Only Ever Yours

by Louise O'Neill

  “Pathetic. Dooming themselves to lives as concubines,” megan sighs.

  “Maybe that’s what they want,” I say, thinking of what rosie told me. “Maybe they want to be concubines.”

  “No,” megan replies. “Everyone wants to be a companion. They’re just making the best of things.”

  The days pass and there is still no sign of Darwin. Every time the Inheritants arrive I scan the group, my heart sinking when I realize that he’s not there.

  “Where’s Darwin?” I ask Isaac during our Interaction, checking megan isn’t in hearing distance.

  “He’s sick,” Isaac answers, his blond hair like curtains over his thin face, crooked nose peeking though.

  “Is he okay?”

  “I think that—”

  “He’s fine.” George interrupts his Interaction with agyness at the table next to us, shooting Isaac a look of warning. “Just a mild dose of …”

  “… influenza?” Isaac finishes uncertainly.

  He must be quarantined. The Zones are so insular that any illness, although rare, can spread like wildfire within hours.

  “Why are you so concerned?” Isaac looks at me knowingly. “Should I tell him you said hello?”

  “No,” I yelp, my face sizzling. “I was only asking for someone else. I don’t care.”

  “heidi … karlie … miranda …”

  No one ever chooses isabel for this task, their eyes skimming over her as if she doesn’t exist.

  “angelina … lara …”

  Another Heavenly Seventy session where I am ignored. Am I repellent to men? What if I’m so unattractive that I won’t be chosen as a companion? And what if they won’t even allow me to become a concubine? Am I destined to become a chastity? I would have to join the ranks here at the School, stay with chastity-ruth, faced with my disintegrating looks in the mirrors, waiting to die of natural causes.

  No. No. I can’t.

  I know Darwin likes me, that he finds me “intriguing” at the very least. I have to make him choose me.

  “He’s back!”

  A hum ripples through the room. The Inheritants have returned, led into the Homemaker room by Darwin. He’s lost weight. His jeans are hanging off his hips, his T-shirt loose across his torso.

  “Ouch. What happened to him?” cara whispers to me.

  He’s wearing a baseball cap so it’s not immediately apparent, but when he raises his hand in greeting, I can see it. The light catches his face, shimmering in the ugly shadows coloring his eye. “Settle down, eves,” chastity-ruth says, but for once no one is listening to her as we check our makeup in our tabletops, looking up intermittently to flutter our eyelashes at Darwin. The other Inheritants are teasing him about the reaction he’s causing, disheveling his perfect curls and punching him in the upper arm, jealousy coating their smiles. Darwin ignores them. His eyes skim over megan until he finds me. “Hey,” he mouths, as if there is no one else in the room.

  “Oh my Father! He said hey to you!” cara stifles a squeal. “You are so lucky.”

  “I don’t think it was me necessarily,” I say as megan’s jaw clenches.

  “Control yourselves.” A note of steel has entered chastity-ruth’s voice and we fall silent, recognizing danger.

  “Today, eves, you have been set the task of creating red velvet cupcakes. Go to your cooking stations. Please do not forget your aprons. If I see any stains on your clothing, I will be extremely unhappy.” She settles onto a high stool at the far right corner of the room, rearranging her black robes carefully. The Homemaker room has a row of ovens and adjacent sinks set in a U-shape, the central space holding six rows of long mirror-plated tables. On each table there are five individual stations with the cooking utensils and ingredients that we will need for our task. I grab my apron from underneath my station, a sugary peach color patterned with cartoon lipsticks.

  The tabletops dissolve into a video-tutorial demonstrating to us, step by step, how to turn the ingredients into cupcakes. I peer closer at the screen, recognizing the face of the TV cook, virginia of virginia Licks fame. She’s pouting her inflated lips at the camera, licking cupcake mixture off her fingers, pressing her redesigned breasts together as she beats the eggies vigorously. No wonder she’s so popular in the Zones, even if cooking is a prehistoric skill. I glance down at my own breasts, also jiggling in a low-cut tank top as I beat eggies too.

  “Very nice.”

  Abraham is standing by my station, staring at my chest. He rubs his nose, his deep-set gray eyes burning with excitement. Shame spreads like a rash over my skin and I want to yank my apron up so that I’m covered completely from the neck down. I concentrate intensely on the desktop and press playback on the tutorial, pretending I didn’t hear the instructions.

  “Everything all right here?”

  “Just enjoying the view,” Abraham says, and I try to smile to cover my revulsion. This is what I wanted. I wanted them to think I was attractive.

  “Maybe it’s time to enjoy a different view,” Darwin says. Irritation shadows Abraham’s face but he backs away and goes to join the other Inheritants milling around. Darwin is grimly satisfied but not surprised. He is used to this, I realize. He is used to people doing whatever he tells them to. I can almost touch this feeling with the tips of my fingers, feeling the authority of it, the protection in it.

  “Don’t worry about him,” Darwin says, moving back to give me space. “He should know better than to bother you.” He rolls his eyes. “Abraham has always been the same, always wanting what I want.”

  I stare at the tutorial again, pressing pause. A trace of sweat smears the screen. I wipe it off quickly, hoping he didn’t see. Did he just say that he wanted me?

  “Like when we were kids. If I ever had a toy, he would try to steal it. He even had the nerve to take my shooting rifle, tried to pass it off as his own.” He doesn’t lower his voice. Like megan, he is unafraid of being overheard. He has that particular brand of bravery that comes with power.

  I want that bravery. I want that power.

  “When was this?” I ask, trying not to stare at his bruised eye.

  “Seven years ago.”

  “You’re holding on to that grudge, aren’t you?” I tease him, looking up through my eyelashes the way chastity-theresa tutored us to do.

  “Is your cake mixture or whatever okay?” he asks.

  Shit. It’s clumping. Is it meant to be that way?

  “I don’t understand why they set this task. Who cooks? This is boring.” He rests against my table, flour dusting his striped T-shirt. “Well, besides talking to you of course.”

  “Maybe they’re preparing us for a Euro-Zone collapse,” I say, blushing.

  “Excellent point, young freida. In the case of an economic meltdown and imminent starvation, I definitely don’t want to be stuck with a companion who can’t produce the perfect red velvet cupcake.” He hoots with laughter. “The horror.”

  “What’s so funny?” megan approaches us with a ceramic bowl clasped under one arm, using her free hand to stir the mixture with a wooden spoon. Her skin is rosy from the heat of the ovens, a few tendrils of dark hair escaping from her loose ponytail.

  “Nothing.” I move back so that she can stand next to Darwin, and I pour a generous amount of red food coloring into the bowl. “Is it supposed to look like this?” I ask anxiously, and megan peers in, wrinkling her nose.

  “It’s so red.” She giggles. “It reminds me of when you got your first womenstruation. Your bed looked like a crime scene.”

  I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I don’t want to look at him, but I have to; I have to see if he heard that.

  “I don’t get it anymore.”

  “It’s fine.” He cracks his knuckles uncomfortably.

  “No, honestly, I don’t. I take tablets, you know? I mean, we all take tablets. Unless we become companions. And then … well, then we don’t. But you know this. Do you know this? Yeah … so … yeah.”

  I ramble on and
on, wishing that a hole would appear in the ground and swallow me up. I feel as if my entire body is blistering with a savage heat.

  “Honestly. It’s fine.” He backs away, probably afraid that I’m about to draw him a diagram of my uterus. “I have to go to the bathroom. I’ll see you in a bit.”

  “Oh, freeds, I’m so sorry. It just came out,” megan says as I press my lips together to stop them trembling. I count the tiles on the floor to calm myself down.

  “To be fair, freida, I’m sure it was an accident,” gisele chimes in from the next station.

  “It really was.” megan’s voice is wobbly. “I could cry I feel so bad.” There is an intake of breath and I raise my head to see if she’s actually going to go that far, but she’s still dry-eyed, her mouth quivering dramatically. jessie moves quickly to megan’s side, liz following, and the two enfold her in a hug. The others crowd around megan too, shaking their heads at me for nearly driving her to tears. The other Inheritants are watching with interest, wondering what the drama is. If we don’t stop, chastity-ruth will intervene. And I know she’ll find a way to make this all my fault. So I do what I always do. I swallow the feelings down, feeling them scorch my insides as they fall into my stomach.

  “Sorry, megan.”

  She brushes the other girls off and pulls me into a floury embrace, a little too tight for comfort. I close my eyes as cake mixture and her cloying floral perfume ram into my nostrils. I can feel the edges of my silver locket pressing into my neck as she hugs me, and a hunger for what’s inside it invades every cell of my body.

  “It really was an accident,” she says, and I tell her, Yes, yes, of course it was, giving in, as she knew I would.

  I had been feeling ill that day, four years ago, my gut twisting like a damp cloth being wrung out. “Go see chastity-anne,” isabel had told me, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to seem weak.

  I remember crawling under my bedcovers, the new ones that had recently replaced my old pink blanket with yellow stars. “These are more appropriate for a 12th year,” chastity-ruth had said. “You do want to be appropriate, don’t you?”

  I curled up beneath the white sheets, trying to hold myself together. The lining of my stomach felt as if it was ripping apart. I buried my head in my pillow, biting on it to stop myself from crying out in pain.

  Good girls don’t cry. Good girls don’t cry.

  I woke in the middle of the night. I could feel something seeping away from the very center of me. I blinked in the dim light of the nighttime lamps, blinking again and again, but it was still there, a shadowy puddle oozing through my new sheets. I shrank away, pulling myself into the corner, away from it, but it was on my hands and it was sticky on the backs of my legs and it was spreading everywhere. I couldn’t stop it.

  And I screamed and screamed and screamed. I never could sleep without meds after that.

  chastity-ruth hung the tainted sheets outside my cubicle for the five days that I bled as a sign that I was unclean. We knew then. We knew this was our curse. We knew it had to be hidden.

  “And to think …” megan had said, passing her disgust on to the others to feed on, like a pack of dogs in a nature video chewing the bones of a carcass, “… you were the first.”

  “Can I play too?” she asked later, peeking in from the corridor into isabel’s cubicle. I can’t remember what we were playing. All I can remember is a sensation of lightness, brimming with laughter.

  “No.” isabel pulled the steel door down from the ceiling, unrolling it until megan disappeared behind it.

  “I don’t trust her,” she had said, watching my nervous face in the mirror. Brightening, she rummaged under her bed and pulled out a tiny gold box encrusted with rare quartz gemstones. Opening it up, she pulled out a heavy silver locket on a fine chain. I was dumbstruck. I had never seen anything so beautiful in my life.

  “I got it for my birthday,” she explained as she fastened the chain around my neck.

  “From who?” I asked in amazement.

  “It’s yours now,” she said. “Because you were the first. Now you’re special too.”

  It happened to everyone else within two months of me, snow-white sheets splattered with their shame, the new anti-womenstruation medication included with our daily bread.

  But at least the others were prepared. At least they knew it was coming.

  Chapter 18

  When the cupcakes are ready, we display them on cake stands for chastity-ruth and the Inheritants to examine our handiwork.

  “Oh dear, #630,” chastity-ruth says as she gingerly picks up one of my cupcakes with her fingertips. “Had some trouble, did you?”

  “I followed the tutorial,” I say miserably. The center of my cakes have collapsed, oozing red food coloring all over the ditzy floral-printed cake stand. I clean up my desk, watching megan as she feeds Darwin some of her cake. Perfectly baked, of course.

  “Excuse me. Where are you going?”

  Socrates, Abraham, and Albert stop in the doorway, their faces incredulous at chastity-ruth’s tone.

  “We don’t feel like sitting around watching them wash up,” Socrates says, shrugging.

  “Do you have a problem with that?” Albert asks, his plump face flushed from the heat, a trail of jam smeared down his chin.

  “No. Of course not.” chastity-ruth’s face goes as red as Albert’s. She curtsies, begging forgiveness. We eves busy ourselves at the sinks, washing the mixing bowls clumsily, pretending not to notice. We know that if she sees us noticing her humiliation she’ll never forgive us.

  “I thought as much.” Albert’s voice is disdainful. “We’ll see you when you’re finished with all this.” He waves his hand at the disorderly Homemaker room before walking out, the other Inheritants following him with pilfered cupcakes in their hands.

  “Will you hurry up?” chastity-ruth snaps once they have left. “Why must you all be so incompetent?” She picks up a wooden spoon from miranda’s workstation and examines it before slamming it down with a resounding crack. miranda jumps back, cradling her hand to her chest, a welt forming across her knuckles.

  “That was an accident.” The chastity’s smile is feral. “Be more careful in the future.”

  I stare at the boarded-up window above my sink, wishing I could make myself invisible so I don’t cause another “accident.”

  “Wash that spoon again. I don’t understand your inability to perform the simplest of tasks,” she says, ignoring the fact that we have never washed dishes by hand before. We just dump the dirty ware in the garbage after our meals, fresh ones appearing like magic in the dispenser for the next meal.

  I remember isabel asking me, “How does it all work, do you think?” when we were about seven, as she made a face at her chick-chick. She was always more curious than I was, asking the chastities daring questions about what the main Euro-Zone looked like or if they could give us any hints about when the Inheritants, our future husbands, would be arriving to Interact with us. She never got in trouble either, her mouth curved into a sunny smile, radiating so much joy that you felt warm just being in her presence. The chastities laughed at her, told her not to worry her pretty little head. She would know soon enough.

  “How does all what work?” I answered, trying to stop myself from running to the Fatgirl buffet for a piece of cake.

  “Like, look at this,” she said patiently, pointing at her plate. “Where does this come from?”

  “The meat-growers’ lab.”

  “But how do they create it?”

  I didn’t answer her. The food arrived. I ate it. We were not designed to ask questions.

  Finally, chastity-ruth decides that the Homemaker room has been cleaned to her satisfaction.

  “Form an orderly line and return to the classroom,” she says, standing behind her wooden desk. heidi groans and immediately looks around her to find the culprit, fright settling on her face when she realizes it was herself.

  “I’m sorry, chastity-ruth,” she says a
nxiously, brushing her bangs out of her hazel eyes. “I didn’t mean to be rude. I was just hoping that I might get to taste one of my cupcakes.”

  “Do the rest of you want to taste your cakes as well?” chastity-ruth asks.

  “Yes, please!”

  “Oh, can we?”

  “They look delicious.”

  isabel and I are the only two who don’t say anything.

  “Of course you can have some!” chastity-ruth proclaims, and the eves grin with delight.

  “You can have some if you don’t have any self-control. You can have some if you don’t care about your appearance. You are more than welcome to stuff yourselves with all of those cakes if you don’t mind being fatter at next weighin. eves, go right ahead.”

  “No, thanks,” megan says at once. “I’m still full from dinner. I couldn’t eat another bite.” She throws a pink gingham cloth over her cake stand and within a heartbeat the others all copy her. She looks at my station and sighs, taking off her candy-striped apron and folding it carefully. “That was a good idea, making yours so ugly, freida. No one in their right mind would want any of your cupcakes.”

  We’re halfway to the classroom when I realize I’ve forgotten my bag. Cursing under my breath, I sneak back, running as fast as I can down the tiled corridor, and burst through the wooden door of the Homemaker room.

  “Oh, I …”

  christy scrambles to her feet, sweeping a jumble of half-consumed cupcakes onto the floor, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand and smearing her lipstick across her face. She begins to cough violently and I grab a glass from underneath the nearest desk and fill it with water, watching as she gulps it down, still coughing.

  “What are you doing here, christy?”

  “chastity-ruth asked me to dispose of the cupcakes.”

  Not like that she didn’t.

  I can see the straps of my bag poking out from underneath the desk and I pick it up.

  “I didn’t mean to eat them.”

  “It’s none of my business.”

  “I just wanted to taste them. But I couldn’t, not when everyone else was being good. I’m still seven pounds over target weight.”