The next day at dinner, my parents are silent, chewing on the food I have made them with almost a look of disgust on their faces. Caleb, too, is quiet, but he's not half as mad at me as they are. I had stumbled in the door last night past midnight to find my parents panicking frantically, my Dad on the verge of organising a search party for me.
"You can't wake the neighbours, Andrew, not for this!" my mother had said in a strained voice. I'd heard her as I'd walked up the pathway, trying to make an excuse for where I had been.
"What if she's been kidnapped? What if that sick Matthews woman went too far this time?" Dad had shouted back. My parents hardly ever raised their voices. Guilt was consuming me.
I'd walked in the door, bloody and dusty and groggy, and told them that I'd wandered too near the factionless area and had gotten lost. I told them that I had fallen and hit my head on a stone. I lied way too easily. They didn't believe me - I could tell - but they said no more. The Abnegation, though not Candor, believe in truth. Lying to cover ones traces is selfish.
Now we sat at the table, eating, and tonight I had offered to make dinner to make up for my abscence the night prior. The food tastes stale and tasteless, scraping its way down my throat. I think it's the overwhelming guilt that I feel that makes it that way. I wish I could enjoy my last meal with my parents, but I cannot. And I wonder why.
When I leave, I will be helping to overthrow the system I have always flawed secretly, the system I never really seemed to belong to. So why do I feel so wrong?
Maybe I'm more Abnegation than I think.
Our parents have a muted discussion about nothing important, and I try to take something from it, something I will remember them by when I become an exile. But there is nothing.
My father does paperwork, my mother knits by the fire, and Caleb reads a book I don't recognise from school, but I don't point that out. We are quiet now after a dinner with a tense atmosphere. We are too quiet. My forehead beads with sweat and all of a sudden, leaving seems to be the best option in the world. But I can't. So I sit there and watch my mother knit, watch my father read, watch the firelight flicker off Caleb's glasses. I'm finding it too surreal to believe that this is my last night here. It's so normal.
When we go to bed, however, there is a tap on the door.
That is not normal.
YOU ARE READING
Divergent: Before We Chose
Fanfiction"I realize that if we had both chosen differently, we might have ended up doing the same thing, in a safer place, in gray clothes instead of black ones." What if Tobias and Tris hadn't met each other in Dauntless? What if fate won over chance, and t...
