did you know her?” He must have known her well, to see her in my face, which is paler than hers, the eyes blue instead of dark brown. Most people didn’t look closely enough to see all the things we had in common: our long fingers, our hooked noses, our straight, frowned eyebrows.
He hesitates a little. “She volunteered with the Abnegation sometimes. Handing out food and blankets and clothes. Had a memorable face. Plus, she was married to a council leader. Didn’t everyone know her?”
Sometimes I know people are lying just because of the way the words feel when they press into me, uncomfortable and wrong, the way an Erudite feels when she reads a grammatically incorrect sentence. However he knew my mother, it’s not because she handed him a can of soup once. But I’m so thirsty to hear more about her that I don’t press the issue.
“She died, did you know?” I say. “Years ago.”
“No, I didn’t know.” His mouth slants a little at one corner. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
I feel strange, standing in this dank place that smells like live bodies and smoke, among these empty cans that suggest poverty and the failure to fit in. But there is something appealing about it here too, a freedom, a refusal to belong to these arbitrary categories we’ve made for ourselves.
“Your Choosing must be coming up tomorrow, for you to look so worried,” the man says. “What faction did you get?”
“I’m not supposed to tell anyone,” I say automatically.
“I’m not anyone,” he says. “I’m nobody. That’s what being factionless is.”
I still don’t say anything. The prohibition against sharing my aptitude test result, or any of my other secrets, is set firmly in the mold that makes me and remakes me daily. It’s impossible to change now.
“Ah, a rule follower,” he says, like he’s disappointed. “Your mother said to me once that she felt like inertia had carried her to Abnegation. It was the path of least resistance.” He shrugs. “Trust me when I tell you, Eaton boy, that resisting is worth doing.”
I feel a rush of anger. He shouldn’t be telling me about my mother like she belongs to him and not to me, shouldn’t be making me question everything I remember about her just because she may or may not have served him food once. He shouldn’t be telling me anything at all—he’s nobody, factionless, separate, nothing.
“Yeah?” I say. “Look where resisting got you. Living out of cans in broken-down buildings. Doesn’t sound so great to me.” I start toward the doorway the man emerged from. I know I’ll find an alley door somewhere back there; I don’t care where as long as I can get out of here quickly.
I pick a path across the floor, careful not to step on any of the blankets. When I reach the hallway, the man says, “I’d rather eat out of a can than be strangled by a faction.”
I don’t look back.
+++
When I get home, I sit on the front step and take deep breaths of the cool spring air for a few minutes.
My mother was the one who taught me to steal moments like these, moments of freedom, though she didn’t know it. I watched her take them, slipping out the door after dark when my father was asleep, creeping back home when sunlight was just appearing behind the buildings. She took them even when she was with us, standing over the sink with her eyes closed, so distant from the present that she didn’t even hear me when I spoke to her.
But I learned something else from watching her too, which is that the free moments always have to end.
I get up, brushing flecks of cement from my gray slacks, and push the door open. My father sits in the easy chair in the living room, surrounded by paperwork. I pull up straight, tall, so that he can’t scold me for slouching. I move toward the stairs. Maybe he will let me go to my room unnoticed.
“Tell me about your aptitude test,” he says, and he points at the sofa for me to sit.
I cross the room, stepping carefully over a stack of papers on the carpet, and sit where he points, right on the edge of the cushion so I can stand up quickly.
“Well?” He removes his glasses and looks at me expectantly. I hear tension in his voice, the kind that only develops after a difficult day at work. I should be careful. “What was your result?”
I don’t even think about refusing to tell him. “Abnegation.”
“And nothing else?”
I frown. “No, of course not.”
“Don’t give me that look,” he says, and my frown disappears. “Nothing strange happened with your test?”
During my test, I knew where I was—I knew that while I felt like I was standing in the cafeteria of my secondary school, I was actually lying prostrate on a chair in the aptitude test room, my body connected to a machine by a series of wires. That was strange. But I don’t want to talk to him about it now, not when I can see the stress brewing inside him like a storm.
“No,” I say.
“Don’t lie to me,” he says, and he seizes my arm, his fingers tight like a vise. I don’t look at him.
“I’m not,” I say. “I got Abnegation, just as expected. The woman barely looked at me on my way out of the room. I promise.”
He releases me. My skin pulses from where he gripped it.
“Good,” he says. “I’m sure you have some thinking to do. You should go to your room.”
“Yes, sir.”
I get up and cross the room again, relieved.
“Oh,” he says. “Some of my fellow council members are coming over tonight, so you should eat dinner early.”
“Yes, sir.”
+++
Before the sun goes down, I snatch food from the cupboards and the refrigerator: two dinner rolls and raw carrots with the greens still attached, a hunk of cheese and an apple, leftover chicken without any seasoning on it. The food all tastes the same, like dust and paste. I keep my eyes fixed on the door so I don’t collide with my father’s coworkers. He wouldn’t like it if I was still down here when they came.
I am finishing off a glass of water when the first council member appears on the doorstep, and I hurry through the living room before my father reaches the door. He waits with his hand on the knob, his eyebrows raised at me as I slip around the banister. He points up the stairs and I climb them, fast, as he opens the door.
“Hello, Marcus.” I recognize the voice as Andrew Prior’s. He’s one of my father’s closest friends at work, which means nothing, because no one really knows my father. Not even me.
From the top of the stairs I look down at Andrew. He’s wiping his shoes on the mat. I see him and his family sometimes, a perfect Abnegation unit, Natalie and Andrew, and the son and daughter—not twins, but both two years younger than I am in school—all walking sedately down the sidewalk and bobbing their heads at passersby. Natalie organizes
