The south dock was better than the north dock for two reasons: the planks were wider, and Old Yan's stall did not have a line of sight to it from the market. Wei Liang had established this empirically over four years of research.
He was sitting with his feet hanging over the edge, watching the river do what it always did — run south, brown and full of itself — when Hao Jin arrived and dropped down beside him without asking. This was fine. Hao Jin had been dropping down beside Wei Liang without asking since they were seven. At this point it would have been strange to ask.
They sat for a while. The afternoon light came through the willows at an angle that turned the water gold. A heron stood in the shallows on the far bank, absolutely still in that particular way herons had, as if they had decided that the problem of movement was beneath them.
"Do you think about it?" Hao Jin said.
Wei Liang did not need to ask what it was. The examination was two months away. Every child in Qinghe between the ages of ten and fifteen had been thinking about it in the particular way that you think about a thing you cannot control — constantly, and sideways, and always right before you fell asleep.
"Sometimes," Wei Liang said, which was true the way a river is sometimes wet.
Hao Jin picked up a pebble from the dock and turned it in his fingers. He was big for twelve — he had always been big, built like someone had started with extra material and decided to use it — but right now he was holding the pebble the way a child holds something small and uncertain.
"I want to pass," Hao Jin said. He said it to the river, not to Wei Liang. "I really want to pass."
Wei Liang looked at his friend's profile. Hao Jin was not someone who said things like this. He was the person who arm-wrestled the ferry captain's son on a dare, who once ate twelve river-dumplings on a bet and walked it off like it was nothing, who had, on three separate occasions, carried Wei Liang on his back for a combined distance of roughly two li because Wei Liang had lost footraces on purpose and then been too proud to admit his feet hurt. Hao Jin was not, generally, a person who said I really want something in that particular voice — the one that means: and I do not know what I will do if I do not get it.
"Tell me," Wei Liang said.
Hao Jin threw the pebble. It skipped twice and then sank. He watched the ripples go.
"My father's been on the boats since he was nine," he said. "My grandfather too, his grandfather. Everyone says: Hao Jin, you're strong, you'll be a good fisherman. Everyone says it like it's decided." He paused. "I don't want it to be decided."
Wei Liang understood this. He understood it in the specific way of someone who had also felt the town's affectionate certainty closing around him — You'll be a good fisherman, Wei Liang, like your father, you'll be fine, Qinghe is a good life — and had mostly let it close, because what was the alternative, and also because he loved Qinghe, he genuinely did, and loving a place made it harder to name the way it could also be a ceiling.
"What do you want?" Wei Liang asked. "Not what you don't want. What you do."
Hao Jin was quiet for a moment. "I want to go somewhere. I want to learn something that can't be taken away from me." He paused again. "I want to matter somewhere that isn't just here."
"You matter here," Wei Liang said.
"I know." Hao Jin picked up another pebble. "That's not the same."
He was right and Wei Liang knew it. Mattering somewhere was not the same as mattering everywhere, the way the river mattering to Qinghe did not mean the river mattered to the sea. The river ran south and the sea received it and did not ask where it had come from.
"What if you don't pass?" Wei Liang asked.
It was not a kind question. It was the question that needed asking, which was different.
Hao Jin looked at the river for a long time. The heron on the far bank shifted its weight, almost imperceptibly, the way herons did when they were pretending they hadn't moved.
"Then I stay," Hao Jin said, "and I figure it out."
Wei Liang nodded. "That's a good answer."
"Is it?" Hao Jin didn't sound convinced.
"Yes," Wei Liang said. "Because it's honest. You're not saying you'll be fine with it. You're saying you'll do the next thing. That's different from fine and also better."
Hao Jin looked at him. "When did you get wise?"
"I've always been wise," Wei Liang said. "You just don't notice because I'm also usually doing something stupid."
Hao Jin laughed — a real one, the kind that started in his chest. The heron, apparently offended by the noise, lifted off the far bank and sailed downstream in the unhurried way of things that could fly and knew it.
They watched it go.
"You are not afraid of anything," Hao Jin said. He said it the way you say something that you've thought for a long time and are finally putting into words. Like it was a fact he'd been sitting on.
Wei Liang thought about this carefully, because Hao Jin deserved a careful answer and not the easy one.
"I'm afraid of a lot of things," he said. "I'm afraid of the river in flood season. I'm afraid of the way my father's shoulders looked last winter when he thought no one was watching. I'm afraid of becoming someone who stopped being curious because it was easier." He paused. "I'm also afraid of the examination, if I'm being accurate about it."
Hao Jin stared at him. "You never seem afraid."
"I'm curious about the things I'm afraid of," Wei Liang said. "It doesn't make the fear smaller. The curiosity is just usually louder."
Hao Jin sat with this for a while. The river ran south. Somewhere up the dock, a fisherman was repairing a net with the rhythmic, half-asleep motion of someone who had done it ten thousand times.
"I wish I was made like that," Hao Jin said.
Wei Liang looked at his friend — the big, careful hands, the way he'd held that pebble, the thing he'd just said about wanting to matter somewhere new, which had cost him something to say, Wei Liang could tell.
"You're made better in other ways," he said.
Hao Jin waited. Wei Liang did not elaborate. He had meant it as a complete statement. It was complete.
After a moment, Hao Jin nodded once — the small nod of someone who had decided to accept a thing without requiring it to be proven. He picked up one last pebble, turned it over, and put it in his pocket instead of throwing it. Wei Liang didn't ask why.
They sat until the light changed and the river went from gold to grey, and then they walked home the long way, talking about nothing important, which was its own kind of important.
That night, Wei Liang lay in his bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about what Hao Jin had said. I want to matter somewhere that isn't just here. He thought about the river. He thought about the heron, sailing downstream like going south was the most natural thing in the world.
He turned onto his side and told himself he was not afraid of the examination.
The ceiling did not argue with him. It never did. This was one of the ceiling's best qualities.
He went to sleep.