Matched

There are other parts to our lives: many hours of work for Ky; sorting and Second School for me. But when I look back, I know those moments won’t be remembered the way I remember each detail of those days with Ky, hiking on the Hil .

Except one memory, of a strained Saturday night at the showing theater where Xander holds my hand and Ky acts as though nothing is different.

There is a terrible moment at the end when the lights go up and I see the Official from the greenspace looking around. When she meets my eyes and sees my hand in Xander’s she looks at me and gives me a tiny smile and disappears. I glance over at Xander after she’s gone and an ache of longing goes through me, an ache so deep and real that I can stil feel it later, when I think of that night. The longing isn’t for Xander, it’s for the way things used to be between us. No secrets, no complications.

But stil . Though I feel guilty about Xander, though I worry for him, these days belong to Ky, to me. To learning more stories and writing more letters.

Sometimes Ky asks me if I remember things. “Remember Bram’s first day of school?” he asks me one day as we move fast through the forest to make up for al the time we spent writing earlier on the hike.

“Of course,” I say, breathless from hurrying and from thinking about his hands on mine. “Bram wanted to stay home. He caused a scene at the air-train stop. Everyone remembers that.” Children start First School the autumn after they turn six. It’s supposed to be an important rite of passage, a prequel to the Banquets to come. At the end of the first successful day, the children bring a smal cake home to eat after dinner, along with a tangle of brightly colored bal oons. I don’t know which Bram was more excited about—the cake, which we have so rarely, or the bal oons, which are unique to the occasion of the First Day. That was also the day he would receive his reader and scribe, but Bram didn’t care one bit about that part of it.

When the time came to board the train to First School, Bram wouldn’t get on. “I don’t want to go,” he said. “I’l stay here instead.”

It was morning and the station brimmed with people leaving for work and school. Heads turned to look at us as Bram refused to board the air train with my parents. My father looked worried but my mother took it in stride. “Don’t worry,” she whispered to me. “The Officials in charge of his pre-School care center warned me this might happen. They predicted he’d have a little trouble with this milestone.” Then she knelt down next to him and told him, “Let’s get on the train, Bram. Remember the bal oons. Remember the cake.”

“I don’t want them.” And then, to everyone’s surprise, he began to cry. Bram never cried, not even back when he was very smal . Al the confidence left my mother’s face, and she put her arms around him and held him tight. Bram is the second child she thought she might never have.

After having me quickly and easily, it took her years to become pregnant with him, and he was born weeks before her thirty-first birthday, the cutoff age for having children. We al feel lucky to have Bram, but my mother especial y.

I knew if the crying kept up much longer we’d be in trouble. Back then, an Official assigned to watch out for problems lived on each street.

So I said loudly to Bram, “Too bad for you. No reader, no scribe. You’l never know how to write. You’l never know how to read.”

“That’s not true!” Bram yel ed. “I can learn.”

“How?” I asked him.

He narrowed his eyes, but at least he stopped crying. “I don’t care if I can’t read or write.”

“That’s fine,” I said, and out of the corner of my eye I saw someone knocking on the Official’s door at the house right next to the air-train stop. No.

Bram already has too many citations from the care center.

The train swooshed to a stop and in that moment I knew what I had to do. I picked up his schoolbag and held it out to him. “It’s up to you,” I said, looking right into his eyes and holding his gaze. “You can grow up or you can be a baby.”

Bram looked hurt. I shoved the bag into his arms and whispered into his ear, “I know a way to play games on the scribe.”

“Real y?”

I nodded.

Bram’s face lit up. He took the bag and went through the air-train doors without a backward glance. My parents and I climbed on after him, and my mother hugged me tight once we were inside. “Thank you,” she said.

There weren’t any games on the scribe, of course. I had to invent some, but I’m not a natural sorter for nothing. It took Bram months to figure out that none of the other kids had older siblings who hid patterns and pictures in screens ful of letters and then timed them to see how fast they could find them al .