by Phoebe North
It’s that you were.
But not anymore. You wrapped your arms around my lower back, drawing me close. Your lips pressed to mine, hard, at first, then yielding. How long were we locked like that, hungry mouth to hungry mouth, my breasts against your body, my fingers all tangled up in your hair? It couldn’t have been long. Before I knew it, we’d drawn away again. Yet your lips still lingered centimeters away from mine, shining with our shared saliva. When you laughed, I felt your warm breath against my mouth. Light, tickling laughter. I didn’t need to ask what was so funny—I was laughing too. How far we’d come since those afternoons in your room when we were little. How strange the path had been, pulling us away from each other and then close again. And yet here I was, resting in your arms, our laughter everywhere—like a pair of twittering birds, tucked inside that tree.
You let me go. You grew serious again, wiping your mouth against the back of your hand.
“There’s something I need to tell you.”
I thought you might break my heart then. Reveal that you were already intended for someone else. But I guess you saw the look on my face, how my features must have grown grave and pale with your words. So you reached out and touched the tips of your fingers to mine.
“Not like that. It’s just—” You hesitated, your words jagged at the edges. “—about Mazdin Rafferty.”
My fingers should have been warm. They were touching yours, after all. But they were cold as metal, cold as space.
“Tell me later,” I said, my words coming out in a rush. “Not tonight. Please, don’t ruin tonight.”
Of course I wanted to know what had happened between you two, what it was that had made you so swift, so cruel. But tonight? Tonight I needed to believe that you were gentle, that you were kind, that the only people on this whole ship were the two of us, sitting together up in that tree.
“But you wrote in your letters—”
“Benny!” My words squeaked out. “Not tonight. Please!”
I slipped my palm against yours and squeezed, to make myself clear.
Smart boy. Or man, I suppose. You listened. How long did we sit there together in the bough of that tree, our hearts beating in both of our hands? It was purple night by the time we climbed down, by the time I thrust myself into your arms. Not to kiss you. Just to hold you for a moment. I smelled your body, heady, beside mine. You didn’t use to smell like that, like book glue and dust and something feral. Once you simply smelled like a little boy, unwashed hair and muddy boots and sweetened milk drying on your breath. Now you’re grown and I am too. I wanted to show you that, so I stood up straight and tried to look brave in the moonlight.
“See you tomorrow?” I asked, my hand lingering in yours. You nodded, but didn’t say a word. You didn’t have to, Benny. Your eyes said enough.
Yours,
Alyana
48th Day of Spring, 22 Years Till Landing
Benny,
Nobody else knows I’m different. That’s the strangest part of what happened between us. Days ago, I was just Alya. I giggled with my friends and fought with my brother when he came over for Friday dinner. I wore my heart on my sleeve—isn’t that the saying? I couldn’t keep a secret because I had no secrets to keep. But today I have you, your kisses, and the way your body felt when we leaned against each other. I am a new creature, with new blood coursing through my veins. Do you feel transformed too? I walk through the dome, bidding the men and women who pass hello. They don’t know why my steps are so light, my smile wide. They think I smile for them.
But it’s your smile. You gave it to me.
There are new lambs in the pasture. Today, I stood by the fence on the way to school and watched them practice ambling forward on their knobby legs. They understand, better than most, I think, the new eyes through which I view our world. Before, it was small, predictable, known. But now? Now it’s grown, Benny. I closed my eyes as I leaned over the splintered rail, offering the half-eaten apple I’d taken for breakfast out to the woolly creatures. When I felt their soft lips against my hand, it felt like laughter. Like falling in love. Like you.
Even school is better. As the months wind down, as my class has neared the age of sixteen, we’ve been left with nothing more to do than whittle the days away. The other kids laugh and gossip, bragging about the jobs they’re sure to get in a few days’ time. But I’m quiet now, penning you this note when my teacher isn’t looking. Full of secrets I share only with you. Do they wonder what’s made me suddenly so serious? Do they have any idea of the magic that’s unfurling inside me? They might suspect, but they can never know.
It’s ours, Benny. Yours and mine. And nobody else’s.
Yours,
Alyana
53rd Day of Spring, 22 Years Till Landing
Benny,
It was fun to pretend for a little while that our love is all sweetness and air, that your violence never cast doubt into my head. But the questions keep popping up like mushroom heads from soil. Will you now tell me the truth about you and Mazdin? I want to know. I’m brave enough, and strong enough. Then I will be able to love you freely, head and heart both. Let’s meet tomorrow outside the library, on the bench at the starboard side, where the dogwood trees will stretch their blossoms like a canopy over our heads. I will be there as soon as school gets out. I will sit there, my legs crossed at the ankles, looking like nothing more than a young girl in love. I will wait for you to finish with your work, whatever that is—pushing around shelving carts, I suppose—and then, when you step through the heavy iron doors, I will lift up my eyes. Ready, then, not to kiss you or to draw you into my arms.
But to listen.
Yours,
Alyana
55th Day of Spring, 22 Years Till Landing
Benny,
Your words have haunted me all day long.
And today, the worst possible day. We had our final interviews with the career counselors today, Benny. Just a technicality, is what Rebbe Schneider said. Nothing to worry about. No reason to fret. Why, the decisions have all but been made about our job placements, our futures. They just need to speak to us one last time, to make certain there are no mistakes.
But what mistakes could there be after everything you told me? It doesn’t matter. It’s fake, all fake. Our qualifications don’t matter. Nor our interviews, our test results. All that matters is what the Council wants. And if it wants to give the best job to a sullen, spoiled boy with no talents or intelligence, it will.
I was one of the first to be summoned. I walked down the hall, every step of my heels feeling weighted by lead. Just a few weeks ago, I chatted with these men and women as if they were old friends. No worries. Just turn on your charms, was what Tateh had told me. Back then—it feels like ages ago now—I truly believed that if I just acted like my sweet, smiling self, then the Council would tell me what was in my heart: my deepest, unspoken desires. My vocation, the person I was meant to be.
Today, I sat down before them, my face drawn. I let my hair veil my eyes, in the way that always makes Momme reach out to tuck it behind my ear. But the vocational counselors weren’t going to touch me. I was safe in that. They just gazed at me, puzzled.
“How are you today, Alyana?”
“Fine,” I spat, in a tone of voice that made it clear I really wasn’t. There were two men and one woman in that little room with me. The last time we’d spoken of handicrafts—of the chores I did for Tateh and Momme, of how happy it made me to sweep the front walk. It had been the truth at the time. Those afternoons spent pushing the broom over the ancient slate gave me time to reflect, to be myself. But now I had other suspicions. Perhaps they had steered the conversation that way because they wanted me to have a service job, to keep me from rising too high, from threatening them.
“Only three days before the vocation ceremony,” one of the men said. He had a mustache. And a gold thread in
his rank cord. Council gold. “Are you excited?”
“Dunno,” I replied, and shrugged my shoulders.
The man reached up and tugged at his mustache hairs. The woman beside him arched her eyebrows. She shuffled the papers before her, reading down my list of scores.
“Your last test indicated a high aptitude for creative arts. Your verbal scores are solid, but your quantitative scores are quite low.”
I looked at her, arching my eyebrows back. Of course, she couldn’t see, not with my hair a crazy net in front of my face. I sighed and shoved it back.
“Always hated math,” I said. I could feel my temper boiling inside me. I needed to get out of there before I said something I was going to regret. The clean-shaven man in the corner smiled, but it seemed a little forced. His eyes didn’t crinkle at all when he spoke.
“I’m sure we’ll find you the perfect job.”
When I didn’t smile, he nodded, lifting up his hand to indicate the door.
“You can go now, Alyana.”
I did, watching them warily as I rose from my chair and pushed it back beneath the table. But when I closed the door behind me, I hesitated, pressing my ear to the narrow slit of light.
Their voices came back muffled, but I could hear the concern in them. For me, or for them?
“. . . never showed any behavioral abnormalities before. . . .”
“Still,” the mustached man’s voice rose up with a rumble, “there’s the issue of her mother.”
Momme? What did Momme have to do with all of this? I did my best to listen, but their words were jumbled; they made no sense.
“We should be sure to match her to a Council-loyal citizen if we’re to ensure she doesn’t get led astray.”
Yada yada yada, their voices went on and on. I stood in that hallway, the little children passing me on their way to the restroom, and felt my stomach drop down somewhere to near my feet. You were telling the truth, weren’t you, Benny? Oh, I didn’t mean to doubt you. I just didn’t want to believe it.
I still don’t, was what I thought as I returned to my classroom and lowered myself into my seat. My girlfriends turned to me, smiling bright.
“How’d it go?”
But I didn’t answer them. Couldn’t. My eyes were on Mazdin Rafferty as he rose from his seat and headed toward the door.
Mazdin Rafferty. His scores are abysmal, and we all know it. Always distracted by girls, by the cruel games he and his friends play. Writing all of our names on a list. Ranking us by our “assets.” My teacher has taken to warning him in the past year: “Watch it, Mazdin. An attitude like that and you’ll be stuck digging ditches soon.”
But his attitude doesn’t matter, and his scores don’t either, do they, Benny?
Because he’ll be a doctor. A vocation the Council will steal for him, right out of the hands of someone who deserves it. That’s why you and your friends cornered him in the dome. Because of the injustice of it. Because he is taking that job from a better, smarter man.
It doesn’t mean that you should have lost your temper, you and those friends of yours. When I looked at Mazdin, I could see the scar that still healed on his lip, the slight shadow under one eye. You shouldn’t have let yourself get swept up in the tide of your anger, no matter how fierce. I want to believe that your friends talked you into it, that they’re wild boys, rougher than you—but who am I kidding?
Because today, sitting at my desk, I felt sick with rage. My friend Sheila asked me what was wrong, setting her hands over mine. I swallowed hard, made myself smile at her. You told me not to tell anyone, so I didn’t. I’ll always keep your secrets. I hope you know that. I hope you’ll keep mine.
I hope . . . I hope you’re wrong. I hope that at the Vocation Ceremony, Mazdin gets the grunt job he deserves, and I . . .
I don’t even know what I want, Benny. Not really, not anymore.
Yours,
Alyana
58th Day of Spring, 22 Years Till Landing
Benny,
I didn’t expect you to come to the ceremony today.
But I felt you there, in the captain’s stateroom, well before I saw you. We filed in, garbed in our best dresses and suits, our hands folded gravely in front of us. I think the rest of them kept their fingers clenched tight so that they seemed more stately, more adult. But mine? They wouldn’t stop shaking. I’d been preparing for this day for years and years—ever since I first set foot in school. Everything in my life was coalescing toward one point. Here, beneath the stars. I should have been happy, but I wasn’t. Couldn’t be. Except for a warmth deep in my belly. Why?
You, it was you. You stood at the back of the room with your friends. They snickered and joked, but you sat forward in your seat, watching keenly. My eyes caught yours and my hands grew still. I let them fall against my hips. Walked taller, prouder toward the front of the room. Even if the Vocation Ceremony was a sham, even if my whole damn life was a lie, I had something perfect, something true.
You.
My parents were somewhere in the crowd. Eitan and his intended, too. I couldn’t have cared less about them, or the captain, prattling on about the new future ahead. Your eyes were amber beams, burning into me. You looked . . . guilty, Benny. Your unruly eyebrows all knitted up. And then I remembered what I’d written in my last letter. You probably thought it was all your fault, didn’t you? That you’d ruined me, somehow, by spilling the Council’s secrets.
Well, it’s true that before you told me of their plans, I’d been innocent. No, that’s not right. I’d been naive. And now I wasn’t. Sometimes knowledge goes down hard as stale bread. One day you’re a little kid who thinks that anything is possible. Why, the captain was just a girl once, wasn’t she? That’s what our teacher said, that someday one of us might rise in the ranks, become captain too. But then you learn that it’s not true. Not everyone is fit to fly this ship. Not in the eyes of the Council.
It’s hard to accept, at first. It hurts to know that your life might be smaller than you had once dreamed. But it’s the truth, Benny. How are we ever supposed to find happiness if we don’t know the truth—the shape of the ship around us and our lives ahead? I’d rather live with you here, in the real world, than fly a thousand stupid spaceships.
I smiled at you. You saw it—I know you did, from the way that you let your eyes dart sideways, to see if your friends noticed; from the way that the skin on your cheekbones and neck darkened a shade. But you didn’t know why I smiled. It was a secret smile, just for you. I wanted you to know that I was all right—that I would be all right, as long as we faced our future together. I want you to know that there is nothing scary or dark or terrible in the whole universe as long as we stand side by side. It was easy to stand up there, and lift my chin high and smile, even as Mazdin Rafferty stole a scroll marked with blue, even as Arran Fineberg heard his work assignment—clock keeper, a specialist job; he’s been sucking up to the vocational counselors for weeks—and let out a hoot, and the captain clapped him on the shoulder as though proud, and called him “son.” As if it wasn’t all part of some plan of the captain’s. As if it was something Arran had earned, and not some scrap the Council had thrown down to the rest of us. I could know the canker at the root of this ceremony and grin and grin through it, all because of you.
I still grinned when he called my name and told me I’d be a baker. I kept my eyes on you even as my mother’s gasp rose up over the applause. It took me a moment to register why this would be such a shock to her. Momme is often angry, but I don’t know that I’ve ever really seen her like that—mouth opened so wide, I thought she might cry.
I went to rejoin my classmates. Only then did I break my gaze from yours, as I worked my thumbnail underneath the seal and read the cursive that was written there, under my name and my work assignment, under the captain’s loping signature. At 0900 hours tomorrow I’m to report to Miriam Jacob
i’s bakery. Your mother, Benny. And the woman mine hates most in a world she sees as almost entirely hostile. Oh, it was hard to smile then. But what choice did I have?
None. No choice at all.
I want you to know that I saw you hovering there, as my mother and father talked at me after the ceremony. I wanted you beside me, to lace my fingers up in yours, to press my face against your shoulder. To kiss you again, easily this time, like it was an old habit. But I think it’s good you kept away. Momme’s nostrils flared as she talked. She drank too much wine and spilled more of it on the marble than she did in her mouth. She kept talking about your mother.
“I hope you know better than to worry about what that woman has to say about the world! She’s to teach you only baking, do you hear me? And nothing else!”
I looked at her, nodded quickly. Drank down my cup of wine. What else was there to do except to flash my gaze at you just as you were getting ready to go? Did you see me? You looked so handsome with your hair brushed back, standing among your friends. I could tell that you shaved today. Your cheeks looked soft and clean. I wanted to kiss them, to taste your skin. Your mouth. Was it for me? Did you know that I would see you and think about how handsome you are?
Well, now you do. Now you know that I watched as you and your boys walked together toward the lift. They let out drunken hoots and howls. But you walked real slow, like every step mattered. I wish I could have been walking beside you. Wish I could have been anywhere but there, with Momme’s rage sucking all the air from the room.
Yours,
Alyana
59th Day of Spring, 22 Years Till Landing
Benny,
Thank you for walking me home today. I’m sorry I wasn’t my usual, yammering self. I don’t think I’ve ever been so tired before. Your mother had me running from oven to oven from dawn until the time you pushed through the bakery door. At first, I was sure that the chime meant just another customer. I got ready to be set to task once again. But instead, your mother only poked her head back through the kitchen door, grinning like a child.