In this world, everyone has a soulmate. Two halves of a pair, two halves of a heart, two souls joined as one. No one knows who their soulmate is from the start; but there is a way to find them.
The words tattooed across our skin showing us the first thing our soulmate will say to us--well, kinda. It's a bit of a complex thing. Instead of the first thing your soulmate ever says to you, it's the first thing they say to you after both of you are sixteen. It doesn't matter how many times you've talked with your soulmate between your birth and your sixteenth birthday. The words won't mean a thing until you're both of age.
The words appear when we're three years old and remain with us until the day we die. Most people have frustratingly simple greetings on their skin:
Hey.
Hello.
Good morning.
Those people never know for sure if they've found their One. Other people's are just weird:
Did you put the thing in the mailbox with the other thing?
Hi, can you please hold my iguana for a moment?
Did you know the scientific name for beetles--coleoptera--comes from the Greek words meaning "sheath" and "wing"?
It can be totally mortifying to have that written on your body for your entire life. The up side, though, is that those people have no doubt of when they find their soulmate. My best friend, Izzy, got lucky like that. She'd been friends with her soulmate, Simon, since we were kids. On the morning of her sixteenth birthday we came to school together, me trying to say that she was so listening when I was explaining Star Wars to her when Simon came up to her.
"Who was Luke Skywalker's childhood best friend?"
"Biggs Darklighter...That is so cheating!"
The moment carried on like normal for a moment before the realization hit them. They looked at each other to their soul marks and back at each other for five minutes before I knew why--they were soulmates.
I know plenty of people who have met their soulmates. Izzy's older brother, Alec, and his boyfriend Magnus, for one. The two of them met at a party and, well, I guess you could say it was me and Izzy who brought them together. I was sleeping over at her house when she convinced me to sneak out to go to a party at Magnus'. Magnus was in college and continues to be famous in Brooklyn for the parties he throws. We managed last an hour before Iz's parents tracked her phone and sent Alec and the friends he was hanging out with, Jace Herondale and my older brother Jonathan, to go bring us home. Alec was in the middle of trying to convince Iz to come willingly when Magnus approached. "And what can I get for the boy with the dazzling blue eyes?" "Your number, to start." The second Alec heard Magnus speak at the party they met he knew who he was and then played it off the smoothest I've ever seen him.
Alec then proceeded to fall down a small flight on their first actual date.
At the same time, I know people who took a lot longer to find their soulmates, some...missteps along the way. My parents, actually. Both of them have the same thing written on their skin: Hey. As you can guess, it made things hard for them. They were already dating their sixteenth birthdays rolled around, both said 'hey' to the other first thing on my mom's sixteenth birthday, and they decided to go with it. Their relationship worked for a while, resulting in me and my brother. Eventually, though, the relationship started to fail. They both knew they weren't soulmates and, even though they still had love for one another, they want the other find all the happiness they could in life.
