FIRST LOVE ♛ The Selection

6 ♛ Two Meetings

THOMAS

"Isn't it just a matter of paying the workers more?" asked Hammond, his question pointed directly at my mother, at the head of the long table. I rolled my eyes, shifting slightly in my own seat to her left. It wasn't the first time he had asked the question. For the past hour, all eight of my mother's advisors danced around the same topic (some flu outbreak in a small Bankston town), trying in vain to get the approval of my mother or the prime minister. At around the twenty-minute mark, I stopped bothering to hide my disinterest. I never did in meetings, for whatever I said wasn't listened to, and whatever I did wasn't paid much attention. Today, I showed up half an hour after everyone else, just late enough to say I forgot and get no more than a few eye rolls. I had hardly moved in the last two hours, balancing a pen on its head between the table and my finger, my elbow resting on the table. True to my word, none of them so much as glanced my way.

Hammond set his hands on the table, leaning forward in just the right way to make the bright wall lights glare off his bald head. "If we raise their wages even at all, they'll simmer down."

"Workers have a fixed wage, Hammond," said Song, passing off his suggestion with a wave of her hand. Song and Hammond had a bit of a war, prime minister versus top advisor, and in the real of our weekly meetings, it was incredibly entertaining. Which is to say, just enough to make me open my eyes every once in a while. Imogen Song was not my favorite person, with her puffy hair and agonizingly slow speech, but she was a good prime minister, and if she kept getting reappointed, I'd have to work closely with her one day. Best to stay on her good side.

Hammond sighed heavily. Perhaps their circling around the same subject was getting to him, too. "The hospitals are flooding. It might spread."

"What do you propose we do?" Song retorted with a tilt of her head. "Raise all the wages in one province? How would we keep it from other provinces?" She folded her hands together. "We're in debt. The system works, it always has. It's kept us going."

"We're still a young country," added Warner, sitting beside her.

"Yes, but a fine country."

"Her patriotism wasn't even vaguely amusing. "We can at least compromise," Hammond attempted.

"There's no room for compromise."

"Then make actual change," I muttered, at the exact moment the conversation paused. They all turned to me at once, and I took my eyes off the pen and looked up. The pen clattered to the table. I hadn't meant for that to be heard.

Mother lifted her chin. "What sort of actual change?" she asked me.

I hesitated, picking the pen up again. The workers needed more money, and we needed to compromise. Letting it die down wouldn't work how they wanted it to, not when the protesting was making the papers, sparking more strikes. Not to mention our lack of control of the papers, which Mother always had a problem with. A reform to the minimum wage should be in our conversation—it was drastic, yes, but feasible. I inhaled. "Perhaps—"

Warner interrupted at that moment. "If you have nothing to add, you needn't say anything," he told me. Chuckles fluttered across the table.

"It's a kindergarten lesson, isn't it?" said Song, her smile aloof, but as frustratingly biting as ever. They all smiled at me like a child showing off a dumb trick.

"Yes, well." I gave them my tightest smile. "I was privately tutored."

"We can tell," Hammond muttered.

I sat up. "Excuse me?"

"Thomas," Mother chastised, as if I had no reason to protest.

"Think before you speak is all," Warner said.