Medical school had always been a far-fetched dream, a paradise on the other side of a formidable sea. In high school, JiaLi had always known that she was a great student, but never excellent. What some were able to study and remember in an hour, would take her an hour and a half, maybe two. But she had done it. She dedicated those two hours, and was rewarded with success. In high school that’s how things had always gone. She attributed her high class ranking and her outstanding GPA to her unrelenting work ethic and her sacrifices (which had resulted in a limited, though not unfulfilling, social life), not to any inherent brilliance. JiaLi figured that if she put in the work, no matter how long it took, it would yield some result. And it had.

            College turned out to be different. The struggles she had suffered through in high school science courses amplified in college lecture halls. She flailed in the deeper waters of high level courses, where there was no curve to rescue her from poor test performances, and one wrong would be a catalyst for an entire semester of drowning.

            Now a junior, she realized that she was below average. Here she was surrounded by people just like herself, students who were considered the brilliant ones in their high schools – but one bright star will not assert itself in the night sky when there are five thousand beside it.

            It was 2AM, two days before finals, when these thoughts overwhelmed her.  The overflowing negativity she had kept locked behind the dam of her chest was once again threatening to burst. The straining heaved her ribcage, the contents spilled from her eyes in rivulets, and the sound of crumbling walls tore from . Her swollen eyes scanned the chaos on her living room floor: MCAT information pamphlets, her Physical Chemistry textbook, the open answer key, her notes on human neuropsychology, a list of deadlines, and the threat of a wholly unprepared final dance performance. She had wasted her day away with review, propped up against the couch, gaining no understanding despite frequent breaks spent dancing. She couldn’t figure out how to move her in a manner that even remotely resembled the twerking necessary for the dance. But that was not the source of her worries as her gaze, sodden with disappointment, fell upon the source of her frustration, her upset, and her worry.

            “X” after angry “X” lined the MCAT organic chemistry section, denoting her lack of comprehension, mocking the wrinkled marks of tear stains. JiaLi dragged the papers towards herself, the pages shaking. She ran impatient fingers over her cheeks, pulled air into her lungs, and prepared to face her self-perceived failures.

            And failure she felt, as problems of misunderstood mechanisms and incorrect solvents accumulated in the pile of things she had to re-review. The dam wobbled once again in her chest, but JiaLi pushed through the river of emotions and pushed through her corrections.

            Birch reductions take away a double bond in a benzene ring, and then resonance makes the remaining bonds face each other. They don’t add a carboxyl group. Organolithiums are more reactive than Grignard’s, not the other way around. Use ozonlysis on problem 16, not magnesium metal in ether.

            JiaLi had gone through it all before. She could not for the life of her figure out why she wasn’t absorbing it. Cradling her pounding forehead into trembling hands, she leaned back onto the couch, tears once again seeping out from behind her swollen eyelids. Deep, unsteady breaths shuddered from her chest, curling the edges of the papers haphazardly lain out around her.

            She was convinced that she was going to fail. Her grades were riding on these finals, for which she was not prepared. What was she going to tell her parents, who were so hopeful that they were going to have a doctor in the family? She was prepared to tell them that she would never be accepted. Never before had she been so unsure about her own capabilities. Never before had her hard work completely failed her. Yet here she was, hours into studying with only pages upon pages of wrong answers to show for it. She needed a miracle. A miracle which was evidently not going to appear at 3 in the morning.

            All JiaLi wanted was to let the sobs escape, to scream her frustrations and insecurities out to the world, to take comfort in arms she knew would be more than willing to offer it. But she didn’t. She couldn’t disturb the weary soul in the room next door, the soul that held far too great of a place in her heart to make him endure another night without rest. So JiaLi didn’t sob, but simply bent over her study guide and let her anxiety tremble in her chest. She refused to give in to the stray tears, angrily scrubbing them away with an already-damp sleeve.

Her anxiety shifted to panic when the creak of a door punctuated the cold silence. She kept quiet as the light sound of dancer’s footsteps approached. YiXing was most likely just going to the bathroom. Eyes fixed on an acylation, she startled at the brush of his fingertips against her shoulder.

            “LiLi?” YiXing whispered, voice soft from sleep. “Come to bed, it’s late.”

JiaLi brushed his hand away, shaking her head. “Go back to sleep, Xingy.” She hated the way her voice trembled.

            “What’s wrong, LiLi?” He snagged a pillow and sank onto their sofa.

JiaLi gently pushed him away, silently entreating him to return to bed. “Nothing, Xingy.”

He raised a skeptical eyebrow. JiaLi sighed and conceded defeat. There was never a point in lying to him. He knew her better than she knew herself. “I still have to finish this chapter, finish the last half of the P-Chem review sheet, and figure out how that ing twerking section in the choreography works. And it’s not exactly helping that I’m not getting anything right.” She scribbled over an erroneous compound. “At this rate I won’t be sleeping tonight.”  

            “Well then, keep working, LiLi. I’ll be here.” YiXing wrapped his warms arms around her midsection and rested his chin on her shoulder. “You get super self-destructive when you’re stressed. Just talk it out if you need to.”

            “It’s just that—” JiaLi’s breath hitched, “nothing is sticking. I swear I’ve copied these mechanisms and memorized these solvents, but once I have to do the problem sets, I blank.”

YiXing tightened his arms around her waist and planted a kiss behind her ear. “I would tell you to sleep on it,” he rumbled, the vibrations of his throat sending warmth through her shoulder, “but the likelihood of that happening is zero. So why don’t you take a break? Switch to another subject for now—” He snapped his fingers. JiaLi could practically feel the beam of his smile against her neck. “You need to learn the twerking section, right?” His lips brushed against her cheek. “I’ll teach you. Dance break!” With the energy not fitting of someone who had just woken up, he sprang to his feet.

            “YiXing, you had two auditions today, take a break!” JiaLi begged from her spot on the floor. She was already guilty for keeping him awake for longer when he was already so physically exhausted. Not only that, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to sacrifice the time to dance when she still had so much to review.

            “I love dancing; this isn’t tiring.” He bent his arms akimbo, face thoughtful. “Now, twerking. What do you know about it?” JiaLi didn’t know how to reply. The little that she knew came from YouTube videos and enviously watching the other members of her team shake their backsides with seemingly little to no effort. Her own efforts, done with a considerable amount of embarrassment in front of her mirror, were mere shadows in comparison.

            “It involves ,” JiaLi deadpanned.

            “Wow,” YiXing replied drily, “I never would have guessed. You’re a genius. Anyway, the first step to learning about a dance is knowing its background. Even though it’s only recently gotten famous, twerking originated from the Mapouka dance in West Africa. Then it was adapted by African American and hip hop culture in the 90’s. Meaning,” he spun on his heels, sending a sultry look over his shoulder, “I’m an expert, seeing as I am a hip hop dancer.”

He planted his feet, shoulder-width apart and squatted.  “You start like this.” He then proceeded to pull his face into a grin so toothy JiaLi snorted in startled laughter. Normally she was the one to pull the funny faces in the relationship. Her boyfriend seemed encouraged, and arched his back inwards. “And then you arch your back. And then you un-arch.” He demonstrated, his back curving inwards and then straightening in a graceful, undulating line.

            “And?”

            “And that, LiLi, is it! Arch, un-arch, arch, un-arch. You just speed up, and there you go: twerking.” YiXing cleared his throat, tilted his head to the left and right, and shook off his legs. “Like this.”

            He then proceeded to twerk so rapidly his was practically vibrating. His face was contorted in such concentration, JiaLi could not help but laugh. Even though his twerking was more than excellent, her sleep-deprived mind could only appreciate the crinkly caricature of his usually-handsome face. She was dying of laughter from seeing her usually mellow and conservative boyfriend shaking his not-quite-so-gifted backside.

            “You look constipated!” She choked in laughter, tipping onto her side. “And you don’t have anything to shake!”

YiXing stopped short at the insult, his look of concentration replaced by a look of betrayal. “Are you saying I don’t have a ?” He turned and began twerking afresh, shifting backwards with very arch of his back, approaching JiaLi with a diabolical smirk. JiaLi tried to bat him away, but the laughter breaking threatening to break her ribcage rendered such actions impossible.

            “Why are you laughing? I thought you loved my !” YiXing whined, punting her shoulder with his hip. The corners of his mouth turned down in an artificial frown.

            “Oh my god, Xingy, of course I do! It’s the only reason I’m dating you.” JiaLi giggled, curled in on herself with mirth. YiXing raised a scandalized hand to his mouth at her revelation.

            “My heart!” He feigned a faint, his body collapsing heavily onto JiaLi’s lap, sending her into more raucous giggles. “You have slain me with your cruel words.” JiaLi prodded his forehead with the tip of her finger.

            “Drama Queen.” She chuckled.

YiXing’s eyes shot open, a smile lit up his face, a single dimple appearing in his cheek. He scrambled to his feet, this time tugging on JiaLi’s hands. “Your turn! Just do what I did!”

            “Contort my face and look like I’m constipated?”

            “You’re a cruel woman. Why do I love you again? Just do it.” The corners of JiaLi’s mouth tugged upwards at his fake pout, but nonetheless bent her knees into a squat. She followed his instructions, arching and un-arching her back like he had done. She concentrated on pushing her chest out and curving her back inwards in a smooth line. Tightness formed between the vertebrae of her spine, stretching muscles in her lower back that she had never used before. Once convinced that her front and back were pushed enough in their respective directions, she straightened again, feeling the strain leave her spine. She glanced at YiXing, who was curled up on the couch.

            “Like that?” He gave her a thumbs-up in response.

            “Like that. Now just go a little faster. Put your hands on your hips, it’ll make this all easier.”

            “Okay.” JiaLi shook out her hands, placing them steadily on her hipbones. Lowering into a squat, she began repeating what she had done before, increasing the tempo, still feeling utterly stupid.

            “Yeah! You’re doing it!” YiXing leapt to his feet, cheering wildly. “Look at that , I knew I was dating you for a reason!” JiaLi abruptly stopped mid-twerk and sent him a withering glare. “Karma, LiLi.” He wandered over to her and brushed his thumbs across her cheekbones. “Feeling better?”

            The buoyancy that laughter provided was not immediately apparent in JiaLi’s chest, but rather the absence of weight. The salt tracks from her long faded tears had cracked and fallen away from giggles. Her paranoia and nervousness had melted from over exuberant praise, however inappropriate.

            “Yeah,” JiaLi breathed. YiXing leaned in with a tender smile and placed a chaste kiss on her lips.

            “Perfect, now let’s get back to work, so you’ll at least get a little bit of sleep.” JiaLi nodded, a smile still on her lips. She sat down again and faced the problems she had escaped from and now faced again with slightly less fear than before. YiXing once again settled behind her, resting his chin upon her shoulder. His arms were a blanket of warmth around her torso, his voice a comforting hum in her ear. “I’ll be right here.”

            And he was. Throughout the night, in the moments when her frustration made another unwelcome appearance and her chest seized with encroaching sobs, he was there. He tightened his embrace, his lips ghosted over moisture-stained cheeks and he whispered heart-felt reassurances. JiaLi leaned back into warm, steady support as slowly but surely, the tides turned.

            Sometime during the night, the reactions fell into place. Her pencil flitted across the page, drawing resonance structures she had finally come to understand. She saw p-orbitals where she couldn’t before, and in doing so, finally understood aromaticity. The number of check marks began to rise, and with them her confidence. She pushed through her other subjects, relief washing over her when the review sheet seemed easier than before. Finally, she felt better.

            It was 6 in the morning when she closed the cover of her physical chemistry textbook. She had studied the final chapter and double checked the final problem set. JiaLi sighed in exhausted relief, and glanced at the warm weight on her shoulder.

            YiXing was asleep. His was jaw slack, each exhale gently shifting the strands of her hair. He leaned his head upon her shoulder, his arms loosening and tightening around her torso with the flow of his dreams. JiaLi smiled softly at the sight. She shifted to sit next to him, gently moving his head back to her shoulder. She brushed a hand against his dark bangs, traced her fingertip along his lips, and prodded playfully at where his dimple normally sat. She leaned her weight into him and rested her cheek against his hair.

            Thank you, YiXing.