Chapter 2
It's one in the morning; he isn't surprised that his soulmate is awake—high school students live in a constant state of sleep deprivation, and that's a fact—but if they're up because of work, too, then they should be doing that, not listening to Liam.
Shaking his head, Gael pulls his sleeve back down.
He'll be the last person to deny that
Your Reign
is
fire
; Jonas can attest that Gael waited out the final hours of his birthday in order to listen to the album the minute it dropped.
He would be a hypocrite to shame his soulmate for listening to music instead of doing homework, and part of him wants nothing more than to put down his calculator and send a response, but his math grade is suffering and he
really
needs to study.
At the very least, he supposes as he picks up his pencil, his soulmate has good taste in music.
Bring umbrella tomorrow
mitosis vs. meiosis?
?
?
Patrick Sweeney
STUDY RULES FOR DIFFERENTIATION!
!
!
!
!
!
Exams are killing me I'm so done with school
The messages ease up after Gael enters his second year of high school, but that doesn't stop him from waking up to a nasty surprise one Saturday morning.
He doesn't realize it immediately.
Rather, he rolls out of bed, goes downstairs, and takes a seat at the breakfast table—and when he turns to greet his mother, her eyes go wide.
"Gael—that's—did you—"
He blinks at her.
"What?"
"Your forehead," she says, like it should be obvious.
Gael's father chooses that moment to look up from his phone, and the instant he spots what Gael's mother appears to be talking about, he chokes on a sip of his tea.
"Have you looked in a mirror yet?" he asks, wiping delicately at his mouth with a napkin, and when Gael shakes his head, mute, he says, "You might want to check before you leave the house, then."
So Gael goes back upstairs to check.
He walks into the bathroom, flips the light switch, and takes a look at his reflection to get an idea of what has his parents acting so weirdly, and
there
.
There it is.
A giant, suspiciously phallic shape Sharpied smack dab in the middle of his forehead.
"What the fuck
,
" he breathes, grabbing a washcloth from beside the sink without breaking eye contact with himself in the mirror.
"What the
fuck.
"
There is a dick on his face.
There is a big, bold dick drawn onto his face in black permanent marker, and though Gael scrubs and scrubs and scrubs until his forehead is red, he only succeeds in smudging it around.
He pumps a fistful of soap onto the towel and renews his efforts with twice the vigor.
He has hagwon later today, and he'd rather step on Legos than go there like this.
Maybe, he thinks, pausing for a second to examine the state of the dick, his parents will allow him to skip just this once.
Does this count as a medical emergency?
Gael isn't sure, but his hands are shaky and the towel is shaky and he's growing more panicked by the second because
it won't come off
.
He's going to die.
He's going to die of public humiliation in front of everyone, and then he's going to come back to life and kill his soulmate, because who the
fuck
draws a dick on their forehead knowing full well that it'll show up on someone else, too?
Someone clears their throat behind him, and Gael reluctantly turns to see his mother standing in the doorway to the bathroom, makeup kit in hand.
She holds it up when she catches him looking.
"I had a feeling it might not come off," she says apologetically, "but I can do my best to cover it up for you."
That's how he finds himself sitting on the toilet seat on a sunny weekend morning as his mother crouches before him, applying concealer to his forehead.
"I just don't understand," he says, wrinkling his nose at the foreign sensation of makeup against his skin.
"Why would they do something like that?" It's a jackass move, to put it lightly.
Gael wouldn't have pegged his soulmate to be one of
those
people—the ones who deliberately leave marks that'll embarrass their soulmate, like it's all a joke, like a fellow human being isn't about to feel the humiliation—but apparently they are, and he's not sure how to feel about this news.
She smiles ruefully back at him.
"Who knows?
There could be any number of reasons for what they did.
Have you considered that it might not have been them?"
Gael pauses.
He hadn't considered it, but now that she mentions it, he supposes she may have a point.
How many people would voluntarily go around with a dick on their face?
Not many, he's guessing.
"Do you think someone else drew it?"
"It's a possibility," she says, shrugging.
"You shouldn't be so quick to assume the worst of them."
Gael thinks back to what he knows about his soulmate.
They're messy, if their handwriting is anything to go by, and they're forgetful, if the constant reminders mean anything.
They like music—Gael usually recognizes the lyrics when they appear on his skin, and on the occasions that he doesn't, he always takes it upon himself to look them up—and they have two younger siblings whom they seem to care for very much.
They're easily distracted, not the best in school, but something about them makes Gael feel comfortable, at ease.
Like they're genuinely nice, genuinely friendly.
Like they're someone who'd understand why Gael can't find it in himself to ever respond to their messages; after all, they haven't stopped writing even after so many years, and yeah, at this point Gael can accept that the messages were always meant for him.
Suddenly, he feels bad for jumping to conclusions.
"Maybe you're right," he concedes as his mother puts the finishing touches on his forehead.
"It doesn't seem like something they'd do."
She sits back on her heels, scans her work, scans his face.
"You sound like you already know them."
"It feels like I do," says Gael.
"They write to me a lot."
"Do you write back?"
"Not really," he admits.
"I never know what to say."
She hums in acknowledgment as she packs the makeup away and gets to her feet.
"They sound nice.
You should get dressed soon, by the way.
We lost some time with the... forehead."
Gael shoots to his feet.
"Right.
Thanks for..." he gestures lamely to his general facial area, "that."
And he wouldn't say that he's come to
expect
his soulmate's messages, but they write just about every day anyway.
He figures that it's pretty reasonable to check his arm every time he suspects he might be feeling something.
So he waits for an explanation to find its way onto his arm, sneaking peeks at it during hagwon, and when it doesn't come, he waits for something—
anything
—addressed to him.
But that Saturday, the only thing Gael's soulmate writes is,
stock up on aspirin
.
And that's when he starts to think he's missing a piece of the picture.
Gael is sixteen when he begins to think that he may not know his soulmate as well as he thought he did.
His soulmate still jots down reminders, but it's not the same.
There are no excerpts from their day, no comments on an album released over the weekend, nothing to suggest that they are anything more than a collection of dates and numbers and locations.
Gael shouldn't miss them as much as he does, but it isn't like he can just ask them to start talking at him again.
He figures he deserves it, in a way, for letting them have radio silence all these years, but that doesn't make it hurt any less.
He manages, though.