America gets dragged back to her room and then kicks everyone out so she can flop on her bed and mope.  Which, given the fact that she can’t do anything else, at least makes sense.

So this was the secret she had been too afraid to share.  She didn’t want to stay because she wasn’t in love with Maxon, but she didn’t want to leave and be separated from Carter.

This, on the other hand, makes no sense.  Girls who leave the Selection are free to get married to other people.  There’s no sign yet that women can’t chose their marriages, so if she left the Selection she’d have been free and clear to flirt and canoodle with Carter in the open, no hiding necessary.  They could have gotten married, and then she’d be a Two, because as we covered, for some unfathomable reason all the military grunts are in the second highest caste.

And it’s not like Maxon would have forced her to stay there if she just said she wanted to leave.  He’s already straight-up asked girls if they want to leave, so no reason to assume she couldn’t have just said “Hey, I’m not feeling any sparks, can I go home?”

The weirdest part is how this is all presented.  Obviously, we’ve got women being considered lesser than men in the marriage department, because they always move, and they aren’t allowed into the military, but we don’t have any other word on the matter.  There’s no comments about how women aren’t allowed in certain jobs, or aren’t allowed to be in the government.  There’s no comments about how they’re kept quiet and their opinions aren’t allowed/heard.  We don’t get this from any direction, not from women actually doing it, from women being forced not to do it, or from America thinking it scandalous that any woman would try.  Instead, everything is presented…naturally.  Like, of of course there’s no women in charge of anything.  There doesn’t need to be a social construct against it, that’s just the natural order of things.

And here we have Marlee, wanting to leave but not saying so.  And it doesn’t give us a reason for why she’s kept quiet.  It doesn’t have an excuse for it, or say that she tried and was turned down, or even throw out an off-hand line about how “she couldn’t say anything because society and expectations and the like.”  Nope, nothing, so the end result is “of course she didn’t say anything, because everyone knows girls aren’t supposed to make their wishes and desires known or do anything about them.  They have to just sit by and hope really hard for stuff.  That’s the natural order of things.”

Fucking.  Creepy.

Finally America puts two and two together and realizes that it could have just as easily been her and Aspen getting whipped, because apparently this girl is so dense that she needed a demonstration.  Someone point-blank telling her that mere flirting was a capital offence wasn’t good enough.

Maxon eventually comes by and says that he didn’t have a choice.  Marlee and Carter were caught on film and the news spread the footage around.  Judging by the eager reaction of the crowd to the whippings, yeah, it seems like Maxon was backed into a corner.  I mean, the whole set-up is ridiculous, but if we take it at face value, then what he says is true.

America has different opinions and thinks he should have done something anyway.  She decides she doesn’t want to be a princess if it means getting forced into making heinous decisions.  About fucking time she realized she doesn’t have the stomach for this.

What I don’t understand is that we’re only 30% through the second book.  That seems like a deciding factor to me, and yet we’ve still got a bunch more bullshit to get through.  Why can’t she just drop out and marry Aspen and put all this mess to bed?  Ugh.

Well, Maxon talks her into reconsidering and deciding later, so we’re back to the whole stasis thing, where she’s undecided, because fuck this book.  Then her maids show up to fawn over her. 

Then Aspen shows up to reestablish his position in the love triangle.  So, yay, we’re back to the status quo.  Because god forbid anything actually happen in this book.  If something does happen, we’ve got to get back to stasis a few chapters later.  Progress is for other books, apparently.