Last time on Matched.com, Cassia is nice and Ky continues to be a nuisance.
Today, the officials show up. Because Cassia must be special, everyone else gapes at the officials, who are only here to test Cassia and not anyone else.
The officials are quiet and serious. They hook her up to the sensor thingies like for recording dreams, which is apparently really uncomfortable.
I stop trying to hold onto so many other things—the memory of Xander’s kiss, what my father has done, curiosity about Ky, worry about Em in the music hall, confusion about myself and how I am meant to be and who I am meant to love.
…
Only when I hold onto nothing can I be the best, only then can I be what they expect me to be.
That’s a rather creepy description of what seemed like a reasonable thing.
When it’s over, the officials suddenly become more friendly, and Cassia explains that they didn’t want to be showing favoritism. That’s actually very reasonable of them. They say she did an exceptional job of it.
“We have our eyes on you now, young lady.”
And Cassia reacts like it’s some horrible fate, of course. Oh no now people are paying attention to her because they think she does a good job! How much better it is to blend like Ky.
She has a nightmare later about sorting Em. She says she doesn’t know how to match Em.
He looks at Em’s face on the screen and smiles. “Ah. That’s not a problem. She has your compact, doesn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“She’ll carry her tablets to the Banquet in it, as you did. Simply tell her to take the red one and everything will be fine.”
Suddenly I’m at the Banquet, pushing through girls in dresses and boys in suits and parents in plainclothes. I turn them, shove them, do whatever I have to do to see their faces, because everyone here wears yellow and it all blurs together, I can’t sort, I can’t see.
This is a pretty good dream description, I think. Everything’s jumping around and frustrating.
Suddenly there’s Em. Cassia tells her to take the tablet and Em says she doesn’t have that one, so Cassia quickly gives her own. And then instead of helping Em it kills her and then Cassia wakes up.
Even though the Officials have laughed at the notion that the red tablet is a death tablet, the rumors still persist. That explains why I dreamed about it killing Em.
I really don’t understand how their society is running itself. People don’t even know if a tablet kills them and they still carry it around and intend to take it if they’re told. Who makes the decisions? Is this all some sort of Chinese Room game of society, where everyone just follows a string of rules? If X, tell everyone to take tablet, no idea of why or what it does?
At least the nightmare isn’t a recurring one, so I can’t be accused of obsessing over something. Besides, I don’t think they can tell exactly what I dreamed. Just that I did. And a teenage girl having an occasional nightmare can’t be uncommon. No one will flag that particular piece of data when it loads to my file.
…but what would flagging mean?
This place seems like there’s the unspoken understanding that all the observation and attention are just there to find something you’re doing and punish you for it, as if that’s the only way governments ever work.
Ever since the day of Grandfather’s Final Banquet last month, I’ve gone back and forth between wishing he had never given me that paper and being glad that he did. Because at least I have the words to describe what I feel is happening inside of me: the dying of the light.
I am only a dabbler in literary analysis, but I’m pretty sure that the dying of the light didn’t mean teenage uncertainty. The dying of the light is what happened to her grandfather! It’s what’s happened to their culture! Why can’t she rage against that, why does it have to be all about her own minor angst?
Then she references the idea that if you don’t know the words for something you can’t feel it, which has always struck me as involving an amazing amount of willful ignorance regarding the fact language was invented in the first place.
She gets up and decides to pull up Xander’s face on the computer, but when she gets there she sees her mom is there using it as a videophone. And her dad is hanging around too. He guesses she’s up to moon over Xander.
I was the same way with your mother. That was back when they let us print out a picture from the ports right away instead of making us wait until after our first meeting.”
And why was that changed?!
Look, I’m not going to argue it doesn’t make sense to change it. I’m sure there’s lots of reasons, good ones, petty ones, crazy ones. But for god’s sake, there must have been a reason. People do things for reasons.
Maybe the author’s trying to give this world a sense of history by referencing all these minor changes, and it’s true, that’s a good way to show that this place didn’t just spring into existence fully formed, but they need to have some context or else it’s just a string of nonsense.
“What did your parents think of Mama being a Farmlander?”
My father pauses. “Well, they were both a little concerned, to be honest.
Better question: why do you think people in the farmlands are different than you are? Even if there are cultural differences, how the fuck would you guys even know with your travel restricted? If the official word is you’re all the same, then that’s the official word.
Their first meeting was in the city, which Cassia explains is unusual – it’s customary for the first meeting to be held close to the girl’s home. Like with the girls being the ones called by last name, it’s not clear if this is an example of them getting special consideration or that it’s to balance things out – if they’re called by last name because they’ll end up changing theirs, then they meet at the girl’s home because she’ll go live where the guy lives. (This is all likely overthinking and it’s just to put the focus on the girl since the expected audience is female.)
Actually, that makes me wonder. Either all the girls move or there’s a fifty/fifty chance of either side of the match needing to move. That should be a factor in people deciding to sign up to be matched.
“When she stepped off the train, your grandmother said to me, ‘She still has the sun on her face.’” My father pauses and smiles. “She did, too. I’d never seen anyone look so warm and alive. My parents never voiced a concern about her again.
Well, that’s sweet, but…it’s just weird to me that people would voice complaints the way parents do in our world when you have no say in anything. Cassia can’t even tease her brother about ending up matched to the neighbor’s kid, but they can grumble about a decision the government made that they can’t change and which is officially supposed to be a triumph of their society?
Her mom pops in to explain that the caller was someone from work, and that she’s got to leave on a trip tomorrow. She says she’ll explain in the morning because they should all get to bed. Cassia does so, but she’s anxious because it’s very unusual for her mother have to go on a trip. She eavesdrops on her parents and hears her dad expressing similar anxiety. Her mother says she isn’t sure if something’s gone wrong, but her explanation for the trip is that there’s some crop they’re supposed to take a look at in another arboretum – so those have crops now? Maybe they’re researching new varieties? – in another province. She doesn’t seem nervous, though, so Cassia is reassured.
Then she mentions the sample.
And then I realize: She doesn’t know. He hasn’t told her. My father has a secret from my mother.
And I have a horrible thought.
So their Match isn’t perfect after all.
The moment I think it, I wish it back. If their Match isn’t perfect, then what are the chances that mine will be?
Cassia, stop borrowing trouble.
You had no problem keeping secrets from Xander and haven’t made any reference to a belief that you’re supposed to tell your match everything. More, unlike you, your father has good reason to not tell your mother, because the more people he tells the more likely the government will figure it out.
The most frustrating thing here is that this is a different society. It wouldn’t be hard for Cassia to have been raised with unreasonable expectations for how her match should go. But the book hasn’t set that up. Most of the time, she’s acting little different toward Xander than a girl in our world.
We skip over next morning, presumably because whatever their mother says is basically the same information as we overheard there, but it’s raining so hiking is canceled. Unlike last time when she could do what she wanted, this time she’s told to go to school and study. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to their schedules – are leisure hours some sort of right, or are they curtailed all the time? If the latter, why don’t we see them canceling activities for other reasons?
Apparently the reason for this is so she can go to the library computers and check out the poems, because I guess apparently library computers have different information than the ones at home? Anyway I’m just irritated because why couldn’t she have decided to go to the library with her free time to do this instead of needing to get pushed into it like this.
At least she’s not dumb. She wants to find out if the two authors of the poems wrote anything else, but knows that if she types in the name of an author whose work was completely purged, it’ll look suspicious as hell, so she scrolls through instead.
You know, if you think about it it’s weird they even kept the names. Unless they saved more than one poem by the same author, it really doesn’t matter any longer, does it?
Although I’m not sure the author gets that there’s an awful lot of poets:
I find one poem by Tennyson and I want to read it but I don’t have time. There is no Thomas. There is a Thoreau. I touch that name; one poem of his, The Moon, has been saved. I wonder if he wrote anything else. If he did, it is gone now.
She’s specifying only one poem per name in those two cases as if she thought it was perfectly plausible there could have been more, and since we’re talking about a canon of only a hundred poems, that means there must be at least one author with more than one poem to his presumably very white European name and probably a good chunk of them for Cassia to think it’s plausible for any given writer to have more than one work recorded.
I’m starting to feel like these hundred poems are less the result of laborious decisionmaking and more someone picking up some English class’s poetry book and grabbing the first hundred out of it.
She wonders what her grandfather’s intention was.
Am I supposed to fight against authority? I might as well ask if he wants me to commit suicide. Because that’s what it would be. I wouldn’t actually die, but if I tried to break the rules they’d take away everything I value. A Match. A family of my own. A good vocation. I would have nothing.
You’d really think that living in a culture with mandatory elderly suicide and apparently no other deaths would mean people would just say their life is ruined rather than that it’s committing suicide.
I’d say that maybe this means that the society’s only been around a short time and things like this are linguistic holdovers from before, but Cassia seems perfectly aware of what she’s saying, since she then clarifies that suicide means death and that this would not be the same as suicide. If she’d seemed a trifle more oblivious, I could assume it was deliberate, but as with so many things, this is in that uncanny valley between what should be objectively true and what would be obviously a delusion on their part.
Anyway, with that bit of melodrama out, Cassia goes on to say that it’s harder to make sense of the words when she’s trying to remember them at the same time, which is a point, although a point that seems to be leading toward her writing the poems back down somehow and getting in more trouble than if she’d kept the nice, easily hidden poems in the first place.
Back to other people! Cassia’s distracted from her issues by the sight of her friend Em, whose matching obviously went well from how happy she looks.
She was matched to someone in yet another province: Acadia is one of the more heavily forested provinces to the east, miles away from our rolling hills and rivered valleys here in Oria. They have stone in Acadia, and sea. Things we don’t have much of here.
It’s really hard to make out what the world is like. The fact they don’t even have stone there makes it sound like the place is completely deprived of natural resources and completely built up, but the description of it as hills and river valleys makes it seem like it’s just different biomes.
Em tells about how the boy she’s matched with seems awesome
“So, he’s handsome. But what exactly does he look like?” I’m embarrassed to hear a hint of jealousy in my voice, plain and clear. No one gathered around me to find out what Xander was like. There was no mystery because they already knew.
Xander overhears this and she can tell he’s upset. This is such a normal thing to be bothered by – it’s not something he should be, because from the sound of it she doesn’t mean anything against Xander, she just likes the romanticism of learning about a match, but it’s understandable he wouldn’t understand that.
The problem is when you realize she’s been spending 90% of her time daydreaming about Ky’s eyes. She’s doing everything short of actually cheating on him, and that seems to have more to do with the weather than anything else, so Xander acting hurt and rejected toward her is exactly how he should act. I can’t hope they talk and get over this little bump in their relationship, because Cassia’s currently steering the whole thing off a cliff.
Cassia worries she’s hurt his feelings but doesn’t actually do anything, seeming to wait for him to take the lead, which he doesn’t because she hurt his feelings.
And Em thanks her for the compact and says she gave it to Ky to give to her because she knew Ky would see her in hiking before now and wanted Cassia to have it back as soon as possible, but since hiking is canceled that fell apart. Cassia says it’s fine, she’s sure he’ll give it to his dad or something to deliver it soon.
“Don’t worry,” Xander says, looking directly at me now. He reaches out with his words to cross the small divides that keep coming between us. “You can trust Ky.”
We end on that without a mental peep from Cassia about any guilt over how her boyfriend is bridging the divides that are entirely her fault or that he’s being nice here about the other boy she’s chasing behind his back.
Seriously, Cassia, this whole love triangle thing is making you look terrible. There’s a reason most books have it going on when no one’s properly committed to each other yet. You don’t even seem to feel bad about it. All the angst is about how you’re not supposed to go after Ky because society says Xander is your perfect match, not about how it’ll hurt Xander for you to cheat on him.