We’re meant to construct sentences using different vocabulary words provided at the top of the page, but I barely know enough words to string together a sentence to begin with. The only characters I can write with reasonable confidence are I, horse, mother, you, have, and a few numbers. This works out well enough for a couple sentences, but I run out of variations pretty quickly:

I bought ten horses.

The horses have fruits.

I have a horse in my sink.

The horse is suspicious of my mother.

My mother is a horse.

The horse is my mother.

“What do you mean by despite the horse, my mother can still have ten sinks?” Cyrus asks, shifting forward to read my answers.

I quickly hide my paper with my elbow, but it’s harder to hide the heat flooding my face. “No cheating,” I tell him.

“I don’t think you have any reason to worry about me copying you,” he says, resting his head on the table like it’s the perfect pillow, his face angled toward me. He put his pen down before I’d even flipped the page. “Though I definitely couldn’t have thought of that sentence by myself. The teacher should give you bonus points for creativity.”

“You can stop now.”

He regards me with an expression of well-feigned innocence. “Stop what?”

“Talking,” I say. Looking at me, I add mentally. Breathing.

“I really enjoy the implication that the horse poses an obstacle to sink ownership,” Cyrus continues like he didn’t hear me, his mouth curving with quiet amusement. “And that the mother can only have ten sinks, specifically. Eleven would just be too many.”

I put my head down, committed to tuning out his existence. But the next few questions are even harder than the first, almost impossible for me to decipher. Out of desperation, I start drawing wonky circles in place of characters I don’t know, hoping I might remember them later, but then it just looks like I’m doodling eggs all over the page. Before Wang Laoshi comes up to collect our tests, I already know that I’ve failed mine.

Well, the good thing is that it’s over, I comfort myself. Until we get the results back anyway.