Confession received through the anonymous form. The building and apartment numbers have been changed.
A square meter was worth a hundred and eighteen thousand yuan in Lane 358 off Jianguo West Road, and sixty-three thousand on the other side of the intersection, four hundred meters away. Same plane trees, same sesame flatbreads at six in the morning, same bus line. The whole difference came down to a two-hundred-meter corridor and a green gate: the primary school at No. 51. My aunt lives in Building 7, fourth floor, no elevator, forty-one square meters delivered in 1987, and her hùkǒu has been at that address for thirty-two years. I moved my daughter's there on April 3rd, 2019, twenty-nine months before she was due to start, because the district requires twenty-four and you don't settle for a two-month margin when you can give yourself five.
On May 16th, 2021, at nine twenty, there were three of them inside the forty-one square meters: two from the school, one from the neighborhood committee with the list on a clipboard. They opened the closet in the entryway and counted the children's coats, four of them, one from the winter before, on purpose. They photographed the bed at the back, the four-hundred-and-eighty-yuan desk bought three weeks earlier on Ruijin Road, the green toothbrush in the glass, the frame where my daughter is six, printed at the lab at No. 22 and left eleven days in the window sun so it would yellow. My aunt served the tea standing up. My daughter had slept there nine nights in two years.
The one holding the clipboard closed the closet and said: "We have eighty files and eleven days. You, you know the building." I didn't give a name. I gave a number: Building 4, apartment 602. I was reading the list upside down, from the other side of the board, and I kept my eyes on it while I spoke, so that he had nothing to write. He ticked it off.