I was thirteen when I finally started what now passed for school in Gilead. Penmanship had been replaced by petty point embroidery, science for gardening, spelling by memorizing prayers, music replaced by learning new hymns by ear, painting replaced by flower arranging, for the most part. I would never take another literature class. How I then longed for poetry, for horror, for romance, to indulge for the genuine interest in reading that I had only developed recently. I would settle for a kindergarten level book now.
The Vidala Schools had replaced public schooling entirely for high ranking girls and pre-teens. They were spread across Gilead and named after one of the most important founding Aunts, yet not actually run by Aunt Vidala herself, at least not there in the suburbs of D.C. These schools were for pre-pubescent girls, those who had not started developing, had not started their menstrual cycles. I had learned about those in my first year of middle school a couple years ago, and was cursed with my own only a few months later. So I did not fit the Vidala School criteria.
Rather, I went straight to Rubies Premarital Preparatory school, as soon as the D.C. campus was opened. As soon as Gilead had been fully instated, after all the resistant ones had been executed along every unfaithful person in positions of oppositional power. So I was in the very first class, though not the youngest even at my green age of thirteen.
Green. That was the aesthetic palette of my life then. Shortly after we settled into our grandiose house on the edge of the city, Aunt Caroline brought a mere three dresses. One with a high collar reminiscent of Puritan clothing, one with puffed sleeves and restrictive tightness in the wrists, and one a little dressier, likely for meetings with my suitors. But tall of the dresses were the exact same hue of spring green, supposedly to represent my purity. It was also a symbol of my status, a privileged girl of a Son of Gilead, of a Commander, slated for a fast approaching marriage.
I would be among the first underage marriages in Gilead, at least, one of the first legal ones. Plenty of Commanders had taken young brides almost immediately after the President's Day massacre and the abolishment of the Constitution and federal law had been nullified. The one good thing was that my parents were being merciful in my arrangement, or, as merciful as they could be. Commander's sons only, no one over 30, no one with former wives, unless that wife had been able to deliver a healthy child.
The only problem was, by this point, I was absolutely certain that I had no attraction to men. I knew I would have to have sex with my husband regularly until I conceived, and I could not know which of my suitors had the highest sex drive. I would certainly be reading them each as best as I could, and express feigned enthusiasm for the winner. I tried my absolute hardest.