“Are you sure?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says, and then I know that he is. He’s in pain. I am, too. It strikes me that perhaps this is part of what we are fighting to choose. Which pain we feel.
Not much time has passed since the Match Banquet, but we are different now, stripped of our fancy clothes, our artifacts, our belief in the Match System. I stand there, thinking about this. How much has changed. How little we knew.
“You always have to make me speak first, don’t you?” Xander asks, a hint of a smile on his face. “You always win our arguments in the end.”
“Xander,” I say, and I sit down and slide right next to him. His arm goes around me, and I put my head on his shoulder and he bends his head to rest on mine. I sigh, so deep it is almost a shudder, at the relief I feel. At how good this is, to be held like this. None of it is for the Society, watching, always. It is al real, for me. I wil miss him so much.
Neither of us says anything for a moment, as we look out at our street together one last time. I might come back, but I won’t live here again. Once you’ve been Relocated, you don’t return except to visit. Clean breaks are best. And I wil make the cleanest break of al , when I go to find Ky. That is the kind of Infraction that no one can overlook.
“I heard you leave tomorrow,” Xander says, and I nod, my head moving against his cheek. “I have to tel you something.”
“What is it?” I ask. I look ahead, feeling his shoulder move under the shirt of his plainclothes as he shifts position slightly, but I don’t move away.
What wil he tel me? That he can’t believe I betrayed him? That he wishes he’d been Matched with anyone but me? Those are the things I deserve to hear, but I don’t think he wil say them. Not Xander.
“I remember what happened this morning,” Xander whispers to me. “I know what real y happened to Ky.”
“How?” I sit upright, look at him.
“The red tablets don’t work on me,” he whispers, soft into my ear, so no one else can hear. He looks down the street, back toward the Markhams’
house. “They didn’t work on Ky, either.”
“What?” How is it that these two boys who are so different are connected in such unexpected, deep ways? Maybe we al are, I think, and we don’t know how to see it anymore. “Tel me.”
Xander stil gazes at the little house with the yel ow shutters where Ky lived hours ago. Where Ky watched and learned how to survive. Xander taught him some of that, without knowing it. And perhaps Xander has been learning from Ky, too.
“I dared him to take it once, a long time ago,” Xander says quietly. “It was when he first got here. I acted friendly to him, but inside I was jealous. I saw how you looked at him.”
“Real y?” I don’t remember this at al , but suddenly I hope Xander’s right. I hope part of me fel in love with Ky before anyone else told me to.
“It’s not a memory I’m proud of,” Xander tel s me. “I asked him to come swimming with me one day and then on the way I told him I knew about his artifact. I knew about it because once, one Borough over, I was coming back from taking something to a friend and I caught Ky using it, trying to find his way home. He was so careful. I think it was the one time he got it out, ever, but he had bad timing. I saw him.” This image almost breaks my heart; it’s another side of Ky I haven’t seen before—lost. Taking risks. As wel as I know him, as much as I love him, there are stil parts of him I don’t know. It’s that way with everyone, even Xander, who I never could have pictured being so cruel.
“I dared him to find and steal two red tablets. I thought it would be impossible. I said that if he didn’t bring them to swimming the next day to prove he could, I’d tel everyone about the compass—the artifact—and get Patrick in trouble.”
“What did he do?”
“You know Ky. He wouldn’t risk his uncle.” Then Xander starts to laugh. Shocked, I bal my fists up in anger. Does he think this is funny? What, in this story, could there possibly be to laugh at?
“So Ky got the tablets. And guess who he stole them from?” Xander says, stil laughing. “Just guess.”
“I don’t know. Tel me.”
“My parents.” Xander stops laughing. “Of course, it wasn’t funny at the time. That night my parents were upset because their red tablets were missing. I knew right away what had happened, but of course I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t tel them about the dare.” Xander looks down and I notice that he has a large brown paper envelope in his hand. It makes me think of Ky’s story. I’m hearing another part of it now. “It was a big mess.
Officials came and everything. I don’t know if you remember that.”
I shake my head. I don’t.
“They checked to make sure we hadn’t taken the tablets, and they could tel somehow that we hadn’t, and my parents were pretty convincing, saying they didn’t know what happened. They were completely panicked. Final y, the Officials decided that my parents must have lost the tablets when they were swimming earlier in the week and that they’d been negligent not to notice it sooner. They’d never caused any trouble before, so they got off without an Infraction. Just a citation.”
“Ky did that? Took the tablets from your parents?”
“He did.” Xander takes a deep breath. “I went to his house the next day ready to tear him apart. He stood on the front steps waiting for me. When I got there he held out the two red tablets, right for everyone to see.
“Of course, I was so scared I grabbed them out of his hand and asked him what he was trying to do. That’s when he told me that you don’t play with other people’s lives.” Xander seems ashamed, remembering. “And then he told me that we could start over if I wanted. Al we had to do was take the red tablets, one for each of us. He promised me we wouldn’t get hurt.”
“That’s cruel of him, too,” I say in shock, but to my surprise Xander disagrees with me.
“He knew the tablets didn’t work on him; I don’t know how, but he did. He thought they would work on me. He thought I wouldn’t remember how horrible I’d been and that I’d be able to start clean.”
“How many other people do you think are walking around out there, pretending that their tablets worked when they didn’t?” I ask, wondering.