Turn 8 of 26

You all get handed a pocket sized book and yelled at to hold it like plebes in the navy do with reef points. You all do as your told and yell while the book soon covers the face. They keep yelling in your faces because your faces show emotion, everyone gets yelled at right in the right ear and it leads to their face losing all emotion and becoming the same angry expression that the officers have.

A small black case opens in front of you and out of it comes a pocket-sized book, gray, hardback, unmarked. 'HOLD THE BOOK!' the officer roars. 'REEF POINTS! Level with your chin, elbows in, like a plebe of the fleet!' Your hands know this too. They bring the book up before the sentence finishes, held edge-out at chin height, forearms locked, and the twenty of you stand like that, a row of identical uniforms holding identical books, and you yell — 'YES MA'AM' — because yelling is what the posture is for.

Then the officers move in close. 'YOUR FACE SHOWS EMOTION, RECRUIT!' The one who takes you plants herself at your right ear, close enough that her breath moves the fine hairs against your skin, and the voice that comes out of her comes out at a volume meant for one person only. 'I can see FEAR in your face! I can see you thinking! Nothing in that face belongs to you! Wipe it!' She yells into your right ear and does not stop — 'WIPE IT! WIPE IT!' — and the book trembles in your grip because your hands tremble, and your face does what faces do under that much sound: it empties.

You feel it happen. The eyebrows first, climbing to a hard level line. The mouth next, pressing into something flat and set, not a frown exactly, more like a verdict. Whatever was in your face — the sharpness, the wit you carried like a knife in your pocket — drains down and out and the expression that settles in its place is not calm. It is angry. It is the exact angry blankness you have been looking at all morning on twenty identical faces, and now it is on yours.

'YOUR FACE IS FIXED, RECRUIT!' she bellows, and steps back to inspect it, and whatever she finds satisfies her, because she moves down the line without another word for you. Down the row you can see it happening to the others, officer after officer planting herself at a right ear, yelling, until the face empties — Six's pale face going last, her mouth setting into the same hard line, her eyes going flat as slate. Twenty faces, one expression. No one cries. Crying would be emotion, and the emotion has nowhere left to sit.

'HOLD THE BOOK! SOUND OFF!' the Lead Instructor calls from the front, and twenty voices answer in one, 'YES MA'AM,' and the faces that say it are all the same face now. The book covers nothing. There is nothing behind it left to cover. The officers begin collecting the books, one by one, tucking them back into the small black cases, and the Lead Instructor walks the row slowly, looking at twenty corrected faces the way a mason looks at a wall that has finally come plumb.