Matched

Guiding, gentle, his hand presses against mine on the downward strokes, releases a little on the upward ones. I bite my lip in concentration; or maybe it’s that I don’t dare to breathe until the a is finished, which it is, al too soon.

The letter looks perfect. I exhale, a little shakily. I want to look up at him, but instead I look down at our hands, right next to each other. In this light, his don’t look so red. They look brown, strong. Purposeful.

Someone is coming through the trees. We both let go at the same time.

Livy bursts into the clearing. She’s never been third before, and she’s almost beside herself with excitement. While she chatters at the Officer, Ky and I stand up and casual y trample what we’ve written into oblivion.

“Why am I learning to write the letters in my name first?”

“Because even if that’s al you learn to write you’l stil have something,” he says, bending his head down to look at me, making sure I know what he’s saying, what he’s about to ask. “Was there anything else you wanted to learn to write instead?”

I nod and his eyes brighten with understanding.

“The words from that paper,” he whispers, his eyes moving to Livy and the Officer.

“Yes.”

“Do you stil remember them?”

I nod again.

“Tel me a little every day,” he says, “and I’l remember it for you. Then there wil be two of us who know.”

Even though the time is short before Livy or the Officer or someone else comes over to talk to us, I pause for a moment. If I tel Ky these words, I step into an even more dangerous place than I was before. It wil put Ky in danger. And I wil have to trust him.

Can I do it? I look out at the view from the top of the hil . The sky does not have an answer for me. The dome of City Hal in the distance certainly doesn’t. I remember thinking of the angels from the stories when I went to my Match Banquet. I don’t see any angels and they don’t fly down on their cotton-soft wings to whisper in my ear. Can I trust this boy who writes in the earth?

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

I lean closer to Ky. Neither of us looks at the other; we both gaze straight ahead to make sure that no one wil suspect anything if they glance our way. That’s when I whisper the words to him, my heart so ful it’s about to burst because I’m saying them, real y saying them out loud to another person: “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.”

Ky closes his eyes.

When he opens them again he slips something rough and papery into my hand. “Look at this for practice,” Ky says. “Destroy it when you’re done.”

I can hardly wait for Second School and sorting to end so that I can look at what Ky has given me. I wait until I’m at home in the kitchen, eating my dinner alone because my work hours were long tonight. I hear my father and Bram playing a game on the port in the foyer and I feel safe enough to reach into my pocket and pul out Ky’s gift.

A napkin. My first reaction is disappointment. Why this? It’s a normal napkin, the kind we get from the meal hal s at Second School or the Arboretum or anywhere else. Brown and pulpy. Smeared and used. I have the impulse to incinerate it right away.

But.

When I open it up there are words inside. Gorgeous words. Cursive words. They were beautiful up on the green hil 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.

And it’s not just words. He’s drawn things, too. The surface is covered with lines and meaning. Not a picture, not a poem, not the lyrics to a song, although my sorting mind notices the pattern of al these things. But I can’t classify them. This is nothing I have seen before.

I realize that I don’t even know what you would use to make marks like this. Al of the words I practice are written in the air or traced in the dirt.

There used to be tools for writing but I don’t know what they were. Even our paintbrushes in school were tethered to artscreens, our pictures wiped away almost immediately after we finished them. Somehow, Ky must know a secret, older than Grandfather and his mother and people before them. How to make. Create.

Two lives, he’s written.

Two lives, I whisper to myself. The words hush and hang in the room, too soft for the port to hear above the other sounds in the house. Almost too soft for me to hear above my heart beating fast. Faster than it ever has in the woods or on the tracker.