The summer after the exam

The exam is over, and my hometown is holding its breath. In the ten days since the last paper was collected, Chizhou has gone quiet in a particular way. The school gates are empty at the hours they used to be full. The tutoring buildings are dark. My room is as I left it on the morning of the first exam, textbooks stacked, the timetable still pinned to the wall, and I keep walking past it as if it belonged to someone else. The city has done this before, every June for decades, and it still manages to surprise me with how completely it suspends itself between the end of one year and the start of the next.

The first days were a collapse, in the good sense. I slept, I ate at odd hours, I watched things I had put off for a year. Nobody in the house asked me to do anything, and the silence of that was louder than any instruction. Then, around the third day, the habits reasserted themselves and the strange work of the season began: the estimating. I found myself doing arithmetic in my head at the dinner table, adding the marks I was fairly sure of, subtracting the ones I was not, arriving at totals that shifted daily. My parents watched me do it without asking, the way you watch a fever run its course.

The city’s version of the same arithmetic is the subject of every conversation. In the supermarkets, in the lift, on the evening walk along the river, the same phrases recur with the gravity of weather reports, the difficulty of the paper, the likely cut-off lines, the experience of last year’s students. A whole city, hundreds of thousands of households, each privately keeping score against the same invisible standard. I used to find the communal reckoning oppressive. Now I find it oddly steadying. The exam was the loneliest thing I have done, and its aftermath, at least, is shared.

The school offered a back-to-school event a few days after the papers, and I went. The teachers, who had spent a year treating us like soldiers, were suddenly mild. They went through the answers with us the way you go through a wound: carefully, without pressure, stopping at the places where the damage was. They tried to ask me for my estimated grades in a careless manner. I came out with a number, provisional and approximate, and the number has been sitting in the house since, a third presence at the table, between my parents and me. We all know it will be revised when the official results arrive. We all treat it as if it were already written in stone.

The strangest part of these days is the absence of the thing that defined everything. For three years my life had a spine: the syllabus, the schedule, the target. Now the spine is gone and I am walking around with more free time than I know what to do with, waiting for the next fixed point, the results at the end of the month, then the form-filling, then the letters. I have started, cautiously, to think about the university applications, about the subjects I might choose, about the city I might move to. The thinking is tentative, the way you step on ice in early winter, testing, withdrawing. I have never had to choose a future before. The exam did not teach me how.

My father takes me to the riverfront in the evenings now, something he does only in the significant seasons, and we walk without saying much. The Yangtze, which has carried the city’s hopes in one form or another for as long as anyone remembers, is running high with the summer rains. He asks me, once, what I think the results will be. I give him the estimate, and he nods, and we keep walking. In a few days the results will arrive, and the arithmetic will stop, and the next phase will begin with its own unknown quantities. For now the city is still holding its breath, the river is high, and I am learning that the summer after the exam is its own kind of education, one with no syllabus and no marks, and, as far as I can tell, no wrong answers.