She closed the PDF. The tablet died.

And where was she? She was the fungus breaking down the dead log in the dark, unseen, yet somehow still responsible for holding the forest together.

Page 201: Matter exists in three states – solid, liquid, gas.

But the revision guide had already done its work. Not in teaching her the properties of light or the life cycle of a fern. It had taught her the cruelest lesson of all: that some children are given revision guides, and some children become revision guides – their bodies the textbook, their sleepless nights the chapters, their tears the worked examples of a system that demands you explain how you got the answer wrong before you are allowed to ask for help.

She flipped to the last section: The Web of Life. Producers, consumers, decomposers. The diagram showed a neat cycle: sun, grass, rabbit, fox. Mei drew her own in the margins of her mind. Sun = The Ministry’s budget. Grass = The school’s resources. Rabbit = The tuition kids with their fancy calculators. Fox = The bell curve.

Mei stood up. She did not feel fear. She felt like an experiment. She was the beaker of water placed over a Bunsen burner, the flame flickering below, the mercury rising. The question was not whether she would boil. The question was whether anyone would be there to record the temperature.

Now, as the PSLE loomed seven hours away, she traced the diagram of the human respiratory system for the hundredth time. Trachea, bronchi, alveoli. She whispered the words like a prayer. But the revision guide couldn’t teach her what she really needed to know.