Last time on Matched.com, Cassia keeps obsessing about Ky and we find out her family isn’t as law-abiding as they seem.

Now, it’s picnic time! They’re picking up their state-approved TV meals, but they’re sitting outside on blankets so everyone thinks it’s awesome.

The workers rush around the yard, trying to get the right meals into the right hands. It’s a bit of a hassle and I can see why they don’t do this very often. It’s much easier to have food sent to people’s homes, schools, workplaces.

That’s a depressing side effect of their whole food-obsessiveness. It doesn’t seem like it’d be too hard to get around – since everyone supports the food thing, they should probably be able to just label the food and rely on people to pick it up rather than needing to verify each person by hand, and they could also have dropped off lunch with breakfast to be brought to the picnic. But they don’t seem that good at thinking outside the box, so I suppose what happens is every now and then they try something like this and whoever’s in charge at the moment decides it’s too much work to do again, rather than trying to improve their system so it wouldn’t be so hard.

Piper and Ky don’t seem to be there, and Cassia guesses it’s because they didn’t get a chance to sign up until it was full. It seems like the real problem is just that they don’t do things like this often enough, so there aren’t enough slots for all the people who want a chance.

Everyone is in a good mood, giddy with the novelty of the whole activity.

See? The main way this is a dystopia is just how hellishly same everything is all the time.

Looking down, trying not to step on anyone’s blanket or in anyone’s food, I walk right into Xander, who has stopped. He turns to grin at me over his shoulder. “You almost made me drop my dinner,” he says, and I tease him back, giving him a little shove. He flops down on the blanket next to Em

This is cute and so, so much better than I-feel-shamed-and-shallow-around-him Ky.

They complain about the food, because it’s meat and vegetable casserole. Meat is delicious, weirdos. That’s basically all it has going for it. Why do they even bother with meat if they don’t know how to make it taste good?

Her friend says she thinks something’s wrong, because she’s already taken her green tablet and she meant to save it for the matching banquet later this week.

“Oh, Em,” I say, putting my arm around her, hugging her. She and I have been drifting apart lately, but not by choice. This happens, as you get closer to your work assignments and vocations. But I miss her. Nights like this, especially. Summery nights, when I remember how it was to be younger and have more time. When Em and I used to spend so many of our free-rec hours together. We had more of them, then.

Cassia continues to be the best protagonist we’ve seen. And she continues to be so, reassuring her friend that the banquet will be wonderful and telling he about how pretty and lovely everything is there. Em says she picked one of the yellow dresses, one with butterflies on it, and Cassia says she remembers how beautiful that dress was and how great it’ll look on her. (Also, we learn They redesign the dresses every three years so I guess there is some degree of creativity left.)

Yellow is the perfect color for Em; it will look lovely against her creamy skin, her black hair, and dark eyes. It will make her look like sunshine, the spring kind.

I seriously can’t remember the last time I read about a protagonist being like this. Cassia is just such an amazingly nice person.

(Also, whitey white dystopia!)

Em then says she’s been wondering about her match now that she knows about Cassia and Xander’s match. In an aversion of the usual science cultism, Cassia says that her match doesn’t make it more likely anyone else will be matched with a person they know, rather than anyone commenting about how it’s less likely for the same thing to happen again (it isn’t).

Cassia can see Em’s still worried, so she tells her to take her compact.

It’s golden. It would look perfect with your dress. I’ll bring it over tomorrow morning.”
Em’s eyes widen. “You have an artifact? And you’d lend it to me?”
“Of course. You’re one of my best friends.”

This might all seem minor, but it’s something I really like. One of the big reasons I became so interested in anime is that for all anime is usually darker and more serious, there’s just less minor nastiness going on. If people hate each other, sure, they’ll be insulting each other, but characters who are friends shouldn’t always be jerks to each other as well. This distinction can get really obvious when you look at the subs verse the dub, where an exchange that was friendly in the Japanese is turned antagonistic in for the English version.

Cassia thinks about how she’s safe now, with the poem destroyed. But she admits she’s not completely safe because she can’t give up her desire to talk to Ky again when she goes hiking, although she hasn’t yet said anything much.

She tells Xander about what they”re planting, which is something called newroses that are grown in a lot of people’s yards as well, which is weird because we already have new rose plants, they’re the hybridized ones that are traditional roses crossed with tea roses.

She tells us, but not Xander, that her mom doesn’t like them.

She thinks the ones we have in the City in all the gardens and public spaces are too hybridized, too far from their original selves. The oldroses took a lot of care to grow; each blossom was a triumph. But these are hardy, showy, bred for durability.

It’s funny to imagine that the old roses she’s talking about are actually the modern tearose hybrids most people associate with roses. Maybe in another generation they’ll have newnewroses and Cassia will be telling her kids that in her day, they had proper newroses that required manual watering and stuff but it was worth it because those were real roses, dammit!

“We don’t have newroses in the Farmlands,” my mother says. “We have other flowers, wildflowers.”

Not to interrupt the hipster gardening thing, but you know what’s awesome about wildflowers? The part where they’re hardy and durable and don’t require constant babying from humans just to produce flowers. Things aren’t better just because they’re the new version, but neither are they better for being traditional, you know?

Also, unless you’re farming wildflowers, all they should be to people in the farmlands is weeds. Modern farming is akready not exactly nature friendly, and I see no reason why people who can’t even compost leaves would tolerate the existence of wildflowers. The farmlands should be endless rows of corn, broken up by the occasional feedlot.

When I was little, she used to tell me stories about those different flowers that grew wild in the Farmlands. The stories didn’t have a plot; they weren’t even really stories as much as they were descriptions, but they were beautiful and they lulled me to sleep. “Queen Anne’s lace,” my mother would say in a slow, soft voice. “Wild carrot. You can eat the root when it’s young enough. The flower is white and lacy. Lovely. Like stars.”

Well that’s hellishly depressing. Doesn’t sound like her mother was particularly happy to live there, even if she did love the person she was matched with. (And how would they know you can eat the root? They’re not allowed to eat anything but what they’re given.)

Cassia asked who this Queen Anne was.

“I can’t remember. I think she’s in the Hundred History Lessons somewhere.

Holy shit they did that to everything? How are you even functioning?

Also, a hundred lessons total and they’re including individual queens. They probably don’t even know Africa exists, it was cut out to make room for European Monarchs Part Seven.

But back to planting! Planting involves dirt which makes her think of getting dirt on her shoes which makes her think of hiking makes me think of Ky. Again.

It’s like the book knows how annoying this is.

While she and Xander talk, she pictures Ky working and walking alone and sitting listening to music and so on and then finally realizes this is a bad idea.

I won’t do this anymore. The choice is made.
I never had a choice to begin with.

This seems like it should be the focus of the story, but instead it seems weirdly secondary. Because it isn’t like Cassia wants to choose Ky, exactly – she originally obsessed about him because she believed he might be the one society chose for her. And all her other interest revolves around the fact she doesn’t know him, so if she was to make a choice, it’d be for a terrible reason that proves the society’s point about not letting people make these decisions!

Xander, being the fact superior option, notices she’s distracted and is concerned about if she’s worried about her dad. She tells him she doesn’t know.

Xander knows I’m not listening to him as closely as I should. He glances to make sure no one can hear us and then he says softly, “Cassia. Are you still worried about your father?”

She looks at all the flowers and tells him that she wishes that this could be what they usually did.

My hands are stained red from some of the crushed petals

Good god, has the author never planted anything in her life?

and they smell of earth and newrose, a sharp-flower smell that I like in spite of my mother’s comments about the oldrose perfume being more subtle, more delicate.

Ha! So “oldroses” are the modern roses! There is nothing subtle about actual old roses, whatever popular culture may claim. The tearose hybrids were all about getting as many flowers as possible at the cost of everything else, including scent. They’re infamously finicky, far more than the original roses were or any plant should actually be, so that’s why her mother says they’re a lot of work. The newrose is probably a move away from the roses her mother knows because it was an attempt to breed back in the original rose traits.

Standing there looking at my work, however, I realize that all my family has ever done is sort. Never create. My father sorts old artifacts like my grandfather did; my great-grandmother sorted poems. My Farmlander grandparents plant seeds and tend crops, but everything they grow has been assigned by the Officials. Just like the things my mother grows at the Arboretum.
Just like we did here.
So I didn’t create anything after all. I did what I was told and followed the rules and something beautiful happened. Exactly as the Officials have promised.

I really like this section. It aptly sums up her world and people’s outlook, and there’s some subtle dystopic suggestion instead of it being in your face.

So, they go get their reward icecream, which is more easily distributed because they don’t have to bother with individually assigned packets. The icecream comes in a foil cup because absolutely everything comes in foil packages, apparently.

You know, considering how much everyone seems to have enjoyed themselves, the icecream seems unnecessary. It’d have been better to let the people who just really wanted to do the work and reserve the icecream for jobs people actually don’t like much.

They eat the icecream and talk about how delicious it is, and then Xander gives her the last spoonful of his icecream and then Xander’s act of kindness inexplicably makes me feel a little like crying, so I have to joke instead.

All of Cassia’s non-Ky characterization is just so great.

The joke is it’s practically kissing, and then we get a little bit about how this isn’t actually a joke from someone in a world where they’re all inexperienced.

We are teenagers, after all. Until we’re Matched, we all have crushes and flirt and play kissing games. But that’s all they are—games—because we know we’ll be Matched someday. Or we’ll stay Single and the games will never end.

Yet she’s been making a big deal of every minor touch and she says they stopped doing anything so minor as holding hands since they were children. And no one’s even considered that if they don’t sign up for being matched, they can apparently have whatever relationship they want with the other non-matched friends they know.

This is also making Cassia’s proxy emo about poor Ky being unmatched make even less sense – so he’s not even being cut off from having relationships. He just can’t pick which of the two types of relationship he has.

Also, “kissing games”? I really, really wonder how this society handles non-matched sex, because if the single population is still allowed to have relationships with each other, it’s going to be pretty hard to keep things stuck on kissing. Mandatory sterilization seems the simplest option here, but doesn’t at all match up with how sexless the society seems to be. From what we’re seeing, it seems like they focused their efforts on discouraging sex outside of matching instead, but that doesn’t work with this new bit.

And then she jokingly asks if there’s any guidelines about kissing and he says of course not because they’re matched so that would imply there are issues with kissing when you’re not matched and arg!

Maybe that bit was thrown in later because they felt kids these days wouldn’t be able to imagine people who weren’t in relationships before seventeen because as we all know all kids these days lose their virginity by thirteen, max, after getting drunk but before doing speed.

And then she acts like kissing is some secret taboo thing: I glance around but no one looks at us, and even if they did, all they would see is two shadowy figures sitting rather close as the evening dims. but you just said kissing is normal why would you even be thinking about who’d see you.

Anyway, the kiss is awesome and she says this is proof the matching was right and she says it’s her first real kiss.

It’s interrupted by a bell telling them they’re done here and it’s time to leave. Em comes over to ask where they’re thinking of going, then looks nervous because she remembers they’re a couple and might not want to hang out with her, but Xander and Cassia are happy to have her stay with them. Because there isn’t much free time left they decide to go hang out in a music hall.

She finds the music hall is filled With workers, young and old, who have finished their late shift. I suppose this happens often; with only a little time left, where else do they have to go? They must stop here on their way back out from the City. Some of them sleep, I see to my surprise, heads tipped back, tired.

This is really dismal, particularly when people have no ability to change jobs or otherwise improve their situation. It’s possible that everyone has occasional late shifts and they normally get time to go other places as well as sleep, but the fact some of them are sleeping here suggests they’re overworked and that it’s standard – because otherwise, they’d just head home and nap, coming here when tired suggests they want to do something and won’t have a chance to on another day when they’re not so tired.

Oh, and naturally, Ky shows up now. He comes over and she’s surprised he’s in a music hall and he says it’s where the workers go.

“Doesn’t it get boring?” The high clear voice of the woman who sings this song winds above us. “We’ve heard the Hundred Songs so many times.”
“They’re different, sometimes,” Ky says.
“Really?”
“They’re different when you’re different.”

Well, that was clear as mud, unless he means that as workers they get fucked up on special worker tablets.

Then suddenly Em starts shaking. They all immediately circle around her to hide her from view.

We’ve closed around Em now, hiding her. Whatever’s happening, the less people who see it, the better. For Em’s sake. For ours. I glance up. The Official in charge of the music hall hasn’t noticed us yet.

Once again we see their society doesn’t seem to function according to the rules we’re told it works under. Their impulse when seeing something wrong is to hide it to protect the person who’s hurt, instead of looking for help from the officials who are supposed to be in charge. This doesn’t match up at all with Cassia’s bit about how if you do what officials say everything turns out well.

So many people are here, and most of them workers, requiring a closer eye than students.

…Cassia, the only time adults require more attention than children is when the society opposes the people in charge. Which may be the case in your world, but you really shouldn’t be aware of it if you think everyone’s satisfied with things. It’s really hard for you to know workers get more attention than students without having a clue of why they’re under closer scrutiny.

“It’s an anxiety attack. I’ve seen people at the medical center who have them. All they have to do is take their green tablet, but they’re so scared they forget.”

Wow, these are some messed up people.

This really makes a lot of sense. Their society is very flat, so they’re not getting the normal emotional extremes and end up with all the normal emotional range compressed into a very narrow band, and it’s so similar that anything new is going to provoke nervousness because they also haven’t had the range of experiences there either. The result is people are going to have extreme responses to anything slightly different.

Then add in an anti-anxiety pill that means they don’t even have to deal with what little anxiety they do experience, and you end up with a population of people who have no way of telling one thing is better or worse than another and no coping mechanisms either.

Oh, and Xander’s uncomfortable because apparently even this is too much information about his job. Because it’s so much better as a society for you guys to bring people like that in for doctors to look at instead of just sending out a public service announcement telling people what an anxiety attack looks like and how to help.

Cassia explains that Em already took he tablet, and adds to us that Em would get in trouble if she gets a second one at the medical center. And then Xander freezes up, not sure what to do, and Cassia doesn’t understand because Xander’s always known what to do when there was an accident and someone needed help.

Ky doesn’t move either. How can you? I think, angry. Help her!

Why are you demanding he do it?

Ky does, of course. He tells Xander to give her his tablet, and Xander does. It works instantly (placebo effect?) and Em calms down enough to talk.

So this means that it’s safe to take a second tablet, just frowned on, presumably to discourage dependency (or further dependency, anyway) because otherwise Xander would know they shouldn’t do that. In that case, why wouldn’t she get another tablet immediately? I mean, the idea is these are for emergencies and it’s apparently a huge deal if you’re not carrying your pill case with you at all times, so why wouldn’t they also think it’s important to always have all three pills in the case?

Also, the reason for them being regulated seems to be to catch people who are getting addicted, so why is it a good thing they’re hiding the fact Em obviously needs help here? That seems like a good rule with obvious reasons behind it.

For a moment, I wonder why Ky didn’t give Em his tablet, but then I remember. He’s an Aberration. And Aberrations aren’t allowed to carry tablets of their own.

…why not? Okay, maybe they’re treated as children, but the ten year olds get the first pill and thirteen year olds the second, so I’d expect them to have at least one of those. Plus I don’t see how keeping the happy pills away from the malcontents is helping your society run smoother.

Cassia wonders if Xander realizes but he doesn’t seem to, even though there’s no reason to suspect because the obvious reason would be that Ky just doesn’t have the pill because he used his already.

What’s more of a problem is the pill containers themselves seem to be carried about in the open, so unless they issue fake ones to aberrations, they should always be really obvious.

Cassia thinks she’s glad she’ll lend the compact to Em, because nice things should be shared – then she thinks it’s the same as having a poem, a beautiful wild poem that no one else has, and burning it. That’s an interesting new layer to the issue – she’s gone beyond admitting that she loves the poem and into thinking about how much other people would enjoy it.

After a moment, I open my eyes and glance over at Ky. He doesn’t look back, but I know he knows I’m watching. The music is soft, slow. His chest rises and falls. His lashes are black, impossibly long, the exact color of his hair.
Ky is right. I will never hear this song the same way again.

My does this summarize well why this is the albatross around this book’s neck.

What was Ky’s purpose in this chapter? To be the one who knew what to do about the tablet (neither Cassia or Xander could have figured out they could give her their own tablet?) and to be the one who knows more about stuff than Cassia, because she apparently doesn’t understand that you form associations in your memory and needed that explained. And to be the one Cassia kept thinking about for no reason.