The Star Missing an Edge

Xu Linchuan did not sleep well that night. It would not be quite accurate to say he did not sleep. A little after eleven, he shut down his terminal once and went to the kitchen for water; at midnight, he pulled out Class Two, Year Three’s assignments again, hoping Han Yu’s rambling report on local history might fill his head; after one, he even took a shower. Each time, he thought he had left that piece of blue cloth on the desk. But as soon as the room fell quiet, it came back. Mihe.

The name returned before the face. He had always remembered what happened in the days around the accident: which gate, what time the call came, which chair the family sat in when they first came to the school, how He Qi had not yet been director then, and had stood at the meeting-room door holding a stack of documents, her hands trembling the whole time. The lively Mihe from before the accident, by contrast, remained only in scattered images. Back then, she had been no more than one of the dozens of children in the class—talkative, always straying from the point in her assignments, far more serious in artifacts class than in history. She disliked anyone touching her light-filtering ring, yet was forever tossing it onto the corner of her desk. Once, Xu Linchuan wrote half a page of comments beneath one of her assignments. When it was returned the next day, Mihe read it and added a line at the very bottom: Mr. Xu, what does this paragraph have to do with the question?

Xu Linchuan took the paper to find her, intending to give her a talking-to. Mihe listened very seriously, then turned the paper back around and pointed to his half page of comments. “So this paragraph still has nothing to do with the question.” He laughed despite his irritation. The ring first cracked when the school’s adaptation room was being renovated. Lin Qi had been temporarily transferred to the north building, and Mihe stood blocking the office doorway with the ring in her arms, asking Xu Linchuan whether he could repair it. He had only been teaching for a few years then, and feared nothing more than students discovering that teachers, too, had things they could not do—especially when the person facing him was a twelve-year-old child. He said he could. The result was appalling.