“Thank you for your dream, Jonas,” Mother said after a moment. She glanced at Father.
“Lily,” Father said, “it’s time to leave for school. Would you walk beside me this morning and keep an eye on the newchild’s basket? We want to be certain he doesn’t wiggle himself loose.”
Jonas began to rise to collect his schoolbooks. He thought it surprising that they hadn’t talked about his dream at length before the thank you. Perhaps they found it as confusing as he had.
“Wait, Jonas,” Mother said gently. “I’ll write an apology to your instructor so that you won’t have to speak one for being late.”
He sank back down into his chair, puzzled. He waved to Father and Lily as they left the dwelling, carrying Gabe in his basket. He watched while Mother tidied the remains of the morning meal and placed the tray by the front door for the Collection Crew.
Finally she sat down beside him at the table. “Jonas,” she said with a smile, “the feeling you described as the wanting? It was your first Stirrings. Father and I have been expecting it to happen to you. It happens to everyone. It happened to Father when he was your age. And it happened to me. It will happen someday to Lily.
“And very often,” Mother added, “it begins with a dream.”
Stirrings. He had heard the word before. He remembered that there was a reference to the Stirrings in the Book of Rules, though he didn’t remember what it said. And now and then the Speaker mentioned it. Attention. A reminder that stirrings must be reported in order for treatment to take place.
He had always ignored that announcement because he didn’t understand it and it had never seemed to apply to him in any way. He ignored, as most citizens did, many of the commands and reminders read by the Speaker.
“Do I have to report it?” he asked his mother.
She laughed. “You did, in the dream-telling. That’s enough.”
“But what about the treatment? The Speaker says that treatment must take place.” Jonas felt miserable. Just when the Ceremony was about to happen, his Ceremony of Twelve, would he have to go away somewhere for treatment? Just because of a stupid dream?
But his mother laughed again in a reassuring, affectionate way. “No, no,” she said. “It’s just the pills. You’re ready for the pills, that’s all. That’s the treatment for Stirrings.”
Jonas brightened. He knew about the pills. His parents both took them each morning. And some of his friends did, he knew. Once he had been heading off to school with Asher, both of them on their bikes, when Asher’s father had called from their dwelling doorway, “You forgot your pill, Asher!” Asher had groaned good-naturedly, turned his bike, and ridden back while Jonas waited.
It was the sort of thing one didn’t ask a friend about because it might have fallen into that uncomfortable category of “being different”. Asher took a pill each morning; Jonas did not. Always better, less rude, to talk about things that were the same.
Now he swallowed the small pill that his mother handed him.
“That’s all?” he asked.
“That’s all,” she replied, returning the bottle to the cupboard. “But you mustn’t forget. I’ll remind you for the first weeks, but then you must do it on your own. If you forget, the Stirrings will come back. The dreams of Stirrings will come back. Sometimes the dosage must be adjusted.”
“Asher takes them,” Jonas confided.
His mother nodded, unsurprised. “Many of your groupmates probably do. The males, at least. And they all will, soon. Females too.”
“How long will I have to take them?”
“Until you enter the House of the Old,” she explained. “All of your adult life. But it becomes routine; after a while you won’t even pay much attention to it.”
She looked at her watch. “If you leave right now, you won’t even be late for school. Hurry along.
“And thank you again, Jonas,” she added, as he went to the door, “for your dream.”
Pedalling rapidly down the path, Jonas felt oddly proud to have joined those who took the pills. For a moment, though, he remembered the dream again. The dream had felt pleasurable. Though the feelings were confused, he thought that he had liked the feelings that his mother had called Stirrings. He remembered that upon waking, he had wanted to feel the Stirrings again.
Then, in the same way that his own dwelling slipped away behind him as he rounded a corner on his bicycle, the dream slipped away from his thoughts. Very briefly, a little guiltily, he tried to grasp it back. But the feelings had disappeared. The Stirrings were gone.
“LILY, PLEASE HOLD still,” Mother said again.
Lily, standing in front of her, fidgeted impatiently. “I can tie them myself,” she complained. “I always have.”
“I know that,” Mother replied, straightening the hair ribbons on the little girl’s braids. “But I also know that they constantly come loose and more often than not, they’re dangling down your back by afternoon. Today, at least, we want them to be neatly tied and to stay neatly tied.”
“I don’t like hair ribbons. I’m glad I only have to wear them one more year,” Lily said irritably. “Next year I get my bicycle, too,” she added more cheerfully.
“There are good things each year,” Jonas reminded her. “This year you get to start your volunteer hours. And remember last year, when you became a Seven, you were so happy to get your front-buttoned jacket?”
The little girl nodded and looked down at herself, at the jacket with its row of large buttons that designated her as a Seven. Fours, Fives, and Sixes all wore jackets that fastened down the back so that they would have to help each other dress and would learn interdependence.
The front-buttoned jacket was the first sign of independence, the first very visible symbol of growing up. The bicycle, at Nine, would be the powerful emblem of moving gradually out into the community, away from the protective family unit.
Lily grinned and wriggled away from her mother. “And this year you get your Assignment,” she said to Jonas in an excited voice. “I hope you get Pilot. And that you take me flying!”
“Sure I will,” said Jonas. “And I’ll get a special little parachute that just fits you, and I’ll take you up to, oh, maybe twenty thousand feet, and open the door, and—”
“Jonas,” Mother warned.
“I was only joking,” Jonas groaned. “I don’t want Pilot, anyway. If I get Pilot I’ll put in an appeal.”
“Come on,” Mother said. She gave Lily’s ribbons a final tug. “Jonas? Are you ready? Did you take your pill? I want to get a good seat in the Auditorium.” She prodded Lily to the front door and Jonas followed.
It was a short ride to the Auditorium, Lily waving to her friends from her seat on the back of Mother’s bicycle. Jonas stowed his bicycle beside Mother’s and made his way through the throng to find his group.
The entire community attended the Ceremony each year. For the parents, it meant two days’ holiday from work; they sat together in the huge hall. Children sat with their groups until they went, one by one, to the stage.
Father, though, would not join Mother in the audience right away. For the earliest ceremony, the Naming, the Nurturers brought the newchildren to the stage. Jonas, from his