Summer Camp

The entire summer vacation was spent almost exclusively in the math competition classroom. It began with the school's own training, followed by a mathematics summer camp attended by students from every district in the city. The camp concluded on July 24th with the preliminary round exam. According to Miss Han, another 25% of the students—roughly ten or so—would be eliminated.

During the camp, classes ran from 8:00 to 11:30 in the morning, 2:00 to 5:30 in the afternoon, and included evening study sessions. Lingquan had been going home for meals lately, but since no one was home to cook for me, I was forced to eat both lunch and dinner in the cafeteria, remaining at school for the entire day. The cafeteria was filled with many unfamiliar faces from other schools—students and teachers alike. I looked around and saw that most were boys. I didn't see anyone I knew from middle school. Perhaps because they were hosting guests, the cafeteria's food quality had improved significantly; at least I no longer had to desperately hunt for meat inside the potato stew. I grabbed my meal, carried my tray to a corner table, and began to pick at my food. The chair opposite me was empty, and even the best meal lost its flavor.

During the evening study session, the members of the Grade 10 math competition class sat scattered throughout the tiered lecture hall, with Miss Han monitoring from the front. I focused primarily on practicing the three major problems of the first round, as well as the plane geometry and algebra of the second. As for combinatorics or graph theory, I had abandoned them entirely. Problem-solving was truly draining; even with the central air conditioning running at full blast, I couldn't stop the sweat from beading on my forehead.

Lingquan sat right next to me on the left. As we wrote, our elbows would occasionally brush against each other, and I could feel the texture of her fabric and the faint warmth of her skin. My heart skipped a beat.

I kept a palm-sized e-reader in my bag, and whenever I grew tired of solving problems, I would tuck it beneath my collection of first-round practice sets to read in secret. I had bought this device back in my first year of middle school when I visited a large mall in Jianglin City with my father. I had filled it with many books in text format, and during middle school, I would often hide under my covers at night to read for a few minutes before falling asleep.

"What are you reading?" Lingquan leaned over as soon as class ended.

"Uh... A History of Western Philosophy. Just reading it like a story."

"'Timaeus says that man has two souls, one immortal and one mortal... The mortal soul must 'be subject to terrible and irresistible passions—first of all pleasure, the greatest incitement to evil; then pain, which deters from good; and besides these, rashness and fear, two foolish counselors, as well as intractable anger and easily-led hope; these they (the gods) mingled with irrational sensation and all-daring love according to necessary laws, and so framed man.' 'The immortal soul is in the head, and the mortal soul is in the chest.'" Lingquan read the page I was viewing word for word.

After finishing, she paused. "Total nonsense."

"There is no such thing as a mortal or immortal soul created by gods. There is only a nervous system shaped by evolution... Forget it, one has to consider the limitations of historical figures, right?"

"But his description is quite accurate," I said with a bitter smile. Terrible and irresistible passions... lately, everything I saw somehow reminded me of myself.

"Indeed," Lingquan lowered her head, continuing to simplify a long, tedious inequality.

"I really want to be a robot," she suddenly remarked. "No pain, no pleasure, no hope... none of those irrational, unbridled things. I would just have to follow orders properly. Why am I not a robot?"

"Robots... don't have a 'heart,'" I replied.

"You should define what a 'heart' is before you say that," she retorted sharply.

"Uh..." I was suddenly at a loss for words.

"Anyway, if I became a robot, I could be spared all that irrational torment. Then, as long as I kept studying, attending classes, and doing my homework well, and could continue taking exams just like I am now, everyone would be satisfied."

"No! I don't want you to become a robot!"

"Why not? For example, if she looked exactly like me, sounded exactly like me, and had the exact same handwriting... you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. To be even more extreme, can you truly be certain that I have a so-called 'heart' right now? We are each like a black box; from the outside, you can't tell if there are electronic tubes or neurons inside—oh wait, you can tell that much. What you can't be sure of is 'feeling,' or let's just use your word, 'heart.' I can see a heart in my own box, and everyone else claims to have one in theirs too. But perhaps their boxes are empty, or maybe there's a gear or a beetle inside, but since no one can see... does it really make any difference whether they have one or not?" She said this while performing a transformation on her equation.

"But... I would be sad if I knew."

"You wouldn't know."

"I would."

"On what grounds?"

"...Irrationality."

"Idiot." She wrote down the condition for the equality to hold and a "Q.E.D.," then unexpectedly reached out and ruffled my hair. "Idiot, idiot, hahahaha." She laughed uncontrollably, until tears streamed down her face.

"Mm..."

I don't know how I passed the secondary selection, but somehow, I did. After the results were released, Miss Han continued to drag us to the lecture hall to drill problems all day long. I suddenly remembered that last September, when the semester had just begun, the lecture hall was packed with a hundred students, with almost no empty seats from the first row to the last. Now... the hall was growing emptier, with only thirty or forty people scattered about.

Yet, I was still sitting here with Lingquan. Could this be called a miracle?

One evening during a study session, a torrential downpour suddenly began. The raindrops were warm and stung when they hit; it was that kind of downpour unique to summer. When school ended, the rain hadn't stopped. I had brought an umbrella, but it was useless against the downpour; I was going to be soaked regardless.

We ran wildly between the unlit buildings of the school, and within a few steps, our shoes were soaked through, sticky and damp. As we ran out of the school gate, I tried my best to hold the umbrella with one hand while tilting it toward Lingquan, though such minimal coverage was essentially futile.

The scent of fresh earth from the flowerbeds was kicked up by the rain, and smelling it seemed to evoke many, many distant summers. They say the brain evolved from the olfactory organs, which is why scents can so easily summon memories and emotions. At the very least, for me, the smell of summer soil and the sound of my heart pounding during that rainy night run were now linked forever.

When we reached the entrance of her apartment building, Lingquan suddenly ran out from under my umbrella, stretching her arms wide toward the rain. After a momentary roar, a bolt of lightning flashed across the sky. I saw Lingquan's rain-streaked face illuminated in a stark, snow-white light, wearing an expression I could not describe—

Unsettled.

I shivered all over and quickly pulled her back to the entrance of her building. I watched as she climbed the stairs and quietly entered her home before I left.

Once home, I quickly changed my clothes and dried my hair; the Math Olympiad was less than a month away, and it wouldn't be good if a cold interfered with my studies. The room was filled with lingering steam and the scent of summer.