After five more torturous minutes of me racking my brain for something full-marks worthy, I finally write down the rough beginnings of a first line: The sparrow and the eagle both can hunt, can fly, can sing, but while one soars free, the other...

Then I pause. Stare down at my wonky Chinese handwriting. Read the line over and over again until I decide it’s pretty much the worst combination of words anyone has ever come up with since the dawn of time.

A low hiss escapes my gritted teeth.

God, if this were English, I’d be flying through the second page already, all the right words pouring out of me. I’d probably be done.

I’m about to scrap the whole thing and make a new essay outline when that terrible, unshakeable cold I first felt in the auditorium begins to creep under my skin.

My pen freezes over the page.

Not again, I beg silently in my head. Please not again.

But the cold deepens, sharpens, pours into every pore of my body as if my clothes have been soaked in freezing water, and through it all my brain registers the alarming fact that either I’m running a high fever, or I’m about to turn invisible before a class of twenty-two people.

I stand up so abruptly that Wei Laoshi jumps, almost spilling his tea. Twenty-two pairs of eyes snap to me, all while the cold continues seeping, growing like some terrible rash, and any second now—

“I—um—I have to go the bathroom,” I blurt out, and bolt out of the room before Wei Laoshi can even respond. Humiliation floods through me as I sprint down the corridor, my old leather shoes pounding over the gleaming floors. Now everyone in my Chinese class probably thinks I have chronic diarrhea or something.

But better that than the truth. Whatever the hell the truth is meant to be.

By the time I reach the closest bathrooms on the second floor, I’ve already turned invisible. There’s no shadow attached to my feet, and the reflection in the floor-length mirrors doesn’t change when I step in front of them, only showing the faded pink door swinging wide open on its own. If anyone else were in here, they’d likely think this place was haunted by ghosts.

I lock myself in the last stall with trembling fingers, wincing as the sharp smell of disinfectant assaults my nose. Then I sit down on the closed toilet lid. Try to think.

And all that pops into my head is:

Once is an accident. Twice is a coincidence. Thrice is a pattern.

So.

It’s happened twice already; it could still mean nothing.

Or maybe it’s an even more common affliction than I realize, and the people suffering from it just tend to keep it to themselves—like irritable bowel syndrome, or herpes.

On that inspiring note, I pull my phone out of my inner blazer pocket. It’s an old Xiaomi, which is pretty much a smartphone for elderly people, but it works, and it’s cheap, so no complaints there.