In front of us, the double line of girls and boys is growing longer, extending into the street, even as the glass-fronted doors of the labs swoosh open and several nurses appear, carrying clipboards, and begin to usher people into the waiting rooms. My aunt rests one hand on my elbow lightly, quick as a bird.
“You’d better get on line,” she says. Her voice is back to normal. I wish some of her calmness would rub off on me. “And Lena?”
“Yeah?” I don’t feel very well. The labs look far away, so white I can hardly stand to look at them, the pavement shimmering hot in front of us. The words most important day of your life keep repeating in my head. The sun feels like a giant spotlight.
“Good luck.” My aunt does her one-millisecond smile.
“Thanks.” I kind of wish Carol would say something else—something like, I’m sure you’ll do great, or Try not to worry—but she just stands there, blinking, her face composed and unreadable as always.
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Tiddle.” Hana winks at me. “I’ll make sure she doesn’t screw up too badly. Promise.”
All my nervousness dissipates. Hana is so relaxed about the whole thing, so nonchalant and normal.
Hana and I go down toward the labs together. Hana is almost five-nine. When I walk next to her I have to do a half skip every other step to keep up with her, and I wind up feeling like a duck bobbing up and down in the water. Today I don’t mind, though. I’m glad she’s with me. I’d be a complete wreck otherwise.
“God,” she says, as we get close to the lines. “Your aunt takes this whole thing pretty seriously, huh?”
“Well, it is serious.” We join the back of the line. I see a few people I recognize: some girls I know vaguely from school; some guys I’ve seen playing soccer behind Spencer Prep, one of the boys’ schools. A boy looks my way and sees me staring. He raises his eyebrows and I drop my eyes quickly, my face going hot all at once and a nervous itch working in my stomach. You’ll be paired in less than three months, I tell myself, but the words don’t mean anything and seem ridiculous, like one of the Mad Libs games we played as children that always resulted in nonsensical statements: I want banana for speedboat. Give my wet shoe to your blistering cupcake.
“Yeah, I know. Trust me, I’ve read The Book of Shhh as much as anyone.” Hana pushes her sunglasses up onto her forehead and bats her eyelashes at me, making her voice supersweet: “‘Evaluation Day is the exciting rite of passage that prepares you for a future of happiness, stability, and partnership.’” She drops her sunglasses back down on her nose and makes a face.
“You don’t believe it?” I lower my voice to a whisper.
Hana has been strange recently. She was always different from other people—more outspoken, more independent, more fearless. It’s one of the reasons I first wanted to be her friend. I’ve always been shy, and afraid that I’ll say or do the wrong thing. Hana is the opposite.
But lately it’s been more than that. She’s stopped caring about school, for one thing, and has been called to the principal’s office several times for talking back to the teachers. And sometimes in the middle of talking she’ll stop, just shut her mouth as though she’s run up against a barrier. Other times I’ll catch her staring out at the ocean as though she’s thinking of swimming away.
Looking at her now, at her clear gray eyes and her mouth as thin and taut as a bowstring, I feel a tug of fear. I think of my mother floundering for a second in the air before dropping like a stone into the ocean; I think about the face of the girl who dropped from the laboratory roof all those years ago, her cheek turned against the pavement. I will away thoughts of the illness. Hana isn’t sick. She can’t be. I would know.
“If they really want us to be happy, they’d let us pick ourselves,” Hana grumbles.
“Hana,” I say sharply. Criticizing the system is the worst offense there is. “Take it back.”
She holds up her hands. “All right, all right. I take it back.”
“You know it doesn’t work. Look how it was in the old days. Chaos all the time, fighting, and war. People were miserable.”
“I said, I take it back.” She smiles at me, but I’m still mad and I look away.
“Besides,” I go on, “they do give us a choice.”
Usually the evaluators generate a list of four or five approved matches, and you are allowed to pick among them. This way, everyone is happy. In all the years that the procedure has been administered and the marriages arranged, there have been fewer than a dozen divorces in Maine, less than a thousand in the entire United States—and in almost all those cases, either the husband or wife was suspected of being a sympathizer and divorce was necessary and approved by the state.
“A limited choice,” she corrects me. “We get to choose from the people who have been chosen for us.”
“Every choice is limited,” I snap. “That’s life.”
She opens her mouth as though she’s going to respond, but instead she just starts to laugh. Then she reaches down and squeezes my hand, two quick pumps and then two long ones. It’s our old sign, a habit we developed in the second grade when one of us was scared or upset, a way of saying, I’m here, don’t worry.
“Okay, okay. Don’t get defensive. I love the evaluations, okay? Long live Evaluation Day.”
“That’s better,” I say, but I’m still feeling anxious and annoyed. The line shuffles slowly forward. We pass the iron gates, with their complicated crown of barbed wire, and enter the long driveway that leads to the various lab complexes. We are headed for Building 6-C. The boys go to 6-B, and the lines begin to curve away from each other.
As we move closer to the front of the line, we get a blast of air-conditioning every time the glass doors slide open and then hum shut. It feels amazing, like being momentarily dipped head to toe in a thin sheet of ice, popsicle-style, and I turn around and lift my ponytail away from my neck, wishing it weren’t so damn hot. We don’t have air-conditioning at home, just tall, gawky fans that are always sputtering out in the middle of the night. And most of the time Carol won’t even let us use those; they suck up too much electricity, she says, and we don’t have any to spare.
At last there are only a few people in front of us. A nurse comes out of the building, carrying a stack of clipboards and a handful of pens, and begins distributing them along the line.
“Please make sure to fill out all required information,” she says, “including your medical and family history.”
My heart begins to work its way up into my throat. The neatly numbered boxes on the page—Last Name, First Name, Middle Initial, Current Address, Age—collapse together. I’m glad Hana is in front of me. She begins filling out the forms quickly, resting the clipboard on her forearm, her pen skating over the paper.
“Next.”
The doors whoosh open again, and a second nurse appears and gestures for Hana to come inside. In the dark coolness beyond her, I can see a bright white waiting room with a green carpet.
“Good luck,” I say to Hana.
She turns and gives me a quick smile. But I can tell she is nervous, finally. There is a fine crease between her eyebrows, and she is chewing on the corner of her lip.