The Draw

It happens every year. You switch, you feel, you change, you make. You never really know what you’re going to get—or who. Last year, I got Gertrude Silverback. She was motherly, soft, and generous. I made seventeen patched blankets that year and sold them for half a silver coin. The year before, it was Mr. William Woodchuck. I became very strict and formal and made my best money doing sales. Thirteen silver coins that year.

The year before that, it was Misty Sugarplum. She was sweet and had a good sense for baking. I made my very first raspberry-lemon almond cookies and sold them by the box. Seven silver coins! They were good cookies.

But the year before that, I got Charles C. Snowdrop. I turned into an emotional snow cone that year, and not the delicious kind. I was dry and uncaring, and couldn’t be bothered to make anything—not a blanket or a cookie, or anything else. I made zero dollars that year and got a fair warning from my sales group: if I didn’t control my emotions better, I’d be prohibited from sales the next year. That would most definitely not be good for me and my family.

That’s the problem with the Draw: you can’t fake it. You have to just… Make it. However possible. You have to, or you won’t survive.

But the way that our lives and the Draw work, it’s almost im-possible. Before we became the New Freeland of Newmen and Women, we were just… people. Now, we’re… something else. Something entirely different. Because the hearts of men angered God, they were given into the hands of our enemy, literally. Ever since, we have been worked hard into sweat and these ratty old clothes, and given hearts that only work if we exchange them.

Hearts. How can we even call them that? They’re shaped like one, and they have a place in our chest, but they’re not hearts. They’re heart-shaped lockets. We can put into them whatever we want, as long as we don’t resist switching them at the end of the year. I’ve got pictures, poems, my parent’s and sibling’s names, fairy tales written on leaves, and even a small plush toy that I won at the fair. As long as it fits, it’s good to be in there.

And you thought that having to exchange hearts was pretty weird already!

Not everyone chooses to put in nice stuff. Some people put in things like black spiders with gnarly legs, and ghost stories, and rotten apples. I’m only ten years old and I know that won’t produce anything good. See, we’re made to make, us New Freelanders, and if we don’t have Making hearts, then we’re pretty much lost, like Mr. Snowdrop, who basically lives on the streets because he doesn’t like dealing with people. You can’t really build a sales empire on stone-cold stares and sarcasm! And New Freelanders have to have a good angle to sell and make any money at all. You can’t do that without a good heart.

My mother, Josephine Bramblebranch, has a really good heart, and she is a book seller. She is sprightly but proper, sweet but resolved. My father, Everett Bramblebranch the First, who is a carpenter, says she’s the perfect combination of salt rock and honey on a well-cooked steak! It’s just something funny he likes to say, to which Mom always answers: “I’m no steak, but I can cook a mean sirloin!”

That’s also a joke. My family has never had sirloin. In fact, we are a long line of Bramblebranches who have never had sirloin, all the way to the year 2047, when the Erebian Empire took over our land and our hearts were stolen for the cause of a better world—or so Emperor Xinzei said, on the day that he enslaved us. He declared that no one person was perfect, but the only way to be was to be perfect, and he had this crazy idea that, if we all exchanged hearts with one another, we could be perfect. So, he took everyone’s hearts and turned them into these heart-shaped lockets that give way into… Into…

Well, I don’t really know where it all goes, really. All I know is that, whatever we put into the locket disappears as it becomes a part of us; every feeling, every image, every fuzzy friend, every memory. Most of it is bound to stay with you forever, but some things get lost along the switching way. Once, I lost the memory of my mother’s laughter. I had to find a way to make her laugh and put it into my heart, which was very, very difficult. But it’ll never sound the same to me again.

I wish we didn’t have to switch hearts at all, so that we didn’t lose things. But, at some point, every year, we need to give it all to someone else. And that’s where our world gets really complicated.

“Ticket, please,” the bus driver lady requests. I slip mine out of my dress pocket and hand it to her. She smiles. “It smells of lavender!”

“Grace always smells of lavender,” my friend, Oliver Vini Vidivici, says. “Her mother washes her clothes in it.”

“Really? Isn’t lavender a Fragrant? Why, we don’t get Fragrants anywhere around here. One could only get them if one went over the Agro borders, but… that’s illegal.”

“He’s kidding!” I quickly grab Oliver and pull him along the seats, where we both hide. No, we no longer have free Fragrants—or Grains, or Cows for cheese and milk and meat, or Fruits. “You’ve really said a lot today, haven’t you?”

“I’m sorry… It slipped out of my tongue like it was a raspberry!”

“Well, next time don’t let it. Besides, raspberries aren’t nice.”

“Not at all.”

“Mum can’t have her cover blown. Clarice Bumblebee is the only Grower in the Agro Group allowed any close to the border on our end of town, and the only one willing to bring us rations on years that we don’t get good Making hearts.”

We grow quiet as the bus driver headcounts. “Twenty-two!” she cheers, and we clap as she set us on the road again.

“I don’t know what we have to be so bloody cheery about. Our lives are horrid!” a boy in the front cries out, to what the bus lady responds, shocked: “Henry Truthseeker! It is not nice to make ugly of a nice day! Look outside your window: the sun is shining, the birds are singing… And it is Draw Day! It is only bound to be a much better day than yesterday!”

Oliver sighs. I look at him. “What is it?”

“I was wondering if Henry was right.”

I look away at the window. It is certainly a nice day, and the sun is shining, but I can’t hear any birds singing.

“D’you know there is a prophecy that says we can get our real hearts back? Something about a street called Church and a carpenter,” my friend utters as he also gazes out the window in the search for birds. I ignore him. “Oliver, you still haven’t answered my question from earlier! Does the switch hurt, do you think?”

“Hm… I don’t quite know how to answer that. I guess it really depends on the heart you get. Like the year I got the heart of Sarah Lee Ford, an engineer. The minute it was settled in, I felt like my mind could fly. I started having all of these amazing ideas that I’d never had before! Mum and Dad were glad about it, but I was terrified! My heart always beat fast, and I was always thinking, and because I was always thinking, I was always talking. I did not ever faint or become fatigued, but I never did sleep, and, when I got my own Locket Heart back, I gained a heart condition.”

“A heart condition?” a young man sitting beside us asks, bemused. “Palpitations. It’s rather awful. Every time I get one, my Locket Heart door flaps open. But we made two gold coins that year with my inventions, so I’ve got to be grateful.”

Henry Truthseeker groans in anguish. The young man who’d asked the question doesn’t think anything that Oliver said could happen to a Locket Heart. He turns to the music sounding loudly in his earphones again and forgets us completely.

Real, flesh and blood hearts are taken away from us when we are only four years old. Then, we are given the Locket Heart. They aren’t real; they’re programmable replacements. Yet, it isn’t until we have them that our Mums and Dads really feel anything for us at all.

Some people think it must hurt, to have feelings that aren’t quite so real anymore. I wonder if that’s the truth for me, too, but I don’t know if there’s any way to tell if it is. “I don’t know if it hurts,” I tell Oliver, going back to that conversation. “I only remember anything after it’s been put in.” He contemplates the thought for a moment. “My very first Locket Heart feeling felt like I’d been dreaming a wonderful dream. Mum said it was because he’d put in a picture of her and I in the belly, while I was under the anesthetic. I think… I think it would hurt if I knew that it wasn’t quite like a true feeling.”

“True human hearts beat and flutter,” a peddler woman sitting across from us puts in. “Locket Hearts never beat and flutter. When we were altogether human, people fell in love and felt a flutter in their heart; when they were afraid, their hearts ‘skipped a beat.’ None of that happens with a Locket Heart. It’s rather annoying, really.”

“Actually, it makes dating a lot easier,” a younger woman wearing mesh tights and dark makeup replies. We don’t quite get it. She gets off on the next stop with a cold stare at my lunchbox, like she’s hated school all her life. Or lunch. Or lunch boxes. “I figure her name must be Snowdrop, too.”

When we get to school, we have our regular program. Then, we settle in the auditorium and wait for the Draw to start. The School Director and Vice Director quickly begin the selection. It’s not a big celebration, and it all happens rather quickly. We are on one side of the auditorium, and adults are on the other, and the Director and Vice Director each draw a piece of paper from a crystal bowl and start calling the names written there, aloud. Then, the switch begins.

“Cora Lively and Delia Slothly. Switch!” Not any match made in Heaven!

“Muffy Joiedevivre and Gregorius Carealot. Switch!” A better match.

“Oliver Vini Vidivici and Joshua Whitestone. Switch!”

My friend waves from the stage. He looks more excited than me to start his training. Having an adult heart means we get the chance to really help our families. A very skilled heart could even get us out of the slums by climbing the Great Ladder of Golden Opportunity into the next city level. The problem is…

Children often don’t understand adult feelings. With the odds of a lottery, you cannot help whose heart you get. That’s why, ever since I got Mr. Snowdrop’s heart, I try to expect the worst first, so that, if I do happen to get a good heart, it becomes a nice surprise for me. So, I think: “Maybe I’ll get Mr. Paynter and fall off a ladder tomorrow. Maybe I’ll get Mrs. Payne and just die of sorrow.”

But Dad always says I should expect the best instead of the worst, no matter what’s happened to me, or else that is exactly what I’ll get.

He couldn’t have been any righter.

“Grace Bramblebranch and… Ness Dark.”

There’s just not going to be a worst year for me than this one.