When the HSK showed up dead on her doorstep, Heather's first emotion was a secret surge of shadenfreude. Like some of her friends in the residential community that bordered the northern outskirts of Beijing, Heather had harbored a not-so-secret distaste for the Chinese proficiency test since failing it abysmally the year before. And so it's sudden death seemed at first an almost divine gift.

But then the reality of the unmoving corpse began to sink in. With no aliba and an awful test record, Heather realized her perilous situation. And while she had said nasty things about the HSK to her friends in the past, she had never planned to kill it herself. But who would believe her given the circumstances? Here the test was lying face down on her doorstep with a gaping hole in its skull, absolutely still and certainly dead. What else was there to conclude?