VIII

The next morning brought Sunday. I had two classes, Legal Procedure at nine and Argumentative Technique at two.

Easy-peasy, until I actually went.

I had been so anxious the night before that I barely slept for the first three hours, but I hadn’t slept much before the Choosing Ceremony, either. When I did fall asleep, I was knocked out. I was only awoken by Oona pounding on my door and asking if I had another white sock, please, because she couldn’t find one of hers.

I got her sock and then dressed in a hurry, picking the first things I saw, another long-sleeved black shirt and the same white pants from last night. I wondered if I’d ever become comfortable with showing skin above my ankles and wrists. In a moment of humor, I remembered Irene’s story—wearing one white sock and one black sock to class.

I changed out one of my white socks for a black one, using the little boots to cover it up. Maybe it would bring me luck.

When I arrived in Legal Procedure, four things made me immediately realize that luck alone wouldn’t cover it. The first thing was that it was a class of only ten people, and Oona wasn’t one of them. The second thing was that Aletheia was sitting in the front row—great. The third thing was that the professor was familiar. She was Sajida Touma’s mother, the woman in the hijab. When she saw me without my head covering, her face screwed into a frown. So I sat in the back of the classroom, next to Ravi, who had forgotten his laptop.

The fourth and worst thing was that, at breakfast, I drank milk. I had not had milk for a while, as it was considered more of a luxury food product. I enjoyed it, but now my stomach was beginning to turn very, very sour.

Judge Touma used the first fifteen minutes of class to review the syllabus, and then she jumped straight into lecture. I thought I was prepared for the kind of note-taking needed to keep up. I was sorely incorrect. In two hours, Judge Touma covered the whole history of legal theory. Even the Candor-born were typing frantically to get the information down. If I hadn’t done so well in Mid-Level keyboarding class, I would have been doomed.

By the time we broke for lunch, my wrists were numb, my head was pounding, and my gut was screaming for a bathroom. I now understood what Judge Morris had meant by wishing we hadn’t been born.

“I think I’m lactose intolerant,” I sighed as I sat down for lunch with Oona and Ravi. Lunch was rice and chicken, but all I took was the plain rice. “Either that, or the milk went bad.”

“Nope, it’s just you,” said Oona.

“If it’s any consolation,” said Ravi, “I feel sick too, after that lecture.”

“You would,” Leanne laughed. She had been in the other class, Argumentative Technique, with Oona and the other half of the initiates.

“What, you telling me that an Erudite didn’t like a two-hour class?” asked Jed, the other Amity transfer.

Ravi groaned. “Ugh. I’m not Erudite anymore, y’all know that. I left that place to avoid two-hour classes.”

“And what’d you want to do when you got here?” asked Jed.

“Be a detective, duh,” said Ravi. “I don’t need to know about the bazillion types of civil lawsuits to do detective work.”

“Well, if you want to last through initiation, you actually do,” I pointed out.

“Please don’t be intelligent with me, Phoebe,” Ravi said.

“Ravi, if it makes you feel better,” said Leanne, “your reasoning is exactly why Erudite and Candor historically have the second most transfers between each other, besides Candor and Dauntless. If you haven’t noticed, over a third of the transfers here are from Erudite. And if we could ask the current Erudite class, I’d bet that a third of their transfers are from Candor.”

“Really?” I asked. Leanne was right; there were two other Erudite transfers sitting at another table with the four other Dauntless.

She nodded. “Yup. There’s an argument to be made about similarity in moral values, but I think a large part of it is just the science-liberal arts dichotomy. A lot of Candor kids get sick of reading and talking, and a lot of Erudite kids get sick of math and science.”

“Case in point,” said Ravi, pointing his thumbs at himself.

“Same,” said Leanne.

It made sense. Erudite and Candor had their differences, and those differences often manifested in furious back-and-forth ethical debate and inter-faction hatred, but when it came to us kids, sometimes the most important thing on our mind was getting away from something as simple as mathematics.

That was why Abnegation had so few transfers going out. Generally. We had everything a person could ever want, really, at the basic level. Guaranteed shelter, family, and community. No one ever failed out of Abnegation initiation. For generations, Abnegation kids had stayed among their own, a comfortable life earned by little more than community service every once in a while, nothing to escape and nothing to run to.

“What I’m curious about,” said Leanne, nudging Oona with her elbow, “are the two hippies over here. I thought Amity and Candor hated each other.”

Jed and Oona exchanged a look. “Pretty much,” said Jed. “Candor thinks we’re all liars, really, because we’ll do anything to keep the peace. But I never felt like that.”

“Me neither,” said Oona. “Honestly, I always knew that I was going to transfer here. Since, um, my dad’s Candor, but my mom’s Amity. It’s a long story.”

Around the table, eyebrows flew up. Inter-faction relationships weren’t legally forbidden, but each faction had their own ways of dealing with them, and none of them were supportive. They were unheard of. Nobody wanted that sort of scandal, especially since genetic science made it so easy to track down both parents. So they just didn’t happen.

“No way,” Ravi said.

“You never told me that,” said Jed.

“Are you serious?” I asked.

Oona nodded. “Get one of the Candor-born over here if you think I’m lying.”

“Don’t just leave us hanging, sis, spill the tea,” said Leanne.

She was blushing, but laughed. “Alright. My parents dated in Upper Levels; they were both Candor and planned to stay together. Then, the morning of the Choosing Ceremony, my mom found out she was pregnant, so she chose to transfer to Amity to raise me. But my dad had chosen before her and it was too late to change. They’ve stayed on good terms, since he understood that if my mom kept me, it would’ve made law school pretty hard. Really, we’ve always been a Candor family, just split up. They let us visit every few months.”

“You can do that? That’s legal?” Ravi asked.

“The legality of my birth faction is a little messy to begin with,” said Oona.

“Whoa,” Lars murmured.

“What about your mom?” I asked. “She’s still in Amity?”

Oona nodded. “Yeah. But she’s got a new husband, who came with a bunch of stepkids, so she’s the last thing from lonely.”

She shrugged it off, but something about the story still made me sad. I thought of my parents, sitting alone at a table built for four. They weren’t so lucky as Oona’s mother. I thought again, suddenly, of Sajida, and I wondered if my parents took her in. Abnegation families often “adopted” the few transfers to our faction. I had left behind all the grey head scarves and full-cover clothing that Sajida would ever need.

We finished lunch and had another hour before our next class, which I used to go back to my apartment and suffer through the effects of the morning milk. Then I hurried to Argumentative Technique.

This course was held in a beautiful mock courtroom and taught by Judge Bandele, a tall black man who somehow struck me as one of the most well-dressed people I had seen so far, sporting a silky jacket with a strange floral pattern across it. The course itself was unlike anything I had ever experienced so far. We sat in the gallery while Judge Bandele sat, appropriately, in the judge’s box above us. He assigned each of us a partner, then told us to ask our partner a list of basic questions. Name, pronouns, former faction, career ideas, rationale for career ideas, fun facts about self. We were paired just so that we were all with someone we didn’t know as well—Candor—born were paired with transfers, and the leftover two transfers were from different factions. I prayed very hard that I would not get paired with Aletheia and got lucky. Ravi got Aletheia. I got a bespectacled Candor-born named Sherlock.

Unlike Aletheia and Katie, Sherlock was nice, and I enjoyed getting to know him. His ancestors were from someplace called Italy. He was named after a detective from an old book. Unlike his namesake, he wanted to be a defense attorney, as he had a soft spot for cases where the criminal might have sympathetic motives for doing a crime, such as factionless parents who stole to feed their children. I disagreed with him there, and we very nearly launched into a debate about theft and morality, but I respected his opinion.

I couldn’t think of many answers, as I didn’t yet know what I wanted to do with my career in Candor, but I told him that I was still doing research on all of the possibilities before I set my mind on anything. I also didn’t have much for the fun facts, so I just told him about my red hair and having to cover it up in Abnegation.

It was a simple, enjoyable icebreaker and I came away from it with a new friend, but that’s all I thought it was. Then, when the room quieted down, Judge Bandele told us to walk up to the floor, one by one, and introduce our partner to the class. Our partner would then say how correct our introduction was.

I have never seen a group of Candor-born look more terrified than in that moment.

I was also a little nervous to speak before so many people, something that I hadn’t done since Upper Levels English class, but I realized very quickly that I was not the person who needed to worry. I had been trained my whole life to get to know people. I recounted every detail of what Sherlock had told me without hesitation. An Erudite girl named Alyss did similarly well, but most of the class stumbled through the short speech. Aletheia was among the worst. She got Ravi’s pronouns wrong and accidentally mispronounced his last name, Balakrishnan, as something very similar to “Ballsack”, which entertained Ravi immensely.

After the last initiate finished mumbling through her speech, Judge Bandele stood up and walked across the floor. He stopped in the center and folded his hands.

“The first pillar of arguing,” he said, “is the practice of listening.”

He met my eyes. I didn’t look away. He inclined his chin, then continued on with the lesson.

I think I could get used to this.

The rest of the lesson was straightforward, mostly discussing note-taking strategies and other listening exercises. I focused the best I could, but I couldn’t help but sneak small glances over towards Aletheia in the front. Every time Judge Bandele condemned the evils of constructing one’s own speech before listening to the opposing counsel’s, Aletheia’s rosy pink cheeks flushed a deeper shade of red. Spite was a vice in which I had never been able to indulge before. It was a satisfying vice, indeed.

A study period, then dinner followed Argumentative Technique. Even though I had done nothing but sit and take notes for two classes, I was so tired. I wasn’t alone. The gossip from lunch and last night’s dinner was subdued now, most people just focusing on the exhausting task of bringing the ravioli to their mouths.

I looked around for Ace, but she was nowhere to be seen. At her normal spot by the door was a different Dauntless soldier. She hadn’t been here all day, actually, which I found odd. I didn’t think I had made her so uncomfortable that she quit her job...but the thought was still there.

I wanted to ask the new soldier where Ace was. In the back of my mind, I was still unsettled. I was here in Candor for a reason, I wanted to find Irene and find out what was so frightening about my aptitude test that she deleted the answers.

But I was also very tired. I still needed to review my notes tonight. My body ached from its less-than-pleasant encounter with dairy. And I had done more talking in two hours of Argumentative Technique than I did on a single day in Abnegation.

I decided that Ace could wait. When the dining hall cleared out, I went. I returned to my apartment. I avoided Aletheia. I told Oona that I was tired. And I fell right asleep in my clothes without even pulling my covers up over me.

+ + +

I wish I could say that, the next morning, I got up bright and early and prepared to solve my mystery with a new outlook.

I wish I wasn’t so good at lying to myself.

The next day wasn’t much different. I was pulled out of bed by an alarm, I slogged through my morning routine, and I dragged myself to my first course of the day, Logical and Analytical Reasoning. Also known as “Math with a Fancy Name”.

It was taught by a perkish Candor woman who required us call her by her first name, Stacey. Stacey was a character. She made a lot of jokes that were funny to only her. She used every opportunity to call us “kiddies”. She was uncomfortably familiar with Ravi, who whispered to me that Stacey taught at an inter-faction summer camp for kids with behavioral disorders, which Ravi had multiple of. When I asked him about her as a teacher, he just smiled devilishly and said, “I find the experience easier if you go into it with a positive attitude, and I don’t have anything positive to say.” I found this unnecessarily sinister. I just tried to focus on the basic logic concepts Stacey was guiding us through.

Ace was at lunch. She hadn’t been at breakfast. But I didn’t get to talk to her because I was trying to help Lars differentiate between types of proofs.

Investigative Techniques was possibly the most interesting of the four classes. It was taught by Judge Morris, the man who had welcomed us to Candor on Saturday. The syllabus had the dates of our assessments on them, but in the details column, it just said “Be Prepared.” We had our first lesson in the open-air courtyard with the trees, sitting at stone desks and benches clustered around a small stage.

Like Judge Bandele, Morris started us out with an exercise, making us close our eyes. Then, using electronic clickers, we had to answer true or false questions about the environment and peers. It was an observance game, Morris explained—the keenest Candor was the one who could remove themself from their own psyche, a single fixed point, instead using all senses to take in all possibilities and all viewpoints. Things got deep very fast. It was too much for a very sleepy someone who had forgotten the color of their own shirt (White. I think.).

And then it was dinner and wrestling with myself about talking to Ace and then falling right asleep again.

And then waking up the next morning, going to Legal Procedure and Arguments again, and going to bed again.

And then came the next day with Logic and Investigations again.

And Legal Procedure and Arguments.

And Logic and Investigations.

Around and around and around I went, a brilliant whirlwind, no rest to be found.