PersonaliKey

Prologue: The Sorting Ceremony

            I fiddled with the pair of ornate keys, one silver and the other gold, dangling from the chain around my neck. I had been dreading today all month, but no amount of pining will get my dad to turn the car around. I tried already. I rubbed my fingers across the faces embedded in the stained glass circles filling each of the key's center ring. There was a slit across each of the faces, dividing them in half. It separated the eyes from the mouth. Each pair of eyes and mouths from the two keys represented a part of my personality. Funny, back when I first got the key during my sorting ceremony, I loved the face in the gold key – its outrageously large smile half and ridiculous angry eyebrows could always give me a smile. Now, I felt like it was taunting me. I felt like the face in the silver key – eyes closed, mouth sewn shut.

"So, honey." My dad said, briefly looking away from the road over towards me, "Are you feeling... nervous?"

"You don't have to do that, dad."

"Do what?"

"You know." I scoffed. "Ask about feelings. I know you Thinking types don't understand them. You don't have to pretend." I gave him a halfhearted smile. I've never seen a thinker try so hard to understand a feeler as my dad does for me.

"You discredit me, my darling Thalia, today is the day your entire future is decided by the Meyer-Briggs Committee." He paused and looked over at me. I sank deeper into the brand-new chair cushion. "It's soundly logical to be apprehensive about the outcome of the Grade Eight Graduation Ceremony, given its weighted importance. Especially since --"

"Since I'm not an INTP like the rest of our family." I said. My father furrowed his brow and softly nodded. I jostled the mouth half of the gold key, the one with the huge smile. The smile meant I was a Feeling type instead of a Thinking type. It wiggled like always, these two crossing golden pins kept that half of the circle locked from flipping. If only I could change that one semicircle.

"Be careful." My dad brushed the keys out of my hands. "Remember, that used to be your mother's crest. She spent her last months alive reshaping that stained glass from the Thinker-frown to the Feeler-smile, just so you could inherit one of the family's ancient relics, even though you're the first INFP."

"I wish she didn't have to change it." Everyone gets a special relic when their personality type is announced after their genetic testing ceremony. Most families have a vault where they store all these relics, and normally you pick one out from the vault. Our family runs the genetic testing for personalities, the whole society depends on us.

"No one gets to choose their personality type. No matter how much a Thinker wishes they could feel emotion, it's biologically impossible for them. You were born an INFP, it's who you are, an unabashed optimist. The Shakespeare family will just have to adapt." Dad pulled his suit sleeve up to reveal his silver and gold wristwatches, which had their clocks replaced with the two faces long ago. He smiled at the ancient watches. "Besides, it is beneficial to introduce a letter of diversity into the family, perhaps our reunions won't take place solely in our corporate buildings anymore."

"What was it like?" I asked.

My dad gave me a perplexed look. "Contextualize your sentence please, Thalia." Sometimes I wonder if they encourage speaking like a robot at the Introvert-Thinker type schools, or if it just comes naturally.

"When I was sorted. I was too young to remember. Was mom there?"

My dad furrowed his eyebrows again. He does that a lot. My friend Sally Singer, she's an ESFP – one of those social types – said that all the thinkers do that. "Yes, she was there. It was an unexpected probability, around half a percent. I remember we ran the numbers the night before, threw a big statistics party to calculate them with the rest of the family." He looked over at the keys around my neck again. "Once she found out, she darted towards her lab, back in our old house, and didn't come out for weeks. Took me hours to get her to come out for food. Her career was selected to be the lead personality geneticist, if you recall, so having such a rare personality type manifest in her daughter was her magnum opus."