I Am Not Your Soulmate (Short, gxg)

Chapter One: Markless

I don't have a Soulmate.

Yeah, that's right. You read that correctly.

And, believe it or not, I'm the only person in history to be born Markless. My family has worked hard to ensure that nobody finds out about that, though. It would ruin their reputations. As well as mine. I'd be a freak!

   And we can't have that.

   So I've spent my entire life avoiding pool parties, proms, and anywhere else that people would notice my lack of ink. You see, not everyone's Mark appears in the same place.

   Not everyone gets Marks the same way.

   For my parents' generation, their Mark was being colorblind until they met their soulmate. For my grandparents', it was an inked imprint of where their soulmate touched them for the first time.

   And for my generation, it was the first words your soulmate said to you. At least, it's supposed to be.

   But I was born without one. So I had to grow up watching every other kid my age show off the Marks on their arms, ankles, necks, and sides like some sort of biological Show and Tell.

It made me feel left out. When I was younger, I always shut down when someone asked me about mine.

So, naturally, my parents made up a cover story by the time I went to first grade. So I could lie. And from then on, my whole life had been:

Can I see your Mark?

"No, sorry, it's on my chest."

Well what does it say?

"Hey, I've got you."

   And I'd always get wide-eyed compliments from people.

   Oh my God that is SO cute.

Your soulmate is going to be so nice!

I wish my Mark was as cute as that...

   And they'd walk away believing that someone was going to catch me in their arms, and discover that we were Soulmates. A perfect love story. Sometimes I'd like to believe that it was the truth. But it wasn't.

I didn't feel completely alone, though.

The only other person to know my secret is my best friend, Brian.

Brian is smart, but also not. Brian is the type of guy that would discover the cure for cancer on accident. The type of guy to program crazy stuff for, like, NASA and then ask you if a ladybug was an animal.

Just last week he had snapped his favorite pair of glasses in half, and asked me if they would still work the same if he glued them together.

I had to spend the next five minutes explaining that they couldn't lose their prescription by being glued together.

Even with his lack of common sense, we had been best friends since kindergarten. Brian had his Mark on his shoulder, and would wear sleeveless tank tops to preschool everyday to show it off.

You sound like you know what you're talking about. It read.

The first time I ever saw him, we were barely six. He was in the middle of a circle of kids, and they were all making up wild stories about their future Soulmates.

I had opted to sit quietly at a desk and stay out of the conversation. Brian saw that I was the new kid, and he left the circle to sit with me.

We've been inseparable ever since.