Chapter 1
(Leah)
The thing that most scared me where the words so carefully carved on the tombstones. A dense fog covered the Assia cemetery, weighing down on every step I took. Either way, I proceeded, engulfed by fog and a seemingly endless forest of tombstones, so different from the silicon ones we now use. The old cemetery was the only remaining relic in our central of what was our society once was.
I was a reader, my vocation had been clear to most from even before I took the aptitude tests. When I was still in primary formation school, I was already familiar with the lettering system and it was no shock when my aptitude test revealed that I was most fitted for “Literary second level formation”. Sarah though had never understood the beauty of words, and the meanings behind them. She was a mathematic, and her vocation laid in numbers not letters.
When at age four I had been assigned my first group of potential contacts, the system had ranked Sarah as most likely to become my best friend and though faulted in many ways, the system had made no error in that choice.
Even having moved to different secondary schools and followed different vocations, we had remained best friends, much to the system’s surprise. It was odd for someone to stay with their initial contact group beyond one year of the selection. You were assigned a new group with your same aptitude at age six, right after the aptitude tests.
At the time I didn’t realize that this unusual friendship was alarming to the society and that we had been observed by the patrollers until they were sure that we weren’t a potential risk. Thankfully they had found nothing and, though we never knew we were being watched, I’m now relieved that by age fourteen we had been ranked as harmless and were no longer under observation.
“Read it to me again Leah, please.” Sarah whined.
Though she wasn’t a reader, her general curiosity made her lack of capacity to read torturous and, whenever we ventured to the old cemetery, she would beg me to read her the engravings. Most people are scared of the graveyard; rumors of ghosts and living dead spread quickly.
The first time we entered it was on a dare and we were just as scared as everyone else. With time though, we got to know the place and so it became our frequent hangout. Quieter than all places in the city, you could hear the wind whispering sweet nothings in the trees and the birds chirping their spring songs. You could hear nature, something else that now belongs to antiquity.
Sarah looked at me once more, pleading eyes and puppy-dog face. I observed her. Her long, blonde hair, once short, had now grown to the length of her shoulders. She had tan skin and light blue eyes that reflected the sky. Realizing I had no intention of encouraging her, she batted her long eyelashes and still pouting.
Sarah was beautiful. My straight brown hair couldn’t compete with her blonde waves and my small green eyes didn’t capture light as hers did. We even dressed differently; whilst she wore miniskirts and tank tops, I wore jeans and canvas shoes. Her bright colored clothes brought out the natural bronze of her skin, mine though were mainly light blue and pastel pink, to try and hide the contrast between the colors and my ivory skin, so white it was almost translucent.
I wondered if she ever looked at me this way. Probably not though, there wasn’t much to look at. It was just I, under the shadow of her natural beauty, that let my mind think of things so futile. She was pragmatic, a mathematician, and the only person capable of making me feel home.
Still pleading, her voice turned whiny.
“Please! You know I can’t read, I’m not allowed to!”
I sighed. That was exactly the problem: she wasn’t allowed to read and I wasn’t aloud to read to her. The laws were there to be followed and after the “modern pestilence”, as they had called it, the punishment for those who didn’t follow was harsh. Nonetheless, this was Sarah pleading and I couldn’t resist.
“Fine, but this is the last one.”
How NOT to be functional 