: Chapter 9

Next week, an ominous poster appears over the Year Twelve lockers, with the following words printed out in large, block letters:

It takes everyone a while to figure out what the poster’s referring to.

“Maybe it means fifteen days left until my will to live runs out,” Vanessa Liu suggests as she crams a mountain of textbooks into her overhead locker, slamming it shut with a roundhouse kick that makes the walls tremble.

Someone behind me snorts. “Sounds about right.”

“Oh! Oh—I know!” Rainie says, her eyes widening, lips parting in a perfect O. Ever since the whole Jake incident, she’s been a lot more enthusiastic about everything. “Maybe it’s for the Experiencing China trip!”

“But, like, that usually happens in late November,” Chanel points out.

“Then what about—”

“Isn’t it obvious?” I say, louder than I mean to. Almost the entire year level goes quiet and turns to me, expectant. My face burns at the sudden attention. Still, I hold my ground and explain, “There are only fifteen days left until our first midterm exam. The teachers probably put the countdown up to remind us.”

Immediately, faces fall. Smiles fade.

“Well, trust the Study Machine to know,” someone says. It isn’t the first time I’ve heard this sort of joke, but there’s an awkward pause after the familiar words, and I know the people from my history class are still remembering what happened in our last test.

My face grows hotter with embarrassment. Shame.

Who knows how long it’ll take me to build up my reputation again?

As people finish cramming books and laptops into lockers and start heading outside for lunch, most of their conversations turning to revision and how far behind they are and how they haven’t even really read Macbeth yet for English, just the SparkNotes summaries, my phone buzzes.

Another Beijing Ghost notification.

I’ve already lost track of the number of requests I’ve gotten, but my heart still stutters in my chest as I find a dark, empty corner in the hall, turn with my back against the wall so that no one can see my screen, and read over the latest message:

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 a huge fan of how the feature made me sound like Darth Vader, everything else worked pretty well.

So I message back:

.

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 a very strict 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, I have to 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’ll think about 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 the issue, 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’ll be 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.”

The rest of the school day passes in a blur.

I drift from class to class, bump into people in the halls, do the in-class history exercises robotically, hand them in early. And even though I haven’t made my mind up yet about the request, I linger once everyone’s gone.

Mr. Murphy starts at the sight of me. Blinks rapidly, like he’s scared I might start crying again. “Alice.” He folds his hands over his desk. “What’s up?”

“I was just wondering,” I begin, going over the lines I’ve rehearsed for the past hour in my head, “since I know I didn’t do that well for the last test—”

“I haven’t marked those papers yet.”

“Still,” I insist. “I have a pretty good idea of how I did, and—I’m not going to lie, I feel…horrible about it, which is why it’s more important than ever that I perform well in our midterms.” I make myself look right at him, and pray that my expression is earnest, rather than terrified. “And so I—I was wondering if you’ve already written the midterms…? And if you’ve got a revision guide ready, like you did last year? I mean, I obviously don’t want to rush you or anything but—”

“Oh no, don’t worry,” Mr. Murphy says with a light chuckle, evidently relieved I’m back in control of my emotions again. “I just finished writing your midterms yesterday—would’ve gotten it done earlier, honestly, if it weren’t for my kids.” He makes a you-know-the-struggle kind of face, and I nod just to speed things along, even though I obviously don’t. “The revision guide should be ready soon too. I’ll send the class an email once I’ve got it printed out for next class—how ’bout that?”

“That’d be perfect,” I say, offering him my best straight-A student smile.

He smiles back, not suspecting a thing. I’m still Alice Sun, after all. Even if I messed up on my last test, there’s no way I’d ever dare cheat. “You know what’s so great about you, Alice?” Mr. Murphy says as he stuffs today’s worksheets into an already overflowing, see-through folder. Even though Airington keeps making grand statements about being a completely “paper-free school,” he’s one of those teachers who’s always preferred physical copies. “You’re so driven. So determined. No matter what happens, you just have a plan and you do it—and you do it well too.”

Normally, this kind of praise would make me giddy with joy, but my chest only tightens.

“You’ll go far with that mindset of yours,” Mr. Murphy continues, gazing out into the empty classroom as if he can see some glorious vision of my future shining right there before us. “I’m certain of it.”

It’s too much. I feel so guilty that I barely manage to stutter out a thanks, just grab my books and go.

When I get back to the dorms, Chanel is in a bad mood.

I know this because she’s lying on our bedroom floor in her BTS pajamas and feasting on three giant bags of spicy strips at 11:00 p.m., breaking the intermittent fasting thing she’s been practicing religiously since the start of the school year.

“Want a latiao?” she asks when she notices me, holding up one of the bags. Her fingers are red with chili oil.

“Um, no thank you.” I walk closer, careful not to step on her hair. “Is…everything okay here?”

“Yeah, of course,” she says. But she’s an even worse liar than I am, and terrible at holding things in. After only a few beats of silence, she throws up her hands like I’ve got her at gunpoint. “Okay, okay, fine. But you’re going to think it’s ridiculous.”

“I won’t,” I promise quickly.

“You’re going to think I’m ridiculous.”

I blink at her, confused.

She heaves a loud sigh, props herself up on one elbow, and says, “I failed my chem test.”

“Oh.”

I don’t know why I assumed it’d be something a lot more dramatic, less…normal. Maybe I’ve come to think of people like Chanel as living on a whole separate plane of existence, elevated from mundane struggles and concerns like getting a bad grade.

“See,” she says, groaning and falling back on the floor with a significant thud. “You’re judging me. I can feel it.”

“I’m not,” I say, trying to collect my thoughts. “And it’s not like… I mean, grades don’t matter that much anyway…” I wince. The words ring awfully false and hypocritical to my own ears. “Sorry. That was so obnoxious.”

Chanel snorts. “It was, a little.”

“So—okay, I do get why you’d be upset about it. It sucks. But also, if it helps… I genuinely don’t consider our academic records to be like, the ultimate indicator of human value or whatever.”

She looks up at me. “You really think that?”

I nod.

“Then why do you kill yourself studying all the time?”

“Well, it’s different for me…” I immediately cringe again, and hurry to explain, “Not in like a special snowflake sort of way but… I don’t know. I guess grades are the only thing I have power over. The only thing I have.”

The second I say this aloud, I realize how sad it sounds.

“That’s not true,” Chanel tells me, and I expect her to sprout some vague, corny line about how I still have so much untapped potential and my whole life ahead of me, but instead she simply says, “You have me. And you have Henry.”

I stare at her. “Henry?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“As in Henry Li? The one at our school?”

“The one and only.”

“Henry literally wouldn’t bat an eye if I dropped dead at his feet,” I say, half laughing now. “Or, no, he’d probably tell my corpse to not dirty his shoes.”

“You might think that,” Chanel says, stuffing three spicy strips into her mouth at once and speaking between chews. “But trust me, he cares a lot more than he lets on.” She arches an eyebrow at me. “He cares about you a lot more than he lets on.”

Heat rises up the back of my neck, followed by a sharp, inexplicable thrill of pleasure. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I say loudly, more to myself than to Chanel.

“I swear on my favorite LV bag I’m telling the truth,” she insists, raising one hand dramatically in the air. Then she pushes herself up into sitting position, her eyes suddenly serious. “I’ve known that kid and his family for—what? Seven years now? And, yeah, he’s always worked like he has a fire lit under his ass. Hell, he used to listen in on his dad’s business meetings and draw up all these solutions for SYS when he was a freaking ten-year-old. But I’ve never seen him this…devoted to a project before. Like, ever.”

“He’s only like that because we’re business partners,” I point out. “And he gets to make a profit out of it.”

“Sure.” She rolls her eyes. “Because we all know that’s the only thing missing from Henry Li’s life—money.”

I decide to ignore what she’s implying. “You don’t have to lack something to want it. And everyone wants money.”

“Not everyone,” Chanel protests. When she sees the look I’m giving her, she adds, “Like monks, for example. My uncle’s a monk, you know. Lives in a temple in Xiangshan and eats only lettuce and everything. He doesn’t want money at all.”

“That’s nice. Good for him.”

She snorts.

“Really.” I move over to sit down beside her. Before she can turn the topic to Henry again, I say, “But back to your chem results…”

“You sound like my mum,” she grumbles.

“I’m not going to lecture you, I promise.” I raise my hand, too, mimicking the oath she made just now. She shakes her head and laughs. “I was actually just thinking—and this isn’t directed at you personally or anything—but…if you had the opportunity, would you ever cheat on the next test? If it was a matter of pass or fail?”

She considers this for a moment. “I don’t think so,” she says finally. “But only because I’m not that desperate.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you know how it is.” She shrugs. “A lot of the kids here were born when the one-child policy was still around. They literally have their entire family—all their aunts and great-aunts and their grandpa’s cow—just counting on them to succeed, not to mention how many of them have parents who immigrated just so they could get a foreign passport, a better education, a better life, whatever. And with that kind of pressure weighing down on you all the time… It can push you to do extreme things. It makes failure a nonoption. Unthinkable. You know what I’m saying?”

I do know. I know all too well what she means.

But my next decision still doesn’t come easily.

In the dead of night, long after Chanel’s fallen asleep, I make lists.

Lots of them; pros and cons, risks and costs.

I map out where and how I’d be able to find the exam answers, the probability of me getting caught in the process, the chances of me getting kicked out, thrown into jail (which sounds super melodramatic, I know, but according to a quick Google search, two students were actually sent to jail for cheating a year ago).

I think about why I’m doing this. I think about why I want—no, need, always need—the money. More money. I think about how ironic it is, that in order to become the person I’d like to be, I might have to do the last thing others would expect of me. I think about guilt and karma and survival and how being good doesn’t ever promise you anything in this world—only power does that.

Power I finally have.

And as the night drags on, I can’t help but think of Mama.

I think of the thin, ugly cut slicing through her worn hands, where once there was an open gash, flowing blood, a dark red river running past her fingertips.

I remember the sound of the robber breaking into our store—the only Asian grocery in our tiny rural Californian town, how proud Baba was to be the owner of the very first one, to “share a slice of our culture” with the locals there.

I remember Mama’s sharp cry of alarm—then pain, the metallic clatter of the knife hitting the floor. The robber’s grunts as my father raced to the cash register, tackling him from behind.

The shrill blare of the sirens afterward.

I’d been helping stack the back shelves when it happened, two cartons of salted duck eggs balanced precariously in my hands. And I’d just stood there, frozen, my body shutting down in shock. Only once the scene had already unfolded and the police had arrived was I finally jerked back into motion, the cartons falling to my feet, the soft crunch of egg shells all I could hear over my ragged heartbeat.

The police were nice enough about the whole incident, but dismissive, the way parents might console a crying child. Look, we get you’re upset, one of the older policemen had told me, patting my shoulder a few times. I fought the urge to slap his meaty hand right off. But there’s no evidence this was a hate crime. I mean, this kind of stuff can happen to anyone, you know? Try not to think too much into it.

And maybe he was right. Maybe it really was just a matter of bad luck, bad timing. Maybe the person standing behind the cash register could’ve been a tall blond man with a nice smile, whose words came out smooth and unaccented when he called out for help, and the same thing would’ve happened.

Maybe.

But here’s the thing about living in a place full of people who don’t look like you—whenever shit like this happens, you can’t help but wonder if you’ve been singled out for a reason.

After the incident, I felt certain Mama would run out of the hospital and book the first plane ride back to China. But I’d forgotten this was a woman who’d grown up in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, who’d poured ice water over herself every night for a month just to stay awake studying for her gaokao. She was not so easily fazed. In fact, she seemed more determined than ever to remain in America (What we do wrong, huh? Your Baba and I work hard, pay tax, obey law—then this man stab me and I run like criminal? How come?).

In the end, it wasn’t fear that sent us packing for Beijing, but money. Or, well, the lack of it. Our little grocery store never brought in much cash to begin with, and whatever my parents managed to save up, they spent it all on me—on tuition, piano lessons, swim classes, weekend Chinese school. Then came the recession, and business seemed to sputter to a stop entirely.

My parents fought it at first, because that’s just what they did; they tried, they fought. When things didn’t work, they fought harder. They started selling things to stay afloat: Mama’s favorite jade bracelet, Baba’s only winter coat, a porcelain vase, the dining table. Mama found a job as a janitor at the nearest hospital, the closest thing she could get to her old nursing career in China, and Baba made a few extra coins every day by collecting and recycling used plastic bottles.

But even then, it wasn’t enough. Nowhere close.

The breaking point came on Chinese New Year. We celebrated it alone in our dark, rented home, sitting around the plastic tablecloth that now served as the table, passing around a plate of those frozen, store-bought dumplings we’d heated in the microwave.

Mama had taken one bite of the dumpling and gone very still.

“What is it?” Baba asked in Mandarin, peering over at her with concern. “Does it taste that bad?”

She said nothing.

“Because we still have a few cups of instant noodles left,” Baba continued. “I could boil the water now—we might even have an egg—”

Then Mama’s face crumpled. Her voice cracked. “I—I want real dumplings.”

“What?”

“I want to go back,” Mama whispered, her dark eyes misting over. It terrified me, seeing her like that. She hadn’t even shed a tear when she was stabbed. “I want to go home.”

Understanding passed over Baba’s face like a shadow. He reached across the tablecloth and put one hand over hers, covering up the half-healed scar. “I know,” he said quietly. “I know.”

We flew back to Beijing a few weeks after that, our first and last shot at the American Dream over, the chapter unceremoniously closed. But I never stopped thinking about the sacrifices my parents made, the pleading look on Mama’s face when she said it, almost like a child—I want to go home—and how the only reason they left home in the first place was because of me.

Even now.

I relive every moment of those final bitter months until my brain threatens to melt in my skull and my eyelids begin to weigh a thousand tons.

And right before I drift off to sleep on my desk, what I think is this:

My parents didn’t work this hard for me to only get this far.