Matched

they are giving us pieces of a real life instead of the whole thing.
And I’ll tell her that I don’t want my life to be samples and scraps. A taste of everything but a meal of nothing.
They have perfected the art of giving us just enough freedom; just enough that when we are ready to snap, a little bone is offered and we roll over,
belly up, comfortable and placated like a dog

It is one thing to make a choice and it is another thing to never have the chance

“Any other questions?”
“Just one,” I say. “What color are your eyes?” I want to know what he thinks, how he sees himself—the real Ky—when he dares to look.
“Blue,” he says, sounding surprised. “They’ve always been blue.”
“Not to me.”
“What do they look like to you?” he says, puzzled, amused. Not looking at my mouth anymore, looking into my eyes.
“Lots of colors,” I say. “At first, I thought they were brown. Once I thought they were green, and another time gray. They are most often blue,
though.”
“What are they now?” he asks. He widens his eyes a little, leans closer, lets me look as long and as deep as I want.
And there’s so much to see. They are blue, and black, and other colors, too, and I know some of what they’ve seen and what I hope they see now.
Me. Cassia. What I feel, who I am.
“Well?” Ky asks.
“Everything,” I tell him. “They’re everything.”

Growing apart doesn’t change the fact that for a long time we grew side by side; our roots will always be tangled.

“You can take it,” Bram says, “but it will always be mine.”

You could have lost it. You could
have broken it. But this way you can look at it one last time. It’s never really lost to you as long as you remember it.

Only when I hold onto nothing can I be the
best, only then can I be what they expect me to be.

“Doesn’t it get boring?” The high clear voice of the woman who sings this song winds above us. “We’ve heard the Hundred Songs so many
times.”
“They’re different, sometimes,” Ky says.
“Really?”
“They’re different when you’re different.”

I don’t want to talk about what happened yesterday, but I don’t want to
not-talk about it either

Later, I realize that the one question that didn’t even cross my mind was the most urgent one of all: Will you keep my secret?