My eyes shift to the bowls in the center of the room. What do I believe? I do not know; I do not know; I do not know.
“Those who blamed aggression formed Amity.”
The members of Amity exchange smiles. They are dressed comfortably, in whatever colors they choose. Every time I see them, they seem amicable, loving, free. But joining them has never been an option for me. Why not? Why was it so easy to discount them?
“Those who blamed ignorance became the Erudite.”
Even though my results told me I could join Erudite, I excluded them almost immediately. I am my father’s daughter.
“Those who blamed duplicity created Candor.”
I have never liked Candor.
“Those who blamed selfishness made Abnegation.”
I blame selfishness; I do.
“And those who blamed cowardice were the Dauntless.”
But I am not selfless enough. Sixteen years of trying and I am not enough.
My heart pounds.
“Working together, these five factions have lived in peace for fifty years, each contributing to a different sector of society. Abnegation has fulfilled our need for selfless leaders in government; Candor has provided us with trustworthy and sound leaders in law; Erudite have supplied us with intelligent teachers and researchers; Amity has given us understanding counselors and caretakers; and the Dauntless provide us with protection from threats both within and without. But the reach of each faction is not limited to these areas. We give one another far more than can be adequately summarized. Therefore this day marks a happy occasion—the day on which we receive our new members, who will work with us toward a better society and a better world.”
A round of applause. It sounds muffled. I try to stand completely still, because if my knees are locked and my body is stiff, I don’t shake. Marcus reads the first names, but I can’t tell one syllable from the other. How will I know when he calls my name?
One by one, the Choosers step out of line and walk to the middle of the room. The first girl to choose decides on the Erudite, the same faction from which she came. I watch her blood droplets turn the Erudite water pink, and she stands behind their seats alone.
The room is constantly moving, a new name and a new Chooser, a new knife and a new choice. I recognize most of them, but I doubt they know me.
“James Callahan,” Marcus says.
James Callahan of the Dauntless is the first person to stumble on his way to the bowls. He throws his arms out and regains his balance before hitting the floor. His face turns red as he walks fast to the middle of the room. When he stands in the center, he looks from the Dauntless bowl to the Erudite bowl—the orange flames that rise higher each moment, and the water reflecting blue light.
Marcus offers him the knife. He breathes deeply—I watch his chest rise—and as he exhales, accepts the knife. Then he drags it across his palm with a jerk and holds his arm out to the side. His blood falls into the water, and he is the first Chooser to switch factions. The first faction transfer. A mutter rises from the Dauntless section, and I stare at the floor.
They will see him as a traitor from now on. His absence will haunt their hallways, and he will be a space his former family can’t fill. And then time will pass, and the hole will be gone, like when an organ is removed and the body’s fluids flow into the space it leaves. Humans can’t tolerate emptiness for long.
“Caleb Prior,” says Marcus.
Caleb squeezes my hand one last time, and as he walks away, smiles gently at me over his shoulder. I watch his feet move, swiftly and surely, to the center of the room, and his hands, steady as they accept the knife from Marcus, deft as one presses the knife into the other. He stretches his hand over the Abnegation bowl, and his blood drips on the rocks. My father nods with approval.
If he had taken longer, I could have had time to think. I hear my name over the ringing in my ears, and a shudder propels me forward. Halfway to the bowls, I am sure that I will choose Abnegation. I can see it now. I watch myself grow into a woman in Abnegation robes, marrying Susan’s brother, Robert, volunteering on the weekends, the peace of routine, the quiet nights spent in front of the fireplace, the certainty that I will be safe, and if not good enough, better than I am now.
Marcus offers me the knife. I look into his eyes—they are dark blue, a strange color—and take it. He nods, and I turn toward the bowls. The Dauntless fire and the Abnegation stones are both on my left, one in front of my shoulder and one behind. I hold the knife in my right hand and touch the blade to the meaty part of my left thumb. Gritting my teeth, I drag the blade down. It stings, but I barely notice. I hold both hands to my chest, and my next breath shudders on the way out.
I open my eyes and thrust my arm out. My blood drips onto the carpet between the two bowls. Then, with a gasp I can’t contain, I shift my hand forward, and my blood sizzles on the coals.
I am selfish. I am brave.
But something about Rough Draft Caleb didn’t work. After I signed with my agent, I did a round of revisions based on her feedback, and one of her notes was that we didn’t really get to see any of the other factions in the manuscript—just Abnegation and Dauntless. She pointed out that this was particularly problematic for Erudite. In the rough draft, as it was, a fairly unremarkable villain named John appeared at the end just to twirl his devilish mustache and cackle ominously as our heroes were led to their deaths, and that was the extent of our exposure to Erudite. One thing I knew from reading Harry Potter was that you needed a strong antagonist, capable of real harm, that had real reasons for doing what he or she was doing (as Voldemort did with his deteriorating soul and quest for wizard purity), or the battle against evil would feel small and unremarkable, and by proxy, so would your heroes. I didn’t want Tris to feel small and unremarkable—the whole point of her journey was to move away from Abnegation obscurity and to embrace her strength and power, not to shrivel at the very end in the face of a lackluster villain.
But there was a problem, which was that the society was so stratified by faction, and inter-faction intermingling was so discouraged, that she couldn’t just wander into the Erudite compound to see how they lived. Rough Draft Tris was still a rule follower, despite having chosen Dauntless instead of Abnegation—Final Draft Tris was, too, in many ways, as she clung to the faction system until the end of Insurgent. But Tris was always motivated to break rules by emotional desperation—in the beginning, she chose Dauntless because she was so desperate to be herself that she couldn’t stand it anymore, and in the end, she was so desperate for Tobias to live that, in order to protect him, she almost let him kill her. So I knew that to get her into Erudite headquarters, she had to be so desperate for something—something emotional, not strictly practical or material—that she was willing to flout the faction rules to get it.
Enter Caleb. With one of my critique partners, I brainstormed a solution to my faction problem: Caleb could choose Erudite. Tris could go to Erudite to see him, once she became disillusioned with Dauntless and was in desperate need of comfort and solace.
The most interesting thing that I realized while implementing this change was that Caleb, by choosing Erudite, became Tris’s foil in a new way. (A “foil” is a character who mirrors and yet contrasts with another character.) Rather than demonstrating what Tris could not possibly have been in Abnegation, as he did in the rough draft, in the final draft he showed what Tris could have been if she had selected the third faction she had aptitude for: Erudite, indulging her natural curiosity and desire to know the facts.
But Caleb also showed us the downside of that choice. Erudite twisted Caleb’s morality, making him vain and easily seduced by the glamour of intellect, just as Dauntless twisted Tris’s morality, making her harsh and cruel. Both traveled down paths that Tris could have taken; both suffered for the paths they traveled, inevitably, since every faction contains both a virtue and a corrupted version of that virtue. Tris choosing Dauntless and Caleb choosing Erudite made it even clearer,
to me and hopefully to all readers, that she needed to find another option, one not presented by the aptitude test. She needed to separate herself from all the factions before she could become the person she was really meant to be.
Below you can see the changes that I made to the rough draft after deciding Caleb should choose Erudite.
CALEB CHOOSES ERUDITE
The bus we take to get to the Choosing Ceremony is full of people in gray shirts and gray slacks. A pale ring of sunlight burns into the clouds like the end of a lit cigarette. I will never smoke one myself—they are closely tied to vanity—but a crowd of Candors the Candor smokes them in front of the building when we get off the bus The building is tall and made of green glass. We call it the Hub; it’s where the politicians work, and where the factions gather, when they have to.
I have to tilt my head back to see the top of the Hub, and even then, part of it disappears into the clouds. It is the tallest building in the city. I can see the lights on the two prongs on its roof from my bedroom window.
I follow my parents off the bus. Caleb seems calm, but so would I, if I knew what I was going to do. Instead I get the distinct impression that my heart will burst out of my chest any minute now, and I grab his arm to steady myself as I walk up the front steps.
The elevator is crowded, so my father volunteers to give a cluster of Amity members our place. We climb seven flights of the stairs instead, following him unquestioningly. We set an example for our fellow faction members, and soon we become a the three of us are engulfed in the mass of gray fabric ascending cement stairs in the half-light. We I settle into the same their pace. The uniform pounding of feet in my ears and the homogeneity of the people around me makes me believe that I could choose this. I could be subsumed into Abnegation’s hive mind, projecting always outward.
But then my legs get sore, and I struggle to breathe, and I am again distracted by myself. We have to climb twenty flights of stairs to get to the Choosing Ceremony.
Caleb My father holds the door open on the seventh twentieth floor and stands like a sentry as every member of Abnegation walks past him. I would wait for him but the crowd presses me forward, out of the stairwell and into the room where I will decide the rest of my life.
The room is arranged in concentric circles. On the edges stand the Choosers—the sixteen-year-olds of every faction. We are not called members yet; our decisions today will make us members initiates, and we will become members if we complete initiation.
We arrange ourselves in alphabetical order, according to the last names we may leave behind today. I stand between Caleb and Molly Rockwell Danielle Pohler, an Amity girl with rosy cheeks and a yellow dress.
Rows of chairs for our families make up the next circle. They are arranged in five sections, according to faction. Not everyone in each faction comes to the Choosing Ceremony, but enough of them come that the crowd looks huge.
The responsibility to conduct the ceremony rotates from faction to faction each year, and this year is Abnegation’s. Marcus will give the opening address and read the names in reverse alphabetical order. Caleb will choose before me.
In the last circle are five metal bowls so large they could hold my entire body, if I curled up. Each one contains a substance that represents each faction: gray stones for Abnegation, water for Erudite, earth for Amity, lit coals for the Dauntless, and glass for Candor.
When Marcus calls my name, I will walk to the center of the three circles. I will not speak. He will offer me a knife. I will cut into my hand and sprinkle my blood into the bowl of the faction I choose.
My blood on the stones. My blood sizzling on the coals.
Before my parents sit down, they stand in front of Caleb and me. My father kisses my forehead and claps Caleb on the shoulder, grinning.
“See you soon,” he says. Without a trace of doubt.
My mother hugs me, and what little resolve I have left almost breaks. I clench my jaw and stare up at the ceiling, where globe lanterns hang and fill the room with blue light. She holds me for what feels like a long time, even after I let my hands fall. Before she pulls away, she turns her head and whispers in my ear, “I love you. No matter what.”
I frown at her back as she walks away. She knows what I might do. She must know, or she wouldn’t feel the need to say that.
Caleb takes my hand. grabs my hand, squeezing my palm so tightly it hurts, but I don’t let go. The last time we held hands was at my uncle’s funeral, as my father cried. We need each other’s strength now, just as we did then.
The room slowly comes to order. I should be observing the Dauntless; I should be taking in as much information as I can, but I can only stare at the lanterns across the room. I try to lose myself in the blue glow.
Marcus stands at the podium between the Erudite and the Dauntless and clears his throat into the microphone. “Welcome,” he says. “Welcome to the Choosing Ceremony. Welcome to the day we honor the democratic philosophy of our ancestors, which tells us that every man has the right to choose his own way in this world.”
Or:, it occurs to me, one of five predetermined ways. I squeeze Caleb’s hand fingers as hard as he is squeezing mine.
“Our dependents are now sixteen. They stand on the precipice of adulthood, and it is now up to them to decide what kind of people they would like to will be.” Marcus’s voice is solemn and gives equal weight to each word. “Decades ago our ancestors realized that it is not political ideology, religious belief, race, or nationalism that is to blame for a warring world. Rather, they determined that it was the fault of human personality—of man’s humankind’s inclination toward evil, in whatever form that is. They divided into factions that sought to eradicate those qualities they deemed believed responsible for the world’s disarray.”
My eyes shift to the bowls in the center of the room. What do I believe? I do not know; I do not know; I do not know.
“Those who blamed aggression formed Amity.”
The members of Amity exchange smiles. They are dressed comfortably, in whatever colors they choose. Every time I see them, they seem amicable kind, loving, free. But joining them has never been an option for me. Why not? Why was it so easy to discount them?
“Those who blamed ignorance became the Erudite.”
Even though my results told me I could join the Erudite, I excluded them almost immediately. I am my father’s daughter.
Ruling out Erudite was the only part of my choice that was easy.
“Those who blamed duplicity created Candor.”
I have never liked Candor.
“Those who blamed selfishness made Abnegation.”
I blame selfishness; I do.
“And those who blamed cowardice were the Dauntless.”
But I am not selfless enough. Sixteen years of trying and I am not enough.
My heart pounds.
My legs go numb, like all the life has gone out of them, and I wonder how I will walk when my name is called.
“Working together, these five factions have lived in peace for fifty many years, each contributing to a different sector of society. Abnegation has fulfilled our need for selfless leaders in government; Candor has provided us with trustworthy and sound leaders in law; Erudite has supplied us with intelligent teachers and researchers; Amity has given us understanding counselors and caretakers; and the Dauntless provide provides us with protection from threats both within and without. But the reach of each faction is not limited to these areas. We give each other far more than can be adequately summarized. In our factions, we find meaning, we find purpose, we find life.”
I think of the motto I read in my Faction History textbook: faction before blood. More than family, our factions are where we belong. Can that possibly be right?
Marcus adds, “Apart from them, we would not survive.”
The silence that follows his words is heavier than other silences. It is heavy with our worst fear, greater even than the fear of death: to be factionless.
Marcus continu
es, “Therefore this day marks a happy occasion—the day on which we receive our new members initiates, who will work with us toward a better society and a better world.”
A round of applause. It sounds muffled. I try to stand completely still, because if my knees are locked and my body is stiff, I don’t shake. Marcus reads the first names, but I can’t tell one syllable from the other. How will I know when he calls my name?
One by one, the Choosers step each sixteen-year-old steps out of line and walk walks to the middle of the room. The first girl to choose decides on the Erudite Amity, the same faction from which she came. I watch her blood droplets turn the Erudite water pink fall on soil, and she stands behind their seats alone.
The room is constantly moving, a new name and a new Chooser person choosing, a new knife and a new choice. I recognize most of them, but I doubt they know me.
“James Callahan Tucker,” Marcus says.
James Callahan Tucker of the Dauntless is the first person to stumble on his way to the bowls. He throws his arms out and regains his balance before hitting the floor. His face turns red and he walks fast to the middle of the room. When he stands in the center, he looks from the Dauntless bowl to the Erudite Candor bowl—the orange flames that rise higher each moment, and the water glass reflecting blue light.
Marcus offers him the knife. He breathes deeply—I watch his chest rise—and as he exhales, accepts the knife. Then he drags it across his palm with a jerk and holds his arm out to the side. His blood falls into water onto glass, and he is the first Chooser of us to switch factions. The first faction transfer. A mutter rises from the Dauntless section, and I stare at the floor.
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