All Chapters of Before They Choose : Chapter 1 - Chapter 6

The first time I lied to a Matcher, I was twelve years old, and I didn't even know it was a lie. Do you feel anything, when you look at him? the woman had asked, kneeling in front of me with her clipboard and her kind, tired eyes, gesturing at Rowan Ashby across the schoolyard. He was eating dirt on a dare. I was seven months from losing my first tooth. "No," I'd said, and it was true, and the Matcher had smiled and written something down, and that was the last time in my life a Matcher ever asked me a question I could answer honestly. I am eighteen years old now. I have three years, two months, and six days until my Assessment, and I have been in love since March. Nobody warns you that the countdown starts before you're ready for it. In Calder City, you grow up counting forward — four years until you're old enough for the schoolyard gate, seven years until Junior Rites, eleven years until you can test into the Guild track of your choosing. And then you turn eighteen, and somethi

Once a month, on the first Sunday, every unmatched citizen of Calder City between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one reports to the Hall of Names for Questioning. It is not called an interrogation. The pamphlets are very careful about that. It is called a wellness inquiry, and it is conducted in a small grey room with a small grey desk and a Matcher who has asked the same six questions so many thousand times that her voice has worn a groove into them, flat and even, like water running over the same stone for two hundred years. "Have you experienced any romantic attachment since your last inquiry?" "No." "Have you engaged in any unsupervised courtship behavior?" "No." "Do you currently hold any romantic feelings toward a specific individual?" This is the one. This is always the one. I have learned to let my eyes go soft and slightly bored when it comes, to let a full second pass before I answer, because the Matchers are trained to watch for the too-quick denial, the guilty spe

The apprentice application sits on the kitchen table for three days before I touch it.It's not a long document ,a single folded sheet of the Guild's heavy cream paper, stamped at the corner with the same crest that watches over every doorway in the Hall of Names: two open hands, palm up, cradling a small carved star. We do not choose for you. We only help you see clearly. That's the motto, printed in careful script beneath the crest, and I have read it perhaps a thousand times in my life without ever once considering how much weight those words are carrying, how much they are doing the work of making a decision feel like a gift.I fill it in on the fourth night, alone, by candlelight, after my parents have gone to bed. Name. Age. Guild aptitude scores from Junior Rites, which I remember with an unpleasant jolt were recorded by the very Institution I'm now asking to let me inside. A short essay — no more than three hundred words on why you believe you would serve Calder City well as a