Chapter 10: The Pool

"Sorry," said Tang. "Rule one."

"You were asleep," said Fu, to the ceiling.

Tang peeled his hand out of Fu's shirt and rolled onto his own side of the bed.

He lay with his face to the wall until the alarm went off.

Then he got up, said something loud and meaningless about the six o'clock sprint, and left the flat fast.

He did not eat, and he did not look back.

By evening he had swum eight kilometres and still could not feel his own legs properly.

When Luo Bin said, "Walk?" outside the natatorium, he said yes.

They went down the steps by the East Gate to the river path.

The Jin River was black and slow and smelled of mud, and there were couples on the benches and old men fishing under the lamps.

Luo Bin walked with his hands in his pockets and said nothing for a good five minutes.

That was unusual enough that Tang stopped and looked at him.

"What?"

"I'm going to say something," said Luo Bin. "Just once. I'm not going to film it."

"That's a first."

"The pool isn't about your grades."

Tang kept walking.

His feet went on, one in front of the other, on the wet stone.

"I know," he said.

Luo Bin stopped dead.

"You know."

"I've always known. Since second year."

Tang laughed, and there was no fun in it.

"I'm not stupid, Bin. Thirty-one people in a corridor don't bet on my GPA."

"I saw the board the first day you put it up."

"Then why do you keep saying..." said Luo Bin.

"Because if I say 'GPA' loudly enough for long enough, it turns into a pool about my GPA."

Luo Bin stared at him.

Tang sat down heavily on a bench and put his elbows on his knees.

It was a relief, he found, to say it to somebody.

"I was nineteen," he said. "It was Lingchen's eighteenth birthday. I bought a cake and took it up to the roof."

"The Yulin Road one with the crooked eighteen."

"You know about the cake?"

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