Last time, officials turn out to be petty, no one understands DNA, and Cassia continues to plot how to destroy the poems.

Now Cassia sulks in bed because she doesn’t want to see her father this morning.

Soon, the smell of the food comes in underneath my door, or maybe it drifts through the thin walls of our house, permeating everything. The smell is a familiar one, a smell of vitamins and something metallic, perhaps the foilware.

How do you know what a vitamin smell is, Cassia? I know what bottles of them smell like. You apparently only eat prepared food, so you should just know what that smell is. Maybe she’s just assuming that since the most important part of food is the vitamins, the smell of food is vitamin caused.

Finally she gets up after her dad’s left for work. The weather is predicted to be rain, so Bram is thrilled but hiking is canceled.

Since her leisure time activity is canceled, that apparently means she has free time she can wander around anywhere she likes. You’d think the society would just have designated alternative activities for them. She decides she’ll go visit her dad at work.

Something more likely to be found at an old library than anywhere else, if they truly do record the composition of everything burned in the incineration tubes.

I know I shouldn’t be surprised they just burn everything, but god, how wasteful.

If only we still knew how to write instead of just type things into our scribes. Then I could write them down again someday. Then I might be able to have them when I am old.

You could just leave it in the damn compact, Cassia.

But anyway – so, looks like handwriting is no longer taught. She still seems pretty defeatist here, though – she knows what the letters look like, so she could draw similar shapes, it’d just be messy looking.

Looking out the window, I watch Bram waiting at the air-train stop. It’s not raining yet, but he jumps up and down on the metal steps to the platform. I smile to myself and hope no one tells him to stop, because I know exactly what he’s doing. In the absence of real thunder, he’s making his own.

This is the most inventive thing we’ve seen anyone do. I sort of wish Cassia was younger, it’d be nice to see her just fooling around at times. Bram is probably the best characterized so far – he’s looking at the world as a kid based on what he wants to do, not what the purpose of things is.

Naturally, Ky turns out to be going to the train at the same time as she does. She assumes this means he goes to work if his activity is canceled, which seems really odd given how their society should function and like it’s just to continue the pity party with him.

Watching Ky walk, his shoulders straight, his head up, it strikes me how lonely he must be. He’s spent so long blending into the crowd, and now they’ve separated him out again.

That’s not really the same thing as loneliness and also please can we stop getting emo updates on Ky already.

He’s surprised to see her and she explains she’s going to see her dad. She explains to us that no one will mention the fact they were visited by officials yesterday: It’s not their business unless the Society says that it is. It doesn’t sound like that’s how anyone actually feels, though, just that you have to speculate madly on the inside because you aren’t going to be told.

I take another step toward the air-train stop, toward Ky. I expect him to move, to start up the stairs to the platform, but he doesn’t. In fact, he takes a step closer to me.

Let the countdown to infidelity begin!

They chatter about exactly where her dad is and how long it’ll take.

Ky’s eyes seem lighter, reflecting the gray around them, and I have an unsettling thought: perhaps his eyes have no color. They reflect what he wears, who the Officials tell him to be. When he wore brown, his eyes looked brown. Now that he wears blue, they look blue.

Ky is now officially a mary sue.

He notices her staring and asks what she’s thinking so she says his eye color and then he smiles and she tells us how much she loves the smile.

This is doing a passable job at showing her as infatuated. The main problem is really the catalyst. If she wasn’t matched to anyone yet and somehow learned he was different some other way and became interested from there, it’d work a lot better.

Then she asks what he’s thinking of and he says home.

I feel that Ky knows. I’m not sure what he knows—whether he knows me, or just something about me.

I think what’s going on here is that Cassia’s fetish is mysterious boys. Just look at this – she doesn’t even know what he knows but she’s sure he knows whatever it is?

He looks at me with those changeable eyes and then she starts going on about their sudden connection and stuff. Please please let’s get back to poetry.

And it strikes me that this might be part of the reason I am going to see my father today; not just to destroy the paper, but to ride on this train with Ky.

How can it be part of the reason if that wasn’t your reason?

I can only assume she’s talking in some sort of general fate terms, but if they don’t have luck they certainly don’t have fate. Plus, if she means fate it’s weird to tie it with something she did for a concrete reason.

On to her dad.

the rubble of the old library appears to be covered in enormous black spiders. The huge black incinerators spread their leglike tubes out across the bricks and over the edges into the basement of the library.

Creepy image and really, really wasteful. They’re really living up to the near future aesthetic. I wonder if they’re also germaphobic.

I’m out of place at this work site. But not forbidden.

So they’ve banned everything and have people whose only job it is to go through old areas and destroy that stuff, but anyone can wander onto a site full of forbidden knowledge?

This could work if the society actually did function more like The Giver, where no one seems to particularly want all the stuff they’ve given up. In that case, they’re just sifting the useless stuff (books) from the useful stuff (china plates). Instead of poetry being banned, Cassia’s feelings of interest and attachment to it are the potential crime.

My father told us that right when they thought they had gone through everything, they found steel boxes of books buried down in the basement. Almost as though someone tried to hide and preserve the books against the future.

This is an interesting turn of phrase. Either it’s just so unfathomable that anyone might have been trying to do exactly that because they think everyone is and always was totally in support of the society, or they can tell that’s what was probably going on but it makes them feel guilty, so they’d rather not think they were destroying something a person found precious enough to try to protect.

She says they searched the boxes but didn’t find anything special so all of it’s getting burned. This begs the question – what wouldn’t they have burned? We know they banned all literature and pictures besides the ones they picked. Maybe nonfiction books? I can’t think they’d even keep copies of the approved stuff because it’d be in a nonstandard format and probably have forewords talking about other stuff. They really don’t want special things.

She can easily see her dad because he’s the only one in official white.

Sometimes I forget that my father is an Official.

I’m pretty sure this translates more closely to “the author suddenly remembered that…”

It’s not particularly clear what an official even is. It’s not a government job, since everyone works for the government. And now it seems it’s not a bureaucracy job either.

We’re informed her grandfather and great-grandmother were as well, and now I’m just starting to get annoyed. Why can’t her family be ordinary instead of this society’s equivalent of lower aristocracy? She says they’re not like those other officials.

Neither of them are, or were, high-level Officials in places like the Match Department or the Safety Department. Those are the ones that do most of the Official-type things, like implement rules.

So why are they even considered officials? What point is there to saying they’re in the super important special people jobs?

Speed is important, but they have to be methodical. “We can’t just set things on fire,” he’s told me.

So instead they’re setting things on fire in a very orderly manner. I feel like there might be some sort of deep meaning here, because it sure doesn’t make much sense from a straight story viewpoint, but hell if I can tell what.

Watching people tear up the books and burn them reminds her of burning fallen leaves.

My mother always laments the waste, since decayed leaves can be good fertilizer, just as my father laments the waste of the paper that could be recycled when he has to incinerate a library. But the higher Officials say some things are not worth saving. Sometimes it’s faster and more efficient to destroy.

Okay, first, you seem to be confusing “efficient” and “speed”. Doing something dumb faster doesn’t make it more efficient. Second, I’m pretty sure recycling paper involves destroying whatever was on it. This isn’t some cursed magic tome you’re handling here, it’s just paper.

A page flutters loose and blows over to her so close she can almost read it before it’s blown away again. This is why regular people shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near here. She then pulls out her own poem and lets it get blown around. Someone grabs it and stuffs it in a burny tube. Bye, poetry!

She heads back to class and runs into her official boyfriend, who’s concerned for her.

She considers telling him everything for a second, then decides that nah, she’d rather keep it a secret. Xander doesn’t press. Instead he tells her there’s a new activity this weekend – they get to replant flower beds and get ice cream afterward. That sounds extremely normal and also like something this society shouldn’t allow, since we were told earlier they really hate anyone knowing about a job if it isn’t their one and only job.

He says he already signed her up because the slots are filling up quick.

A tiny bit of annoyance that he did this without talking to me first flashes through me, but it vanishes almost instantly when I notice that his smile seems a little awkward. He knows he’s crossed a line—he never would have done something like this before we were Matched—and the fact that he worries about it makes it all right. Besides, even though it is a glorified work project, I would have signed up in a heartbeat myself. Xander knows that. He knows me and he looks out for me.

This is the healthiest relationship I’ve seen in any of these books. Look at this. It is glorious.

Cassia then ruins it by immediately thinking about Ky an if she should sign him up too. But let’s just ignore that and focus on the worldbuilding aspect, which is that, because he’s working, he’s not going to have a chance to hear about this until he goes home, so he probably won’t have a chance to sign up.

Before she can figure out what to do, it’s time for class. The class is Applicable Sciences, although god knows what it actually involves given their society’s whole need-to-know-only attitude toward practical education. Another girl isn’t there.

Piper has her vocation! A few people get them early, like Ky, but the rest of us receive them at some point during the year after our seventeenth birthday. One by one we get picked off until everyone is gone and there’s no one left in our year at Second School.

This is a very sharp departure from The Giver’s system, and it’s a quite inexplicable change, especially when this isn’t how things work in our own society either. For plot reasons, they can’t all get them at the same time if Ky’s meant to be working early, but it’d have been easy to, say, break them into a couple big groups based on how much education their future job required instead of having them trickle out like this.

She hopes her main friends aren’t picked soon, and then starts talking about how Xander’s really smart and she struggles to keep up. There is not technically anything wrong with that latter bit but I just really don’t like it. She also takes a minute to remember that she’s matched with Xander and will end up living together, so it’s not like school is her only chance to stay in contact with him.

we’re still Matched, I remind myself. He’s not going to leave me behind. He doesn’t know that I saw Ky’s face that day on the screen.

…why do you keep saying things and following them with Ky-related non sequiturs?

She goes on to say that she’s pretty sure Xander would “understand” and it wouldn’t “jeopardize” the whole match thing, but she’s not totally sure, even though it isn’t even clear if matches can be jeopardized by stuff like that since they’re assigned to you by the state.

Then she spends some time daydreaming about Ky’s face. I’m really feeling bad for Xander.

Then she spends a moment thinking about how she had to destroy the poems but she does regret that she had to destroy the poems, and that’s all for this chapter.