He turned his screen around. He had titled their PowerPointA Timeline on the History of China. Tally raised an eyebrow.
“That far back?”
“You were a chancellor’s daughter. I was a soldier.” Nate brought the screen toward himself again, resuming his typing while he spoke. “But we were born near the end of the dynasty, only some fifteen years before the first emperor died. His son was a puppet ruler for a few years, then after a nephew took the throne, war broke out in almost every corner of the empire.” Slowly, his voice started to trail off, amusement giving way to gravity. “They sent me out tofight for the dynasty’s last stronghold. That was also the first time I saw you cry. You never liked showing weakness because that was what the imperial court had taught you, but that night behind the stables, you did. You begged and begged me not to go, and I went anyway, and of course I blamed myself when you chased me out onto the battlefield and took an arrow right through your heart.”
At some point, Tally’s breathing had turned shallow. She was rapt, so captivated by his words that she could almost see the events playing out in her mind’s eye. He had a natural talent for script-reading. And someone on his game show had a great knack for cinematic writing.
“They let a court woman out onto the battlefield in 200BC?” she asked nonetheless.
“It was 207BC, if you must get technical.” The corner of Nate’s lips quirked up. He seemed to shake off some of his previous intensity. “By the end of Ziying’s reign, daily life had turned to chaos. No one was around to protest when you put on a rebel’s garb, and I wasn’t fast enough to stop you from being mistaken as the enemy.”
His fingers were still clacking away on his laptop. One could only guess what he was writing on the PowerPoint slide.
“It was kind of beautiful, in retrospect,” he continued. “If we weren’t born immortal, our first run of humanity was so tremendous and tragic that we were given the rest of existence to live again. The first emperor died while on the search for the elixir of immortality. He never found it. Maybe somehow, we reaped its magic instead.”
Nate hit the enter button. New slide.
“Well,” Tally said slowly, “if that’s how I died”—she leaned back on the bed—“what about you? You mentioned we always died together.”
It wasn’t as if she was buying this. She wasn’t. She just wanted details of the fictional narrative if someone had already gone through the effort of creating it.
“We did.” Nate mimed a knife into his gut. “I killed myself.”
Tally’s jaw dropped open. “Oh my God.”
“Don’t worry,” he assured, casual as ever. “I probably would have died in that battle, anyway... better to go in your arms. I’ll have you know I’ve only ever killed myself another three times in our other lives. All of them war related.”
“I”—Tally’s mouth opened and closed—“how can yousaythat so indifferently?”
“I’m not being indifferent at all.” Nate’s eyes flickered up. With the golden sunlight behind him, they were as dark as onyx, glimmering as if true precious stones had been slotted in. He was lovely, objectively speaking. By sheer appearance, she might really believe him an immortal who had stepped right out of a fairy tale. “Wait until you hear about what you did next in the Han dynasty.”
Tally shook herself out of her delusion, heaving a sigh. She gestured for Nate to hand over his laptop. “Let me see what you’re writing on that PowerPoint first. I don’t want you doing all the work.”
Every evening for the next three weeks, Tally went to Nate’s room to work on their timeline. Her extracurricularswould have to go on without her until the project was over. Five days in, they realized that choosing a country with such a long history perhaps had not been the best move for a midterm project, but it was too late to turn back and start from square one. They had to work effectively and use every available minute.
Tally had always been in the habit of starting her homework as soon as she returned to her room, but now she outright refused to get distracted until her assignments for that day were complete. She wouldn’t check her phone once, intent on finishing her to-do list faster and faster so she could head over to Nate’s room earlier and earlier.
For the sake of the project. She was unwilling to sacrifice any of her other classes, which meant she needed to allocate her attention with utmost care. Then, happily, all her homework was perfect before seven o’clock, and that left the rest of the night for world history.
Well, that little voice in her head piped up. Maybe a part of her liked hearing Nathaniel Zhou’s stories too. But they were just that: stories. Tales of revolution in earlier eras when the villages were stout; later golden ages when the masses flooded into the cities for commerce. Amid it all, he always wove in accounts of what the two of them got up to during that time, and she had to admit it amused her to see how much he could invent.
At present, Nate tossed a wadded-up ball of paper at her face.
“Ow,” Tally complained, shooting him a scowl. She wassplayed on his floor, leaning on her elbow while she typed in a stock image search for cartoon horses. A storm was raging outside, running fast rivulets down the glass and darkening the room into a despondent gray. “I’mlistening, you dick.”
“You were tuning me out,” Nate insisted.
“I heard everything you said,” Tally fired back. She copied and pasted the cartoon horse. “The Ming dynasty’s crops. Our cute tea shop. I can’t believe you would think I was having an affair when all I wanted to do was throw you a surprise party.”
“Hey, it wasn’t for a lack of trust.” Nate peered at her screen to see what she was doing, even though he could track the shared document on his own laptop in front of him. “Youmade me read an erotic manuscript about adultery. I hadn’t slept for three days fulfilling orders and reality started blurring a little.”
Tally rolled her eyes, scrolling back to the previous two slides to add more information on the Ming dynasty’s literature.
Jin Ping Mei, the bullet point read.Translated as “The Plum in the Golden Vase,” an anonymous manuscript considered a classic of Chinese literature with explicit descriptions of sexual escapades.
“I’m sure I thought it was hilarious.”
“You did. ‘An absolute masterpiece,’ you said. I almost have a suspicion you contributed toward writing it.”
