Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

The eerie silence seemed to be taunting him, and the isolated sound of the second hand rotating around its axis only reminded him of how little time he had left, intensifying every sliver of moonlight spilling through the open window.

He had only 30 minutes left to find the next clue, or someone else…was about to die.

“Hey Yejing. Lin Yejing, are you even listening to me?”

Do you know what is not fun? Having to sit through a 3 hour mandatory awards ceremony in a freezing cold gym, on folding chairs that felt as if they were made of steel. An hour in, and my was already asleep. By the two hour mark, my back hurt, and my legs were numbing. By the third hour, I was ready to burn the school down.

"Why couldn't they just have the award recipients show up?" my best friend, Andi, continued on, not noticing my drifting attention. "The awards are all so bogus and it's all just teachers' pets and rich kids whose parents donated to the school.  What was that Su-whatever girl getting recognized for anyway? Didn’t her dad donate a library last semester?”

"That girl apparently wrote an article for the Washington Post in America," I shrugged, hitching my shoulder bag further up my shoulder.

"Yeah, and the article was so small, I could have used it as a sticky note," Andi scoffed. "You, Lin Yejing, on the other hand, actually deserved that award. You're the best writer in this school, no, in this goddamn city."

She was, of course, exaggerating, as any best friend should. I mean sure, I liked to write, but I had long since given up on it. I had told my parents once, two years ago, that I wanted to study creative writing in college, and my dad had basically laughed in my face, and told me to go to medical school.

Besides, Andi was the only person, other than me and some people in the internet, to have read anything I have ever written. Who was she, at 20 years old, to judge me as an amazing writer?

"At least the next assembly we have to sit through will be graduation in the spring," Andi added. "Finally, we get to be ‘*Qinghua University graduates’ and hold the title over everyone else like the uptight pricks that we are."

Andi is the resident genius at school. My college entrance exam scores had barely, just barely, gotten me into Qinghua, and I constantly had this irrational fear of falling behind with my school work. 

I was smart, sure, but everyone here was smarter. Everyone else is studying what they want, and me? I’m studying pre-med, and probably will continue on to Medical school after graduating. I don't know what I want to do with my life other than writing, and a surgeon certainly wasn’t one of them.

It was a grim thought.

"By the way, my birthday's coming up in three days," Andi reminded me, poking me on the side as we reached our bus stop. "Is my present ready?"

"Almost," I grinned, then shook my head. "You know, most girls will ask for a dress, or a cute purse, or just money for their birthday, not a fanfiction."

"I can't help it if all you can do is write," Andi shot back playfully.

I knew she meant it as a compliment, but my smile faulted. She was right. All I know how to do is write. What the hell am I thinking? Med School? Sure, I had the guts to be a doctor or surgeon, but did I have the heart? No.

"Anyway, your horribly fluffy fanfiction, 8 full chapters, is coming up. I swear, it's long enough to be published as a short story book," I said, shaking myself out of my bad thoughts.

"Does it have a happy ending?" she asked. "I better marry my lovely Lee Minho in the end!"

"It's fanfiction, and a birthday present," I told her. "Of course it ends happily."

Andi’s family is from Dalian, which is a good 500 miles from Beijing. Since I was a Beijing resident, and have been for all of my life, I lived off campus. My mom worked with stocks for the government and my dad is, you guessed it, a doctor. Usually, after school, Andi and I would go back to my house and  hang out.

We had barely stepped foot into my room when I heard my mom calling for me. "Yejing, come here for a moment!"

"Wait here, I'll be right back,” I told Andi. “Whatever you do, don't click the folder on my laptop desktop that has your name on it. No spoilers till I finish the story and give it to you officially, you hear?"

Zeng Andi POV

As Yejing sped out of her room, I took a quick glance around her room. Since her parents didn’t venture in here often, she was able to really let her true self shine. Shelves upon shelves of books lined one wall. On a bedside table, notebooks were filled with what I knew to be character charts and ideas for stories that she comes up with.

However, there were still signs of her parents’ influence. Located on a dressed table near the door was a stack of medical magazines, no doubly brought in my her father.

I sighed, flopping down in Yejing’s computer chair. I was a law major at Qinghua University, and I loved what I was studying. If I could not anything for the rest of my life, it would be to argue, prove other people wrong, and get paid for it. Yejing, on the other hand, was on the pre-med track, and I knew that Yejing had no interest in medical school what-so-ever.

She wanted to be a writer,