Free Natural Selection by Malinda Lo Page B

Morgan’s breath catch. “Who’s that?” she whispered, nudging me.
    A man was emerging from the Sedona Outdoor Adventures bus. “I don’t know,” I said. He had short, dark blond hair and was wearing cargo shorts and a muscle shirt that showed off tanned biceps. The other girls in Nature Club giggled nervously.
    “He’s so cute,” Morgan breathed.
    “Yeah,” I said. He was cute, and he knew it. I could tell by the way he grinned at Ms. Lucas, who looked the teeniest bit flustered.
    “Listen up, everyone,” Ms. Lucas called, turning away from the guy. When we were standing in a circle, Ms. Lucas said, “Let me introduce you to our professional guide. This is Matt Steiger, a grad student at Arizona State. Matt studies ecology and leads tours through the Coconino every summer. We are lucky to have him.”
    “Hey everyone,” Matt Steiger said with a grin. Morgan practically swooned, and all of a sudden the Zach Effect seemed way less important.
Nice to meet you, Matt
, I thought.
Thank you for distracting Morgan.
Maybe this camping trip would be more fun than I expected.

3
Kurra
    I was born on Earth, and I lived there with my parents until I was five years old. That’s when we came back to Kurra for four years. My parents wanted me to go to school for a while with the other Imrian kids in Isina’uru—to learn what it was like to be Imrian—but they were also worried that if I went to elementary school on Earth, I’d slip up and reveal who we were. I had to learn how to lie.
    By the time I was nine, I understood what was expected of me. Ama took me back to Earth and enrolled me at Hunter Glen, a boarding school. It was horrible at first. I missed my parents and my Imrian friends, and after four years on Kurra, Earth felt like an alien planet. The food was weird, the clothes were strange, and I had to speak English all the time, which meant I had to remember to call my parents
mom
and
dad
rather than
ama
,
aba
and
ada
. The thing that made me most uncomfortable was hiding the fact that I had two fathers. I could have said one was my stepdad; I could have said my fathers were gay and my mom was their surrogate. There were plenty of lies I could have made up, but all of them felt wrong. I’d lie about me, but I didn’t want to lie about my family, and I knew nobody at school would understand my parents’ relationship. Humans were just so incredibly different from the Imria. Their emotions were so volatile that even though I tried to close myself off to them, sometimes they still broke through unexpectedly. At the beginning, it felt like I was trapped in an unending game of dodge ball, and I couldn’t keep my defenses up 24/7.
    It wasn’t until I became friends with Morgan, who seemed to totally get me, that I began to relax and to accept my life on Earth. Of course, as soon as I started to feel like I belonged, it was time to leave. I had to go back to Kurra after eighth grade to prepare for my first
kibila
.
    Kibila
is a ritual of renewal that each Imrian goes through every fifteen years. The first one,
kibila’sa
, takes place when you turn fifteen. It’s the most important one, because it’s the first time you officially choose your own identity. Depending on which region of Kurra your family lives in, the ritual involves hiking into the mountains or spending time at sea. You go with a cohort of other Imrians in your age group, and every fifteen years, that cohort will reunite and renew their identities together.
    Historically, everyone born on the same day undergoes
kibila
together, but in recent generations there have been fewer and fewer Imria born, so now we have to fudge the dates a little. Now,
kibila
links together those born within the same month. There’s only one other Imrian in the Isi Na region whose birthday corresponds to mine: Nasha Shuri.
    I knew Nasha when we were little; she was one of only a couple of dozen students at the Isina’uru school. She changed a lot in the time I was at