The power cuts every night at 11pm in Tiong

Bahru’s Block 78, but on the night of the OLevel

results, the lights stayed off for seven hours

straight—no generator, no repair crew, just the

hum of mosquitos and the smell of burnt kaya

toast drifting up from the void below.

Ling, sixteen, slipped through the rusted fire

escape of the abandoned St. Andrew’s Exam Annex,

her school bag heavy with stolen answer sheets

and a packet of her brother’s favourite kueh

lapis. He failed his Maths paper. Again. Their

father, still silent after losing his job at the

docks, had stopped speaking to him. Their mother,

cleaning HDB stairwells at dawn, whispered

prayers to Kuan Yin while scrubbing blood off

her palms from a fall on wet tiles. Filial piety

wasn’t a virtue here—it was a debt paid in

silence.

The vault door groaned open not from a key, but

from the scent of her brother’s sweatstained

uniform. Inside, the air tasted like chalk and

old British tea. The desks were still arranged

in 1947 formation—wooden, inkstained, each with

a nameplate: “J. M. Winters, Examiner, 1942–1945.

” The ghosts didn’t speak. They didn’t need to.

When Ling placed the papers on the desk, the ink

bled backward into the pages, and her own

memories began to peel away: her first bite of

durian, her mother’s voice saying “You’re my

only daughter,” the way her brother used to

carry her on his back when she broke her leg at

the old Kampong Kapor playground.

She screamed. No sound came out. The ghosts

weren’t punishing theft. They were punishing

forgetting.

At 4:17am, she ran back to Block 78 with the

papers—now blank, useless—and threw herself onto

her brother’s bed. He was awake. He didn’t ask.

He just held her hand as the morning light crept

through the venetian blinds, and whispered,

“I’ll retake it.” Not because he had to. But

because she had lost the memory of his laugh.

The next day, the school board found no evidence

of cheating. The vault was sealed. The lights

never cut again. But Ling never remembered her

brother’s birthday again. Or the name of her

childhood dog. Or the taste of her mother’s

chicken rice.

The ghosts took what mattered most—not the

answers, but the love that made her want them.

They didn’t steal the papers. They stole the

reason she stole them.

And that was worse.