When we were 16 years old

Hannah

Things stabilized after our return from our camping trip and remained stable thereafter. We took part in our third camping trip and, knowing what was really going on, kept to ourselves for the duration of the entire trip without telling Miranda why for the sake of her continued mental health.

Like they had done on the previous year’s camping trip Lisa and Miranda shared a room, only this time it wasn’t because Lisa rudely evicted the girl who was supposed to be Miranda’s roommate. She spoke to my mother before the camping trip was due to commence and expressed her concern for Miranda’s mental state and her desire to ensure it remained stable and asked my mother if she would make it so that they were roomed together in the same cabin. They were, and the boy who was in training to be a homeopath who was supposed to be Lisa’s roommate during the last camping trip was placed in the cabin with them. Lisa and Miranda had become much closer, almost inseparable, since the previous years camping trip. If ever she had time available Lisa would attend Miranda’s practices with the orchestra. The two of them were spending more time with each other and less time with the rest of us, even having sleepovers to which I was never invited. I wondered if the feelings that Miranda had for Lisa that I’d learned about during the last camping trip had developed into something real. I hadn’t seen anything in the way they interacted with each other in public that suggested that there was a physical relationship between them, but then the five of us had become experts at being secretive.

As for me and Kevin, nothing had happened between us romantically either during or after the camping trip, so great was his fear that he would be the subject of the ultimate punishment should we be caught together. I completely understood his apprehension. Kevin hadn’t been subjected to any excessive attention for close to two years and I knew he was much happier and more relaxed not worrying about any imminent threat to him.

For me the past two years had brought with them an enormous amount of knowledge. It had been decided by my mother and some of the others who were overseeing my special education that it was time I started learning about the policies according to which Prospera was governed that none of the citizens outside of a select few high ranking officials knew about. The first thing I asked her about when I was told this was the camping trip and the reasons we were sent on it every year.

“The point of the camping trip is to instil in all of you a greater sense of independence and maturity by placing you in an environment that gives you the freedom to behave as you wish and to confront and resolve any issues you might have that you’re afraid to address in the main village. The manner in which you conduct yourselves on the camping trip gives us information that we use to better understand your character as individuals,” she answered impassively.

“So you were having us watched?”

“Yes, we had five students observing you who reported to us when you all returned, they’re also being readied for official positions; I can’t tell you their names just yet.”

“What about our cabin mates? Do you room us with people who you think are perfect matches for us?”

“Yes, it works. Your father and I were cabin mates, as were all of your friends’ parents. Who figured that out? Was it you?”

“It was Kevin; does that surprise you?”

“No, not at all. He’s exceptionally bright, and he scored the highest points on the camping trip; his maturity, leadership and organisational skills are second to none.”

“The children who didn’t score well, they were the ones who received new occupational assignments, right?”

“That’s right, the occupation you’re assigned is based on your natural skills but also on your personality index which we start compiling when you’re two years old.”

Listening to my mother talk I was astounded that she could remain so impassive when talking about things such as secretly monitoring and analyzing people and deciding the course of their lives. Equally astounding was how everything she said confirmed what Kevin had believed about Prospera since he was a small child: that there was a sophisticated program of testing, observation and quantification going on that dictated life in Prospera. I wasn’t sure if I was ready to be a part of this convoluted and secret system, a misgiving I expressed to my mother.

“Don’t worry, I felt the same way when all of this was shared with me, but always remember that you’ve been chosen to carry out this responsibility because we believe that you’re ready.”

Part of this new phase of learning that I was being introduced to was to travel around the village with my mother as she carried out her tasks as a Prospera prefect. One day a week I would be excused from school and would go with my mother in the morning to the Central Administration building and assist her with her work before we set out around the village on horseback. The days we did this varied to ensure that our visits couldn’t be prepared for and because there were particular aspects of Prospera that were best inspected on certain days. With winter almost upon us most of the visits we were making were to check up on the progress being made in readying the village for what was always a harsh winter. The stockpiling of provisions was the most important aspect of preparing Prospera for winter; that was our main priority. We travelled to farms and talked with farmers about their expected yields, we travelled to the greenhouses where vegetables would be grown during the winter and inspected the preparations being made there, we talked with the cattle ranchers about the livestock numbers and their readiness for slaughtering, we went to the mill to check on the amount of grain that was being processed and stored, we visited the oil well and the oil refinery to find out if enough oil was being pumped, refined and stored, we visited the lumber yard where the wood that we would need for heating our homes was being cut and stockpiled, we checked on the work being done on the village’s water network, where the grease that had been applied to the pipes the previous year to keep them from freezing was being scraped off so that new grease could be applied to the pipes.

These trips that I took with my mother opened my eyes to the level of authority and responsibility that she had. The people that we visited spoke with her with deep respect and my mother displayed extensive knowledge about everything that she dealt with, whether it was agriculture, infrastructure, education or health. The efficiency and purpose with which she went about her tasks was impressive; in a short space of time my perception of my mother had been transformed and I quickly had to adjust to this new image of my mother which, in some ways, unsettled me. The respect with which people spoke with my mother I could tell was tinged with fear; she clearly wielded enormous power. I would learn how much when we visited the home of Martha, the mother of a six year old girl named Samantha who loved reading and was always coming to the library. My mother was acting on news she’d received that Martha was pregnant. We were joined at the house by one of the village’s midwives, who examined Martha and left the house after a quick word in my mother’s ear. What happened next kept me awake for two nights straight. My mother sat down and said to Martha, chillingly calmly, that the population of Prospera was at the limit of what the village’s resources were capable of sustaining and that a midwife would be visiting her in the coming days to terminate the pregnancy. That said, we left and moved on to the next item on our itinerary for the day. My mother hadn’t displayed even the slightest bit of emotion when telling Martha that her unborn child was going to be killed or when Martha completely broke down after receiving the news. This wasn’t an easy job that my mother was doing, the decisions that she faced were all challenging and her workload was immense. Watching her left me with more doubts about my ability to do what I’d been selected for and about my belief in the policies of Prospera. I couldn’t get Martha’s tears or my mother’s cold treatment of her out of my mind. The scenes that I’d witnessed were not commensurate with the egalitarianism Prospera was supposed to stand for; Martha had been the victim of cruelty by someone who had been given the authority to victimise if that was the prescribed remedy to a problem. My fear of my mother grew. Had she been behind the death of Tom and the other mysterious deaths in the village, most of them children? Was I expected to do the same one day? I couldn’t imagine myself doing what I’d seen my mother do to Martha and the thought that I might have to someday was a weight on my mind that threatened to break me.

I had been explicitly told not to share any of what I was learning with anyone else, but the only way that I could reach some kind of peace with what I had been exposed to was to get Kevin’s opinion on it and to include his perspective in my thinking. The problem was that Kevin had changed. Long gone was the boundary-pushing crusader for truth, replaced by a quiescent, model Prospera citizen. He attended school every day, went out on the fishing boat every Friday like he was told, and had stopped talking about and trying to uncover secrets and conspiracies. He’d remained the person he’d been on our second camping trip and hadn’t told us why. We all had our theories, the most credible of which came from Darren, who hypothesized that Kevin was continuing to keep to himself because if we were being watched on the camping trip there was a good chance we were always being watched. Personally I thought the reason that Kevin was keeping to himself and trying to be inconspicuous was that he’d at long last arrived at a place of comfort with his place in Prospera. Every day after school Kevin liked to sit on one of the benches by the lake reading or just sitting alone with his thoughts. Like when we were on the camping trip, one of the reasons he did this was so that we’d always know where to find him. In the end I didn’t go to him and share with him the experiences that I’d had with my mother. I didn’t want to cause him any unnecessary concern and at some point I was going to need to stop depending on him every time I was having a hard time with something in Prospera and I decided that time was now.

The day after my mother had informed Martha of what was going to happen with her pregnancy I secretly paid her a visit to check on how she was doing. Remarkably she was doing rather well, displaying none of the despair that she’d displayed the previous day. On closer inspection I saw that her demeanour was anything but normal. From her tone of voice and her smile it was disturbingly obvious how hard she was working to keep the person she’d been the previous day repressed. The words with which she spoke to me were equally disturbing.

“I understand now. I was being selfish before, thinking only about my own feelings; it’s not right for me to put myself before Prospera.”

I didn’t stay any longer after she said this to see if I could get her to tell me the truth. She was terrified of me. By joining my mother on all of her official trips I had become associated with the absolute authority she possessed that so many feared. I didn’t want this. I didn’t want to be feared, to be regarded with wariness, to be cut off from my fellow Prospera citizens by a barrier of authority. The future of isolation to which my mother had consigned me by having me accompany her as she carried out her duties was one which I couldn’t see myself being able to function in. The worst part was that at this point there was no way out for me. I had had information shared with me that was considered deadly in the wrong hands and being in possession of that information I was expected to bear the burden of the responsibility that it carried with it. And it was my burden to bear alone, for as much as I had Kevin, Darren, Miranda and Lisa, the fact remained that I would be the only one of us on the Ethics Committee making decisions on and addressing issues like maintaining a manageable population level. I was alone, surrounded by people who now feared me and facing a future of constant moral conflict. Not even Kevin could help me with this.

Miranda

The danger involved in what we were doing was ever present in mine and Lisa’s minds. During our sleepovers at each other’s houses we took the utmost care late at night to ensure we made as little noise as possible, when we were out in the open we made sure not to touch each other or talk to each other too intimately, if ever we were secretly approached by a boy we dismissed him as gently as we could.

We’d been together for two years and had in that time all but perfected our ability to keep our relationship a secret. There were times, however, when we couldn’t help ourselves and took an extraordinary risk by ducking behind a wall or some bushes to steal a kiss, or we’d make a plan to both ask to go the bathroom at the same time during school and we’d go into one of the stalls and kiss and sometimes even make love. We felt an urge to be with each other physically because of our love for each other but it was also the taboo nature of our relationship that gave us a constant thrill. On a few occasions we’d very nearly gotten caught—a couple of times during our sleepovers when we’d been together in the same bed and our parents had come in to check on us and we’d had to lie and tell them that we were snuggling together because it was so cold, and once when we were in a bathroom stall and somebody entered the bathroom while I was going down on Lisa. Once the coast was clear, the exhilaration we felt from having almost been caught had us going at each other harder than before. Our need to keep the truth about ourselves a secret sobered the mood between us sometimes when we were alone. As much fun as it was to sneak around and be in our own secret world the idea that what we were doing was something that was deemed unacceptable was a burden on us both. We loved each other and didn’t see how the fact that we were two girls made that wrong. It affected Lisa much more than it did me. She said to me often that it upset her that we needed to be afraid of being with each other.

“Kevin’s right, there are things about Prospera that are deeply wrong,” she said to me one night during one of our sleepovers.

“Maybe we are allowed to be together, maybe there’s never been a couple like us before because we’re the first, not because it’s not allowed,” I responded, trying to alleviate her despondency.

“You know that’s not true, but thanks for saying it. That’s what I love about you; you’re so positive and optimistic.”

Moments like these, when we felt as if the uncertainty of our situation didn’t matter, were becoming fewer and farther between. Lisa’s anxiety and anger over our situation was growing inexorably. The times when she would talk about the inherent wrongness of our need to fear what would happen to us should we be discovered were increasing in number and the discontent she felt was manifesting in various areas of her life; in an unexpected role reversal I was having to regularly calm and reassure her. The area of her life that was the most affected by her discontent was her schoolwork. As part of her medical training Lisa was required to perform an exercise that involved synthesizing dry poppy buds into an anaesthetic, administering it to a pig, cutting the pig open, removing a kidney and sewing the pig up again without the pig waking up in the middle of surgery or experiencing any post-op difficulties. The exercise didn’t go well. Lisa’s anaesthetic was improperly prepared and the pig woke up in the middle of the operation, requiring Lisa’s supervisor to quickly slit it’s throat and hold it down while it bled to death. Failing the exercise affected Lisa deeply. She sought me out as soon as she was excused by her supervisor and pulled me out of my orchestra rehearsal so that we could go to her house and make love. Her parents being away at work, we were free to make as much noise as we wanted. Lisa was exceptionally forceful, pouring all of her frustration with herself for failing her exam as well as her constantly growing frustration with our situation into me. Her body felt heavier than usual on top of me with all of the pressure she was pushing down on me with, her tongue battered into my mouth and her fingers, rather than slipping into me, felt more like they were puncturing me. She was coming apart and I wasn’t doing an effective job of holding her together, making our situation more dangerous and difficult to manage. Our plan had been to remain as inconspicuous as possible but with Miranda pulling me out of rehearsals so that we could make love it was only going to be a matter of time before we drew attention to ourselves and were caught. Added to all of this was the unstoppable march of time. Lisa and I had been together for two years, in another two years we would be eighteen, the age at which we were expected to be seen enjoying the permission we had to take romantic partners. What were Lisa and I going to do if people found it odd that we didn’t have boyfriends and were continuing to spend all of our time with each other? Suspicion about us was going to grow and the increased attention we would receive would make it impossible for us to be together. We were running out of time, we both knew it. Soon we would be forced to separate and partner with boys for the sake of giving ourselves the appearance of normalcy. The thought of having to do so made my skin crawl. I couldn’t imagine being intimate with anyone but Lisa, certainly not a boy, and seeing Lisa with someone else would cause me too much pain. The only boy who I could picture myself being comfortable feigning intimacy with was Kevin, but that would mean taking him away from Hannah and that was out of the question.

Lisa and I never talked about what we would do when that time came. The inevitability of it was too painful for us to give voice to. All we could do was make the most of the little time that we had left. When we were together I did my best to make sure we didn’t rush through things. If ever Lisa was using my body as an outlet for her anger I would kiss her softly and hold her tightly and not allow her fingers to enter me until she had calmed down so that we could properly enjoy being with each other; on our sleepovers we stayed up so late kissing and pleasuring each other that the following day at school we would be dozing off during our classes. The strength of the bond that we shared was incredible. From the occasional gossip that we heard it sounded as if none of the other couples that had gotten together during the camping trips had stayed together. What Lisa and I had was special, in the face of frightening unknowns and surrounded by people from whom we needed to hide our true selves we had continued seeing each other and had fallen deeper in love. What existed between us couldn’t have been shameful if we were willing to risk so much to continue being together, it just couldn’t. As I thought about this I was having ever greater amounts of my time consumed by thoughts about the unfairness of what we were facing. Unlike Lisa, who felt mostly anger, what I mostly felt was disappointment in Prospera for being so narrow minded. Ever since our second camping trip during which I had reconnected with my friends and had had Lisa reciprocate my feelings for her, my faith in Prospera had been steadily recovering and now, with the strain that our secrecy was placing on me and Lisa, that faith was starting to erode again. Slipping into the shell of panic and mistrust into which I’d slipped before wasn’t an option, nor was it something I could see happening any time in the future. Lisa needed me and I needed to be there for her. Lisa and I would remain together and we would remain strong for each other, because in this environment of fear, worry and mistrust we were each other’s only hope.

Lisa

I couldn’t understand the lack of anger that Miranda was feeling. The sneaking around and hiding that we were doing was making me feel subhuman and I couldn’t look past the wrongness of that. The fear that we were living in required me to suppress everything that I was feeling when I was in a place where I could be seen and when I was at home with my parents. The only time I could express all of the negative feelings that were constantly threatening to burst out of me was when I was with Miranda. My expression of my anger when I was with Miranda upset her and created tension between us. I didn’t like that I was doing that, but I couldn’t help the way I was feeling. Every day I would go around the village and see people that I’d grown up with and trusted and would wonder if Miranda and I would be safe from them if the truth about us were to get out.

Hannah’s mother in particular caused me the most unease. Growing up she had been a maternal figure to me as she had been to so many others: kind, sweet, giving and welcoming. For four years Miranda had been telling us about the things that she’d been learning as she was being prepared for her place on the Ethics Committee and about what her mother was like as an instructor and what she’d told us shocked us all. She told us about the measures that were being taken to keep the population of Prospera below a certain limit, about the reasons behind our cabin pairings on the camping trips, about the staggering amount of knowledge that was being kept from the citizens of Prospera because it was decided long ago that the village would be destabilized if people were to have access to such knowledge, and she described her mother as a cold, stern woman who did the things she told us about without showing the slightest bit of conflict or remorse. Miranda was never included in these conversations; we thought it best to exclude her from them to prevent them from having an impact on her fragile mind. After hearing all of Hannah’s stories her mother became the person I feared the most and trusted the least. The person we saw, who went through the village smiling, greeting and chatting with people was not, according to Hannah, who she really was, and if we’d been so fooled by her just how deep did the deception go in Prospera?

I wasn’t expecting to become entwined with Miranda to the extent that I had. I’d never been one for relying on people; in fact it was the exact opposite: I’d always felt a strong pull toward isolation and solipsism. Miranda had changed that about me. The guilt that I had felt that had impelled me to be there for her as much as I could had opened my mind to the idea of real friendship and from there the closeness between us grew to the point where it wasn’t enough for us to be just friends. The night during the camping trip when I’d kissed her had been my expression of my desire for us to cross the only boundary that remained between us. Part of me wondered, however, if I was only with Miranda because of the strong attachment I felt to her as my closest friend and not because I was actually attracted to girls. Before that night when Miranda’s tears had melted the cold façade that I was presenting to her I’d never so much as entertained the idea of being with a girl. I’d always looked at Darren and thought that the two of us would make a great pair. Like me he was solipsistic, reserved and utterly devoted to his academic and occupational pursuits.

Lately the thought that Miranda and I were getting too deeply involved had been troubling me. As the person who had played the biggest role in helping Miranda to overcome her anxiety problems I was wary of us developing feelings for each other that were too deep, afraid of what it would do to her should our relationship come to an end for some reason. The responsibility that I felt for Miranda’s mental wellbeing required me to ensure that our relationship didn’t suck us in too deep, which was hard to do given how obsessed with her I’d become. It was getting to be that I couldn’t stop thinking about what it was like being with her, what she smelled like, what she felt like, what she tasted like. My growing obsession with her body and her sexuality was making me do things that put us in danger. Using Miranda’s body to express any emotion I was feeling was the only way I could think of to do so. When I was happy I used sex to show her how happy she made me; when I was angry I used sex to show her how outraged I was by our inability to freely be who we were.

But were my feelings for her real? They felt real, but I wasn’t sure. It was possible that the feelings I had for Miranda were a combination of the sympathy I felt for her, my admiration of her talent and the sense of injustice I felt about our situation. I had to admit that engaging in something forbidden that required us to be careful and secretive to avoid getting ourselves into trouble was exciting and I enjoyed feeling the moral indignation that I felt I was entitled to. I knew that Miranda’s feelings for me were real. She’d confessed to me that she’d had feelings for me for years and that had I not kissed her that night she most probably wouldn’t have told me how she felt, meaning we would never have gotten together. Knowing that her feelings for me were genuine and that she’d had them a long time increased my concern about the seriousness of our relationship. I couldn’t leave her; if I did, I would destroy her.

Complicating all of my thoughts about my relationship with Miranda was the close relationship that had developed between Darren and Penny, the playwright that I’d evicted from Miranda’s room on the camping trip two years ago. The play that Darren had been writing and rehearsing on that camping trip had been staged and had been a success. Penny, impressed by the quality of Darren’s writing, had asked him for his input on something she was writing and they’d remained close since. I’d see them walking together or working together and I would experience unbidden feelings of jealousy. The way I felt about Darren was nothing like the way I felt about Miranda. Darren had always been, to me, someone with whom I had enough in common for us to be comfortable companions. Miranda was emotional, brilliant, fragile and complicated; the multifaceted nature of her changed me every day in ways I always had to adjust to. The person I was when I was with Miranda wasn’t the real me. I didn’t like personal drama, tension or insecurity. My relationship with Miranda had made all of these things the arenas in which I was living my life. My academics were suffering and my mind, of which I used to have complete control, had become unpredictable and a challenge for me to get a hold of. At times the pressure I was feeling from these various directions came dangerously close to overwhelming me and whenever that happened there was only one way for me to deal with it: go to Miranda. I’d do things like pull her out her orchestra rehearsals so that we could go somewhere where we could be intimate with each other; I’d show up at her house in the evening or at night and say that I was there for our sleepover and Miranda would have to quickly lie and say she’d forgotten to ask her parents if it was okay, to which they would always say that it wasn’t a problem at all. Miranda being the only person with whom I could share my feelings did present problems though. Because of the fragility of her mind I had to be extra careful not to say anything that she couldn’t handle so that she wouldn’t have another precipitous mental collapse. This left me most times with physical, sexual expression as my only means of communication. Without the ability to give voice to much of what I was feeling those feelings remained trapped within me, growing more pernicious with time. I was going to crack, I could feel it.