The Dead on the List

Hui Nan left the office, her steps heavy. The conversation with Chang Di had lodged in her like a splinter. She had come here thinking she was protecting a student. Now she was beginning to wonder: in this school, where exactly was the line between protecting someone and harming them?

She pushed open the door to the biology office next door and looked for the one colleague she had grown closest to: Huang Lu. Thirty-one years old, slender as a bare branch, with long thin limbs, Huang Lu was the only biology teacher in the fourth grade, and one of the few people at this school Hui Nan could actually talk to.

"Huang Jie, are you busy?"

"Not at all — I was just sitting here bored. No class this afternoon, and if the principal hadn't arranged a dinner tonight I would've gone home already."

"Huang Jie, can I ask you something? I heard that before I started here, a girl in Class 4, Grade 4 hanged herself. What do you know about her? What kind of person was she?"

"Oh, that Gu Qing. She was pretty, spent all her time drawing, not academically driven, average grades. Her parents didn't seem very involved — when the girl didn't come home one night after hanging herself, they didn't even come to school looking for her. They found her the next day."

Hui Nan thought: Gu Qing's death does have suspicious aspects. Students who are disciplined and then kill themselves usually do so out of fear of their parents' reaction. But Gu Qing's parents didn't seem to care much. Would a single disciplinary note be enough to drive someone to suicide?

Huang Lu continued: "Kids today have such fragile temperaments. One thing goes wrong and they kill themselves. When I was in middle school, Ma Dahua was even worse than she is now, and I survived just fine."

"She taught you too?"

Huang Lu glanced around. The other teachers in the biology office were all occupied with their own work, seemingly indifferent to their conversation. Huang Lu lowered her voice. "I've been at this school for years and I haven't said a word to that woman. I used to study here myself — Ma Dahua was already teaching language arts back then, always hinting to students to bring her gifts. My mother was sick at the time, money was tight, everything went toward her medical bills. No money to bring gifts to Ma Dahua, so that monster made it her mission to torment me. Once she even slapped me in front of the whole class. But I never thought about killing myself. Actually, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to kill her."

An awkward silence fell. Hui Nan quickly changed the subject. "Right — let's get back to Gu Qing."

Huang Lu blinked, realized she had said too much, and followed Hui Nan's lead. "Oh, right. Actually, I still have a drawing Gu Qing did. There was a biology test once — the last question was a labeled diagram of the eyeball. She left every blank empty and drew a little figure next to the eyeball instead. It was kind of funny, so I kept it."

Huang Lu pulled open a drawer and produced the exam paper. At the last question, in the space for the eyeball diagram, there was indeed a small figure — but no one would have found it cute. It was a figure with a contorted expression, mouth wide open in a silent scream, one eye gone, replaced by a gaping bloody socket. Its hands cradled a large eyeball — the one from the diagram.

Both women shuddered simultaneously. Huang Lu stared at it in disbelief. "How is this possible? I distinctly remember it was a cute little figure with big wide eyes. Why is the eyeball falling out now?"

"Huang Jie, you're overreacting — you probably just remembered it wrong."

"How could I? Is the drawing moving?"

"Stop scaring yourself." Hui Nan snatched the test paper from Huang Lu's hand.

"It has to be some student's prank. Oh — Huang Jie, do you have a list of all the staff? I can never remember names, and I'd be embarrassed if I got someone wrong at dinner tonight."

"A list? Yes, I have a directory — the latest one, everyone in the school. Let me print you a copy." Huang Lu was momentarily thrown, then quickly found the file on her computer and clicked print. She needed something to do, something to push that bloody image out of her mind. Except that once you have encountered something terrifying, what usually follows is something even more so.

A sheet of paper crept slowly out of the printer. The moment the two women held the list in their hands, their faces went rigid again. Many of the names on the list had been enclosed in small boxes — including both Hui Nan's and Huang Lu's. The names of the dead are the ones that get boxed.

Huang Lu stared at the paper, speechless. Her face went nearly as white as the page.

Hui Nan swallowed and forced out a sound: "The printer must have a glitch. What terrible luck."

She grabbed the list, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it in the bin.

The printer fell silent, as if nothing had happened. Of course it hadn't malfunctioned. It was a machine with no soul, faithfully executing a list that had already been written.