Only Ever Yours

by Louise O'Neill

  I think of when Darwin kissed me, heat flooding my belly, how I wanted to pull him into me as deeply as I could. I doubt that I was maintaining a “neutral expression.” Was I doing it wrong? Did he think that I was behaving more like a concubine than a companion?

  The screen cuts back to the blond companion in the rocking chair. A hologram of a calendar appears beside her, a day each month circled in red.

  “The conception and birth of sons will be your primary function. It is important to remember that if you are chosen to become a companion your …” she lowers her voice—“womenstruation will return. You must monitor your cycle carefully. Whenever you are indisposed, you must retire to another bedroom until you are clean again.” She wrinkles her nose in distaste and smoothes down her neat bob. “Once the lucky few are selected by their future husbands, further training will be provided to ensure you are properly prepared so you can do the Father proud.”

  The red triangle of the concubines blasts through her fading face, a very different blonde appearing on-screen this time, stomping forward on long legs clad in fishnet stockings. She blows a kiss at the camera, glossy redesigned lips almost falling off her face. She flips back her ironed-straight hair to show off massive breasts, smashed together in a red satin corset. They look like two bald chastity heads stuck onto her skinny torso.

  “Hello there!” She winks. “Welcome to sex-ed for concubines. The only third who needs to know this stuff!”

  “Pathetic,” megan says as a few girls at the back holler. She taps lightly on her desktop, the mirror dissolving into the trademark pink graphics of MyFace.

  “Those of you who are chosen for this third are joining an age-old tradition. Concubines have always been a part of society, an important part. You just have to make sure that the guy you’re with is having a good time. Easy!”

  The digi-vid cuts back to the same room, but the camera angle is different. We can see a concubine from the side; she must be about nineteen or twenty and she’s on her knees, the same man as before standing before her. He’s gripping her dark ponytail in his fist, pumping her head up and down.

  “It’s nice to make eye contact.” The voiceover advises, and sure enough her blank eyes are fixed on his.

  “Always be willing.”

  He yanks her head back sharply. Grabbing her by the waist, he pushes her onto the bed and she throws her head back, moaning.

  “Make noise. Make sure that you look like you’re really enjoying it.”

  We’ve all seen this stuff before on late-night TV. The same dead-eyed, slack-jawed concubines, screaming with pleasure as soon as a man comes within two feet of them. I can’t even remember the first time I saw a porno. I presume I must have been shocked, frightened even, but after watching another and another and another they sort of blend into nothingness. The guys are always anonymous, their faces blurred, and the women may as well be. The man on-screen is pulling out of her now, aiming at her face, and christy’s foot starts to knock restlessly against the leg of her chair, her face pallid at this glimpse into her future. A lump forms in my throat. That can’t happen to me.

  christy pushes her seat back, and in a flash of blond hair I can see isabel. Her withered arms and legs are poking out from baggy denim cut-offs and a cornflower-blue jersey vest that is at least two sizes too big. Her breasts have vanished into her sternum, hidden beneath the protruding bones. She can’t weigh more than eighty pounds.

  She stiffens, as if she can feel my gaze on her skin, and tousles her messy hair until it covers her face again, covering her secrets.

  “It’s impossible to go into full detail in this short video about all the tricks that you will need to learn,” the concubine says, toying with the black laces tying up her corset. “You will be given extensive training after the Ceremony.”

  The screen flickers, turning back into a mirror, showing all the rows of eves sitting. Waiting.

  “That’s enough for today,” chastity-mary says, tripping over her robes again as she ushers everyone out. I can hear cara, gisele, and daria discussing the videos, the twins asking idiotic questions about mandatory skirt lengths for companions. isabel is last to leave, dragging her bones with her.

  “You miss her.”

  megan is standing in front of the mirror-board at the front of room. Pulling her ponytail over her left shoulder, she expertly teases out hairs to make it look thicker.

  “Miss who?” I ask. She doesn’t dignify this with a response.

  “I don’t,” I say, feeling foolish. That’s the thing about megan. Just when you think that she is the most self-absorbed person you have ever met, she’ll blindside you with her insight. “I don’t miss her at all.”

  “Why are you worried about her?” she persists.

  Because she was my best friend. Because she’s fading away before my eyes, like an old foto losing its pigment. It’s as if they broke her apart into thousands of pieces, made her into a human jigsaw, then reassembled her. But they’ve put her back together wrong. I want to find the missing piece that will make her the real isabel again, but when I look at her directly she seems to shimmer into translucence. And no one else notices.

  “You weren’t this worried about her when she was fat,” megan points out.

  She didn’t deserve my sympathy when she was fat, fat, fat, when she was greedy, when she was disgusting. Fat girls should be made obsolete. No one will ever love a fat girl.

  The Messages play on and on in my head.

  “You have to focus,” megan says, undoing two buttons on her chartreuse silk shirt and pulling her pencil skirt down pale, slim legs. I get up to let her pass as she comes to sit next to me.

  “We can share,” she says, although there are rows of empty seats. She wraps one arm around my waist, the other clinging to the desk for balance. “She doesn’t deserve a friend like you,” she says, tracing over our reflection in the desk with her fingertips.

  No. She deserves better. She deserved a lot better than me.

  “Forget her. This is what isabel does. She thinks she’s too good for you. She thinks that she’s better than everyone else.” megan spits the words out as if they’re rancid.

  “What?” I ask, taken aback by her rancor.

  “She doesn’t care about you. She probably never did,” she says with a swish of her glossy hair. And just like that, she breaks my heart in two.

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

  “Just forget her,” she says again, eyeing me warily. For the first time in days all I want to do is to crack open the locket around my neck and lick the insides, cram every last dusting of numbness into me, anything so I don’t have to feel like this anymore.

  I rest my head on her shoulder, energy leaching from me. “That’s a good girl,” megan says, and I close my eyes, wishing I could smell lavender.

  “It looked painful, didn’t it?” I say quietly.

  “What did?”

  “The digi-vid. Sex. Do you think it will hurt?”

  “How would I know? Go ask rosie or one of the other whores.”

  I wince at the harsh words, but I suppose she’s right. They’re not concubines yet. For now they are just girls who are making the wrong choices. They’re “whores.” But what if they don’t realize that they’re making the wrong choices? What if the path they are on just has different signposts to ours?

  “What difference does it make anyway, freida? It’s not like we can say no.”

  “But you said no.” I’m fed up with this ambiguity. “You said no. And they never say no. And you said that made them whores. I don’t understand.”

  “Don’t be academic, freida. It’s not attractive.”

  “I’m not trying to be academic.” My voice cracks. I’m confused, I want to say. I’m scared.

  “Where are you going?” I say instead as she walks away.

  “Class.” She pauses at the doorway. “It’s only School, freida. Just think of it as a bridge to our future. We only need to use i
t to get to the other side.”

  It doesn’t feel like a bridge, I think as she leaves. A bridge would feel some way steady. This feels more like I’m balancing on a tightrope made of cobwebs.

  Chapter 20

  May

  Eight weeks until the Ceremony

  I woke today and realized that I was counting in weeks now, not months, not years. Only eight weeks left. Only eight weeks until the Ceremony. Only eight weeks. The words keep dancing in my mind, getting jumbled up and confused. Eight … Ceremony … Weeks … Eight … Left … Weeks … Until … Eight … Ceremony … Eight Weeks Left.

  “Are you excited?” natalie, a 12th year, asked while we lined up for the buffet at breakfast. Her dark hair is cut in a geometric bob, round brown eyes almost covered by thick bangs.

  “Sure,” I replied, just like the final-year eves had told me when I was twelve and I screwed up enough courage to ask them the same question.

  Were they lying too?

  “But what do you and Darwin do?” megan asks on VideoChat. “He must have chosen you for Heavenly Seventy at least ten times.”

  “We talk,” I answer, eyes flicking toward the corner of the screen at my video-feed. I have my hair half pinned up to show off my new feather-shaped earrings studded with amber stones. “I had to buy them for you,” Darwin had said as I put them on. “They reminded me of your eyes. You’re beautiful, freida.”

  “But he keeps asking you.” Her voice is baffled, arched eyebrows almost reaching into her floral-print headscarf.

  “We just talk.”

  “For seventy minutes? About what?”

  Everything. Anything. As soon as he enters the classroom he searches for me, smiling with relief when he finds me, and I can feel my jaw clench. Where would I be? I want to ask him. Where else could I possibly be? All throughout class I can feel his eyes on me. The other Inheritants are friendly, but they keep a respectful distance now. There have been no other sordid incidents with Abraham. Mahatma does not dare to even glance at his eFone during our Interactions. I catch some of them watching me with interest, no doubt wondering what he finds so captivating about me. And my fellow eves have never been nicer to me.

  “I love your earrings!” jessie and liz squeal as we take our seats for Comparison Studies, their faces buried under layers of their new bronzing powder. It’s because of me, apparently. The trend to look browner is because of me. “Where did you get them?”

  “They were a gift,” I reply, raising my voice so isabel can hear. She’s not the only one who can get gifts, who can have secrets.

  “It’s a done deal,” freja says at lunchtime, scrunching a napkin full of cheesy goo into her glass. “Darwin has chosen you.”

  But he hasn’t. Not officially. There are still eight weeks left, eight weeks in which I could mess it up, eight weeks where this could all fall apart.

  But from the outside it must indeed look like a “done deal.” chastity-ruth asks Darwin to make a selection for Heavenly Seventy, and every time I hold my breath, afraid that today is the day he’ll change his mind. I still feel shocked when he calls my name, even after all this time. There is a moment just as the door bolts behind us that we hesitate, each of us at either side of the cramped cupboard, a thick, heavy energy separating us. Will it be like we remembered? Did we imagine it all in the first place? Then we fall on each other, kissing hungrily, a heat uncoiling in my stomach and seeping into every cell of my body. We move apart, a little embarrassed by the intensity of whatever this thing is between us. He always breaks the silence first, asking question after question, determined to know everything about me, to “figure me out,” as he says.

  “What was it like growing up in the School?” he asks, sliding down along the glass wall until he is sitting on the ground, pulling me down with him.

  “It was fine,” I say vaguely, fixing the thigh-high slit in my maxi skirt. “We started at four.”

  “Where were you before that?”

  “The Nursery. I don’t remember much about it.” Indistinct images swim before me, each undercut with a core of familiarity. “But what about you?” I say, pushing the vision away. “It must have been fun growing up as a Judge’s son!”

  “I don’t know about that,” he replies as I trace the skin around his eyes, the bruising long faded into a pale golden ring.

  “Oh, come on.” I snuggle up closer, huddling into his armpit, the worn cotton of his sweatshirt soft against my cheek. He kisses the top of my head.

  “It was okay.”

  “Just okay?” I probe, keen to hear more about the new world I’m about to enter.

  “The Euro-Zone is so small; everyone knows everyone else. I’ve always felt so visible—like because of who my dad is I have to be on my best behavior at all times.”

  “Did your parents tell you that?”

  “My mom says to be myself. That who I am is enough. Not to worry about what other people think of me.” He says this in a semi-mocking tone, as if it’s a joke, and I wonder if I should laugh. I try to imagine what it must be like to be told that who you are is enough, to have the permission to “be yourself.”

  “She’s very beautiful, my mother,” he continues. “Even now. She’s nice as well. You’ll like her.”

  I bite the inside of my cheek to stop myself from grinning at his use of the future tense, the implicit promise in it.

  “But my dad …” He stops, searching for the right words. “I want him to be proud of me. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.” I stay silent, afraid of saying the wrong thing. “My mother says he only wants the best for me,” he says, pinching the bridge of his nose. “It’s my own fault.”

  “What’s your fault?” I ask softly.

  “Nothing,” he says, pulling his knees in toward his chest. I rest my hand on the back of his head and he breathes in deeply. “He’s always telling me to be careful, to keep people at arm’s length,” he says in a rush, getting the words out before he can change his mind. “You know, to make sure that they don’t want to be my friend just because of who I am. Who he is, I guess.” Our eyes meet in the opposite wall. “He told me to be extra careful in here.”

  “I can understand that. A lot of the girls here are very determined,” I say, my voice deliberately breezy to convey how different I am (I am easygoing. I am always happy-go-lucky.) and Darwin visibly relaxes.

  “He said that once the eves knew I was a Judge’s son I would be an easy target.”

  “I think it’s more to do with that fact you’re the best-looking out of the bunch,” I say cheekily, and he throws his head back in laughter.

  I slink up the length of his body and kiss his neck, waiting for him to groan with pleasure. I keep waiting for him to lose interest in me, but he doesn’t. He chooses me every time, again and again.

  “You’re a good listener,” he tells me another day. I’m sitting in his lap, legs wrapped around his waist, my heels kicked off and strewn by the door of the cupboard.

  “I have practice,” I say, stroking his hair. “My sisters love to talk.”

  “Your sisters?”

  “The other eves.” I lean in to kiss him, inhaling his breath until he breaks off.

  “I always wanted a brother.”

  “Why? I think being an only child sounds perfect.” I think enviously of the undivided attention. “It makes you special.”

  “You’re special.” He pushes my hair away and stares into my eyes. I kiss him again to hide my anxiety. When is he going to figure out that isn’t true? When will he realize how very far from special I really am?

  “At least if I had a brother I would have someone to talk to,” Darwin says when we come up for air. “Someone who understands. I’d have someone I could trust not to gossip about family stuff. Discretion is really important to Dad; he’s always telling me not to air our dirty laundry in public. It doesn’t help when you want to make friends though.”

  Maybe you’re better off, I think. You’re less likely to get hurt.

>   “But if I had a brother—”

  “Why don’t you?” I interrupt without thinking, and I immediately apologize. “Sorry, that was rude of me.”

  “No, it wasn’t.” He laughs. “I don’t know. My dad had two other companions before my mother. The first one was barren, they had to have an investigation into why she was ever issued her fertility certificate. She was sent to the pyre, naturally. The second companion lasted a little longer. She fell soon after the Ceremony.” He pauses thoughtfully. “The son’s name was Benjamin. He died two days after he was born.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “I don’t know. Bad genes? Neglectful mothering? They couldn’t decide so the girl was sent Underground for testing. Then Dad chose my mother. They had hoped for more sons but she hasn’t fallen since me, and Dad said he couldn’t be bothered going through the hassle of getting a new companion.” I nod, wondering how much longer his mother has left before her Termination Date. “I have a lot to live up to. Only son and all that!” He shakes his head, pulling me closer to him. “I can’t believe I told you that. I’ve never told anyone.”

  He begins to bring presents with him more frequently. A thick cuff with a faceted amber stone in the center follows the earrings. The download of an album by an obscure indie band from the Americas that I have never heard of.

  “I love their music,” I lie, and his eyes light up in excitement. “Especially their earlier stuff.” We sit in the cupboard, sharing one set of earbuds, their “best song ever” threatening to split my eardrums in half. He bobs his head in time to the noise, stuffing his hands into the pouch at the front of yet another hooded sweatshirt.

  “Like a kangaroo,” I say absentmindedly, pulling at the pocket.

  “A kangaroo?” he asks, turning the music off. “How have you heard of kangaroos?”

  “I, er, I watch the Nature Channel,” I reluctantly admit. “I like animals.”

  “The Nature Channel?” he repeats, grabbing the nugget of information to store away for safe keeping. “Tell me more. I want to know everything.”