One Year Ago
Ruoying had always been afraid of failure. From the first day her fingers had touched a piano key, from the time she had learned to shoot an arrow, she had understood that it was a hit or miss. One wrong shift of her hands and she was done.
The arrow would fly wherever it pleased, perhaps skewering the floor or a wall. Or, worse, it would land just shy of her target, only millimeters away from victory.
To Ruoying, failing in such a small way was exponentially worse than missing the bullseye completely.
All this ran through her head as she sat in a hard plastic chair, twisting her hands together, adernaline and anxiety flooding her senses.
Next to her, one of her teammates, Lihua, whispered in such a low voice that nobody else could hear it,
"Don't you dare mess up."
Funny how such a simple statement could make one feel so much more nervous.
Math had always been her strong subject. She was confident she had what it took to win, and yet Ruoying suddenly felt a need to prove herself, to deem herself worthy.
No, she told herself fiercely. I can't lose. I won't lose. I will not mess up and lose.
She had looked forward to this day for so, so long. She loved math competitions. She loved solving problems, the sound of pencil against paper, the rush of adrenaline when the question flashed across the screen. But above all, what she really loved was when she held that golden trophy above her head as people cheered and clapped.
It made her feel important. Recognized. For once, the center of everyone's attention.
Something she didn't have at home.
And so, Ruoying shifted in her uncomfortable chair, pencil in hand, poised over her paper. She watched in anticipation for the problem to appear on the giant screen above the stage, all while Lihua's words echoed through her mind.
Don't you dare mess up.
I won't, she assured herself. I promise I won't.
Sometimes, though, not all promises can be kept.
A closed circuit TV camera is mounted on a wall 7.4 feet above a security desk in an office building. It is used to view an entrance door 9.3 feet from the desk. Find the angle of depression, to the nearest hundredth, from the camera lens to the entrance door.
Startled, Ruoying did a double take. A problem that easy— a trigonometry problem, no less— at a math competition? It was too good to be true.
There's no way I can mess up on this problem.
She scribbled down a few numbers, haphazardly reaching over her teammate to snatch up a blue plastic calculator, and punched in the expression.
Inverse of tan . . . seven-point-four over nine-point-three . . .
38.50922837.
Ruoying glanced at the screen again. Round to the . . . what, again? Tenth? Hundredth?
Probably tenth. Problems like these always wanted you to round to the nearest tenth.
If only she had known. Perhaps then she would have spared another few seconds to read the problem again.
But she hadn't known. And so she placed the tip of the pencil on the paper, and wrote down 38.5 degrees.
Sure she had gotten the right answer, Ruoying threw down her pencil and hit the buzzer in front of her. She looked around wildly, making sure that nobody had finished yet. Next to her, Lihua put down her pencil and peered at Ruoying's paper. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see her teammate's eyes widen.
She frowned. Is she so surprised that I answered the question so quickly?
But it wasn't out of astonishment.
It was a look of fear.
"Ruoying!" Lihua hissed, jabbing her finger at the paper. "Your answer—"
"Is right," she finished loftily.
"No—"
But her words were cut off by the announcer yelling into his microphone,
"Lin Ruoying from Team 3 rings in! What's the answer to the problem?"
Lihua grabbed her pencil, ready to correct whatever mistake her simple-minded brain thought Ruoying had made. "You rounded—"
"Ming Lihua!" the announcer shouted. "Please don't talk while someone is giving an answer!"
She glared at the emcee, but shut up nonetheless.
Ruoying eased her paper out of Lihua's death grip and smoothed it out. "The answer to the problem is 38.5 degrees!" she declared triumphantly. She grinned, waiting for the cheers and clapping to break out as the rest of the teams groaned in frustration and disappointment.
But that never happened. Instead, the announcer pronounced gleefully,
"That is incorrect!"
Wait, what?
Ruoying stared at the emcee, dumbfounded. She didn't know what to feel— disappointment, confusion, frustration, anger— maybe a combination of them all. She only heard vaguely as Team 5 buzzed in and delivered the right answer, which turned out to be 38.51. She felt almost betrayed— she had lost her team's chance of winning the competition by a difference of 0.01 degrees.
She hung her head, propping it up with her hands. Find the angle of depression, to the nearest hundredth, from the . . . from the camera lens to the entrance door . . .
How stupid was she? Yes, she could solve advanced, high-level math problems, but as soon as she was given a simple question, she just had to screw it up by apparently forgetting how to properly read a question. She closed her eyes in shame, wishing it would all go away.
"Why am I so dumb?" she whispered to herself.
"Maybe you should have asked yourself that before signing up for a math competition," said a nasty voice from behind her.
Feeling eyes boring into the back of her skull, Ruoying lifted her head up and turned around.
The whole team was standing there, hands on their hips, glaring at her like she had just introduced pop-up ads to the world.
Lihua, in particular, was spitting mad. "Round to the nearest hundredth!" she spat out. "How hard is that?! If you could just read the problem, maybe we wouldn't be here right now!"
"The rest of us work hard and get the questions right," another teammate, Chen Min, added. "You, on the other hand, don't ever study and look what happens! You get it wrong and now we're out!"
"I—" Ruoying started indignantly, then stopped. She wanted to say that she did study and she did work hard, but the truth was that Chen Min was right. She never studied. She never really had a need to, because she already knew the topics and she trusted herself to get the right answer. And she always did get the right answer. That is, until now.
But did that mean she didn't work hard? She really didn't know. She had always assumed that even though she understood the material and didn't need to study, she still worked hard. Working hard and studying were not synonymous. Chen Min, queen of literature, should know that best out of everyone.
But as soon as Ruoying opened her mouth again to refute the claim, Yang Suyin, the team captain, stepped forward.
"If you want to be on this team, you must work hard," she said, staring down the rest of the team. Suyin was gifted with the ability to condemn anyone with something as simple as a look, and the entire team had always been afraid of her. Ruoying shrank back in her seat, feeling Suyin's gaze on her.
"We work hard," Lihua insisted. "It's Ruoying who doesn't."
Chen Min scoffed at me. "She should get kicked off the team," she suggested, a cruel gleam in her eyes.
Ruoying gasped. "What?!"
Suyin frowned, her eyes sweeping across the team. Ruoying held her breath, desperately praying that she wouldn't agree. Suyin was smart, level-headed, and most of all, reasonable. She wouldn't ever consider cutting a teammate— at least, Ruoying hoped she wouldn't.
"We don't have any room for errors," Suyin said finally. "That means that if we want to win any competition, we can't have any weak, underperforming members in this team." Chen Min looked at the captain expectantly, and Suyin added, "And a teammate that does not study, insisting that she will do fine— and then, missing a question— falls under the category of disappointing."
Lihua groaned. "Please use regular words, duizhang," she said. "Is she leaving, or not?"
Yang Suyin stared at her dead in the eye. When Lihua didn't move, she then turned to Ruoying.
"Pack up your things."
She blinked, and sputtered, "W-what do you mean?" She hadn't felt so lost, so untethered and unmoored, for years.
Suyin held her gaze, her features sharp and cold. "I mean, goodbye. Goodbye, Lin Ruoying, and don't ever come back."
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And end of prologue! Hope you enjoyed this little dramatic backstory for Ruoying lol
1437 words! Not bad for a prologue!
We'll see about casting for Lihua, Chen Min, Suyin, etc. :D
Okay, but seriously, Suyin is giving me Siyang vibes—
OH GOSH I JUST REALIZED IT EVEN SOUNDS LIKE HIS NAME—
- Chloe