Only Ever Yours

by Louise O'Neill

  “#755 and #734, please leave your desks and come to the front of the room.”

  The rest of us exhale in relief as the chosen two walk to the front of the room as if their feet are made of lead. They step into the glass boxes flanking the chastity’s desk, and magnified fotos of the two girls are projected, side by side, onto the mirror-board behind them, each image eight feet tall. Within seconds they appear on our desktops. cara’s image is on the left, her dirty-blond hair skimming past her elbows, full eyebrows framing sky-blue eyes. naomi is on the right, cheekbones contouring her dark skin, her black haircut in thick bangs, drawing attention to her eyes, cat green and almond-shaped like mine.

  “So, girls, let us begin,” chastity-ruth says, walking up and down the center steps dividing the rows of seating. “At the end of each section, I will ask you to record your VoiceNotes. Please make these comments as detailed and thorough as you can, to help #755 and #734 to explore their weaknesses. Remember, your voices will be disguised to maintain anonymity, so you may speak freely.”

  “Your skin is too dark, naomi,” I hear someone say. “I think that you should ask about some lightening cream.”

  “cara, your hair color washes out your skin tone,” someone else whispers. “I think you should ask about a tanning cream.”

  We have undertaken this task every Friday since our first Comparison Studies class in 4th year; two different victims each time. I always start off wanting to be kind, but somehow, once I start speaking too, I can’t stop. I guess it does sort of make me feel better, at the time, a faint feeling of superiority swelling inside me like a balloon, but afterward my tongue feels bitter, like a hole has burned through it.

  “What did you say about her?” I asked isabel when we were in 14th year, watching agyness’s eyes turn glassy with unshed tears, wondering if my comments had been the cause. “Did you say anything about her being flat-chested?”

  I willed her to agree, to collude with me, to follow me down into this dark rabbit hole.

  “No.” isabel’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “I never say anything like that. I usually just recommend they get their hair trimmed.”

  In that moment I loved her for her basic decency. And I hated her too. Because once again, without even trying, she was better than I was.

  naomi and cara take their seats, shoving their earbuds in. We are all the same when it’s our turn. Maybe we hope this time it’ll be different, that this time everyone will agree that we’re beautiful. Or maybe not. Maybe on some level it’s actually okay when the distorted voices whisper in our ears, telling us we’re ugly, we’re vile, and everyone knows it. We may be perfectly designed, but really our eyes are too close together and our thighs are too big.

  cara’s face is ashen. What was it I said about her? I’m sorry. I’m always sorry.

  “As you know, girls, there is always room for Improvement. With every year since your design date, you are getting older, losing your bloom, depreciating in value. Standards, girls! Standards must be upheld. I’m sure #755 and #734 are grateful.”

  I look at cara again, holding her face together in a smile. She doesn’t look very grateful.

  “An easy way to ensure equality of standards is to create consistency,” chastity-ruth continues, pointing at the board behind her. It’s still split in half but with two new images. On the left there is a foto of a woman from before us, and on the right a foto of liu.

  “This woman from Old Japan is the prototype for #783. All variations have been regulated.”

  I would never say this aloud, but I sometimes think the modifications have left liu’s features almost bland, so diluted that they are almost interchangeable with mine, or megan’s, or naomi’s. All that is different is our skin tone and hair color. But at least we still have some diversity, however marginal. It’s rumored that nowadays only blond, blue-eyed girls are designed in the Afrika-and Chindia-Zones, their past literally whitewashed.

  “As you can see, girls, the contrast between women today and the women before is vast.” More and more images emerge of the women before as chastity-ruth continues her lecture. “Please note the lack of symmetry in the face, the bulbous noses, the dilated pores over the forehead and chin. Undesigned, natural women.”

  The screen updates with new horrors and I feel as if I might vomit. I have to close my eyes when she starts presenting examples of the obesity epidemic. I can only endure so much.

  “There were theories before us that obesity had roots in emotional or psychological problems.” There is something excited about her, her shoulders tense with expectation, her fists clenching. “This is nonsense. It is laziness that causes fat. Laziness and greed. And it will be your downfall if you allow it. But you won’t let it, will you?”

  “No.”

  “Will you?”

  “No.”

  “WILL YOU?”

  “NO,” we scream, whipped into a frenzy.

  “But one of you has.” Her voice drops to a whisper. We look at each other, searching for the culprit. Who? Who is it? isabel. It has to be isabel.

  “Look in the box!” liu yells, pointing at a figure ascending slowly into the glass box on the left of the chastity’s desk, emerging through the trapdoors from the Organized Recreation Space. It’s christy. My heart is thumping so loudly in my ears I can’t hear chastity-ruth, I can’t hear the other girls. All I know is that she’s standing there, ready to be crucified for her sins. “This is going to look amazing on MyFace,” megan says, pointing her fone at christy.

  “Step forward, #727.”

  The glass doors part. She stands before us.

  “Remove your bathrobe.”

  There’s silence. christy unties the white toweling robe and lets it fall to the ground. She’s wearing pink lace underwear, small lumps of flesh spilling over the underwear, the inner edges of her thighs close to touching.

  “#727 has been lazy. She has been lazy and she has been greedy. She deserves to be punished. Don’t you agree?”

  Flashes from digi-cams and eFones are exploding like flares. My hands are clammy, fear crawling up my spine bone by bone, unfurling in my throat.

  “Don’t you agree, girls?” A note of warning has entered her voice.

  “Yes, chastity-ruth.”

  “I can’t hear you. Does #727 deserve to be punished?”

  “YES, chastity-ruth.” We have to give her what she wants. We will give her whatever she wants.

  She reaches into the pocket of her robe and retrieves a marker, someone behind me gasping at the rare sight of a writing implement. Wielding it like a blade, she walks around christy, once, twice, three times, before cutting into christy’s fair skin, drawing vivid red circles on her body.

  “What is #727, girls? What is she?”

  We don’t know, we don’t know, we don’t know.

  “She’s fat, girls. She’s fat and disgusting. Say it with me. She’s fat. Fat. Fat.”

  Some of the girls sing with her, more and more people joining in until it seems the ceiling may shatter with voices. It looks like a lightning storm now, camera flash after flash bursting through the room.

  My eyes drift from christy’s thighs to isabel’s, and I can’t help but measure the difference. It should be isabel up there instead of christy. I look up and isabel is staring at me, understanding shimmering between us. She knows what I am thinking. I’m sorry, I tell her with my eyes. I’m so sorry. She looks away. She doesn’t care what I think anymore.

  “Fat. Fat. Fat.”

  Amid the hysterical chanting, chastity-ruth holds her hands together, as if she’s praying for inspiration. Her robes swish on the ground as she squats beside me. “Fat. Fat. Fat,” she whispers in my ear. My heart feels too big for my body and I look at her in panic, her washed-out gray eyes burning into mine. She can see into my soul, just like isabel can. She can see, and she hates me too.

  She bangs her fist on my desk so hard that the screen flickers and dies, a large crack splintering the middle. Her od
or is invading my nostrils, the unfamiliar smell of the marker pen mixing with a sour hint of sweat.

  I look at my broken desk, my reflection warping, split into two halves, both sides of my lips mouthing the word.

  Fat.

  “That was intense.”

  Back in the dorms, cara answers my request to VideoChat almost immediately and we fall into an uneasy silence.

  “Intense.”

  “But obviously it had to be done. christy should have known better,” she says quickly, paranoia kicking in.

  “Obviously.” My own fear beats in my body like a second heart.

  cara chews on the ends of her hair, golden strands peeping out of her mouth. “Look, freida, I’ll talk to you later.” Before I say something I regret, her eyes seem to add. I’m about to turn the VoiceChat off when she speaks again, her voice quieter this time.

  “Do you think my nose would be better if it was straighter?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “In Comparison Studies. Someone said I should get it redesigned when we leave School.”

  “No, cara.” Her gorgeous face fills the screen, delicate freckles sprinkled over an adorable nose. “Your nose is perfect.”

  She grins and waves goodbye, christy forgotten. I request isabel to VideoChat, staring at her profile foto as the beeping tone stretches out into nothingness.

  Maybe she has her ePad on silent.

  Maybe she’s taking a nap.

  Maybe she hates me.

  The MyFace newsfeed is clogged. I listen to megan’s status, then daria’s, then gisele’s. All are the same, blow-by-blow accounts of what happened in Comparison Studies, accompanied by countless fotos of christy in her underwear. I know I should update my status, put something generic like “Fat women should be made obsolete,” but I don’t have the energy.

  “Stream TV.”

  The Americas-Zone’s Next Top Concubine is playing, newly designated concubines participating in tasks to select the one who will be chosen as the American Father’s personal concubine for a year. I watch as one of the finalists bows before the American Father, his hands gripping her curly auburn hair. I think I’ve seen this episode before.

  An ad for vaginal bleaching cream.

  One for a new laser treatment that promises to remove any unsightly body hair. “If only amber had known about this!” amber, a member of girl band the slutz, has her hand held high, waving to a friend. The camera zooms in, a red arrow pointing out the shadowing of stubble across her armpit.

  I keep flicking, allowing the drone of the TV to wash over me, wash away these thoughts.

  Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

  “Hey, megan,” I say, accepting the VideoChat request.

  “Hey, girl. What’s up?” She’s not even pretending to look at me, totally focused on her own video-feed.

  “Nothing much. What’s up with you, girl?” Pathetic. I’m better than this in my head.

  “Well, obviously I’m in shock after what happened today. It was awful. Poor christy. I feel so bad for her.”

  So bad that you took thirty-seven fotos and posted them all on MyFace.

  “I would kill myself if I got that fat. I bet no one in the Americas-Zone ever gets fat.”

  “Apparently in the Chindia-Zone the eves are so well designed they don’t need kcal blockers at all.” I sigh at the prospect of unlimited access to the Fatgirl buffet, free from shame. “It’s physically impossible for them to go above target weight.”

  “Hmm.” It’s funny how she can’t see beyond the Americas. I can understand her wanting to leave the Euro-Zone, with its four thousand inhabitants and increasingly limited budget, but most of the world’s money is in Chindia now. It may have been the Americas who came up with the idea for the Noah Project, but it was the Chindians who funded the development and construction of the Zones. No one else could afford it.

  “I wonder why it wasn’t isabel.”

  “What do you mean?” I pretend to misunderstand her.

  “Come on, freida,” she says, those green eyes boring into mine through the screen. “isabel has gained about three times as much weight as christy. She’s enormous.”

  “That’s not very nice.” My guilt that she’s articulating my thoughts is making me defensive. Since when did megan and I agree on anything?

  “No need to be cranky. I’m only asking because—”

  “Yeah, I know, I’m sure you feel really bad for isabel too,” I say, and her face starts to turn a rather alarming shade of purple. “Sorry.”

  I wish I was brave enough to turn off my ePad and let her get back to giving her hair one hundred brushstrokes, or whatever it is she does to make it so shiny. I want my hair to be that shiny. Ugh. Why am I so useless?

  “Sorry,” I say again, and she smiles at my apology, tossing ebony waves down her back.

  “It’s okay. I know you’re struggling. I’ve noticed that there have been some …” she pauses meaningfully—“difficulties with you and isabel.”

  Paranoia turns my stomach over. Can everyone else see it too? Do they talk about it behind my back, say that they always knew isabel would dump me in the end? They must have wondered why isabel, the #1 eve for so many years, would choose to be best friends with someone as inconsequential as me. I knew I was never good enough to be her friend; I wasn’t pretty enough or funny enough and I didn’t even have great taste in clothes. Everyone else probably knew it too.

  “isabel can be strange, can’t she?” megan’s tone is conversational but her eyes are sharp, taking in everything.

  “In what way?”

  “She’s always been secretive, don’t you think?”

  “isabel?”

  “Yes, isabel,” megan says impatiently. “I don’t trust secretive people.”

  “Yes!” I say, falling on the excuse with indecent haste. “She has been, I guess.”

  Not about everything. Most of the time she was the most honest person I knew. But, yes, sometimes she could be guarded, cagey even, if I asked her a question she didn’t want to answer. There was a part of herself that she kept hidden, that she didn’t trust me enough to show me.

  “But it’s no excuse to fall behind in the rankings, freida,” she says, wagging her finger at me. “You started this year at like, what, #5?” As if she doesn’t know. Our rankings are chiseled into our souls. “And now you’re #10. You’re hanging on by your not very well-manicured fingertips. I mean, when was the last time you went to chastity-hope for Beauty Therapy? You had better not be pulling an amber.”

  “I’m going to get that new laser treatment done when I become a companion …”

  “If you become a companion. If,” she says, holding her hand up to shush me. “And you will have to rank in the top five if you want to be guaranteed one of the richer Inheritants. And that’s not exactly looking definite right now, is it?” She stares at me with unconcealed impatience. “Do you want to be a concubine? Is that it? We’ve spend the last sixteen years in this School surrounded by girls. Do you really want to spend the rest of your life in a harem, surrounded by yet more girls? If you’re a companion, you’ll only have to share a house with some man and however many sons you’re lucky enough to birth. It’s freedom. For girls like us, being a companion is the only option.”

  A warm feeling spreads in my stomach at being included with megan in “girls like us.” She leans in to the camera to fix her makeup, wiping away flakes of mascara from underneath her eyes. They seem greener on the screen, little specks of emerald fanning out from her pupils.

  “When are they going to figure out a way to ensure our morning makeup lasts the whole day?” she asks, rubbing at a small smudge on her browbone. “I’m so sick of having to reapply midmorning. Anyway. What was I saying?”

  “For girls like us, being a companion is freedom,” I prompt her, thrilled at the opportunity to say “girls like us” again.

  “So, yeah, whatever. It’s not like I care or anything, but I think you need to sta
rt considering your future. Stop being such a girl and drop the deadweight. And in isabel’s case, that’s like 150 pounds of deadweight.” Her face screws up with revulsion. “So disgusting. I’d kill myself before I’d let that happen to me.”

  “Yeah, I suppose you …” I begin but I’m talking to myself, the screen going black as megan hangs up without saying goodbye. She never did that to me when isabel was #1.

  Chapter 7

  February

  Five months until the Ceremony

  “How about the one on marine life?”

  “Seen it.”

  “Rainforests?”

  “Seen it. Three times.”

  “You’re in a strange mood.” agyness scratches the new haircut that megan said makes her look like a cancer patient.

  “I’m bored. This weekend is lasting forever.”

  “I’m going to watch the marine one. Call me back if you change your mind.”

  “agyness?” I say before she turns off VideoChat. “Don’t mention this to the others. I don’t want them to know that I still watch the Nature Channel.”

  “But you do watch the Nature Channel,” she answers slowly.

  “Yes, but I don’t want anyone else knowing that.”

  “Who cares?” She rubs her head again. Her hair is so short now you can see the pink of her scalp peeking through. She’ll have to check that attitude at the door when she becomes a chastity. “You should just be yourself, freida.”