Chapter 5: Warm Hands

Ye Xiao, his little sister, arrived early on Saturday with a bag of fish balls and a rolled-up engineering drawing.

She was twenty, short and round-cheeked, with her brother's upturned eyes and none of his stillness.

She kicked her shoes off at the door, flopped onto his bed and spread the drawing across his knees before he had turned the lock.

"Ge, you look terrible," she said. "Did you sleep?"

"I slept."

He had put the brass lamp on the high shelf under a cloth, and it was only a lamp on a shelf.

Behind the cloth, in the thin light from the window, a long damp shape stood against the wall.

"It's the statics," said Ye Xiao, tapping the page. "A beam, three loads, two supports," she said.

"I keep getting a negative reaction at B, and I know that's wrong."

"I don't understand statics," Ye Ming said.

"You don't have to. Just look at it and be handsome."

Ye Ming bent over the drawing.

Behind his shoulder the dry voice spoke.

"You've drawn the moment arm on the wrong side of the second load. Tell her to check her sign."

"Check your sign on the second load," Ye Ming said.

Ye Xiao looked up, narrow-eyed.

"Since when do you say things like that?" she asked.

"I read," he said.

"You read?"

"The arrow is right and the sign is wrong," said Gu Chen, with real satisfaction.

Ye Ming repeated it.

His sister stared at the page, grabbed her pencil, and for a minute the room held only the scratch of it.

"It's positive," she said. "Ge, it's positive!"

She threw her arms around his neck, smelling of fish balls and the bus.

On the high shelf, the cold stirred and settled.

When she had gone through the fish balls she fished out a crumpled envelope.

"The tuition," she said. "Twenty-eight thousand a year, and the Quiet Water scholarship pays twenty."

She smoothed the envelope on his knee.

"The second installment is due on the fifteenth. The office says it needs a form."

She hugged him at the door and told him to eat vegetables.

Then she ran down the stairs two at a time, shouting a goodbye at the squid shop.

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