“Nervous about your evaluation?”
I turn around. My aunt Carol is standing in the doorway, her hands folded.
“No,” I say, though this is a lie.
She smiles, just barely, a brief, flitting thing. “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine. Take your shower and then I’ll help you with your hair. We can review your answers on the way.”
“Okay.” My aunt continues to stare at me. I squirm, digging my nails into the windowsill behind me. I’ve always hated being looked at. Of course, I’ll have to get used to it. During the exam there will be four evaluators staring at me for close to two hours. I’ll be wearing a flimsy plastic gown, semitranslucent, like the kind you get in hospitals, so that they can see my body.
“A seven or an eight, I would say,” my aunt says, puckering her lips. It’s a decent score and I’d be happy with it. “Though you won’t get more than a six if you don’t get cleaned up.”
Senior year is almost over, and the evaluation is the final test I will take. For the past four months I’ve had all my various board exams—math, science, oral and written proficiency, sociology and psychology and photography (a specialty elective)—and I should be getting my scores sometime in the next few weeks. I’m pretty sure I did well enough to get assigned to a college. I’ve always been a decent student. The academic assessors will analyze my strengths and weaknesses, and then assign me to a school and a major.
The evaluation is the last step, so I can get paired. In the coming months the evaluators will send me a list of four or five approved matches. One of them will become my husband after I graduate college (assuming I pass all my boards. Girls who don’t pass get paired and married right out of high school). The evaluators will do their best to match me with people who received a similar score in the evaluations. As much as possible they try to avoid any huge disparities in intelligence, temperament, social background, and age. Of course you do hear occasional horror stories: cases where a poor eighteen-year-old girl is given to a wealthy eighty-year-old man.
The stairs let out their awful moaning, and Grace’s sister, Jenny, appears. She is nine and tall for her age, but very thin: all angles and elbows, her chest caving in like a warped sheet pan. It’s terrible to say, but I don’t like her very much. She has the same pinched look as her mother did.
She joins my aunt in the doorway and stares at me. I am only five-two and Jenny is, amazingly, just a few inches shorter than I am now. It’s silly to feel self-conscious in front of my aunt and cousins, but a hot, crawling itch begins to work its way up my arms. I know they’re all worried about my performance at the evaluation. It’s critical that I get paired with someone good. Jenny and Grace are years away from their procedures. If I marry well, in a few years it will mean extra money for the family. It might also make the whispers go away, singsong snatches that four years after the scandal still seem to follow us wherever we go, like the sound of rustling leaves carried on the wind: Sympathizer. Sympathizer. Sympathizer.
It’s only slightly better than the other word that followed me for years after my mom’s death, a snakelike hiss, undulating, leaving its trail of poison: Suicide. A sideways word, a word that people whisper and mutter and cough: a word that must be squeezed out behind cupped palms or murmured behind closed doors. It was only in my dreams that I heard the word shouted, screamed.
I take a deep breath, then duck down to pull the plastic bin from under my bed so that my aunt won’t see I’m shaking.
“Is Lena getting married today?” Jenny asks my aunt. Her voice has always reminded me of bees droning flatly in the heat.
“Don’t be stupid,” my aunt says, but without irritation. “You know she can’t marry until she’s cured.”
I take my towel from the bin and straighten up. That word—marry—makes my mouth go dry. Everyone marries as soon as they are done with their education. It’s the way things are. “Marriage is Order and Stability, the mark of a Healthy society.” (See The Book of Shhh, “Fundamentals of Society,” p. 114). But the thought of it still makes my heart flutter frantically, like an insect behind glass. I’ve never touched a boy, of course—physical contact between uncureds of opposite sex is forbidden. Honestly, I’ve never even talked to a boy for longer than five minutes, unless you count my cousins and uncle and Andrew Marcus, who helps my uncle at the Stop-N-Save and is always picking his nose and wiping his snot on the underside of the canned vegetables.
And if I don’t pass my boards—please God, please God, let me pass them—I’ll have my wedding as soon as I’m cured, in less than three months. Which means I’ll have my wedding night.