PersonaliKey

Extrovert University

I lifted the two keys attached to my necklace, one silver and the other gold, up to the dorm's hazy ceiling light. The all-too familiar face embedded in the golden stained glass that filled the key's center practically glowed. It had oversized angry eyebrows, matched with a devilish toothy smile. The silver key, which had a blue-gray face, had its eyes closed and its mouth sewn shut. It still creeped me out. My relic, made by my deceased mother, given to me at my sorting ceremony. That was years ago, though. The two pairs of eyes and mouths represent the four parts of the personality: Introverted, iNtuitive, Feeling, and Perceiving. Or INFP. Or as my new roommate and best friend Sally Bowie called it, the unabashed optimist.

"Thalia!" Sally barked. "Are you even listening to me?"

I hopped off the bottom bunkbed onto our obnoxious pink shag carpet. Sally hopelessly searched through her piles of disorganized notes and unlabeled folders strewn about the floor around her. Her blonde hair was wrangled with five separate hair ties in a top bun that knew nothing of gravity's bounds. She was juggling her family relic, a crystal ball filled with four different colored gases for her personality. "It's just a silly civics exam, Sally."

Sally pouted, and her precariously balanced bun flopped into her face. Sally's an Extroverted, Sensing, Feeling, and Perceiving person, or ESFP. Basically, a dramatic wet puppy. Normally I pestered her to study, but her life was exceptionally stable lately, and she was running out of things to worry about. It's obvious why the Bowie family was famous for singing, no one else could fill sixteen albums with personal tragedies. Most people just don't know half of them are about their lunch. She handed me a piece of paper coated in music note doodles. "Quiz me."

"We need to leave or we'll be late."

Sally wrestled on her stitched-up backpack. "It's a half-hour walk. Quiz me on the way."

"Fine. What noble family provides all genetic services for personality determination?" I glared at her. "If you get this wrong, I swear..."

"Your family! The Shakespeare family." she cheered.

We walked out into the blazing sun. I pointed to a large marble statue with a stone pathway towards campus dancing around it that had two faces on it. "Here's a harder one – tell me about those faces."

"It's that thing on your keys. Your family crest." Sally said with a questioning twinge.

"No."

"You're messing with me. I've seen it a thousand times."

"It's almost what's on my keys." I pointed to the obnoxious smile on the gold key where a frown appears on the statue.

"You knew what I meant." Sally scoffed and adjusted the books in her hands. "I just forget that you're... y'know." She shrugged.

"An outcast?" I stared at her.

"A Feeler. Your family can't comprehend the emotions of squirrels. Would you really want to be a Thinker like them?"

I shook my head. I had never fit in with my family. My dad pretended to understand emotions for me, but he just couldn't. Biologically, he can't. He doesn't have emotions. My mother, a prodigal Shakespearean INTP, was the head geneticist, I was now heir to the family's entire company... Yet the vaults of ancient family relics didn't contain a single one that matched me. That didn't stop my mom, she was proud that such a rare genetic mutation manifested in her child. Yeah, real maternal instincts. She spent her last three months alive in her workshop, modifying her relic from INTP to INFP. I was her 'magnum opus,' and so I inherited these two keys from her. I shouldn't sound so bitter, these keys changed my life! They--