Three Recipes for Human Happiness

The exam looked nothing like I expected. (Then again, at the Academy nothing looks like I expect. You’d think “defying expectations” is a separate discipline, and Wei Lin is the tenured professor.)

It all took place on the clearing. That one, with the passage. No lecture hall, no committee, no exam slips, sheets of paper, pens, or the nervous half-voiced muttering of “what question did you get?” The hole in the stack that the four of us had found. Except now the hole was wider. As if someone had expanded it overnight. Or it had expanded on its own. Or it had always been this size and we’d just grown enough to see it.