Chapter 11: Exams and Cheating

The desks were pulled apart one by one into rows and columns, with gaps over a meter wide between them.

Old Wang stuck exam-number labels to their corners, then cleared the room.

As I stood in the corridor enjoying the breeze, let me explain. The first comprehensive exam of third grade lasted one day.

The morning brought two battles in succession: math from eight thirty to ten, followed by a ten-minute break, then English from ten thirty to eleven thirty.

The afternoon held the longest and toughest battle: a full two hours of Chinese. It took the longest because it included a three-hundred-character composition dreaded by countless elementary schoolers.

Once the rooms were arranged, there were still over ten minutes before the exam. The corridor was packed with students from different classes. Some nervously bit their nails, others checked formulas one last time by the railing, and a few boys from other classes craned their necks to inspect our classroom.

I didn’t join the crowd. I strolled into Class Two next door, my assigned exam room, and found desk 07 by the white slip at its corner.

No sooner had I sat down than two fingers poked the back of my head. I turned to find Su Xiaoqing, number 08, making faces at me, while Zhang Wei, number 09 behind her, was so nervous he was crossing himself in prayer.

“Quiet! All candidates, return to your assigned seats and put extra stationery in your drawers!”

Two stern-faced invigilators entered, one heading to the front and one to the back. One carried a sealed brown envelope of exam papers.

In an instant, the classroom became so quiet you could hear a pin drop, broken only by the quick, nervous breathing of the children.

Riiiiiing!

The piercing long bell exploded over the campus.

The exam had officially begun!

The brown envelope was cut open, and bright white papers smelling faintly of ink were passed back from the front row. As students received them, the room filled with the rustle of pages turning.

Zhang Wei was already sucking in breaths of despair behind me. Su Xiaoqing bit the plastic cap of her ballpoint pen and even seemed to savor its taste.

Perhaps affected by the atmosphere, I grew a little serious too. Seated at my desk, both hands on the slightly rough white paper, I composed myself.

As a reborn person facing the first trial of my new life and the System’s weighty mission to take first place, I focused as though I were about to sit the college entrance exam and solemnly looked at the first section:

【I. Basic fill-in-the-blank questions (1 point each, 20 points total)】

1. 15 + 8 ÷ 2 = ( )

Me: “…”

I stared at the equation, deflated.

Fifteen… plus eight… divided by two… equaled what?

All right, this exam really wasn’t difficult at all. If I didn’t take first place, I’d hardly have the face to show myself again.

I wondered what System module would unlock after I completed the mission.

…

…

…

The invigilator in Room Three was Zhao Yonggang. He’d taught at Xia Minghan Primary School for almost twenty years and was known as “Sharp Eyes” because he wore glasses and loved catching students out.

In his exam room, anyone trying to pull a trick had nowhere to hide.

The morning sun was still hot. Hands behind his back and soft cloth shoes on his feet, Zhao Yonggang paced the narrow aisles like a lion patrolling his territory.

Only twenty minutes into the math exam, he’d already locked onto a target: the short-haired girl at desk eight, her elbows sun-browned.

She’d been restless from the start. One moment she scratched her head, the next she chewed her pencil until it clicked. Every so often her body jerked forward and her eyes darted toward the paper of the clean-cut boy at desk seven.

More suspicious still, her left hand kept moving furtively beneath the edge of her desk, occasionally reaching toward the desk behind her.

Something was going on. Definitely!

Zhao Yonggang pushed up his black-framed glasses, slowed, and unobtrusively retreated into the shadow of the back door, watching that column of desks.

Sure enough!

The instant the boy at desk seven turned his paper over, the short-haired girl’s eyes lit up. Under cover of the rustling pages, her fingers hooked swiftly backward at a practiced angle.

Tap.

A gray-white ball of paper, tightly crumpled to the size of a little fingernail, passed between two desks.

For the invigilator, it was the perfect opportunity.

Caught red-handed, with the evidence!

A cold light flashed in Zhao Yonggang’s eyes. He strode forward so quickly that his cloth shoes seemed to stir the air.

“You! Stand up!”

The sharp shout exploded over the quiet room like thunder.

Thirty or forty children froze. Pencils stopped in midair, and some students turned to look.

Su Xiaoqing stiffened slightly when called out, but she didn’t look particularly frightened. She rose slowly, put both hands behind her back, and blinked her bright dark eyes at the invigilator with an innocent, bewildered expression.

“Teacher, what’s wrong? I haven’t finished my questions yet.”

“Still pretending?” Zhao Yonggang sneered and jabbed a finger hard at the corner of her desk. “Hands out! What are you hiding? Did you think I didn’t see what you just did? Cheating on an exam, passing notes! Under school rules, that’s an automatic zero for this subject!”

A chorus of sharp intakes of breath ran through the room. The children looked at Su Xiaoqing with awe and sympathy at the words “zero points.”

But Su Xiaoqing wasn’t afraid. She rolled her eyes and let her wild side show.

Zero? Fine, then!

She’d barely guessed a few questions right on the math paper anyway. Either way she’d get a beating. She’d been caught because her skills weren’t good enough, and she’d accept it!

In all his years of teaching, Zhao Yonggang hated nothing more than a defiant student who wouldn’t be cowed. Seeing her act as though she feared nothing, he grew angry. His narrow eyes turned, and he shifted his terrifying pressure to the next suspect.

He spun around and slapped desk nine. “Zhang Wei at desk nine, right? Good! You stand up too!”

“Aah!”

Chubby Zhang Wei, who’d been trying to shrink his head into his body, trembled all over. He stood shakily, his legs quivering like a sieve.

Zhao Yonggang loomed over him. “You passed that note to her, didn’t you?

“You’re young and already up to no good, sharing answers during a monthly exam! Letting someone copy makes you an accomplice. It’s just as bad! You get a zero too!”

“Waaah—no, Teacher! I’m innocent!”

At the word “zero,” Zhang Wei imagined the feather duster soaked in salt water in his mother’s hand and immediately broke down.

He waved his short, thick arms desperately. “Teacher, I really didn’t pass it to her! I… I’m even worse at math than she is! I was copying too! I took the note because I was going to copy it myself!”

“…”

A strange silence fell over the entire room. The air filled with unprecedented awkwardness.

Even a few children from other classes watching the drama covered their mouths and snickered.

Zhao Yonggang frowned. “You were copying too? So the note came from someone else?”

His voice rose sharply, and his chilly gaze swept down the column. “Who let the two of you copy?

“Speak! If you don’t explain today, both of you will be criticized before the whole school!

“Letting someone copy your answers in an exam is a zero too. In society, that would be harboring a criminal!”

The atmosphere in the classroom grew so oppressive it seemed about to solidify.

Fang Luo, seated at desk seven, frowned slightly and turned halfway around. The clean, tidy little boy who usually gave off a stay-away-from-me air looked calmly and deeply toward the back row.

There was no doubt that Fang Luo had thrown the note. After finishing the fill-in-the-blank questions, he’d torn a corner from his scratch paper and slipped it backward.

When Su Xiaoqing saw Fang Luo turn, her heart skipped a beat.

As the saying went, loyalty mattered when you traveled the world. If Fang Luo was caught for letting her copy and given a zero in math too, she would have failed him as a friend.

She couldn’t betray him.

With that thought, a bandit’s fierce resolve lit her eyes.

While Zhao Yonggang glared at Zhang Wei and demanded a confession, Su Xiaoqing moved with lightning speed, snatching the incriminating paper ball from the gap beneath her desk.

“Su Xiaoqing, what are you—” Zhao Yonggang caught the movement from the corner of his eye and reached for it.

But the next moment brought a scene he would never forget.

Su Xiaoqing opened her mouth, closed her eyes, and swallowed the pencil-smudged scrap of paper whole!

She swallowed so quickly that she had to pat her chest to get her breath back, as though silently saying it was a little dry.

Then she lifted her head, flashed her little canine teeth triumphantly at the stunned Zhao Yonggang, and held out two empty palms.

“Teacher, what note? There wasn’t one! I already ate it, so don’t go accusing innocent people!”

Zhao Yonggang: “???!!!”

The workings of an elementary schooler’s mind were truly shocking.

The teacher in his forties stood there, petrified. In twenty years of teaching, the students he’d caught cheating could have lined up from the first floor to the fourth. He’d seen cheat sheets thrown out windows, hidden in shoe soles, even torn up and stamped underfoot on the spot.

But this was the first time he’d seen one swallowed whole.

It was rough paper torn from an exercise book. What if something happened?

“Oh, you… you child!”

“What’s wrong?” Su Xiaoqing still hadn’t realized.

Zhao Yonggang no longer cared about exam rules or catching cheaters. In a panic, he grabbed her arm and hurried her toward the door.

“Why would you eat paper? Come on, we’ll go to the washroom and you’ll stick a finger down your throat to bring it back up! What if something happens to you?!”

As he pulled her along, Su Xiaoqing stumbled, apparently beginning to realize paper wasn’t something to eat. Still, before crossing the threshold, she quickly winked her left eye at Fang Luo at desk seven and even lifted her chin proudly, as though she’d just won a tremendous victory.

The back door slammed shut.

The long-suppressed room finally erupted in a burst of barely contained laughter, which quickly died when the other invigilator sternly slapped a desk.

“Ha ha ha!”

“Quiet!”

“…”

Fang Luo sat looking at the slight, disheveled figure being led to the washroom outside. He lowered his eyes to the pencil in his hand and sighed helplessly.

More than ten minutes later, the washroom commotion subsided. Su Xiaoqing returned slowly to the exam room, her eyes red-rimmed and water at the corners of her mouth, looking miserable.

Zhao Yonggang followed, his face ashen. In the end, with no physical evidence recovered and still shaken by the girl’s recklessness, he could only deduct ten points each from Zhang Wei and Su Xiaoqing for exam-room discipline. He said no more about zeros.

When the submission bell rang, the math exam ended amid the chaos.

One paper filled from top to bottom and two almost entirely blank papers were collected in turn, and order finally returned to Room Three.