Only Ever Yours

New York • London

© 2014 by Louise O’Neill

First published in the United States by Quercus in 2015

Cover design by Nicola Theobald

Cover photo © Angelo Calvo

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of the same without the permission of the publisher is prohibited.

Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use or anthology should send inquiries to
[email protected]
.

e-ISBN 978-1-62365-455-9

Distributed in the United States and Canada by

Hachette Book Group

1290 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10104

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

www.quercus.com

For Michael and Marie O’Neill, with all my love

September

Ten months until the Ceremony

The chastities keep asking me why I can’t sleep. I am at the maximum permitted dosage of SleepSound, they say, eyes narrowed in suspicious concern.

Are you taking it correctly, freida?

Are you taking it all yourself, freida?

Yes.
Yes.
Now, can I have some more? Please?

No more can be prescribed. Not safely anyway, they say. They warn of muscle spasms. Internal bleeding. The corrosion of vital organs.

But I cannot see these “vital organs” in the mirrors. All I can see are dark circles under my eyes, a gray pallor like a dusting of ashes over my face. The hallmarks of too many nights spent burrowing a hole in my mattress, tossing
and turning, yearning to join the perfectly synchronized breathing of my sisters. I can hear them now, sucking artificial heat into their lungs greedily, oblivious to me, lying in my cot, buzzing like an exposed wire.

I am a good girl. I am pretty. I am always happy-go-lucky.

The robotic voice spills down the walls and crawls along the floor, searching for a receptive ear. And we eves are more receptive when sleeping. We are like sponges, absorbing beauty, becoming more and more lovely as we dream. More and more valuable.

Except for me.

Night after night I lie awake, nothing but the Messages to distract me from my clamoring thoughts. chastity-ruth says thinking too much robs you of your beauty. No man will ever want a companion who thinks too much. I do try to be more controlled. I try to shape my mind into nothingness. But when night falls in the dorms the demons stir, their eyes flashing white in the dark, looking for something to feed on.

I am a good girl. I am appealing to others. I am always agreeable.

It’s the heat; I know it is. It’s pumped in at night to detoxify our pores, rolling in waves through the dormitory, molding to my skin. The SleepSound can disguise the fire in my lungs only for so long before I jerk awake, gargling steam. I blink as my cubicle flickers in the subdued light. A single bed with snow-white sheets. A locker crouching beside it, the black paint peeling off in ribbons. It is a small house made of mirrors, every surface papered in glass.

And there I am. And there. And there. I am imprisoned in these walls.

I watch in the mirrored ceiling as I spread my body out like a starfish, bending my knees away from the sticky sheets. My hands hit the clammy mirrored wall behind my head, the black silk nightgown gathering around my waist. I turn onto my right side, my forehead pressed against another mirrored wall, a heavy sigh misting the glass. I etch my fingertips over my high cheekbones, watching as I trace circles around my almond-shaped eyes. My skin feels crepe thin, as if it’s slowly dissolving into my bones.

Before us, they counted sheep to help them fall asleep. Before us, there were sheep to count.

I fumble under my pillow for my ePad, its square corners reassuringly solid in my hands. I update my MyFace status, whispering into the screen, “I can’t sleep again. Anyone out there awake?” A shiver of satisfaction runs through me as the video-status uploads, as if this somehow proves that I’m real. I exist.

“freida?”

Am I dreaming of her again?

She’s like an apparition, standing in the arched doorway between the corridor and my cubicle, her full-length pink bathrobe glowing in the shadows. She tilts her head, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, waiting for me to say something. I nod and her tense face softens as she creeps into my narrow bed, aligning her body with mine, our limbs interlocking like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. We are reflected in all of the mirrors, splintering into
parallel images, echoed from the ceiling to the walls and back, multiplied over and over again. Her milky-white legs entwined with mine, her white-blond hair bleeding into my dark brown waves.

isabel.

“I was afraid you were a chastity.”

“Sorry.”

“If she catches us breaking Isolation, we’ll get in trouble.”

“It will be fine.”

“Still . . .”

“chastity-ruth isn’t on duty,” she replies, reading my mind as always.

We breathe in unison. I rest my head on her shoulder, inhaling lavender, counting heartbeats. She shifts, pulling her arm from under me, and my head drops onto the damp sheets. She inches back, away from me, until she’s hovering on the edge of the bed, one foot planted on the ground for support.

“Good idea. It’s too hot, isn’t it?” I say quickly.

She came in, after all this time, I tell myself. You didn’t ask her to. She came in by herself.

“Hmm.” She taps her toes against the base mirror, her neon-pink nail polish matching her robe. I seem to be the only person affected by the heat.

“So,” I blurt out. “Where have you been hiding?”

“I haven’t been feeling well.”

“I sent you chat-requests . . .” I trail off, thinking of her room, the corrugated steel door rolled to the floor and
bolted down like a portcullis. I’ve sent her countless messages in the last two months. All unanswered.

“I can’t sleep.”

“Nervous about tomorrow?”

She shrugs apathetically.

“Have you asked chastity-anne for more SleepSound?”

“It interacts badly with my other meds.”

“What are you taking?” I prop myself up on my elbow to look at her. “I’m on the maximum dosage and I haven’t had problems.”

“gisele broke out in hives when they mixed her dosages. She looked ugly for a week,” she says, as if I hadn’t spoken, as if I don’t exist. She’s been doing that a lot lately.

“Can you
stop
kicking the mirror? It’s really annoying,” I snap, and her foot slows to a still. I feel guilty at the flicker of hurt on her face but somehow satisfied as well, savoring the sense of being seen by her.

“How do you know that about gisele anyway? You haven’t been at Organized Recreation or the Nutrition Center all summer,” I say, watching our reflection in the ceiling. I’m squashed against the wall, isabel skirting the edge of the mattress, a sliver of white flashing between us. Fat women are ugly. Old women are ugly. But gisele? Honey-hued gisele, with her honey-blond hair, honey-flecked eyes, honey-colored skin? Ugly?

“So that’s where she was last weekend,” I say when she doesn’t answer. “She told us she was in quarantine with suspected flu.”

“Hives,” isabel repeats. “Hives the size of eggies all over her face.”

“Pity it was during vacation,” I joke weakly, tasting a bubble of nausea. “Her rankings won’t be affected.”

“Be nice.”

“That’s easy for you to say, Miss #1.”

“You’re #3. And we were all designed equally,” she replies mechanically.

“Yes. But some eves were lucky enough to be designed better than their ugly sisters.” I hold my breath, waiting for her to disagree with me like she always used to.

“You’re not ugly, freida,” she sighs. She’s tired of me, tired of my constant need for reassurance. “None of us is.”

“I am compared to you.” I can hear the need stitched through my voice and I hate myself for it. “My skin is so tired looking.” I stroke the contours of my face in the ceiling mirror, searching for cracks. “What if my ranking is affected?”

“Better tired looking than fat.” Her voice is flat, as if someone has let the air out of her lungs.

I turn to face her, our noses almost touching. I breathe in deeply, as if I could suck in her mesmerizing beauty and steal it from her. I looked up her chart online once, hoping to find an easy formula to copy. PO1 Metallic Silver hair, the computer chanted, #76 Folly Green eyes. Muted gold-colored skin, frosted-pink lips, a few small freckles over a neat nose.
I wish I looked like you. Everything would be easier if I looked like you
. I’ve been thinking that since I was four years old. “What are you talking about, isabel?”

She rolls onto her back and points at the ceiling, waiting for me to copy her. I watch as she loosens the silk tie around her waist, unwrapping the bathrobe, laying her body bare. A thickening at the waist, a roundness at the thighs. In the dark, my sharp intake of breath sounds like a scream.

“I know.” She pulls the robe closed, hiding her sins.

“Have you tried throwing up?”

“Of course,” she says impatiently. “It doesn’t always work, you know.”

“What about the extra meds you’re taking? Are they helping?”

“They did at the start. They don’t seem to be working anymore,” she whispers.

“Maybe it won’t be so bad.” I want to sound consoling but I don’t know how. That’s always been isabel’s role in our relationship. “Maybe you won’t be the only one. Lots of eves gain weight over the holidays.”

We both know this isn’t true. Not this year.

“I don’t understand how it even got this far. Surely someone must have noticed in your weekly weigh-ins? You haven’t even set foot in the Nutrition Center for—”

She holds her finger to her lips to forbid me from speaking further and I swallow my thoughts. Just one more secret between us. I close my eyes but all I can see is her flesh spreading, threatening to engulf her bones.

“I was thinking the other day about your obsession with monkeys.”

isabel’s voice is so low that for a moment I wonder if she said anything at all, if my desire for us to be close again is so desperate that I have started imagining her speaking to me.

“Remember?” she says, reaching her hand out to touch mine. “The monkeys?”

“They were a fascinating species.”

“I’m sure they were. Did you have to pretend to be one though?”

“I was four!”

“No excuse.”

“That’s exactly what chastity-ruth said when I fell out of a tree in the garden and broke my leg. What a witch.”

She clamps a hand over her mouth to stifle her giggles.

“Excuse me. It was extremely painful,” I say in indignation, but I’m smiling too.

“I thought she was going to kill you when you had to take your Monday foto with that massive cast,” she says, her voice rising.

“Shh, isabel, you’ll wake the chastities.”

“Who cares?”

“Ah yes, princess isabel never gets in trouble!” I tease, bowing my head in mock salute. “It must be nice to be so special.”

I wait for her to laugh, to tease me back, but there’s nothing. Her body stiffens beside me. The silence is overwhelming, jamming into my eardrums, and I search blindly for the trail of our conversation.

“But the thing about the monkeys was—”

“I’m tired,” isabel cuts across me and the words fizzle in my throat. I always take it a step too far, chastity-ruth says.

We shift apart in the bed, space yawning between us again.

I am pretty. I am a good girl. I always do as I am told
.

The Messages continue, as if nothing has changed.

Dawn slowly pours out of the light-lamps, chasing my dreams away. Unfolding my body, I stretch out, claiming the entire mattress. isabel has gone.

I get out of bed, tossing my hair back to scan my face in the mirrored wall. I do this every morning, a part of me hoping that I’ll have been magically transplanted into a different body during the night—isabel’s, or megan’s maybe. That I’ll wake up and be paler, thinner, different.
Better
.

On the wall opposite my bed, an outline of a handprint is etched into the glass in pink plastic. I press my hand to it, feeling heat prickling my palm until the glass coating thins to transparency and I push through, grimacing as what feels like thousands of sticky fibers dissolve against my skin. Inside, mirrors cover every surface again, even the floor. At the front of the room there is a narrow steel changing room with gray rubber tubes curving from the top into the ceiling. I slump in the fuchsia armchair beside the changing room, drumming my fingers on the onyx marble vanity table. A semicircle of coral light bulbs around the mirror casts my face in a rosy glow. I tap the glass and it turns milky, then opaque, dissolving to reveal
a computer screen, a cartoon graphic of a woman laden down with shopping bags popping up.

“Good morning, freida,” the Personal Stylist Program says in a staccato voice. “How are you today?”

“Nervous.”

“I believe that is to be expected on the first day of term,” it says. “How do you want to improve yourself today?”

“A complete redesign would be nice,” I mutter, chewing on my lip until I catch a glimpse in the mirrored wall of how unattractive it looks.

“How do you want to improve yourself today?” None of the PSPs understands sarcasm.

“Maybe something in white? Stream Fashion TV. I need some inspiration after the holidays.”

A catwalk appears on the screen, a long strip of wood suspended midair in a black vacuum, pounded by a torrent of fashion models. They have been designed primarily for this purpose, hundreds of them falling off the factory line with their gaunt bodies and featureless faces.

White looks good with my skin tone. I picture megan in something similar, her complexion turning like spoiled milk, and I feel a brutal thrill.

“Wait. That one’s perfect.” On my VoiceCommand the screen freezes on a model wearing a sheer white round-neck tee embroidered with appliqué lace flowers, a white lace skirt falling in ruffles to knee length.

“Is that okay?”

“Yes,” the PSP concedes. “I will request the appropriate items from the fashion closet now. Step into the changing room.”

The screen snaps back into a mirror. S41 Delicate Iced Chocco hair. #66 Chindia Yellow eyes.
That’s me. That’s what people see when they look at me
. I peel off my nightgown and throw it into a trapdoor set in the wall underneath the vanity table. The changing room opens, beeping loudly until I step in, the steel trap closing like a greedy mouth around me.

“You have gained weight.” The voice fills the room. “You are now 118.8 pounds. I will recommend in your weekly report that you are to take extra kcal blockers until your weight stabilizes between 115 pounds and 118 pounds.”

“Do I have to take more?” I hate the kcal blockers, which always leave me doubled over with stomach cramps. I guess I should be grateful they’ve improved since the early days when exploding colons were reported. “It’s embarrassing.”