Stardawn Read Free Page A

soft lips against my hand, it felt like laughter. Like falling in love. Like you.
    Even school is better. As the months wind down, as my class has neared the age of sixteen, we’ve been left with nothing more to do than whittle the days away. The other kids laugh and gossip, bragging about the jobs they’re sure to get in a few days’ time. But I’m quiet now, penning you this note when my teacher isn’t looking. Full of secrets I share only with you. Do they wonder what’s made me suddenly so serious? Do they have any idea of the magic that’s unfurling inside me? They might suspect, but they can never know.
    It’s ours, Benny. Yours and mine. And nobody else’s.
    Yours,
    Alyana

53rd Day of Spring, 22 Years Till Landing
    Benny,
    It was fun to pretend for a little while that our love is all sweetness and air, that your violence never cast doubt into my head. But the questions keep popping up like mushroom heads from soil. Will you now tell me the truth about you and Mazdin? I want to know. I’m brave enough, and strong enough. Then I will be able to love you freely, head and heart both. Let’s meet tomorrow outside the library, on the bench at the starboard side, where the dogwood trees will stretch their blossoms like a canopy over our heads. I will be there as soon as school gets out. I will sit there, my legs crossed at the ankles, looking like nothing more than a young girl in love. I will wait for you to finish with your work, whatever that is—pushing around shelving carts, I suppose—and then, when you step through the heavy iron doors, I will lift up my eyes. Ready, then, not to kiss you or to draw you into my arms.
    But to listen.
    Yours,
    Alyana

55th Day of Spring, 22 Years Till Landing
    Benny,
    Your words have haunted me all day long.
    And today, the worst possible day. We had our final interviews with the career counselors today, Benny. Just a technicality, is what Rebbe Schneider said. Nothing to worry about. No reason to fret. Why, the decisions have all but been made about our job placements, our futures. They just need to speak to us one last time, to make certain there are no mistakes.
    But what mistakes could there be after everything you told me? It doesn’t matter. It’s fake, all fake. Our qualifications don’t matter. Nor our interviews, our test results. All that matters is what the Council wants. And if it wants to give the best job to a sullen, spoiled boy with no talents or intelligence, it will.
    I was one of the first to be summoned. I walked down the hall, every step of my heels feeling weighted by lead. Just a few weeks ago, I chatted with these men and women as if they were old friends. No worries. Just turn on your charms, was what Tateh had told me. Back then—it feels like ages ago now—I truly believed that if I just acted like my sweet, smiling self, then the Council would tell me what was in my heart: my deepest, unspoken desires. My vocation, the person I was meant to be.
    Today, I sat down before them, my face drawn. I let my hair veil my eyes, in the way that always makes Momme reach out to tuck it behind my ear. But the vocational counselors weren’t going to touch me. I was safe in that. They just gazed at me, puzzled.
    “How are you today, Alyana?”
    “Fine,” I spat, in a tone of voice that made it clear I really wasn’t. There were two men and one woman in that little room with me. The last time we’d spoken of handicrafts—of the chores I did for Tateh and Momme, of how happy it made me to sweep the front walk. It had been the truth at the time. Those afternoons spent pushing the broom over the ancient slate gave me time to reflect, to be myself. But now I had other suspicions. Perhaps they had steered the conversation that way because they wanted me to have a service job, to keep me from rising too high, from threatening them.
    “Only three days before the vocation ceremony,” one of the men said. He had a mustache. And a gold thread in his rank cord.