CHAPTER 1
I glance up at the eye, a shining black bead atop an old telephone pole. I walk briskly through pelting droplets, head bent. A cascade of water skims off my hood.
I show my face again to the bead on the awning of a shopping center, and again to one on the bus shelter where people huddle like cattle.
Each eye, memorized.
Not to see them. For them to see me.
My face.
I’ve become very familiar with it since I moved to the city. When I arrived a year ago, I found a book about the muscular system, fallen behind the desk bolted to the wall in my room. The apartment block where I live was a girls’ college dormitory once. The book must’ve slipped back there, forgotten by some long-ago student when women could still attend universities.
I hid it beneath my mattress, memorized the meaty striations bisecting my face, the delicate fish fin between eyebrows, the birds’ nests encircling each eye. In front of the mirror—hours of practice—working each muscle like a marionette. Now I can make myself look like anything at all.
The face I show the cameras is my most faithful: placid, thoughtless, empty.
I arrive downtown well before my next adjudication. To pass the time, I sit in a café, scan my calendar. Colored squares fill the screen—different adjudications around the city, documents of profiles and background information on each of my reformeds.
My eyes close for a moment, and my ears range the café—plasticore plates sliding against each other, clink of utensils. A soundscape I never could have imagined where I grew up. In the Cove, only the shush of the ocean, carts on a rocky roadway, the scrape of a tiny knife slipping into the tight mouths of oysters, occasionally slipping into the pad of my thumb, a silent gush of red falling through my hands.
Seated nearby, a man some years older than me scrolls through the endless, bright feed on his screen. I watch his fingers fling past pictures. Palm trees forking the sky. A baby held in a man’s arms like a loaf of bread. A woman sitting on artificially green grass in the high-necked, bulbous dress popular with young wives.
And then, an image unlike the others. A white building, rounded and hut-shaped, fashioned from opaque material. Against
practice—working each muscle like a marionette. Now I can make myself look like anything at all.
The face I show the cameras is my most faithful: placid, thoughtless, empty.
I arrive downtown well before my next adjudication. To pass the time, I sit in a café, scan my calendar. Colored squares fill the screen—different adjudications around the city, documents of profiles and background information on each of my reformeds.
My eyes close for a moment, and my ears range the café—plasticore plates sliding against each other, clink of utensils. A soundscape I never could have imagined where I grew up. In the Cove, only the shush of the ocean, carts on a rocky roadway, the scrape of a tiny knife slipping into the tight mouths of oysters, occasionally slipping into the pad of my thumb, a silent gush of red falling through my hands.
Seated nearby, a man some years older than me scrolls through the endless, bright feed on his screen. I watch his fingers fling past pictures. Palm trees forking the sky. A baby held in a man’s arms like a loaf of bread. A woman sitting on artificially green grass in the high-necked, bulbous dress popular with young wives.
And then, an image unlike the others. A white building, rounded and hut-shaped, fashioned from opaque material. Against a backdrop of marshy jungle, the building glows. It makes a light all its own.
I stand from my chair. Water that had collected in the folds of my raincoat unfurls to the ground. I barely notice. My eyes, transfixed. That photo. A facility building. Not from the Meadows, but another, shrouded in overgrown foliage. Above the screen, the man suspends his fingers, engrossed in the image too.
Can’t believe it’s been well over a decade since I last saw the Glades, the photo is captioned.
“The Glades,” I speak, and the man with the screen whips his head around, eyes wide. He doesn’t know me, doesn’t know if he’s been caught.
“The Meadows,” I say, placing a hand on my chest.
His shoulders dip, relaxing.
“I haven’t met many of us,” I tell him, though of course it’s not true. By now I’ve met dozens. Hundreds.
The man scans the café for anyone who might overhear. “Not that you’d know,” he mutters.
He’s right. If we’ve made it here, we’re reformed. What happened in the facilities, what they did to us, are closely guarded secrets.
A gold band encircles his finger. For a moment, his eyes trail to my own wedding finger, bare. “They haven’t matched you yet?” he asks.
I shake my head. “They made me an adjudicator. My time’s up in a year, though.” An adjudicator’s term is two years and already I’m half-done. Then a ring will be my fate too.
“You can’t have been out long,” he says.
I pull my shoulders back, trying to appear my full eighteen years. “About a year.”
“I’ve got almost fifteen,” he says. “Mine was one of the first cohorts.” The muscles beneath his face are controlled but too tight. Hiding something. “I don’t understand reminiscing,” he says, gazing again at the screen. “I’d never go back.”
“I would,” I say, surprising myself.
He frowns. “You would?”
And I nod, an unexpected knot forming in my throat.
For them. For her.
Rose.
• • •
The night I first saw Rose, the air was dim, blushing with dusty violet, as close as it got to night in the Meadows. Just past dinnertime. The girls would be filing from the glowing walls of the dining room, having eaten their carefully portioned meals. From where I sat inside the yew tree, I could see for miles, a sea of purple flowers, hazy in the evening, stretching for what I knew was farther than a person could ever walk.
The shuttle was a slim black knife, cutting first with its glint, then with its sound. The rumble up the dirt road meant only one thing: another girl. Her hair, cut short at the sides. Her body, muscular. Stocky. She wore a shiny black raincoat, thick metal zipper laddering up the front—an alarming contrast to the thin white dresses we wore. Most of us were twelve, thirteen, fourteen when we arrived, but she was older. A dart of grief passed through me. The Meadows would strip all of it away. Her body, forced to be still, would lose its muscle, and her hair forced to grow, and that coat thrown out with the trash.
That coat. I didn’t know how it was possible but her coat, I could see, was stippled with rain. No rain in the Meadows. No snow. No weather of any kind.
This girl carried rain with her.
Two matrons met her at the door, bulky white figures with a hand hovering over her shoulders. The girl took a few paces, and paused. She turned, so even from the yew tree, I could see her face. For the first time, I had an awareness of how many muscles must live inside a human face. I could see them all, the anatomy of her.
Every girl who’d entered the Meadows wore the same face: wondrous, bright-eyed. Hands clutching acceptance letters. Minds daring to imagine a future of easy breath in these bright halls and purple fields.
Rose’s face—nothing like that. Looking like it could grip the sky and rip it in half. Looking like she wanted to.
CHAPTER 2
Neon sprays of weeds
and scabby rust-colored scrub covered the rockside. I picked over the basalt and peeked over the edge of our cliff where, far below, the ocean had peeled back to reveal a circus of tide pools, the violet blush of urchins, pink sea stars holding the rock like grasping hands. The ocean could sneak up on a person there, surging unexpectedly through blowholes in the pocked surface. You had to listen. You had to be always on guard.
This is the place I grew from, this dirt, this sea wind, this salted air. I didn’t look at the ocean much in those days. It felt mean, uncontrollable. Now I know about the tides that pull at it, the moon—forces the sea couldn’t possibly understand. I imagine it might’ve wanted to do something different, to stretch long and thin, to muscle inside the hidden pockets of caves and the every-color cavities of tide pools. To feel itself unfold across the midnight depths that nobody else got to touch. Perhaps it threw itself against the rocks for a reason.
The only cause strong enough to pull my eyes toward the sea was the hope of spotting June’s boat. I’d known her since we were little, back when I recognized her only by sight, the fishergirl tying ropes, smelling of ocean and guts. She sailed with her father, pulling creatures from the depths, some grown grotesque from radiation. June saved them for me. “A three-headed crab,” she’d whisper as we passed each other on market day. Or, “An eel with one huge glowing eye. Come by later and I’ll show you. But you have to play for me.” And I’d spend the evening at her house, scratching a song from my shabby violin.
That day, it was nearly dusk before June’s boat bounced through the white-tipped froth, returning to harbor.
“Get back to work, Eleanor,” my mother called.
I tore my eyes from the wooden shape of the Musketeer and pointed them toward the ground. I harvested crab squash, and a blushing bouquet of sea radish. I reached over to pull up an apple-shaped kohlrabi, spidering green limbs reaching toward the sky. My mother had fashioned this plot years ago from a piece of land that nobody wanted. She’d hauled dirt, forced the ground here to mean something.
I looked at my mother and longed to ask her the question. The only one that mattered. Now and again I would slide it to her across a silent morning or afternoon.
“Where did I come from?”
She’d avert her dark eyes, continue assembling a candle from old drippings or rewiring a toaster there wasn’t enough electricity to use. “Somewhere else,” she’d say, gruff.
This was all she’d ever tell me. The people in town whispered, though. They said that I was left in a linen blanket on the doorstep of my mother’s cliffside cottage, that I’d simply shown up one day, a squalling pink bundle so incongruous in this windswept place. They said that I didn’t really belong to my mother.
This, the earliest knowing I had, reinforced every trip to market where people would stare and then not, and my mother’s face was still square-shaped and mine still soft and round. Even before I had words, I already knew I was not meant to be in that place.
Nearby, there was a tree, just outside the cottage. My tree—a craggy maple, clawing at the cliff, always threatening to send a root into rock and crumble us into the sea far below. “Shouldn’t even be here,” my mother complained, kicking at its leaf-fall each autumn.
The tree was not native to the area—leaves with points like daggers that flushed crimson in autumn—suited to a different climate, perhaps even from across the sea. How it came to grow in that spot, no way to know.
I’d imagine, though. A green seedpod blowing in on a strange, wayward wind from northern parts. Or clinging to the wagon wheel of a traveling man trading radishes and copper trinkets, unsticking when it arrived in the Cove. Or carried in the pocket of a girl fleeing her town as it receded under water, like so many towns had in the decades before I was born.
The tree and I were both transplants, growing in dirt not our own. We were both meant for other things.
On the cliff nearby stood our cottage, abandoned for years before my mother made it a home. “How’d you do it?” I would ask her.
“No choice,” she’d say. “Nowhere else to go. Nothing to do but make the most of it.”
“Look at you now,” I’d said once, smiling.
“Look at me now,” she’d grumbled. “I’ve got a shack, a deviant maple tree, and a plot of rock the size of a football field that really, really doesn’t want to grow carrots.”
I didn’t reply, didn’t put voice to the flare of pain that filled my chest, didn’t say But you’ve got me. Instead, I asked, “What’s a football field?”
She waved me off, in that way of adults when they didn’t have the energy to explain about Life Before.
I placed the vegetables I’d gathered in my mother’s knit sack. There was an oval of dirt printed just above her cheekbone, placed there by one of her thumbs, those tiny squared trowels. I lifted my own thumb, already calloused and careworn at twelve, and, without thinking, placed it on the dirt-shape on her cheek.
She swatted my hand away.
“I just—I wanted to see if my thumb would fit. If our thumbs were the same size.”
“You can see plainly that they’re not,” she said. And with that she bent at the waist and meshed her fingers into the winding petals of lamb’s tongue.
People lived like this now, like ancient pictures I’d seen of feudal times, women bent over, plucking bits of wheat from a field, their task stretching for acres. I wonder if they ever recovered from a life facing the ground.
At sundown, too dark to work, we walked the short distance to our cottage, folded our limbs onto the threadbare couch, and turned toward our state-provided screen to watch dispatches from the city. The screen flickered to life, the picture ebbing and flowing with the unreliable current of electricity. The announcers were never named, but we knew they were important—messengers for the state. The women especially resembled each other, like dolls pressed from the same mold, merely in different colors, with glossy hair, thin limbs, delicate features. Not like in the Cove where people had the option of growing wild—fishermen with beards to their sternums, women whose faces were cracked by weather and time. A very few wore makeup and tamed their hair, but most didn’t bother.
This night, two announcers spoke in front of a blurred white background. A man with a waxen face, as though carved from soap, and a woman whose brown skin was buffed with makeup. The dispatches had told us that, during Life Before, all people hadn’t been treated equally. But, by the time I was a baby, the state had officially eradicated discrimination based on race. Their words, the certainty of them, reassured me, even as they snagged in my mind.
On our screen, the announcers said what they always said. We’re working hard to fix this. We care about each of you, so much. The tone was of a parent consoling a sick child. What was wrong in our country was a malady that needed to run its course. We are so sorry for your hunger, for your aches and pains. If we could take them, we would. If we could put them into our own bodies, we would. We are trying our best. My mother made a gruff sound with her throat, but she didn’t speak her true feelings, though there were no ears in our cottage. Illegal, to speak ill of the state.
I knew what she thought already. My mother didn’t approve of the state, though I always wondered why. They’d saved us after the Turn, when nature rebelled, swallowing whole cities beneath oceans, the sun burning so hot, it turned much of the country to wastelands. The Turn happened slowly. People could ignore it, put it out of their minds. And then, fast. The country collapsed within a few years, and for a long time, all anybody did was survive. Until the Quorum took over.
My favorite part of the dispatches was any mention of the facilities, the schools where the most remarkable children in the country were sent. I watched hungrily for the occasional video of a child tearing open their letter of admission. “Congratulations! You have been accepted to the Estuary, a place where the best and brightest of our country learn to burn even brighter.”
I’d never been in a car—had never traveled beyond the Cove—so the dispatches were my only means of seeing how others lived. Sometimes, enormous houses out of my dreams—screens that took up whole walls, slick self-driving cars shaped like bullets, bowls mounded with fruit in colors brighter than anything we got at the market. Other times, dim huts, worse off than any place I’d seen in the Cove. And it was those that gave me the greatest thrill. Because any child could be chosen for a facility. The state knew each of our names, could track us on satellites and cameras affixed to roofs and defunct telephone poles. The algorithm conducted intelligence tests just by watching us handle everyday problems, Mrs. Arkwright told us, always compiling and weighing results.
It didn’t matter where the child was going—the Estuary, the Pines, the Archipelago. Their faces beamed when they opened their letters. Parents wrapped them up, crying proud tears.
That is how I grew up, dreaming of a place beyond the Cove. Each night, lying beneath my woven blanket, wishing alternately for June, imagining the soft places of her, imagining her touching the soft places of me, and for one of those letters. Wishing with every muscle of me, every cell.
• • •
There was no camera crew like in the dispatches, but otherwise it happened remarkably the same. Thick envelope, an unbelievable white. Same words: The Meadows, a place where the best and brightest of our country learn to burn even brighter. Same gasp from my mouth. Same eyes searching for my mother’s. There, the comparison ended. No joy in her gaze. No feeling at all but a sullen mouth, drooping in a familiar frown. I swallowed disappointment. No matter, I told myself. In days, I’d be gone.
The Meadows. I tasted the word.
Next morning, I ran down the hill, through fields of waist-high thistle that scratched my fingertips, toward the market square, ignoring the threat of gopher holes that could snap an ankle in a heartbeat. Had to reach the dock before the boats went out.
I pulled up in the market square, huffing. There—her father’s boat, still rocking against the dock. June would be here soon, in her leather overalls, waxed and thick-smelling from seal fat, but beautiful. Perfect.
The square felt strangely hollow, market stalls covered with tarps, the only sound the wind faintly flapping a canvas poster hanging above the marketplace. The poster was secured to the wall of an old brick cannery. Stenciled across the top, in enormous red letters, Strong Families Build a Strong Nation, and beneath that a giant-sized illustration of a family. A man, smile cutting his meaty pink cheeks. Beneath him, two white children, plump and healthy-looking, one boyish and one girlish in the obvious ways, blue gingham and pink gingham, as though masculine and feminine were perfect inverses. And beside them, a woman.
For as long as I could remember, my eyes had drawn to her. Her gaze was positioned permanently sideways, peering adoringly at the man and children, her mouth red-glossed and smiling toothlessly. Something in her carefully arranged face felt like a riddle I could solve, if only I looked long enough. One of these days, she’d break character and show me who she really was.
“You’re leaving.”
June’s raspy voice. It sent a shiver through me. She stood in the doorway of an alley, backlit by sun. Her hair made a fraying halo around her head.
“Not till tomorrow,” I said.
June’s face was downcast, a wrinkle between her brows that had deepened in the last year since her mother had died. June’s mother, smile eternally dimpling her amber cheeks, voice slightly accented from the island where she’d been born, had come here after that same island was erased by the sea. She fell for June’s father, with his scrub of red beard and fair skin permanently flushed from the wind. After June’s mother died, he remarried within the legally permitted six-month grieving period. It was customary.
June’s face was already becoming copper like it did every summer, a scattering of freckles across her nose. The color she got from her mother, the freckles from her father. I thought about this often, the particular blending of features, and how much more sense June made, knowing what she was made of.
And me. Who did the brown of my eyes resemble? Who the lobe of my ear? Who the squirming in my chest, longing to be free?
“When did you get your letter?” June asked.
“Last night,” I told her. “News travels fast.”
“Stella the spinster’s daughter chosen for a facility—bound to be the thing on everyone’s lips.” She cocked her hip to the side. “What’s it called? Oh, yes, the Meadows. Sounds lovely.”
“You could be happy for me,” I suggested.
The intensity on her face melted a little. “It’s just that I’ll miss you.”
“You’ll miss me?” Most of our lives, we never went more than a day without seeing each other, in the market or at the schoolmarm’s. Still, I felt a punch in my heart from surprise.
“Of course I’ll miss you,” she said.
Sometimes, on community devotion day, my mother would have us trudge to the rough-hewn sanctuary building for a service. The state had eradicated every shred of religion, but this was allowed, this sitting together in silent thought. It was always hair-pullingly dull until my favorite part, the Wanting Hat. Down every bench, the brown felt hat passed between hands—gnarled hands and salt-chapped hands and young hands not yet thick with calluses. The hat filled with whispered wishes, hushed desires. When it was my turn, I’d lower my mouth to the hat’s empty hollow, and wish for June. To do what with, I hardly knew. To be close to her, was all. Facing her in the market that day, I wondered, had she ever wished for me?
“What will I do without you? Nobody else cares about my daily catch,” she said. “Who else will I show the fish with no eyes?”
I smiled. “Who else will play music for you? Who else will draw you crass pictures of Mrs. Arkwright on their chalkboard? Or pick you a flower from the field and put it behind your ear before you even notice?”
Her face brightened as I spoke, then clouded, like the sky does. “No one.”
The buoyant feeling in my chest dissipated. I had always thought of June as permanent. Imagined our childhoods stretching out before us—walks among the junipers and cliff-diving and one day being brave enough to reach out and touch her skin.
“We could’ve had all our lives,” she said. “We could’ve had a million years.”
I took a step closer. “I’ll see you again—” I started, but bit off the rest. I didn’t know if it was true. Instead, I looked around, and walked backward into the alley, unobserved by any villagers. “Come closer.”
Her face rearranged, a smile breaking through her dubious expression.
When she moved close, I leaned near to her ear, cheek brushing hers. “June.”
I felt her shiver beneath my breath. Slowly, I moved my mouth from her ear, and she moved her mouth to mine. Our lips touched, softly. She moved closer, the movements like an unwritten language that we never needed to be taught. I cupped her bottom lip in my mouth, held it like something precious.
Five years have passed, and it occurs to me, the most miraculous thing about that moment: not June’s breath in my mouth. Not the current that arced through my body. Not the way she looked at me w
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