THE SADDEST GIRL SINCE THE SONG DYNASTY

WORSE THAN EACH OTHER - PART III

She had always been a strong academic performer, but her scholarly zenith came in her second to last semester of university. Lady Zhao sat the notoriously difficult Mathematical Methods for Econometrics exam and managed not only to score above the gang of three who, in her year group, dominated the top positions, but performed a feat previously considered impossible – she avoided dropping a single mark, avoided dropping even a fraction of a mark. It was said that lecturers would take half-points off for handwriting, bad or not, in the event a candidate got all the answers and showing of method correct in order, for an obtuse reason (the scoreboards only had space for only so many digits), to avoid awarding a mythical triple figure result. Lady Zhao's score topped the list with 00.0 for all to see. With a thousand-plus-year history of academic-test-score obsession in China – the modern incarnation of this psychology being public display boards – Lady Zhao won minor celebrity status, and interest from a corporate sponsor.

That sponsor was ECN. It offered her a year of tuition-and-living-expenses-covered study in Toulouse followed by a similar deal in the UK for a summer at King Endowment. At the end of it all, ECN would have the pleasure of her working for them in their Shanghai premises for at least three years (though they themselves reserved early termination privileges). She arrived in not-quite-London with a blended Chinese-French accent and a few thousand euros saved up.

And just as their paths to the outskirts of Crawley, East Sussex, had differed, the two's respective social standings at King Endowment at the start of July 2010 began poles apart.

To meet Lady Zhao for the first time was to encounter a candid, personal-space invading woman who had in her arsenal of conversation starters plenty of ludicrous anecdotes. Not only that, she made efforts to socialize, to entertain, to go out and eat and talk and drink. Within a week, it could easily be said that thirty out of the thirty-one students she shared her lectures in the IDK Theatre with (a partially underground hall with no vertical or horizontal lines) considered her a new friend, or at least someone they'd like to get to know more.

The thirty-first person, the one for whom these criteria didn't apply, was Ander. He would leave lectures and go straight back to bed (it took him a long time to adjust to the time difference); he would briefly say "Umm, I'll see" when invited out, and then wouldn't show up, and worse, made little effort to dress his excuses in anything more than having zero fucks to give. He was viewed by those who noticed he existed as the probably-American-but-you-can-never-be-sure moody loner. After all, didn't all the English-as-a-second-language students speak like Californians?