What's a Soulmate? Read online

  “Very.”

  I aim a big, cheesy grin his way and push his food across the desk.

  “How was school?”

  “Meh,” I say around a mouthful of turkey melt. There are only a few months left before graduation and it’s obvious in the antsy, buzzing energy I can feel in the hallways. Everyone’s ready to move on to what’s next, whatever that is. For me, it’s Southerland University. I have no idea what I’ll even major in, but I’m excited to see what’s thrown my way there. “Can it just be June already?”

  “Absolutely not. I refuse to rush through the last few months of us all living under the same roof.”

  “Would you be opposed to the rushing through of the 8:00 to 3:30 portion of every Monday through Friday?”

  I laugh as he sits back, scratching at his chin a little in fake contemplation. After a few seconds, he sighs and shakes his head at me.

  “You might have already got in on early decision, but I doubt skipping the last five months of your senior year would impress anyone at Southerland, sweetheart.”

  He’s laughing and there’s a smile behind his words, but it’s easy to see how my father is not looking forward to me leaving for college. I’ll only be a few hours away, but I have to understand—this is the same man who not only cried on my first day of kindergarten, but called into work sick so he could sit in his parked car across the street in case I needed him.

  My mother still laughs whenever she tells the story.

  “He had me bring him food on my lunch break. He looked like a crazy person.”

  “I had on my uniform at least!”

  “He seems to think that made some kind of difference.” She always stage whispers the next part, leaning in close to whomever she’s telling it to. “He looked like a crazy person in uniform.”

  I have a sneaking suspicion he did almost the exact same thing the first time I drove myself to school. When I suggested maybe he and mom make a weekend out of my initial move into the dorms in the fall, he didn’t even attempt to hide how happy the offer made him. Not that I mind any of this. I love my dad, and I know me being gone is going to be a lot harder on him than he tries to make it seem.

  I watch him for a minute, grinning at the way he moves the extra napkins off his plate and onto mine. It’s not because I’m a messy eater per se… I just really go out of my way to protect my clothes. I put hours into making most of them after all.

  Maybe if they were more along the ‘ready-wipe’ variety of Beth’s leather, pleather, and all things vinyl, I wouldn’t bother as much. But getting anything out of silk or linen? A veritable form of torture in my book. Maybe worse than water-boarding.

  Yes, oddly enough, though I consider myself one of the most pragmatic, least romantic people I know, that doesn’t stop me from dressing like I’m the lead in a quirky, rom-com.

  I really like skirts, okay? They were one of the first things I learned to make. They’re also comfortable, and I like the way they swish around my legs when I walk.

  Anyway, back to my father.

  I know he’s going to miss me when I leave. I try to imagine, for a second, how his Friday dinners at the office will be without me. All I can picture is him emptying his change into the vending machine in the hallway, and it’s so sad I have to shake myself away from the thought.

  Speaking of vending machines though…

  “Crap…”

  He pulls a handful of quarters from his pocket and hands them over without a word. I always forget the drinks.

  “Be right back.”

  I wave my hand into the air behind me as he calls out his order for cream soda. As if I didn’t already know.

  Making my way through the labyrinth of desks and shelving units, nodding and waving to a few of dad’s coworkers as I go, I wonder how many cans of the nasty stuff he goes through in a week. It can be argued my blood is made up of about ninety-five percent sweet tea, but despite this fact, cream soda is too sickeningly saccharine for me.

  One can is cradled in the crook of my elbow and I have my fingertip under the tab of my grape soda before I’ve even straightened back up. There’s a door in the process of opening on the other side of the room, and I watch as an officer starts to usher in a line of boys. It’s not unusual for me to see something like this, given how often I’m here, but it’s still uncommon enough it’s hard to look away.

  There are only a few boys with the older man, no more than five or six. Most look around my age, but one or two may be as young as twelve.

  It’s hard to imagine what a kid so young has done to get himself sent to this place. I know, I know. Not all of them have done awful things. Some were never taught to live life differently than the circumstances they’ve grown up with. Some haven’t been afforded the opportunity to make a different choice. And some have been, and choose to follow the easier, more well-beaten path of what they know instead of the more difficult road to bigger opportunities and a better life.

  I get all of that. Everyone lives their life with different circumstances and all of that. Still. Seeing a scrawny twelve-year-old wearing the same ill-fitting, stiff-collared gray jumpsuit as the beefy, got-to-be-much-younger-than-the-twenty-five-years-he-looks guy in front of him is something of a difficult pill to swallow.

  That’s pretty much all I can think of—how I hope to God they don’t expect that little kid to share a bunk with the behemoth, but for all I know, the little boy likes to set puppies on fire and the big guy might have just skipped one too many days of school—when…

  Well, when it happens.

  The last guy in line walks through the door. He’s as tall as the beefy guy on the other side of the possible puppy-torcher. There’s another guard behind him and, for a split second as the door closes, the boy is kind of back-lit by the late afternoon sun streaming inside.

  And that’s why I start to think my eyes are playing tricks on me.

  For a second, I can’t see his face because the way the light shining in from behind him makes it seem as if his hair, wild, curly, thick, and in the kind of disarray only a teenage boy can perpetrate, is on fire. It’s almost blinding, and I blink hard to block it out. My head doesn’t exactly hurt, but there’s this weird pressure behind my eyes so intense I swear I can almost hear it.

  The door clicking into place barely registers as I look back up.

  I never realized before how sunlight has an actual color to it. That it was anything other than a blinding, bright white. That the way it looks when it catches and filters through someone’s hair could actually bring tears to my eyes. That the shadows it casts over someone’s face leaves them covered in a myriad of even more, very different colors. That the shadows it leaves on a person’s face aren’t all the same hue…

  And those are only the things I never realized about a five-second strip of sunshine coming through a closing door.

  It’s exactly like Audrey said. Or well, it’s exactly like Beth said that someone, who knows who, said that Audrey said.

  Color. Seeping into everything.

  It’s so overwhelming I barely realize how I’m staring at him. The last boy in line, standing in a decidedly still gray jumpsuit, with standard metal cuffs linking his hands in front of him. His hair is still dark, but not quite black. And his eyes… His eyes look like someone took the color of his hair and mixed in the sunlight. For a second, I swear they almost glow.

  And the second they meet mine, the weird pressure behind my eyes just … goes away. And everything goes quiet. Or maybe it’s only inside me that everything goes quiet because I can still see people moving throughout the room. They’re only on the periphery though—of both my vision and my cognizance—but this boy, this boy is in the middle of it all, and I can’t look away.

  For a split second, I’m calmer and feel more assured than I think I’ve ever been in my life.

  Then I blink, and it’s like the volume turns back on.

  He’s staring at me the same way I’m staring at him—confusion frozen
on his face, complete with slightly slack-jawed wonder. His stare moves from my face, to my hair, and then sharply to the right and left me. Then back to my hair.

  It’s the only thing letting me know I’m not alone in this. That he sees it too. He has to. In fact, everything is so bright and vivid and so much more I can barely comprehend all that’s been hidden from me up until this moment.

  There’s an inappropriate, cliché weak in the knees joke to be made here somewhere, but I can’t even make myself blink. Even if I could do anything other than stare, I’m not dumb enough to think this is a situation that can be written off with a cheesy punchline, or made more comfortable by laughter. Or more normal.

  Because this is not normal. Even if I take out the whole, hey, that person—yeah, that one right there—is the entire reason this is even happening right now thing, there’s still the very concrete fact I’m standing here in a stupid silk skirt, and he’s standing there in handcuffs.

  So instead of laughing, I keep looking at him and bite the inside of my lip to keep the strange urge to cry at bay.

  The whole thing takes only seconds, but it feels like an hour has passed.

  But as my drink slips from my hands and hits the floor with a hiss, it’s definitely over. I nearly drop the second can as I jump back from the explosion of grape soda and the shock of the rapidly expanding puddle’s color delays my reaction time.

  “Shit.”

  I dash back into the break room with big, splotchy stains already spreading across my shoes and skirt and grab an entire roll of paper towels off the counter. One of the officers, a new, female guard I haven’t been introduced to yet, is already mopping up my mess. Within a few seconds, we have it all cleaned up and I think she says something to me, but I can hardly hear myself think so I only offer a shaky nod.

  The abject humiliation I feel over something so small is amazing. I blink and look back down to the stained fabric, still wet and plastered to my legs, and that’s amazing, too. Before, a stain was only that. A stain. Now it’s something else entirely. Something actually kind of pretty against the stark white fabric.

  “Everything okay, sweetie?”

  Looking up at my dad’s face is like seeing it for the first time. The pressure starts to build behind my eyes again, so I look back at the floor and take a second to gather the soaked paper towels from it. I glance back at the spot across the room where the line of boys was before. It’s empty now, but I can hear an officer sounding off orders in the hallway leading down to Intake.

  It’s a split-second decision, but I decide to keep what’s just happened to myself.

  “Yeah. Yeah, everything’s fine.”

  Chapter Three

  This is a lot harder to hide than I expected.

  With Beth around, I never really have to worry about anyone paying attention to me though. And right now, I could not be more grateful. Audrey pulling the week-long disappearing act starts to make all the sense in the world. It’s more than a little tempting to follow her example.

  Of course, in order to get away with that, I would probably have to tell someone what happened. And I don’t know why, but keeping it to myself feels like the right way to go for now. I suppose I’ve always been more of the ‘suffer in silence’ type. Not that it’s suffering exactly … even though there’s this weird, achy feeling in the center of my chest and it’s almost like I’ve simultaneously swallowed a rock and a swarm of butterflies. Actually, that does make it sound like suffering, so maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that’s precisely what it is.

  Is it supposed to be like this?

  I’ve asked myself this question at least a hundred times since Friday, but I don’t really see how there can be a concrete answer. I don’t even know what it is. Meeting my Soulmate? Rounding a turning point in my life? Seeing the world in—quite literally—a new light? Realizing my fate?

  I’m no more likely to figure it out sitting here in the cafeteria than I was lying at home, hidden in my bedroom all weekend.

  My best friend, who knows me too well, asked what was wrong as soon as I got out of my car this morning. No, really. I didn’t even have the door shut yet. Because while I was hiding away, turning a thousand questions over and over in my mind, she was wondering why I wasn’t answering her phone calls and missing out on our weekly frozen yogurt run at Frenchie’s without bothering to offer up an excuse.

  Thankfully, knowing me too well means she also is incredibly adept in picking up on when I don’t want to talk about something. I don’t play that card often, mostly because nothing ever happens to me, so she took my excuse of a ‘raging migraine’ and went with it. Because she’s a good friend, and she knows I’ll talk to her about it whenever I’m ready to.

  Okay, so it also probably had a lot to do with how Ryan Marckson happened to be at said frozen yogurt place when she went on Saturday and seems to have asked her out. But hey, I am more than happy to let her ramble to everyone within hearing distance of our table if it means I can fade into the background for half an hour.

  Especially since I already knew this was going to happen sooner or later. I might have paid Ryan a little visit about a week ago and maybe let it slip how Beth’s had a thing for him for a while now.

  So while she talks, I wonder over the fact her hair is not the pale shade of gray I’ve been looking at for years, but instead a yellow-white color called blonde.

  Over ten almost consecutive hours spent with a bootleg Introduction to Color program I had to download illegally taught me that. Normally I’d have to either pay or register for classes to help teach me all of the nuances and shades and how the different intensities have different names for them all together. Hell, these are things I’m told anyway. I’ve known for years the words eggplant, puce, and plum are all simply different shades of purple. But I didn’t really know it. I couldn’t have really known it until I could see it.

  And once I see it…

  God, even looking at the toe of Beth’s Converse where she’s stretched her leg out to rest on the corner of my chair is too much—at how even the scuffs across the dirty rubber have a color other than gray. There’s a mole high on her right cheek, right below the outer corner of her eye, and the fact it’s a different color from even the few freckles less than an inch away is absolutely mind blowing.

  Suddenly there’s lump in my throat that I have to take a gulp of my water in order to swallow. I swear, I’ve teared up more in the last couple of days…

  Beth nudges my thigh with her shoe and raises a brow at me when I look up. A silent ‘everything okay?’. I nod and offer a smile that probably looks more like I have a bad taste in my mouth than anything else. It’s obvious she doesn’t quite buy it, but she lets it go and jumps back into the conversation without missing a beat. I stare at her face for a second longer.

  Her eyes are an indeterminate color. Hazel. Whatever that means.

  The fact there are colors that can’t be named or even described properly is another thing I’ve heard of before. I’ve read about them in stupid romance novels that only prove infuriating to readers who still only see in black and white. But infuriating in a way one gets used to and learns to overlook in time because it’s just the way things are.

  I understood, or thought I did, because it’s something that had been explained enough times I simply accepted it to be true. If something as small and, in the grand scheme of things, as inconsequential as this could be so misunderstood and truly beyond comprehension? Well, I have to wonder what else I’ve managed to trick myself into thinking I have a grasp on.

  For instance, I have always known my hair is red and my eyes are blue because my parents have told me that. So when I saw my reflection for the first time in color, in the tiny, smudged mirror on the back of my sun visor while driving home Friday evening, I thought, “So my hair is red. My eyes are blue.” When I got home and slipped up the stairs, I stood in front of the full-length mirror on the back of my bedroom door, and thought, “My hair is red and my eyes are blue
.”

  And I’ve been taught grapes are purple, so surely grape soda and the stain mine left on my skirt would be the same. So, while running my fingers over the fabric, I added, “This is purple. Probably.”

  But what if I was wrong? What if it isn’t a purple stain on what used to be my favorite skirt?

  So I booted up my laptop and clicked on the first link that seemed relevant enough to help me. And I ended up more confused than I ever thought possible over something I had thought so simple before. If something is red, then it’s red. Right? And if it’s purple, it’s purple.

  Well, the splotch on my skirt looked like something that could have been purple, but clearly wasn’t the same as the example on screen. And my eyes are a lighter, more translucent shade than what the site told me was blue.

  So I clicked, I read, I dug deeper and deeper until I looked up to see the sky lightening through the blinds, heard my mom moving around in the kitchen downstairs, and realized the entire night had slipped by. So I jumped out of bed and grabbed the first bolt of fabric I could reach from the stack in the corner, and tossed it on top of my sewing table. There was already a pattern lying on one corner, so I opened it and threw a handful of straight pins at it.

  Not the smartest decision, but I’ve stayed up sewing all night on more than one occasion, so I just went with it. I went with it, and I prayed she was too tired to notice my light still on when she first got up. Or that if she had, she’d only pop her head in, see the not terribly uncommon mess, and tell me I should really get to bed soon. I sat at the table, stiff as a board and practically holding my breath, until I heard the television turn on downstairs.

  I fell asleep marveling over how even the darkness has its own color.

  Saturday and Sunday were spent doing more of the same. Locked away in my room, telling my parents I wasn’t feeling well and not answering my phone whenever Beth called.

  All in all, I plowed my way through learning about primary colors and how if I mix them, I get secondary colors. About the different shades and intensities, and the true meanings of the words opaque and translucent. I spent hours reading about the way a color can look completely different given the amount of shadow it exists in or how it appears in natural light versus artificial. I pored through what had to be thousands of pictures of different eye colors and hair colors.