My name is Ronna Deallus.
My faction is Candor.
I do not belong here.
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For a faction where the truth is valued above all else, the Candor are strangely reluctant to admit their own flaws. We are taught from when we are toddlers that honesty is the way to peace, that lies and deceit breed fear, chaos and war. Lying to spare someone’s feelings would be sheer stupidity: why hide the facts from someone and prevent them from learning from their mistakes and becoming a better person? Surely it would be kinder to tell them the truth, than to lie and let them carry on in ignorance?
But we are a faction of hypocrisy. We spend our lives pursuing the truth and sparing no one from our brutal honesty, and we even go so far as to say that self-denial and modesty are just ways of lying to yourself, and yet when someone voices honest criticism of our faction as a whole, we suddenly decide it’s okay to pick our truths and leap to the defence of our way of life. We have learnt how to twist the truth when it suits us, and manipulate it so the truth is what we want it to be.
These are the thoughts that fill my brain as I sit in the school cafeteria with my lunch at what has become the Candor table. Before we even sit down I can hear the beginnings of a debate starting up behind me, and my heart sinks a little.
Just once, it would be nice to actually do something fun, something other than what our faction – and everyone outside of it – expects of us.
There are five of us today. Alicia, my best friend, sits to my left, her flaming red hair bobbing up and down as she gestures animatedly about some apparently important topic. I can’t imagine she ever doubts the principles of our faction – while I am more open with her than I am with most people, I am always careful of saying too much. She is a true Candor, open with her opinions and hell-bent on knowing the facts behind any situation, and making them known to the rest of the world. If I told her how I really felt, it would only be a matter of time before the whole faction knew.
My boyfriend Jack sits on the other side of me. Even as he frowns at Alicia across the table and focuses all his attention on whatever she’s saying, he reaches under the table for my hand and interlocks his fingers with mine, sending a warm sensation tingling through my veins. We’ve been friends since we were just four years old and his family moved in next door to mine. He managed to scramble underneath the fence between our gardens and pop up in our flowerbed, covered in mud from head to toe. He told me my teeth were too big, I told him he needed a bath, and we’d been best friends ever since – until a couple of months back, when he kissed me in the middle of a school corridor with what felt like the whole school watching.
Sometimes, like now, I am perfectly content to sit and study him: the way his hair untidy hair shines gold even under the harsh fluorescent cafeteria lighting, the way his eyebrows knit together slightly when he concentrates, the light behind his dark eyes. Despite having to tell the truth all the time, I only really feel like I'm truly being myself with a handful of people, and Jack is one of them.
I look away from him before he notices me staring. Tomorrow, the three of us will have our Aptitude test. We will know where we are supposed to spend the rest of our lives. People say the results don’t change anything, that it’s still down to you to choose, but I’m not so sure that’s the case – I don’t know what I’ll do if I get anything other than Candor.
“...which is obviously not the case!”
“Oh really? Well what about just the other day when the bus wasn’t running and I had to walk here, I saw them lurking on the corner of a street and-”
