Last time, Cassia boggles at how smart Ky is for knowing how to draw in dirt.

I’m getting good at C.

Even assuming Cassia’s fine motor control is terrible, this should not be that hard. I’m strongly right-handed. When I was younger we were learning about how important thumbs are and told to try writing with our thumb taped down and compare that to lefthanded writing. Without my thumb, it took longer to write. With my left hand, chicken scratch. One of the things I started doing when I was bored in school was writing letters over and over to try to get them halfway legible.

Yet even I didn’t have trouble with C. At most, my completely recognizable C was a bit blocky.

The author makes a good attempt at explaining why Cassia needs Ky to explain this all to her:

“You know, you don’t need me. You could teach yourself,” he says. “You could look at the letters on your scribe or your reader.”
“They’re not the same,” I tell him. “They don’t connect like yours do.

But not good enough. Cassia supposedly wants to learn to write for practical purpose, not because it’s pretty. She wants the words out of her head again. She’s so motivated she’s willing to do some really dangerous things. Yet she’s also okay with going incredibly slow so she can make sure every letter looks like Ky’s, which she”s suddenly decided is the perfect kind of writing?

“Cursive,” he says softly. “It’s harder to read, but it’s beautiful. It’s one of the old ways of writing.”

Bullshit and bullshit and bullshit!

Cursive is not beautiful. Beautifully written cursive is beautiful, just like beautifully written anything. My printed words look way better than my cursive, or did back when I used cursive, because all the loops made my letters swell up into fat ungainly monsters, while when I print it’s all neat sharp lines and curves. My calligraphy is lovely, though – and more readable than any cursive I’ve seen, even the ones where people are writing carefully. If you were going to preserve an archaic style, go for the one that doesn’t suck.

Second, no one should know cursive. It’s outdated right now, and we’re at least a hundred years into the future in this story. (And good riddance.) My brother doesn’t know cursive. I can barely remember it. The schools are dropping it from their curriculums left and right.

Third, if you’re going to teach your kid a banned skill, why the fuck would you do it twice? It’s doubling the number of letters to memorize to write the same words. And even assuming you were that dumb, why would your kid then teach their kid the same thing again? Unless they regularly practiced with both, they should have trouble even keeping up their own memory of it – that’s the problem with passing down skills like this, they’re very easily lost.

(What I’d expect, if anything, is that the alphabet people know would get a couple cursive letters replacing regular ones – most adults I know use a mishmash of cursive and print, so someone who was used to using cursive As might teach their kid that. After all, this isn’t about preserving the sanctity of the Proper Way Of Doing Things, whatever the author might think, it’s about keeping the ability to write.)

I don’t want to copy the blocky, flat symbols of the letters we use now. I like the curves and sweeps of the ones Ky knows.

If you poll a classroom of kids, you will largely get the answer that cursive is messy and ugly. People do not just know that your stupid elitist modern-society-sucks issue is better, because it isn’t objectively better. The only reason people give a shit about cursive is because we’re told it’s something to give a shit about.

People who are used to one thing will think that thing is the right way to do it! Cassia should think proper writing is blocky no matter how much the author thinks it’s ugly.

Then Ky holds her hand while he shows her how to write a lowercase a.

She doesn’t get why he’s teaching her the letters to her name, and he realizes she wants to write the poems. He asks if she still remembers, and when she says she does, he asks her to tell him some so that he can help remember.

If I tell Ky these words, I step into an even more dangerous place than I was before. It will put Ky in danger.

Will it?

I mean, you have a match and a presumably bright future doing stuff with sorting. But Ky’s already an aberration who can’t get matched and has a shitty job, and considering the one example of an anomaly is a murderer, I don’t think knowing poetry is enough to demote you any further.

And I will have to trust him.

That’s a more interesting question. It occurs to me that we don’t know for sure that classification is a one-way street. Maybe if Ky does something to prove his loyalty to the government, he can get moved back up to normal status. That would make this kind of thing actually dangerous – as it is, there’s no sign telling would help him and if anything, I get the sense he’d just get in trouble for knowing about the poetry in the first place. They seem like the sort to be really into thought crimes. This whole society seems to be designed to encourage people to keep everything a secret. It’s idiotic.

I remember thinking of the angels from the stories when I went to my Match Banquet.

Do you know what I liked about the angel bit? That she didn’t seem to know they were angels. She just thought they were people with wings. So much for that.

Someplace deep within me—Is it my heart? Or perhaps my soul, the mythical part of humans that the angels cared about?—tells me that I can.

These are some really incompetent imagination-hating atheists. They’ve removed almost all of their culture, and somehow they missed the parts talking about souls and angels? This shouldn’t be hard!

Also, for the record, the idea the heart is where emotions come from is just as irrational as the idea there’s a soul doing it. If we’re cutting out myths, the whole heart business is a good target.

She whispers two lines to him, then he gives her paper and tells her to destroy it after she’s done looking.

When I open it up there are words inside. Gorgeous words. Cursive words. They were beautiful up on the green hill with the sound of wind in trees and they are beautiful here in my gray-and-blue kitchen with the grumbling of the incinerator in the background. Dark, curling, swirling words curve across the brown paper. Where dampness has touched them the words are slightly blurred.

Cursive words she can somehow read without a problem despite not even knowing what the letters are supposed to look like, and having no practice with even reading regular handwriting.

Also that’s yet another incompetence point for Cassia – seems it is perfectly possible to find something to write with and write on.

There used to be tools for writing but I don’t know what they were.

But you know what angels and souls are? They completely removed every reference to writing but they couldn’t get rid of the word angel?

Even our paintbrushes in school were tethered to artscreens, our pictures wiped away almost immediately after we finished them.

WHY WOULD YOU EVEN SPEND TIME WITH PAINTBRUSHES. WHY.

…

So, about what Ky wrote/drew. She whispers it so the port doesn’t hear, so I guess that only listens but doesn’t have any visual component? It’s about him having two lives. He drew himself.

The line of his jaw gives it away; the shape of his eyes, the spareness and strength of his body. The spaces left empty; his hands and the nothing they hold, though they are cupped, tipped skyward, in both pictures.

So hey, anyone ever learn about the history of art? One of the things I found interesting was how terrible early art was. It took people forever to grasp such complexities as perspective. People drew the idea of the image in their head over the actual picture. And those were people employed to draw things and getting plenty of practice, not having to secretly scribble on napkins. You can see something similar with people learning to draw. They draw something with bits from different angles because their knowledge of objects is in 3D.

Assuming Ky is a prodigy, his art is going to be merely terrible instead of incoherent scribblings.

In the first picture, he looks up at something in the sky, and he looks younger, his face is open. The figure there seems to think his hands might still be filled. In the second, he is older, his face narrower, and he looks down at the ground.

Instead, we get impossibly detailed renditions on a crumbled napkin that perfectly convey exactly what he means, something talented, well-trained artists with enormous amounts of practice still struggle with.

He follows up with some emo poetry about which is his ~*~*~*true self*~*~*~*~?

Then her dad calls her name so she quickly chucks it in the burny tube. At least they apparently recycle the foil containers, I was figuring they’d just burn it all.

Her dad is there to say there’s a matching official calling at the computer.

Bram glares at me on his way out of the foyer because this message has interrupted his game.

So…they have videogames, apparently? Who makes those? Are there a Hundred Videogames? Why doesn’t Cassia ever play them?

The official there to talk seems like a friendly guy. He says that normally right now they’re arranging the first video chats but since the two of them already know each other that seems silly, so The other Officials on the Matching Committee and I decided it makes the most sense for the two of you to have an outing together instead. Supervised, of course, by an Official, as are communications for the other Matchees.”

Okay, this sounds completely reasonable until you pause and realize she just had an outing with her match a couple chapters ago, even one that included eating together as well as a kiss, and she spends all her free hours with him and her friends, all unsupervised. I’m not really sure what should go here, and having them spend more time together would probably happen no matter what, but the emphasis on supervision is weird.

Then another call comes from her mother, who wants to talk privately with her dad, then Xander comes over to spend the last chunk of night before curfew with her (unsupervised!!!)

It feels good to be with Xander, in a different way than it feels good to be with Ky.

God I hate love triangles.

At least she says they both feel nice like standing in the light. Different types of light, but neither feels dark. so I guess we can say at least the text doesn’t intend for one to be the obvious jerk. And in fairness, Ky seems like a perfectly nice guy, all the problems come from how she relates to him.

Xander says he got the call too, though he’s disappointed about the official.

“I wish we could go alone.”
“Me too.”

They’re outside on an empty street. You’re alone right now, you idiots.

Xander asks if she daydreamed about who her match would be before the banquet, and when she just says sometimes apparently he’s hurt.

She thinks the problem with the match is that they know each other too well. We feel the uncertainties in our touch, see them in each other’s eyes. We don’t work them out on our own miles away from each other the way the other Matches do. because obviously relationships are better when you’re constantly stressing about how you have no idea what the other person is thinking.

Cassia starts telling us about how she wants Xander to kiss her but he doesn’t and of course girls can’t initiate anything so they don’t. Xander heads back to his house because it’s almost curfew, but she doesn’t because she’s waiting for Ky, who gets back late.

And he does show up to deliver her artifact, and their fingers don’t touch and she’s sad about that.

What is wrong with me?

I don’t know, Cassia.

She says his is still in her house and she can go get it, but he says it’s fine, she can give it back later and she wonders what color his eyes are.

Cassia then starts going on about how she completely understands what Ky means by feeling like he has two lives, because losing your family and being moved across the country to a new family where you’re never supposed to talk about your life before is EXACTLY LIKE being uncertain which boy you think you really should be dating and Ever since the day of the mistake with my Match, I’ve never known which life is my true one.

Then she checks the compact to see if Ky put anything in the super secret hidden compartment that fooled the society for generations. He didn’t, so she stares at his compass for a while.

We’re now halfway through the book, and the love triangle has nearly strangled everything else. I’m hoping Ky bites it.