Page 1 of Ceremony of Lust

1

Yael

Tomorrow is my eighteenth birthday,the day I will meet my future husband.

Tomorrow, my new life begins, and today, my current life ends.

Today, I am a girl, but tomorrow, I will be a woman.

In Ripley, life changes quickly once you turn eighteen.

These are my thoughts as I walk to my last day of school.

When I arrive on campus, I’m practically the only one of my friends still there. Most of the friends I grew up with are all married now; some are even pregnant with their first child. One has already been shunned. As the youngest in my group, I am the last to be matched, but I have benefitted the most by watching them and learning from their mistakes.

At lunch, all my younger friends talk about is my match ceremony tomorrow. They have this romanticized version of it in their heads but wait until it’s their turn. They’ll be just as scared as I am.

“What will you wear?” one girl, Frieda, asks me.

I shrug. “I don’t know.”

The girls gasp and stare at me with wide eyes. Frieda sighs, a dreamy expression on her face. “I’ve had my eye on an emerald green dress.”

Conversation veers from me as they chat happily about the dresses they’ve been dreaming about wearing to their match ceremonies and about the men who still haven’t been chosen. I’m more than content to tune them out. What dress I wear tomorrow does not matter; I have a closet full of them. What matters most is who is selected for me.

For over a month, being matched is all I’ve thought about. Every day, the knot in my stomach grows tighter. I have no control over who I marry. Will he be kind? Will he be handsome? Or will he be cruel? The only person who knows my fate is Hadassah, Ripley’s Mystic.

Tomorrow night, the entire town will gather in the temple. Every eligible male will be in attendance, waiting to see if Hadassah will pick them to be my husband. A list of men suitable to be matched runs through my head. Most of them are harmless but one name stands out the most—Anders Huxley. He’s the chief Elder, and after the unexpected death of his wife, he’s now eligible to be matched. My skin pebbles with goose bumps thinking about marrying him.

Anyone but him, I tell the universe silently.

After school ends, I’m in no hurry to return home, but when I do, the house is unusually quiet. Normally, there is opera playing in the background; my grandmother loves it. From Berlioz to Bellini, I’ve heard them all.

“Yael, what are you doing home?” My grandmother appears in the doorway of the dining room, her hands buried in a dish towel attached to her apron. She’s baking, which is never a good sign. When my grandmother is worried, she bakes, and there’s only one thing she could be worried about. My match.

I sit at the dining room table and reach for an apple. “What do you mean? School is over.”

“You have a meeting with Hadassah today,” she reminds me, taking the apple from my hands. From the depths of her apron pocket, she produces a small paring knife and deftly cuts the apple into slices for me.

My hands fly to my head. “I forgot!”

“Well, you might as well change into a clean dress,” she says with a sigh. “And then I’ll braid your hair if you like.”

I nod my head eagerly and rush to my tiny bedroom to change into a long-sleeved black dress. It has a turtleneck and a long skirt that stops at my ankles. Despite the light jersey material, I feel hot and constricted. Once I’m seated back at the dining room table, nibbling on my snack as my grandmother gently brushes my hair, my anxiety dissolves.

“Are you nervous, Yael?” she asks softly as her fingers divide my hair and begin to nimbly plait it into a complicated work of art.

“Yes, of course. Weren’t you?”

My grandmother sighs heavily as though something is weighing on her mind. “Yes, I was, but sometimes Match Ceremonies have serious consequences. Sometimes, the match doesn’t work out, and one family has to pay a high price.”

My grandmother’s tone worries me. I’ve never heard her speak like this before. “Who are you talking about, Grandmother?”

“It doesn’t matter. Let’s just hope the past does not repeat itself.”

Ripley has secrets, deep ones woven into the fabric of our daily lives. There are whispers of names, like my mother’s, we are forbidden from saying, but the forbidden sounds echo in the community.

“Is that what happened to my mother?”