XVIII

We had our midterms that week.

The midterms would cover all the material we had learned in our four classes thus far. Then we would be ranked by our scores. They were meant as benchmarks, to show us how well we were doing and how hard we should study for the final exams.

I didn’t study for the midterms at all, which was dumb. But honestly, it was all I could manage to continue going to class.

My sleep schedule had never been worse. My mind was just too full of things to let me simply stop thinking for eight hours. My dreams were troubled, nightmarish at times. Lady Rose was there, every time. Sometimes she was holding me, plunging a Choosing Ceremony knife into my chest. But most of the time, she was just there. Staring. Blood streamed from her eyes like tears.

At the advice of Oona, I wrote my thoughts and nightmares in a journal. It was a cheap little black book that I kept in what I called the secret pocket, a torn flap inside my computer bag that let me hide things between the protective layers of the bag. I was pretty honest in the journal, and the word “Divergent” appeared more than once, so it was better to be safe than sorry. For good measure, I wrote backwards, right to left across the page in an illegible mutation of cursive. I was left-handed and writing backwards had always been easier.

The journal helped me organize my thoughts. But it also kept me up worse. I had begun staying up until midnight or later every night, furiously scribbling my every thought and inkling into the journal. I did, indeed, scribble a lot. A handful of pages were just nonsensical doodles or wild roses where I let my pen run in circles until the ink bled through. It looked like the work of a crazy person. I didn’t know if I was crazy. I felt like it, sometimes.

I think my friends could tell. Even Judge Bandele pulled me aside on Sunday and asked if I was alright. I told him, truthfully, that I didn’t know.

Our midterms were on Tuesday and Wednesday. We would have most of Thursday, Friday, and Saturday off before resuming class on Sunday. The exams would resemble our finals. All of the initiates, transfers and Candor-born alike, would take every exam at the same time.

Tuesday brought our Legal Procedure and Logical Reasoning exams. Both of these were in the typical exam format, pen and paper with multiple choice, short answer, and long essay questions.

We took them not in the Institute classrooms, but in the Merciless Mart itself. For some of the initiates, it was the first time they had been inside. We were brought up to a place that I knew rather well—the Department of Academic Integrity. Irene’s department. I saw her once, handing a packet of exams to Judge Morris. Even though she couldn’t see me, and I didn’t say anything, she lifted her chin as I passed by and I wondered if she could sense me.

The Exam Room, and everything about the format of Candor exams, was designed to test not only our academic skills but our honesty, as well. The Exam Room’s walls and low ceilings were made of mirrors. The desks were arranged very close together and tilted at an angle, as if to make it easier for someone to look over one’s shoulder and see the answers. The exams were all the same, with all the same answers and pages, and all multiple-choice answers would be filled out with easy-to-see bubbles. A loud air conditioner meant that no one would overhear two students whispering answers to each other. And there was no test proctor, just us in the room.

It was the cheater’s dream exam. Except for one catch. On Thursday morning, after all four midterms were taken, we would each be put under the truth serum in a miniature version of the Full Unveiling, to be asked whether or not we had cheated on the midterm exams. Anyone caught cheating would be kindly excused from initiation. A factionless life lay just beyond a quick peek at the ceiling mirrors.

This fact alone was enough to scare most of us into complete honesty. Near the end of my Legal Procedure exam, my neck began to ache from looking down, but I was so scared of accidentally peeking at my neighbor’s paper that I didn’t dare to stretch. After the exam was over and we all filed out of the room, twenty people let out a chorus of sighs.

We went to lunch, then all filed back into the room to do it again for Reasoning.

The day left me so mentally drained that I had no trouble sleeping that night, at least. I fell asleep in my clothes without bothering to pull the covers over me.

The Argumentative Technique exam, the next day, was much different. Ten of us would take the Arguments exam while the other ten took the Investigative Technique exam, and then we would switch.

Each of us were paired with a volunteer law student or young lawyer. I had Annabeth, a redheaded woman who worked in the Integrity offices. We were quite the matching pair and I wondered who in upper management had the sense of humor. Annabeth took me to a small, bare room with a table and a one-way mirror. We were being watched by two other volunteers, who would later convene with Annabeth and determine my grade.

On the table were two files—one for a Mr. Plaintiff X and a Miss Defendant Y. Annabeth flipped a coin and I chose tails. I was given Miss Y. I would argue on Miss Y’s behalf in standard debate structure. The objective wasn’t necessarily to win, as Annabeth was much more experienced than I. It was just to defend Miss Y to the best of my ability.

The case was pretty simple, but in an actual trial, could swing either way. Miss Y was an Erudite scientist who hired Mr. X as an intern for a six-week project. Before the project, Miss Y had Mr. X sign an agreement of hire. The agreement said that Mr. X would only get paid at the completion of the project, provided that Mr. X did not get terminated. The agreement also outlined reasons for termination, particularly, three instances of being tardy to work. Mr. X was tardy three times in the first two weeks, but Miss Y did not fire him. On the sixth and final week of the project, Mr. X was fired without pay for three tardies. Mr. X then sued Miss Y, claiming that she had ignored the tardies in order to get free labor, then terminated him right before she was supposed to pay him. Miss Y’s defense was that she did not keep a careful eye on the interns’ clocked hours until she calculated the hour logs at the end of the project, so she did not know about Mr. X’s tardies until then.

I didn’t think I did very well. I pointed out that neither Mr. X nor Miss Y were lying, so Miss Y did not intentionally keep Mr. X for free labor. I also argued that if Mr. X was concerned about termination, he would have brought up the matter to Miss Y in the first two weeks. However, his silence and continuing to work suggested that he hoped Miss Y would overlook the tardies. While it was terrible that Mr. X had to work for free for six weeks, he also tried to deceive her.

I petered off in the closing statement and left my argument hanging. But Annabeth congratulated me, and it wasn’t just flattery—Candor weren’t much for flattery. So maybe it was okay.

After lunch was my final exam, Investigative Technique. Judge Morris called it “the escape room exam”. A funny name, but which, like everything Morris said, was delivered with such deadpan monotone that I couldn’t help but get a shiver down my spine.

We were each locked in a small room alone. I would have thirty minutes to escape. The room was a one-room apartment and looked as if someone might have lived in it. To open the door, however, we had to find two keys.

The first key was easy—as soon as I turned on the light in the bedroom, something felt unbalanced. The light on one side of the room was dimmer, less complete. I dragged a chair over to the center of the room and removed the frosted glass cover from over the lightbulbs. There, taped to the outside of the third bulb, was the first key.

The second key took a little more time. I knew I wouldn’t get anywhere by ripping the place apart, so I took my time, searching for things that stood out to me. Unusual hinges, false drawer bottoms, disrupted dust patterns. As the timer ticked down to five minutes left, I finally got it—the stove. When one turned each of the four knobs, the flameless burners would glow red and begin to emit heat. All except one, which glowed, but wasn’t hot. I placed my hand on it and the knob popped off in my hand. On the inside was the key.

This one I was sure I had done well.

Until I unlocked the door and saw that I was sixth to finish. Aletheia, standing next to a scoreboard that listed her name first with a score of eight minutes, gave me a smirk. I casually turned away from her, put my hands behind my back, and flipped her the bird.

I thought it was over. Until I returned to our apartment later that night after dinner. I found Aletheia in my bathroom, filing her white-tipped nails over our bathroom sink.

“Hey,” I said. “This is mine and Oona’s bathroom.”

“Mmm...I prefer the lighting in here,” she replied, admiring her nails.

“Well, I have to pee.”

Aletheia smirked. It was a small expression, but her glassy lip gloss seemed to exaggerate it to cruel proportions. Facial makeup, especially foundation, was strongly discouraged in Candor, but it didn’t stop girls like Aletheia from using clear lip gloss or nail polish anyway. “Don’t they teach you manners in Abnegation? It’s more ladylike to say, ‘May I use the restroom?’”

“Okay,” I said. “I gotta piss like a racehorse. May I use the restroom?”

Aletheia met my eyes in the mirror.

“I know what you are,” she said.

Briefly, my heart jumped to my throat—she couldn’t possibly know I was Divergent. I wondered if I had misplaced my journal, but no, it never left my computer bag, which never left my person. And it wasn’t like anyone could read it.

“Really now,” I said evenly.

“Is it not obvious?” Aletheia asked, turning to face me. “You’ve tried to scrub it off, you got rid of that ridiculous scarf, but that’s Abnegation pride. Still thinking you’re better than everyone else.”

My shoulders tightened more, but now for a different reason. “Get out.”

The smirk stretched. “God, you stink of it. Maybe that’s why you got stabbed. The factionless smelled your stink and didn’t want to deal with it anymore.”

“Get out of my bathroom,” I said.

“Or you’ll what?” Aletheia leered. “This isn’t the Hub. I don’t have to follow a Stiff’s orders here.”

“What is wrong with you?” I snapped.

“What’s wrong with you ?” she retorted.

“My thing is that I don’t care about you, but you decided you hate me anyway! Your thing seems to be that you get off on power trips, but I don’t know, I’d hate to assume!”

“I already know I get off on power trips, and I need to deal with that in my own time,” said Aletheia, taking a step closer to me. “But when you say you don’t care about me, I think you’re lying.”

“I am not a liar.”

“But you’re pretty full of yourself. All Stiffs are.”

“Did you forget the part where Abnegation hates pride? As in, that’s their main thing?”

“On the contrary.” She tilted her chin. “I think you love it.”

I stepped back. I didn’t mean to. But a knot tightened in my stomach, and I was unable to respond except a weak, “What?”

Aletheia’s smirk turned into a full smile.

“You’ve never heard that before? That self-hatred is just another form of pride? All your moral superiority, pretending that you’re so righteous and perfect and different in everything you do, did you not notice that it’s because you’re obsessed with yourself?”

“That’s not true.”

“Please. Abnegation is crawling with people like that. People like you. People so obsessed with keeping up an image of self-sacrifice that they just never stop thinking about themselves, thinking about how other people see them. And yeah, I said image, because I know it’s not real. I see how you defend the poor factionless, saying ‘oooh, they can’t provide for themselves, you have no right to treat them like they’re inferior’. And all while sitting on thrones above the rest of us, thrones built on the backs of factionless slaves. Don’t kid yourself. Your service, your morals, your selflessness? Bullshit . Abnegation’s government is designed to create a suffering poor.”

“Abnegation was founded to help the poor!” I yelled. “You don’t know anything!”

Aletheia nodded. “I know that you always think you’re right.”

“Hah, and you don’t? You claim that you care about the factionless, when the only reason we ever spoke to each other was when you were yelling at Miriam for cleaning our room!”

“I am not always right,” Aletheia shot back. “And I don’t care about the factionless. The only thing I care about is the survival of the fittest. But you can’t believe in both.”

“You think I believe in both?”

“Our society was constructed around meritocracy, Phoebe,” said Aletheia. “Only the best deserve to live in the factions. Am I wrong?”

I was silent. She wasn’t.

“I think that meritocracy is a wonderful thing,” she continued. “It’s the one idea that every single faction can agree on. Even the Amity. Even the Abnegation. Especially the Abnegation—you guys coined the concept, didn’t you?”

Again, she wasn’t wrong. In the harsh light of the bathroom, her platinum blonde hair was nearly white; her washed-out blue eyes were a bright silver. She locked on my gaze and didn’t look away.

“But meritocracy is based in pride,” she said. “To maintain a meritocratic system is to love the ideal of pride. And to claim that one is truly absent of pride while maintaining such a system is—what? Hypocrisy? Duplicity? Whatever it is, it doesn’t belong in Candor.”

“Get out of my goddamn bathroom,” I snarled.

Aletheia raised her eyebrows at my language. But she seemed to have made her point because she brushed past me to the door.

“I’m just saying—” she grinned “—that if you want to be a prideful bitch, don’t bother hiding it. Trust me, it’s more fun this way.”

I slammed the door.

Now alone, I leaned against the bathroom sink and gasped. The stench of her nail topcoat still hung in the air. She had left the bottle on the countertop. I hated the smell, I hated her. I hated the violent struggle inside me that Ace, Miriam, and Lady Rose started, and I hated Aletheia for adding more fuel to the fire.

Was I really prideful? Was I really a liar? Was Abnegation really corrupt?

Furious, I knocked the nail polish bottle to the floor. I wanted to break it, but it landed on a plush white mat and rolled to a gentle stop. I scooped it up and held it to the light—it wasn’t completely clear; it shimmered slightly, like a liquid mirror. It looked expensive.

I unscrewed the cap, poured all of the polish into the toilet, and threw out the bottle. I wish I could say I felt guilty for even a moment.

I didn’t.

+ + +

Thursday was the interrogation in the Integrity Offices. Friday was a free day. Saturday was Visiting Day. Normally, I floated exhausted through my days and weeks, too tired to reckon what was important, but this weekend had me on edge every morning when I opened my eyes.

My first encounter with truth serum, that Thursday, wasn’t as bad as I thought. All twenty initiates and our professors sat in the room. One at a time, an initiate would receive the serum and answer the questions.

Irene did all of the asking. I wondered if she had requested to do it personally, on my behalf. It didn’t seem like the sort of task that the head of a department would care about.

When it was my turn, I was led to a chair in the center of the room. Irene’s assistant positioned a syringe over a vein in my neck, inserted the needle, and pressed the plunger. I barely felt the pinch. What followed was what it might feel like to freeze the ocean over—one second, adrenaline rushing through my veins. The next, my blood like lead. Then my brain went silent. For the first time in what felt like forever, I felt calm. My thoughts did not race. My eyes stared only at Irene’s black glasses.

She cleared her throat and began.

“What is your name?”

“Beatrice Prior.”

“And you go by Phoebe?”

“Yes.”

“Are you an initiate at the Candor Institute of Law and Investigation?”

“Yes.”

“While taking any of your four midterm exams, did you cheat in any way?”

“No.”

“Did you help one or more of your peers cheat in any way?”

“No.”

“Did you attempt or commit any act of academic dishonesty not previously mentioned?”

“No.”

“Thank you for your candor, Miss Prior.”

And then it was over. The assistant marked my responses. I returned to my seat.

Afterwards, as we filed out of the room (no one had cheated, so nobody was getting kicked out) Irene stopped me while packing up the truth serum equipment.

“A moment, Miss Prior.”

She continued packing up the equipment with her assistant, taking her time until we were the last three people in the room. Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out a white business card.

“This is my information,” she said. “I will be contacting you about your internship within the week.”

For a moment, I was confused. An internship? But she placed the card in my hands and squeezed, and then I remembered. The Full Unveiling. Irene said she would be in contact about preparing me for it. Presumably, that meant that she would teach me how to lie.

“Okay,” I said.

She nodded, took her things, and left with her assistant, the echoes of their shoes and her cane gradually receding. I looked down at her card. It was completely white, without even ink. Instead, the letters were embossed, raised above the paper so that one could only read it through the letters’ shadows.

Irene J. McCandless, Esq. (she/her)

Executive Director

Department of Academic Integrity

ijmccandless@candorint.gov

“For justice is blind; not by nature, but by choice.
Law without love is cruelty.”