ymms drafts

swimming pools & lion facts

Soulmate AU: the name of your soulmate appears on your wrist when you turn thirteen. Camila is desperate to find hers. Lauren just hopes hers will like her.

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When Camila turns thirteen and finds a generic, female name on her wrist, she doesn't know which part to freak out about first. The fact that her soulmate is a girl, or the fact that she's called Lauren. She looks it up, and there are over 200,000 people in the U.S. with the name Lauren. There's even a girl in her class called Lauren, but she knows it's not her – that Lauren was bragging about how her soulmate was clearly a boy in their class, and Camila isn't exactly a male name.

How is she supposed to find her soulmate when it's such a common name? And how is she going to tell her mom that it's a girl?

Personally, Camila doesn't have any problem with having a female soulmate. People fall in love with the person, not the gender, and Camila is just happy she has a soulmate in the first place. She'd heard horror stories about people who never got a name on their wrist when they turned thirteen.

The name on her wrist is both comforting and terrifying. She has a soulmate, thank god, but she doesn't know how she's going to find her.

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When Camila is fourteen and a freshman in high school, her buddy for the first week is a senior named Lauren. While the age difference isn't ideal, she's desperate to find her soulmate, because it worries her a lot. If she finds her Lauren, she won't be so stressed.

She catches a glimpse of the girl's tattoo, and it's Brad. She feels bad for this Lauren, because she has a generic name, too, but she's also really relieved that it's not this girl. She hadn't felt any connection at all, and the age difference, while it wouldn't matter when they're older, is too much.

Another Lauren to cross off the 200,000.

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Surprisingly, other than the Lauren that's in her class, the one who's already found her soulmate, Camila doesn't run into any other Laurens, except a girl working at a checkout in Walmart who looked like she really didn't want to be there.

Camila gets a job as a lifeguard at her local pool when she's seventeen. It's for Saturdays and after school (if she wants) and she's never actually had to save anyone's life yet. She's kind of worried about that, even though she's had a lot of training, and it's definitely a relief when most of her job is watching people in the pool and blowing a whistle at kids when they get too loud.

She starts working before school to earn some extra cash – she's been thinking about colleges, and that's expensive, so she needs some money behind her – and when she gets to work and the pool is literally empty, Camila isn't sure how this is going to work out. Maybe it'll be an easy couple of hours.

She's sat in her lifeguard chair, watching the pool, in a weird daydream because nothing is happening, when a raven haired girl walks in and gets into the pool via the steps. Even though it's empty, the girl doesn't jump in, and Camila respects that. She remembers when she'd go swimming regularly, and she'd hate it when people jumped in or splashed her.

Camila smiles a little when the girl pulls a pair of goggles on and then ducks under the water. She watches the girl swim for a while, and she's ready to jump into the pool when she sees the girl stop in the middle of a length.

She doesn't look like she's in trouble, so Camila can't comprehend why she stopped halfway through. Most people would carry on until they reached the end of that length and then take a break.