Grayscale

Chapter Twelve

        All of my life, I had grown up hearing stories about how other people met their soulmates. My parents were in kindergarten. It was the first day of school. Their parents had just dropped them off at the front door, telling them their tearful goodbyes, when as soon as my grandparents let go of my mom, she turned around to head into class, and bumped right into my dad. They made eye contact, and my mom started jumping up and down, screaming, "Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, his eyes aren't grey!" My grandparents pulled both kids off to the side and explained that something very special had just happened to the two of them. From then on out, they were practically joined at the hip.

        My little brother was about eleven. He was out playing basketball with a group of his friends, and they were just joking around and having a good time at the court in the park. His friend passed him the ball, and he was getting ready to shoot it, when he felt eyes on him. He turned his head, and all of a sudden, he dropped the ball. It was the only time he'd ever walked away from a game.

        My aunt almost died in a car crash when she was fourteen, and the firefighter who extracted her from the car was her soulmate. He was fresh out of high school, and the age gap was hard on them at first, but they're two of the most in love people I know now. She thanks God all the time that he was the one at the scene that day.

        A girl in school was walking down the hall about a week ago, talking about how she met her soulmate while ice skating a few winters ago. She'd been hanging out with a group of people who already met their soulmates, and the other girl was hanging out with her family, trying to teach her little brother to skate. He took off, and was doing really well, until he skated right into her, and knocked her flat on her ass. His sister rushed over to help her up, and they spent the rest of the day skating together.

        Wes met Sam in sixth grade, two days after Sam moved here. They were instant best friends. My uncle met his wife at an ice cream parlor when they were twelve. They eloped at sixteen. Robin met Dane at the mall, and she hasn't stopped talking about the day since.

        But me? I was sixteen, and I was tired of waiting on my soulmate to come and find me. So I decided to date this really cute, really sad boy whose soulmate had just died. We fell in love, and we had just finished confessing that to each other when in walked this man. We made eye contact, and my whole world fell apart, because I now had to make a choice. The boy I already loved, who couldn't bear to lose the second girl he loved, or the man I was predestined to spend the rest of my life with?

        It wasn't a happy day. I didn't run home and tell all of my friends and family, didn't start asking people to teach me what the colors were so I could finally color-coordinate my clothes and stop looking like a clown . . . I ran out of the coffee shop we met at and collapsed in the alley beside it, sobbing, trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do next.

        And now I was here, walking as far apart as the sidewalk would allow with this beautiful stranger who had just unintentionally ruined the one really good thing I had in my life. Who had just shoved away the only person who'd ever understood what it was like to wake up wanting to die for absolutely no reason, because you just couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel that day. What it was like to be okay one day, and a total mess the next. What it was like to feel like you had to pull away from everyone else and keep to yourself because no one else could possibly understand what was going on in your head.

        But he did. He understood. And today, I watched him walk away from me, despair plastered all over his face, as he struggled to understand how something like this could have possibly happened on a day like today, on the day when we he told me he loved me, and I told him I loved him, too. He'd just walked away, and there had been nothing I could do to stop him. I had more pressing problems. I had to talk to my soulmate.