Casey Anderson isn't expecting much from her Mark - but when her soulmate turns out to be Prince August, the boy next in line for the throne, everything changes.
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In a world much like our own, Casey Anderson is trying to navigate her senior...
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My parents' Marks didn't match.
The thing that you have to understand is that my parents were pretty much the most romantic people ever.
They had sort of a Disney movie, fairy tale kind of love - the kind where it was obvious when you looked at them how into each other they were. Where they were in their own separate world and you knew nothing else could really compare.
They met on a train trip across Canada. They'd crossed paths at a station, and my dad says he remembers thinking that my mom was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen. Mom says she just remembered a guy with a guitar - a guitar she would recognize days later, when she found it forgotten on a bench during a transfer.
She returned it to him, and they spent the rest of the trip falling in love. They were married less than a year later, and had me around two years after that. Dad started a band, and Mom got a job teaching art classes at what is now my high school.
They lived the starving Artist life for a good while, until Mom got a steady job and Dad's band gained a bit of a local following.
Then Mom's grandfather died, leaving her enough money to buy a small house on the outskirts of the city, and a car that actually worked more often than not.
They were happy, and in love, and oftentimes strangers would stop them on the street and tell them how beautiful our family was.
And then the Rift happened.
I try not to think about that too much. About the looks on their faces when the government announced what the Marks really meant - coated in a bunch of pseudo-science bullshit, because no one had acknowledged the magic yet.
About the promises that fell apart, the vows that the Marks didn't matter. That they still loved each other more than anyone else could.
Which did work, at first, until Dad met his soulmate at a gig and slowly but surely fell in love, slowly but surely fell away from us.
He left, and Mom's never been the same. She hasn't found her soulmate, not yet. Maybe not ever.
It's not like she's looking.
I'm jolted out of my thoughts by the screech of bus brakes. I hadn't even realized that I'd made it to the bus stop, too lost in my residual annoyance at Del and the painful memories of the past year.
Checking my phone for the time, I wince. It's already almost five. It's gonna take me the better part of an hour to get home, and knowing Mom, she's going to worry.
She never likes when I'm home later than expected, and me and Del's weekly coffee stop usually gets me home no later than five.
Mom never used to worry about where I was. She was more of a free-spirit, free-reign parent. But that was before.
