The Spare: Prince Osten's Selection

Chapter 1

I sighed as I twirled my spaghetti on my fork . Tomorrow was my eighteenth birthday which meant I was old enough to apply to go to university in the fall. My marks at school were good so I knew getting in to most schools would not really be a problem, the problem would be actually finding the cash to be able to pay the tuition to attend.

I loved my family and the little town I came from, but I knew it was not where I was supposed to be forever. Harrisburg was a very traditional small town right in the middle of Midston, one of the largest provinces in Illéa, the large and young nation that was once the United States, Canada, and portions of central Amerca. My mother and father had both been born in Harrisburg, my grandparents had been born here, and so on. It was the type of place that people were born, lived, and died in which meant it was a place where you got stuck. That was not what I wanted.  

In addition to that, it was also a place where people did things the old way, and in their mind, that was the right way. Even though the caste system had been abolished slowly throughout my lifetime by King Maxon and Queen America, it still felt like those lines still existed. My dad came from a family of Threes, and his father, my grandfather, had a very successful medical practice in Harrisburg, Dr. Johnson W. Collins and Associates, while my grandmother stayed at home raising my father and his two brothers in their cookie cutter, white picket-fenced home. My grandfather was a proud Three and was very influential in Harrisburg because our family had been there for generations. He had expected my father to take over the practice as the oldest son, but those plans were derailed when he first caught sight of their housekeeper's daughter, my mother.

Although it was a tradition more than a law in the old days, the public schools were only for the lower castes. So even though my mother was only two years younger than my father, their paths never crossed. She, as a Six, attended the local overcrowded public school while my father was tutored at home by private tutors alongside other higher caste sons of influential Harrisburgians. My mother's family had always done my father's family's housecleaning, and one summer, my mother tagged along with my grandmother to her weekly jobs in order to begin her inevitable life as a housekeeper as her Six status entailed. My father, just seventeen years old at the time, caught sight of her dark chestnut hair and brilliant green eyes and immediately was smitten by her. He began offering to help her with her cleaning trying to catch her attention, and on the last day of the summer, he passed her a note as she left on her last day of cleaning for the summer declaring his feelings for him. Lucky for my bumbling Romeo of a father, she returned his affections, and they fell in love over secret letters over that whole year, only seeing each other in passing glances and the occasional times my mother would come to help clean when she didn't have school. 

They had to keep their love a secret out of fear of rejection by both my grandfather as well as the town as a whole. One did not court someone outside their cast. A Six dating a Five or a Three dating a Two was fine, but for a man to date below their cast was nearly unheard of. A woman's caste would change to match her husband's upon marriage if they were different, and it was nearly unheard of to jump from a Six to a Three. However, it was lucky for my mother and father that the very same year they fell in love, Prince Maxon had his Selection and fell in love with America Singer, a Five from Carolina. After a horrific attack upon the palace at the end of the Selection that led to the death of King Clarkson and Queen Amberley, Prince Maxon immediately took the reigns of the country and married America a few months after, and they became the King and Queen of Illéa and ruled until their daughter Eadlyn took over a few years ago. 

The good part for my parents came in when King Maxon announced his plan to slowly abolish the caste system by absolving the castes into one another one by one. This meant castes would supposedly not matter anymore and a simple number could not decide what type of job you could get. My father thought this meant he could marry my mother with little repercussions as everything seemed to be changing.