modeling you’ve been doing—”
I almost flinch out of my seat. “How do you know about that?”
“What?” he asks, confused.
“How do you know I …”Modeled.The past tense threatens to slip its way into the sentence. It’s bad enough that he’s the only person here who knows about my modeling career. I can’t have him finding out that my modeling career failed before it even properly took off. That as of now, I have no future plans, no known talents, no useful connections, no marketable passions, no projects in the works, not even a regular sleeping schedule. I have basically nothing except a nice wardrobe and a strong dose of existential dread. “I don’t remember ever telling you I became a model.”
“I mean, it’s all over your social media,” Cyrus says like it’s obvious.
I blink. “You follow me?”
Before he can reply, a shadow looms over the two of us, and we both look up to be punished with a terrifying angle of Wang Laoshi’s scowling face.
“While it’s nice to see you already bonding with your new teammate, it would be better to wait until I’m finished talking,” Wang Laoshi says.
“New teammate?”I repeat.
“Yes, and if you’d been paying any attention, Leah, you would have heard me announce all the teams based on your test scores,” Wang Laoshi says impatiently. “If you have any objections, I don’t want to hear it—all decisions are final. This trip is about opening yourself up to new places, new ideas, and new people. Most growth happens when we find ourselves in unexpected situations. And frankly,” he says, raising his brows, “your Chinese skills couldreallyuse some help from a much more fluent speaker.”
