Chapter 10 — Midnight Pages
1681 Words
The results were posted on the board outside the main hall at half past three.
Wei Chen stood in front of them for a long moment.
He found his name.
Found his score.
Looked at it.
Then sighed.
Li-Mei was in their usual spot — the table by the window in the far corner of the school library where the afternoon light came in at the right angle and nobody bothered them. Her notes were spread across the table in the organized chaos that only made sense to her. Her pen was moving.
Wei Chen sat down across from her.
She did not look up.
He was quiet for a moment.
Then he sighed.
Not dramatically. Just — heavily. The kind of sigh that carries genuine weight.
Li-Mei's pen kept moving.
A minute passed.
He sighed again.
Her pen slowed slightly.
Another minute.
He sighed a third time — the deep, heavy, rattling kind that seemed to come from somewhere below his stomach. The kind that makes the air in a room feel different.
Li-Mei set her pen down.
She looked up.
Wei Chen was staring at the table with the expression of a person carrying something they did not know how to put down.
"Do you have something to say?" she asked.
He reached into his bag.
Pulled out his English test script.
Placed it on the table between them.
Li-Mei looked at the score.
Then at him.
Then without a word she reached into her own bag and pulled out her English script and placed it beside his.
He looked at her score.
He was not surprised. He had never once been surprised by Li-Mei's results.
She picked up her pen again.
"It is not the main exam," she said simply. "You will do well."
She went back to her notes.
Wei Chen looked at his script.
Then at her.
Then at his script again.
Then in the quietest most carefully constructed pitiful voice he could manage —
"Li-Mei."
She kept writing.
"Li-Mei."
Still writing.
"I was wondering if maybe — possibly — you might consider—"
"No," she said.
"You do not even know what I was going to say."
"You were going to ask me to tutor you in English."
A pause.
"...Yes."
"No," she said again.
Wei Chen was quiet.
Then — "Please."
Still writing.
"Li-Mei."
Writing.
"I am asking very nicely."
"You are always asking very nicely. It does not change my answer."
Another pause. Longer this time.
Then Wei Chen said — carefully, deliberately, like a man playing his final card —
"I will buy you any snack you want."
Li-Mei's pen stopped.
She looked up.
Wei Chen watched something move behind her eyes — the particular light that appeared whenever food or a good bargain entered the conversation.
"Any snack?" she said.
"Any snack."
She closed her notebook.
Stood up.
"Let us go," she said.
The convenience store three streets from school was Li-Mei's favourite place in the immediate neighborhood. Not because it was special. But because it had the widest selection of snacks within walking distance and Li-Mei had opinions about selection.
She moved through the aisles with the focused energy of someone on an important mission.
Wei Chen followed.
He watched her pick things up, examine them, put them back, pick up something else. He watched the items accumulating in her basket with growing attention. He watched the brands. The sizes. The prices.
He reached quietly for his phone.
Checked his account balance.
Whispered something under his breath that sounded like —
"I am going to regret this."
Li-Mei did not hear him.
Or possibly she did hear him and simply chose not to acknowledge it because she was very busy selecting the most expensive chocolate in the entire confectionery section.
By the time she declared herself satisfied the basket contained enough snacks to last a reasonable person approximately two weeks.
"Go to the checkout," she said pleasantly. "I will be there in a moment."
Wei Chen looked at the basket.
Looked at her.
Took the basket to the checkout.
He began placing items on the counter with the resigned dignity of a person accepting their fate.
Behind him he heard Li-Mei moving back through the aisles.
He did not look.
He was trying to calculate the total in his head and the number was making him feel slightly unwell.
Then Li-Mei appeared beside him.
She set a small reasonable selection of items on the counter — her actual favourite snacks and his, none of them expensive, all of them familiar and ordinary and exactly the kind of thing they shared between them on a normal afternoon.
She began returning the other items to the cashier with a cheerful apology.
Wei Chen stared at the small reasonable pile.
Something in his chest did something he was not going to think about.
"I was just messing with you," Li-Mei said without looking at him. "Obviously I was not going to make you pay for all of that."
She picked up her snacks.
Started toward the door.
"Of course I will tutor you," she said over her shoulder. "We are friends. I would do it without the snacks."
She paused at the door.
Looked back at him.
"But the snacks are still appreciated."
And she walked out into the afternoon.
Wei Chen stood at the checkout for one more second.
Then he followed her.
And if he was smiling as he walked through the door —
He was not going to think about that either.
The weekend belonged to English.
Li-Mei had a system.
She sat at the restaurant table on Friday evening after closing with her English textbooks, Wei Chen's previous test papers, and a fresh notebook. She worked through everything methodically — identifying every pattern of mistake, every area of weakness, every type of question that consistently lost him marks.
Then she built worksheets.
Page after page of carefully constructed exercises — each one targeting a specific weakness, each one building on the last, each one explained in the margins in her small neat handwriting that Wei Chen could follow without needing to ask questions.
She was still working when the restaurant went dark around her and the neighborhood outside grew quiet.
She did not notice.
Mama Chen noticed.
She came downstairs at half past eleven for a glass of water and found Li-Mei at the table surrounded by papers — pen moving, brow slightly furrowed, completely absorbed.
She stood in the doorway for a moment.
She had intended to say something firm about rest and sleep and the importance of not burning yourself out over someone else's English results.
But she looked at Li-Mei — at the careful handwriting, at the neat stacks of completed worksheets, at the quiet dedication of a girl who had decided that if she was going to help someone she was going to help them completely — and something in her chest made the firm words impossible.
She walked to the kitchen.
Made two cups of warm tea.
Set one beside Li-Mei without a word.
Li-Mei looked up. Startled.
"Mama—"
"Do not stress yourself too much," Mama Chen said quietly. "Rest when you need to."
She looked at the worksheets for a moment.
Then at Li-Mei.
Then she went back upstairs.
Li-Mei looked at the tea.
Then at the worksheets.
Then she picked up her pen and kept going.
The tutoring sessions happened across the whole weekend.
Wei Chen arrived both mornings before she had finished breakfast. He sat across from her at the restaurant table with the particular focused attention he only gave to things that genuinely mattered to him — the same attention he gave to basketball plays, to numbers, to the moments when Li-Mei's expression shifted in ways that told him something was wrong before she knew she was showing it.
He worked through every worksheet.
He asked questions when he did not understand.
He did not complain.
By Sunday evening Li-Mei looked at his completed exercises and felt something she recognized as pride — clean and genuine and slightly inconvenient because it was difficult to pretend she was only doing this for snacks when she cared this much about whether he actually understood.
"You are improving," she told him.
"Because of you," he said simply.
She looked back at the worksheets.
"The comprehension passages are still weak," she said. "We need to work on those."
"Mm," he said.
She looked at him.
He was already reading the next exercise.
She let it go.
She should not have let it go.
The rumor arrived on a Tuesday.
Li-Mei heard it the way you hear things that are meant to reach you — not directly, not face to face, but carried on the particular current of whispered conversations that stop just slightly too late when you walk past.
She throws herself at him. Everyone can see it. She attached herself to him when he arrived and never let go. It is embarrassing honestly. And now his scores are suffering because of her.
Li-Mei kept walking.
She did not stop.
She did not turn around.
She found her seat in the classroom and sat down and opened her textbook to the correct page and looked at the words without reading them for approximately four minutes.
Then she picked up her pen.
And kept going.
Because that was what she did.
But something had shifted.
It was small. Subtle. The kind of change that only someone paying very close attention would catch.
Her smiles came a half second slower than usual. Her laugh — when it came — was real but quieter. She answered when spoken to. She showed up. She tutored Wei Chen through the next week's sessions with the same patience and the same prepared worksheets and the same careful explanations.
But the warmth that usually came so easily — the effortless overflowing warmth that had always been the most natural thing about her — was being carefully managed now.
Turned down slightly.
Like a light with a dimmer switch.
- Writer
