hy hasn't it come yet? Fei turned eighteen months ago, for goodness sakes! Mother told me that Fei would surely receive it by her eighteenth birthday, if not her sixteenth!"

"Maybe this special school that your mother told you about was no more than a fairytale that she told our childen for entertainment. You always knew how much I hated the way that she convinced the children that it was all real."

"Zhù Dǐngxiáng! How could you say such a thing? My mother wasn't a liar. I know you didn't agree with her stories or her thoughts on our childrens' futures, but that doesn't give you the right to say that my family's history, my history, is unworthy for our daughters!"

Fei's father sighed. She could see him in her minds eye pinching the bridge of his nose with exhaustion, something he seemed to be doing more and more often these days. "I'm sorry. I just don't want you to wait around for a letter that may never come. Besides, didn't you say that your mother told you that it usually skips a generation?"

"Well... yes. But it's skipped four generations this time. I'm starting to worry-"

"Shèn Ài Lì. I don't want to talk about it anymore. If it's going to come to us, it will."

Fei couldn't help but let her parent's disappointment become hers. It settled in her stomach and left her feeling cold. She didn't know what was wrong with her but these conversations, ones where Fei's abilities and future were questioned, were ones her parents had many times. For the past few months they would discreetly examine her while they thought she wasn't paying attention. Often they could be heard in the night, Fei's father comforting her mother who was fretting over something that hadn't arrived. Unfortunately, Fei didn't know what that something was.

"They're fighting again, aren't they."

Fei jumped at the sound of her younger sister's voice. "Yes." Mǎ-Lì and Fei had been baking cookies - Mǎ-Lì's favourite pastime. She had always been good at the baking parts, but Fei happended to be pretty good at the decorating so they made a good team. Fei had been concentrating so hard on eavesdroping that she'd completely forgotten that Mǎ-Lì was even there.

"Same old fight again?"

"Yeah."

Mǎ-Lì sighed. "I wish Grandma were here so she could settle this once and for all. I hate hearing them argue over this time and time again."

Fei also shared this sentiment, if there had been anyone who could calm their mother down, it was their grandmother. Many older women tended to seem more... old as they aged but their grandmother's personality only seemed to brighten. Before she had died a few years ago, she had been one to go around the neighbourhood and say hello to anyone that was around. She attended many sorts of events that Fei and Ma-Li got dragged to as well. Fei found it odd that their parents never attended these events too but their grandmother had just waved it off and said that they simply wouldn't have enjoyed it. Fei didn't know what there was that could not be enjoyed. At these gatherings, many people laughed and danced and ate so many interesting foods. Fei missed all of that. "You and me both. Why can't they just come out and say why they're so disappointed in me? Have I done something wrong?"

Mǎ-Lì deliberated for a moment. "Well, there was that one time where you forgot to clean the bathroom-"

"Hey! You know what I meant!"

"Yeah, yeah. I don't know either. I guess until you get whatever this thing is, we'll be listening to more of this arguing."

"Unfortunately." Fei sighed and began to ice the flower-shaped cookies while Mǎ-Lì pulled the sprinkles out of the cupboard and pressed the sugar-pearls onto the cookies exactly as Fei had told her to earlier. They'd always made a great baking team since Mǎ-Lì could make the best tasting cookies ever (she'd even won school competitions with her skills) and Fei always knew how to make them pretty. Their mother had once suggested that they should open a bakery together but that idea was promptly shut down by their father who told them that it was impractical.

"I know that this isn't a polite thing to say, but I kind of wish that grandma hadn't told us that her stories were real. If she hadn't maybe Mom and Dad wouldn't fight so much. I don't understand what the big deal is, it's not like we actually believed her stories anyway."

Fei kept shut as her sister talked. Sure, she wished that their grandmother hadn't told them those stories, but Fei loved those stories. Instead of bedtime stories from books of old people, their grandmother had told the these fascinating tales of dragons and the brave people that rode them. Yes, Fei (sadly) would admit that the stories were nothing more than fiction, but as a child, it had been her dream to ride a dragon one day. Not only that, but they were the only stories that Fei had heard about their ancestors from her mother's side of the family. "Okay, I've finished icing the cookies. I'm going to get ready for bed now. You can handle the rest of the cleanup yourself?"

"Yep. Thanks for helping me with the cookies, I just couldn't think of what design to do."

"No problem, goodnight!"
 

The following day was just like any other. Boring. The Zhu family lived only a couple blocks from the high school that the sisters attended. Normally, Fei had to run those couple of blocks to get to school because she was nearly always running late. However, this morning their mother had kicked them out of the house so that they would have enough time to arrive at school. Their mother had insisted that running with the cookies would smash the sugar pearls and crack the icing that they'd worked so hard on.

"Ugh, why the hell did you make a double batch again?" Fei complained. "I could still be in bed, catching a little more beauty rest!"

"Hey, you were the one that insisted I make a double batch!"

"Yeah, because you said that you wanted enough to give to your entire homeroom class! What was I supposed to say?"

Mǎ-Lì simply grumbled in response.

"Say, whose birthday is it anyway? You don't always bake cookies for your classmates and you didn't tell me who they were for."

"It's Lily's birthday today. Some of her relatives are coming to the city to take her out tonight and then her parents wanted her to visit the other side of their family to celebrate on the weekend. After all of the those celebrations, her parents don't want her to throw a third birthday party so I decided to make her the cookies instead."

"Oh, I see. What's your first class?"

"Math. It's on the third floor."

Fei groaned. She wasn't fat, but she really didn't want to climb three flights of stairs first thing in the morning. It was too bad that the main elevator was broken (and had been since Fei had started at the high school) and the remaining one was for students that were physically incapable of climbing all those stairs.

"Come on, it's high time you got some exercise!" Mǎ-Lì teased.

"Exercise? I get exerci