chapter 24
Ky gives me three gifts for my birthday. A poem, a kiss, and the hopeless, beautiful belief that things might work. When I open my eyes, as I put my hand up to the place on my cheek where his lips touched, I say, “I didn’t give you anything on your birthday, I don’t even know when it is.” And he says, “Don’t worry about that,” and I say, “What can I do?” and he answers, “Let me believe in this, all of this, and you believe it, too.”
And I do.
For one entire day I let his kiss burn on my cheek and into my blood, and I don’t push the memory away. I have kissed and been kissed before. This is different. This, more than my real birthday the day of the Match Banquet, feels like a day to mark time by. This kiss, these words, they feel like beginning.
I let myself imagine futures that can never be, the two of us together. Even when I sort later that day, I keep my mind on the task at hand by pretending each number sorted is a code, a message to Ky that I will keep our secret. I will keep us safe; I won’t reveal a thing. Each sort I perform correctly keeps attention away from us.
Since it is not my turn for the sleep tags that night, I let my dreams take me where they will. To my surprise, I don’t dream of Ky on the Hill. I dream of him sitting on the steps in front of my house, watching the wind shuffle the leaves of the maple tree. I dream of him taking me to the private dining hall and pulling my chair out, bending so close to me that even the pretend candles flutter at his presence. I dream of the two of us digging up the newroses in his yard and of Ky teaching me how to use the artifact. Everything I dream is something simple and plain and everyday.
That’s how I know they are dreams. Because the simple and plain and everyday things are the ones that we can never have.
“How?” I ask him the next day on the Hill, once we are deep enough into the forest that no one can hear us. “How can we believe this might work? The Official threatened to send you back to the Outer Provinces, Ky!”
Ky doesn’t answer for a moment, and I feel as though I’ve yelled when really I kept my voice as low as possible. Then we walk past the cairn from our last hike and he looks straight at me and I swear I feel that kiss again. But this time, I feel it on my lips instead.
“Have you ever heard of the prisoner’s dilemma?” Ky asks me.
“Of course.” Is he teasing me? “It’s the game you played against Xander. We’ve all played it before.”
“No, not the game. The Society changed the game. I mean the theory behind the game.”
I don’t know what he’s talking about. “I guess not.”
“If two people commit a crime together, are caught, and then separated and interrogated, what happens?”
I am still lost. “I don’t know. What?”
“That’s their dilemma. Do they tell on each other in hopes that the Officials will go easy on them—a plea bargain? Do they refuse to say anything that would betray their partner? The best scenario is for both to say nothing. Then they can both be safe.”
We’ve stopped near a group of fallen trees. “Safe,” I say.
Ky nods. “But that never happens.”
“Why not?”
“Because one prisoner will almost always betray the other. They’ll tell what they know to get a break.”
I think I know what he’s asking me. I’m getting better at reading his eyes, at knowing his thoughts. Perhaps it comes from knowing his story, from finally knowing more of him. I hand him a red cloth; neither of us try anymore not to let our fingers touch, come together, cling before letting go.
Ky continues. “But in the perfect scenario, neither would say anything.”
“And you think we can do that?”
“We’ll never be safe,” Ky says, brushing my face with his hand. “I finally understand that. But I trust you. We’ll keep each other as safe as we can for as long as we can.”
Which means that our kisses have to stay promises, promises left like his first kiss, soft on my cheek. Our lips do not meet. Not yet. For once we do that, the Infraction will have been committed. The Society will be betrayed. And so will Xander. We both know this. How much time can we steal from them? From ourselves? Because I can see in his eyes that he wants that kiss as much as I do.
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 Hill.
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 still 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 still. 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 all 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 small cake home to eat after dinner, along with a tangle of brightly colored balloons. I don’t know which Bram was more excited about—the cake, which we have so rarely, or the balloons, 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’ll 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 balloons. 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 small. All 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 all feel lucky to have Bram, but my mother especially.
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’ll never know how to write. You’ll never know how to read.”
“That’s not true!” Bram yelled. “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.”
“Really?”
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 full of letters and then timed them to see how fast they could find them all.
That was why I knew before anyone else that Bram would never be a sorter. But I still invented levels and records of achievement and spent almost all my free time during those months coming up with games I thought he would like. And even when he figured it out, he wasn’t mad. We’d had too much fun, and after all, I hadn’t lied. I had known a way to play games on the scribe.
“That was the day,” Ky says now, and stops.
“What?”
“The day I knew about you.”
“Why?” I say, feeling hurt somehow. “Because you could see I followed the rules? That I made my brother follow them, too?”
“No,” he says, as if it should be obvious. “Because I saw the way you cared about your brother and because I saw that you were smart enough to help him.” Then he smiles at me. “I already knew what you looked like, but that day was when I first knew about you.”
“Oh,” I say.
“What about me?” he asks.
“What do you mean?”
“When did you first see me?”
For some reason I can’t tell him. I can’t tell him that it was his face on the screen the morning after my Match Banquet—the mistake—that made me first begin to think of him this way. I can’t tell him that I didn’t see him until they told me to look.
“On the top of the first hill,” I say instead. And I wish that I did not have to tell him this lie, when he knows more of my truth than anyone else in the world.
Later that night I realize that Ky did not give me any more of his story and I did not ask. Perhaps it is because now I live in his story. Now I am a part of his, and he of mine, and the part we write together sometimes feels like the only part that matters.
But still, the question haunts me: What happened when the Officials took him away and the sun was red and low in the sky?