Sincerely, Anonymous

January 14

Dear Annabeth,

I am so sorry not to have written sooner but I swear to you nothing interesting has happened. 

Emily turned 17 today. Because her birthday is so late in the year, she has the option to take another year of school before going into her Career. They don’t like to have people younger then 18 have the Procedure.  Of course, they won’t tell anyone this, the Procedure isn’t public information. They do strongly suggest that people not graduate until they are 18, mostly due to complications in the Procedure. Kay once told me it’s because the brain isn’t fully developed yet, and that if anything goes wrong Emily, and others under 18, have a higher risk of complications that could range from not being able to get her memories back to death. Emily had to make the decision today and go file the paperwork at the Government building in town, and while I tried my hardest to try and convince her not to go, there is never stopping her once she ha made a commitment to something.

I should probably tell you a little about Emily first. Emily is my oldest friend (not in years but in time we have known each other). That doesn’t alway matter to some people, it’s the quality of a friendship, not quantity, that effects it’s success. I think it really says something to not tire of a person for so long, and that why Emily is the one that I trust the most. She is the one I would most likely consider my Best Friend. She was the new kid when we first met, and I seem to latch on to anyone new. We went to different schools for middle years due to some kind of relocation in her father’s Career and didn’t talk much for a while. I hadn’t even known she would be at Cardea with me until the second day when I ventured to the Cafeteria and found her sitting alone.

Emily knows me the best of all my friends, except maybe Amy. She can read me like a book and is the only person I trust to contact panicking at any time of the day. 

She is mature for her age, even though she is the youngest in my group. She always has been. She is fiercely protective and I think of her as more of a mother figure to me than I do my own mom. 

In a way I lied when I said Amy was the only one with a number. Emily used to have one too, but the Black Tens got rid of hers, they didn’t need anyone else in the Facilities. Emily has a kind of metal disease about organization called OCD. She wanted to be perfect, and I don’t blame her, I just want to be perfect in a different way. I want to be perfect on the inside. 

I remember first hearing about Emily’s number. It wasn’t like when Amy told us all about hers. Amy cried and we all went to the psychological department of Cardea and signed out a room and skipped classes and hugged her and told her she was beautiful. I found out about Emily’s disease during our health class. The class is designed to tell us about all the kinds of diseases people can have. They tell us that certain jobs need people with certain diseases. Our numbers can “help” us, they said. Of course they lied. They only say this so that we tell people about our diseases and get assigned our numbers. The teacher was talking about Emily’s disease and Emily ripped a piece of paper out of her book and wrote “I have that” and passed it to me. I stared at the paper in disbelief and the teacher came over and grabbed it out of my hands and sent Emily directly to the Psychologist at the school, who filled out all of Emily’s paperwork to get her number. For a while she had her own metal cuff, but unlike Amy, Emily never tried to hide hers. She wore it proudly. Its her own little act of rebellion. Funny enough her little rebellion went unnoticed, not a single person has realized the absence of her cuff or the missing paperwork to her disease. It’s incredible what people can forget.

It’s things like this that made me say yes to the Black Tens. I want the cuffs to go away. I want my friends to tell people their problems in their own time. I want them to be able to have the Careers that they deserve, even if they have a number.

Apparently when the Black Tens approached Emily she said yes before they even told her what she would be doing. The second they told her that I had chosen her to help me with a “very special job” she agreed to help. They told her what it was after but I don’t even know if she was listening. She trusted me. I want to think I would trust her the same way, to just say yes before the sentence is even finished, without knowing the consequences, but I just don’t know. I guess you don’t know the kind of person you are until you have to make the decision yourself.

I think that is why she is my Best Friend though. She may be the most reasonable and mature person I know but she still didn’t even think twice the second she was given a chance to help a friend. Because of this, the Black Tens helped her out a little. They made sure that her number accidentally never showed up on the paperwork given to the Panel, and they’re the ones who melted her cuff from her wrist, just as they have done with the few I have acquired.

Emily’s Career now is a doctor. If her number had been on those papers the best Career he could have gotten would be stocking shelfs in the local pharmacy. That just shows you how the Black Tens are the good guys.

But for now Emily has a new problem, receiving her Procedure too early. She asked me if I could go with her to sign the paperwork. She didn’t want her parents there, since they wanted her to take the extra year of school. She knows she can’t do that. Emily will need to have the memory swipe done if the Black Tens plan is to work. She needs to go into her Career the same time the rest of us do.

We took the subway to the building. Years ago, everyone would take cars everywhere, but they’ve since been deemed “unsafe” and “polluters”. The Government created solar powered subway systems and placed them in all the towns across the nation. It’s one of the few good things that they have done, accept when the sun doesn’t shine for weeks and all the subways are down and everyone has to walk everywhere. That doesn’t happen too often. You likely know this, but I want to tell you everything just in case. Maybe the memory wipe made you forget why all the subways were there. 

Emily and I sat in the lobby for a whole two hours before they called her in to make her final decision. We sat in silence, clasping each others hands. She knows that filling out the papers might just mean her death, or spending the rest of her life in the psychology facility unable to move or speak or think. I could just read on her face what she is thinking. She knows that by filling out that paperwork she might one day be able to escape the cuffs for good or escape the memory swipe or at the very least give everyone else a chance to. She knows that the risk might be worth it because without the Black Tens she would have had to wear that damned piece of metal for the rest of her life. Or maybe that’s just what I am thinking.

I could see there was a war going on behind her eyes. I knew in the end her selflessness would win, and it did as she signed her name off on that paperwork. And it continued to win as we sat, hands still clasped, on the subway home, silent tears running down her face.

Love Always,

Lilly