Chapter Text
Victor Santiago’s heart no longer jumps when he approaches his (many) children to have ‘The Talk.’ Of course, this only applies the time he meets with his youngest, Amy. By now, he’s given ‘the talk’ to all seven of his sons.
Why would he, a retired detective from the NYPD, fear the prospect of speaking with his seven-year-old daughter? Her eyes still brighten when she walks into her father’s vast office, the doors always open for family to enter.
“Amy, I wanted to talk to you today about soulmates,” he begins with a gentle grin.
His daughter is comfortably sitting in his office chair (the Winchester 3000, best in the precinct), her legs not even touching the ground. Amy shoots her father a shy smile and adjusts the black scrunchie holding one of her own pigtails. “Yes, Dad?”
“First of all, do you know what a soulmate is?”
“I know! I know!” Amy raises her hand in the air, her smile widening. “It’s, like, a matching puzzle piece. For a person. They can be tough to find, but they fit perfectly.”
“Exactly!” Victor replies. “You’re so smart, Amelia.”
He easily removes a silver star sticker from the sheet on his desk, pressing it to his daughter’s cheek. Amy excitedly giggles and runs two fingers over it. “Love you, Dad.”
“Now, do you know how someone finds their soulmate?” Victor asks.
“No, I don’t really know,” Amy frowns, biting the inside of her cheek. “D’you just guess?”
“Truth is, honey, it’s hard to know,” explains Victor, crossing his arms. “You see, in this world, soulmates can feel each other’s feelings. Of course, emotions can be confusing. They’re hard to pinpoint. Luckily, you can feel their emotions if they're strong enough.”
“Oh, that’s so cool! When does it start happening? Does it ever stop? Can you ever talk to your soulmate?” Amy asks, her questions traveling a mile a minute.
“Whoa, one question at a time,” Victor laughs. “People don’t exactly know what age soulmates start feeling each other’s emotions, but they assume it’s around ages six to ten. The feelings never really stop, but they do fade if both you and your soulmate fall in love with other people. If you’re lucky, hon, you can talk to your soulmate about feelings, if they’re strong enough. Some people can only rarely talk to their soulmates, and other do it constantly. Just depends on the people and the strength of the emotions.”
“That makes sense, even if it sucks for the unlucky ones,” Amy nods. “But what if you mix your feelings up with theirs? Also, how do you know if you find your soulmate?”
“It’s hard to explain, but you can usually tell if your mood changes suddenly,” Victor rationalizes. “When you meet your soulmate, there usually isn’t a ‘eureka’ moment. People are usually pulled to become closer to their soulmates, though, and can realize over time if their soulmates’ emotions match their own. The universe helps by leaving you little mementoes from your soulmate as you get closer to them. Does that make sense?”
“Yeah, Dad. You’re a good teacher.”
“Thanks, Amy.” Victor Santiago can’t help but smile.
Amy raises her hand yet again. “Oh, just one more questions. Are you and Mom soulmates?”
“Yeah, we are,” Victor confirms, blushing.
“I figured,” Amy reaches for the stickers and presses one onto her father’s cheek. He lets Amy decorate his police badge in stars, too, and she says they match when she finishes.
The first time Jake Peralta notices his soulmate’s emotions, he’s annoyed beyond belief. He goes so far as to march across the street and ask for Regina Linetti (of course, he asks his mom first. He isn’t that rebellious.)
Using Gina’s full name will make him seem more formal, right?
“What is your deal?” Gina demands, standing at the front door and putting both her hands on her hips. “You know I just got home from dance practice!”
“This is important, Gina,” Jake insists. “I felt my soulmate’s feelings for the first time! Can I come in?”
Gina immediately perks up at the mention of Jake’s soulmate. “Of course you can come in! Mom’s on the phone, so she’ll leave us alone.”
“Thanks, Gina.”
“How’d it feel, Jake? Are they cool? I wish I could contact my soulmate.”
“I dunno,” Jake kicks his sneakers off and runs upstairs with Gina to her room, silently waving to Mrs. Linetti. “I think I hate my soulmate. They’re aggravating!”
“Uh-oh,” Gina frowns. “You sure you didn’t just annoy yourself and mix the feelings up? It happened to Todd Cowan last week, remember?”
“Positive,” he snaps.
“Tell me everything,” Gina sits down on her bed and pats the space next to her. Jake takes her up on the offer, resting his head on her shoulder as he mopes. He shoves his Buzz Lightyear backpack (it’s cool, no matter what some people say) onto the ground and starts to rant.
“I was just riding my bike home from school when I felt this voice in my head, you know? It was frantic and 一 and almost angry,” Jake recounts. “So I started pedaling faster, ‘cause I just felt like I had to, and I got home super fast. Then I just think ‘I really need to do my homework and double check it.’ My soulmate tricked me, Gina! I finished the math problems Mrs. Finn assigned us, and I even showed my work like she insisted! Double-checking homework sucks.”
By now, Gina is laughing so hard she can’t talk.
“It’s not funny!” Jake protests. “My so-called soulmate is my polar opposite!”
Gina rolls her eyes once she catches her breath. “Yeah, they’re not procrastinating and not distracted. You poor thing. D’ya need a hug and a cup of hot cocoa so you can get over the pain of getting your work done?”
“But you don’t understa-”
“Kids?” Mrs. Linetti calls from downstairs. “You want something to eat or drink? Sorry I was on the phone just now!”
As upset as Jake is, he can’t say no to food. Racing down the stairs with Gina right behind him, he spots a tray of Mrs. Linetti’s famous lemon bars. They’re practically to die for, and an entire plate of them sits right in front of his eyes.
“Thank you, ma’am,” he replies, excitedly biting into a lemon bar and feeling the sugar course through his bloodstream. “Would you mind if I took some of these home?”
“Oh, go ahead!” Mrs. Linetti encourages. “Tell your mom I said hi. Does she want my recipe?”
“I’ll tell her, and I bet she’d like the recipe very much,” Jake promptly answers, trying to be on his best behavior. It isn’t every day the Linettis offer him a family recipe (at least, he thinks it is.)
“C’mon, Jake,” Gina groans, beckoning him toward the stairs once again. “We have math homework from Mrs. Finn, remember?”
“Coming!”
Once they’re upstairs, Gina pulls out her sheet of long division problems and finds a crumpled page of notebook paper. “Can you check my homework once I’m done, Jake?”
“Oh, I thought the homework thing was just a diversion,” Jake groans. “Is today National Homework Day or something?”
No, that’s April 2nd, a voice in his head quips.
“Gina! My soulmate is talking to me now!” Jake whispers, afraid to let them in on the conversation. They’ve already caused enough damage, he believes.
“Ooh, what’re they saying?” Gina asks. “Do they know the answers to the math questions?”
“No,” Jake scowls. “They just informed me that National Homework Day is actually a holiday. It’s in April.”
“Your soulmate is such a nerd. Tell me if they say anything else, kay? I have to get started on problem one. D’you know what seventy-nine divided by eight is?”
“I do, but I’m certainly not letting you know.”
“You think you’re getting Linetti family lemon bars with that attitude, punk?”
“I’m not a punk! My soulmate is obsessed with homework, goose. Go easy on me.”
“Fine,” Gina concedes. “Please, just show me how to number one? We don’t all have motivational soulmates who have good grades.”
“Come on,” Amy mutters, trying to block out the voice in her head. “Come on … please, just go away.” Her voice grinds into a growl as she desperately rubs at her temples, sitting in the backseat in the Santiago family minivan. Her seatbelt barely works anymore, covered in sticky fingerprints and spilled blue soda, but at least she’s out of the baby carseat. Being the youngest child isn’t easy, she knows; her brothers teased her over the carseat for weeks.
“Whassa matter, Ames?” her older brother Luis asks, squished in next to her. “Y’alright?”
Scowling, Amy mutters, “I suppose. Just annoyed for no reason. My stupid soulmate won’t shut up.”
“Amy, I didn’t know you had begun that process yet!” her mom calls from the front seat, where she’s currently whizzing past trees and houses at exactly eight miles over the speed limit. Amy would say something, but she’s been through this whole ‘five mile safety zone’ thing far too many times.
“Mom, I told you about this a long time ago, remember?” Amy pleads. “I’ve known my soulmate for ages now. Probably, like, two or three years, to be honest.”
All conversation stills in the family minivan, nothing but resounding beeps and the occasional expletive shouted from open car windows. Amy locks her knees without rhyme or reason, just hoping her mom remembers learning about this significant milestone in her only daughter’s life.
“You weren’t listening, were you?”
Slamming on the brakes to avoid a nearby car, Amy’s mother winces a little. “Sorry, hon, it must’ve slipped my mind. You know how busy it is at home. My fault.”
“It’s fine,” Amy groans, sure that her life is never as fine as she says. Typical for her age, she thinks, biting back the part of the truth her parents don’t want to know. “I just kinda hate my soulmate.”
From the passenger seat he’s so near and dear to, her oldest brother Vic calls. “Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of a soulmate, sis?”
“I guess.” Amy frowns, crossing her arms and reaching into her constellation backpack for her blue spiral: her soulmate book, to keep track of her thoughts and feelings. “I just assumed they’d be a perfect fit for me. Hence, the whole ‘mate’ thing.”
She takes out her favorite set of pens, desperately trying to get some notes in about what her soulmate’s thinking. Some book they’re re-reading for the tenth time, she thinks. Written by some fellow like ‘Logan’ or ‘Bogan.’ It isn’t clear, but Amy can tell it’s historical fiction, so she’s a little more appeased, but the soulmate cheers when the characters get into a gunfight.
“Are they that bad?” her brother Manny asks from ahead, head buried in a copy of ‘Peanuts’ strips and only half-listening to the conversation. His backpack is stuffed with library books (“they’re overdue, kiddo!” Dad shouted last week) and his head full of daydreams.
“Yup,” Amy confirms, looking up from her soulmate notebook, ink still drying in the acrid, junk-food-reminiscent minivan air. “They’re super immature, they never focus on one thing, they hate being organized… so, they’re completely unlike me! I can’t be myself when my dumb soulmate’s feelings go in the other direction.”
She doesn’t quite know what this ‘Bogan’ fellow did to deserve the affections of her soulmate, so she keeps her mouth shut for the meantime. Maybe she’ll tell her family later; learning Mom forgot put a damper on her attitude toward open conversation.
“Woah, woah, Amy. Your soulmate is not ‘dumb.’ Take that back, Amelia,” Mom warns, resisting the urge to honk at a silver SUV up ahead, teeth gnashed with conflict.
“Yes, Mom,” Amy begrudgingly grumbles.
Vic smirks. As the oldest Santiago brother (technically, he’s Victor Santiago, Junior, but nobody calls him that), he pretty much always something to add to family discussions. “Hold on, Mom. You’re okay with Amy’s soulmate reading violent books, but she can’t even call them dumb? Biased much?”
“Well, I can’t control her thoughts! I can tell my children what language not to use, but I can’t do anything to Amy’s soulmate.” Mrs. Santiago absentmindedly swats at the shotgun seat, knocking Vic’s baseball cap a few degrees off. Shrugging, Vic readjusts his cap and returns to his position of defense or coolness or whatever he calls it 一 arms crossed, back slouched, a ghost of a frown present on his face.
“She’s got a point,” Luis says. “It’s not Mom’s fault if Amy has a weird, lazy soulmate, right?”
Amy crosses her fingers, hoping her soulmate can’t tell her whole family is gossiping, but the soulmate is evidently too engrossed in a drug heist to care. The only thing Amy knows about drugs is what she learned at school (just say no, she recites, fresh in her memory from last week’s assembly), but her soulmate is filling her in with all sorts of facts she doesn’t want.
She sticks her fingers in her ears, trying to block out the sound of her soulmate narrating from whatever book they’re reading, until she gives up and simply reaches for the soulmate notebook.
Thank goodness she learned Ford improved shorthand for fun a month ago. Sure, she did it to write faster, but it doubles as a secret code with which to guard her family from ever knowing their innocent little angel is learning about drugs. Amy fills her journal with codified script, explaining ‘weed’ and ‘mary jane’ are actually the same thing.
To Amy’s delight, her soulmate, whoever they are, keeps reading from the book. Even as Mom parks the minivan in the garage and the Santiagos spill out of the car into the house, Amy keeps her head low and keeps scribbling notes (it’s for research, she claims) about the various cases detectives solve. Rushing to her room, which isn’t actually hers because she shares it with Luis and Manny, Amy sits down at the little desk and keeps writing.
She keeps taking notes, feeling glad she did today’s homework already, until a comment jars her perception of this ‘Bogan’ guy.
“G’night, sweetheart,” Quigg said, winking. “Need someone to walk you home?”
Amy Santiago’s stomach drops, and Jake Peralta’s with it. A grimace rises on Amy’s face, a tightness stirring in her chest at what she just heard. Jake isn’t sure why, but he tears the page out of The Squad and shoves it in his bedside drawer. Almost intentionally, robotically, he shoves the book back onto his father’s bookshelf, still stripped bare from the abandonment a few years ago. Adding a tally mark to a fragile index card, he marks fifteen books read.
‘Sixteen’ never quite makes its way onto the list.
Jake Peralta doesn’t really know if he likes boys.
There, he said it, Jake sighs, a weight somehow lifted off of his chest for a moment before it falls right back. It reminds him of a prank Keith Pembroke started a couple months back, scampering around the halls to elevate and drop students’ backpacks. Up and down, weightless and heavy again, binders and textbooks dragging kids down as Keith ran away and fist-bumped his friends.
Except liking boys is much, much worse than feeling the drag of his backpack pull him down. Liking boys is dangerous 一 not Die Hard dangerous, cool and mysterious 一 but dark and quiet, guilt seeping into his lungs, iron and lead weighing him down when he can’t quite think of what to say. Liking boys feels alien, like he just noticed the water he’d been swimming in his entire life.
He doesn’t know if this is who he is, who he wants to be. Nobody thinks ‘deviant’ when they’re asked who they want to be when they grow up.
Liking boys is breathless, yes, falling head over heels, scuffing his shoes running after unattainable hope, but a furtive sting in his heart keeps him lucid among all this. To teenage Jake Peralta, the very act of liking boys is set apart from him. Girls like boys, he was taught: girls who wear their boyfriends’ jerseys on the nights of football games, girls who pass secret notes in class but are somehow never caught.
He wasn’t ever meant to join that demographic, he thinks with a grimace, beating himself up inside for maybe thinking about kissing a boy.
Though he’d never tell a soul, Jake dreams about getting into a car with a boy (if he’s lucky, a boyfriend, even) and just driving away from this 一 from school, where he hears the people in his grade yell ‘that’s so gay’ and not know what it means at all. They say it to boys with high-pitched voices or nice handwriting, boys who put on foundation in the morning or go to theater rehearsal after school. Driving sounds idyllic right about now.
Jake suspects this stems from his soulmate. This one thought worsens everything else, plunging him further into a cesspool of doubt and mindlessness. Obviously, whoever they are (yes, they, he’s a bit wary of gendered terms right in the middle of this gay crisis, okay?!), they like boys. He’s a boy. That part’s easy.
Sometimes, when he can’t sleep after a full day of homework and video games, he can’t help but curse his soulmate out for making him question this again. For making him walk down the same, terrible road every day, wondering what’ll top his wedding cake. For keeping him tied down, his heart so confused it must be bound, scarred, rejected.
Maybe his soulmate’s a boy, maybe they aren’t. He can’t know for sure.
Jake gets in the habit of practicing his responses. My girlfriend, my wife: an endless mantra, a tongue-twister he can’t decipher as fiction or not. It’s not like Jake doesn’t like girls, because girls are funny and pretty and kind and exciting, generous and bold and strong 一 he thinks he just might die when he walks into his bar mitzvah and he sees Jenny Gildenhorn on the dance floor in a silvery blue dress-
But then Eddie Fung swoops in, wearing a three-button tux with a wine-red bowtie, and Jake’s head is spinning, hopeless, some foreign sort of jealousy suddenly churning through his nervous system. Nervous is right. He can’t tell who looks better, Eddie or Jenny, and Jake only thinks she said she’d dance with me as envy stirs in his chest.
He walks away, leaves it all behind, the last notes of his (now) least favorite song trickling away as Jenny keeps dancing, her arms around Eddie’s neck as she whispers into his ear.
The day of Jake’s bar mitzvah, Amy Santiago stays in bed until 10 A.M. Her brothers have tried their hardest to make her move, nudging her shoulders and pulling her blankets back, but their little sister is locked in a nightmare. Time and again, she violently turns in bed, muttering a few lyrics to Air Supply’s ‘I’m All Out of Love’ and twisting the bedsheets around herself. Her parents don’t think much of it, seeing as their sons regularly complain about Amy’s sleeptalking habit.
They simply come to her room once she awakes, carrying a cold cloth. Amy cries into her mother’s cashmere sweater, wiping sweat from her forehead and asking why soulmates have to exist. Her father tells her he doesn’t know, but that there is always good, even in hurtful, lonely, desperate places.
A few hundred miles away from Amy’s childhood home, Jake’s stomach stops hurting. He gains the courage to leave his mother’s closet 一 his thinking place, where it’s so dark he can’t see his hand two feet ahead of him 一 and it feels like cashmere rubs against his cheek as he crawls out from behind the clothes his dad left.
Amy Santiago doesn’t quite know if she likes girls the way some of her brothers do. She says some and not all due to the time she walked in Luis kissing his friend Daniel; she remembers the stone-cold fear in his eyes as he sat her down and told her he wasn’t ashamed, just scared.
She knows better than to ask about the difference.
Amy knows not to assume, especially when her heart flutters like a hummingbird’s wings when Ashley Orchard walks into school. She and Ashley sit across from each other in homeroom and English. Every day, when they do a warm-up writing exercise, Ashley whispers words in Amy’s ear and asks her to spell them. Their teacher smiles over, seeing Ashley’s desk dotted with neon-green post-it’s, and Amy finds herself reading the dictionary throughout the school year (just in case Ashley needs to spell effervescence or petrichor or infinitesimal.)
Everyone gets girl crushes, right?
After summer begins, Ashley invites Amy over for a party and she thinks she might just faint. Amy walks into Ashley’s living room, which feels bigger than her whole house, and Mrs. Orchard hands her an embroidered pillowcase with her name on it. Being friends with Ashley sparks a strange love in Amy’s heart, as she and all their classmates watch High School Musical and eat popcorn by the TV. It’s idyllic.
When Amy gets home, she writes about every detail of the party (“I didn’t know people could invite others over for no reason, diary!”) and tapes in all the photographs they took. Her brothers roll their eyes when she gushes about Troy and Gabriella. Amy’s journal grows thick under the weight of her momentos - mostly sticky notes with words like ‘ecstatic’ and ‘egregious’ written in her own handwriting, and Polaroids with silly captions.
“Melanie Adams brought nail polish!” reads one, as Ashley shows off a mock French manicure. The trail of white polish around her fingernails is rough, but it’s fancy nonetheless. Off to the side, cut off by the photograph’s frame, Amy makes a peace sign with pink-and-white polka-dot nails.
Another is captioned “Attempted all-nighter <3”, as Amy and her friends crowd around the clock in Ashley’s kitchen. It reads 11:06 P.M., a time unheard of for middle-schoolers, and the flash of the camera illuminates the girls’ eyes as they pose by sticking out their tongues.
“Ready for freshman year!” says the last, picturing Ashley’s fireplace as old math homework sits in embers. MacKenzie Hollis is holding their copy of ‘A Wrinkle in Time’ the way she’d toast marshmallows. Amy remembers silently grimacing, frozen in place. She didn’t dare burn herself over a book (or look bad in front of Ashley Orchard, who may as well be a celebrity to Amy.)
Ashley Orchard is the queen of eighth grade, as silly as it sounds.
She likes hearing the latest gossip, winking at her friends when boys approach them, and declaring who her bridesmaids will be at age fourteen. Her best friends, Melanie and MacKenzie, are the same way. When soft-spoken Teddy Wells moves to town, they elbow each other and pass secret notes in class. Amy knows they think he’s cute but boring (they honestly think Pig Latin is a foreign language) and keeps her mouth shut.
It’s not as if she doesn’t like boys. Boys, as long as they’re not the polo-wearing, Kik-sending menaces her brothers grumble about at home, are fine. It’s just that Amy doesn’t always want fine; she wants to tell everyone she might be bisexual without hearing their shocked gasps. She can imagine the remarks now.
“But you don’t look gay!”
“That’s not a real sexuality, you know.”
And the exhausting “I think girls who like girls are so hot.”
Those are simply some of the reasons Amy keeps quiet and walks on, questioning everything until her second-guessing becomes more like third or fourth or fifth...
After the party, as Amy enters high school and enrolls in algebra II, human geography and marching band, she never talks to Ashley anymore. They no longer have any classes together. There are chance encounters in the hallway, perhaps a sentence or two exchanged in the library, but Amy stops reading the dictionary so much. The embroidered pillowcase is forgotten in a drawer. The diary is pushed away, full of stories she finished telling.
On the other side of New York, Jake crosses his fingers for his soulmate. He’s since decided he’s bisexual, having told Nana (“my grandson is so wonderful!”), Gina (“I’ll always be here for you, Pineapples”) and his mom (“I’m so happy you feel comfortable telling me!)
Coming out is a relief. The other burden off of Jake’s chest is the moment he realizes he no longer has ‘Breaking Free’ or ‘Bop to the Top’ constantly stuck in his head.
Amy’s diaries tell her story.
She is thirteen, worrying about scuffing her yellow Vans and piercing her ears for her birthday. Her mother says she can’t wear makeup for another two years. Amy stays up on weekends listening to pop music and doing math homework in black pen. It’s always more exciting in ink, for some reason, and she corrects her mistakes with a neon pink highlighter. She doesn’t need it very often, bringing her a surge of confidence. She ignores the procrastination her soulmate wants. They’re better than that.
She is sixteen, never worrying about homecoming or prom anymore. Amy doesn’t wear makeup even if her parents let her 一 too expensive, too time-consuming. She wakes up early for band rehearsal, spends all day running in between classes only to spend her afternoons tutoring students. Half of them are older than her. Every Friday night, Amy grabs her mellophone (yeah, the French horns have to switch instruments to march, it’s a pain) and rushes onto the football field. Her soulmate wonders why it’s so much easier to fall asleep in class once Amy enrolls in band.
She is nineteen, fresh out of high school and already working toward her college degree. Much to her parents’ chagrin, Amy majors in art history. She reads faster than her colleagues, bikes to class and locks the chain before anyone else is in through the door. Amy takes notes on obscure paint mixtures and Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro. During class, her head fills with thoughts about forensics 一 the angle from which a bullet enters its victim, different chemicals used to detect blood, how long drugs can stay in someone’s system 一 and Amy double-majors because she falls in love with her soulmate’s game.
She is twenty-two, graduating from college as her parents cheer and brothers smile in pride. Amy has a cap, gown, and class ring, everything short of a letterman as she walks down the stage and poses for pictures. Her soulmate, a hundred miles away, shudders with joy as Amy delivers her salutatorian speech. Words echo, parents clap, and Amy smiles so wide her face hurts. Next stop, police academy.
They meet when she’s a new recruit at the Nine-Nine, and she feels a spark when he shakes her hand. She thinks nothing of it. He notices she has a strong handshake.
“I took a seminar,” she boasts.
“Where?!”
Her soulmate hasn’t talked to her in years.
She misses their voice, their good advice and annoyingly funny-not-funny jokes. Amy and her soulmate come close every day, feelings mingling and distorting like the abstractions they are, exhaustion settling in both their bones on nights they’re both awake. It isn’t the same without talking, though. Her soulmate seems to have cut all lines of communication. Amy only waits for an answer on the figurative phone. The ‘on hold’ music happens to be the Funky Cold Medina, which makes Amy hate her soulmate all the more.
There are too many thoughts to contain, she knows.
Amy still keeps a soulmate notebook full of little mementoes taped in 一 a bisexual pride flag, two stamps from Quebec to Albany, a coupon from Goodwin’s department store 一 ones that just happen to remind her of her soulmate. She doesn’t even know why. Finding them was a one-in-a-million thing, the kind of thing she happened to see in the pockets of old jeans or sitting in her kitchen drawer. Something just stuck out to her. Her notebook is filled with tiny details, scrapbooked ideas, stories of a life she’s never led. The ideas just come to her.
She sits up in bed, 2:48 flashing on her alarm clock. Blue birthday cake.
Their favorite flavor of cake, she imagines, jotting it down in the notebook before falling back asleep. It might be near her soulmate’s birthday.
She goes shopping with Kylie, falls into some sort of dizzy spell, and finds a receipt in her wallet for a copy of Die Hard. Somehow, the movie’s sitting in her purse, wrapped in plastic and remarkably unscathed. Apparently it’s a Canadian copy. Amy wrinkles her nose when she finds it’s a VHS, taping the receipt into her journal and making a note to never watch it.
Only a few miles away, her soulmate is browsing through the internet when he hears a rumor that a foreign copy of his favorite film might have better sound quality.
Taxes are due in eight months, so Amy finds her ten shoeboxes of records and starts filing everything. She pages through sales receipts for days, recording everything online and moving them around so much carbon’s left all over her fingers. Her categories are neat: hobbies, recreational, educational, work-related, large purchases, food/drink, every sheet with its own story and compartment, so nice it’s almost too easy to pay taxes-
And her heart stops.
Page 143 of ‘The Squad’, yellowed with time and scuffed at the edges, sits in front of her. Her eyes scan across the page, wondering just when she read something Jimmy Brogan wrote 一 she doesn’t think she’s ever bought one of his books. Not with his reputation. Homophobia, racism, and sexism aren’t exactly her type of historical fiction.
“G’night, sweetheart,” Quigg said, winking. “Need someone to walk you home?”
Amy’s stomach churns, never having forgotten this line, and she scrounges around for her boxes of notebooks. Her eyes wash over the pages, stopping every now and then to admire her selection of gel pen or Disney stickers. There’s no time, she chides herself, holding the page between thumb and forefinger to ensure it’s real. It seems so surreal, almost ethereal, to find it now.
April 13th, 1993: soulmate reads offensive line in Bogan/Logan book. Was sitting in car with Mom, felt sick, soulmate did something to make it all okay.
Amy Santiago isn’t especially good at reading signs from the universe, but she’s smart enough to know this means something. She gently tapes the page into her scrapbook, careful to avoid getting fingerprints on the tape. It sits there, almost waiting for her to finally find her soulmate. As hard as Amy tries, though, getting through is impossible. All she can do is hear the music playing in their head.
Bop to the Top. Just great.
“What the fuck?” Jake mutters, opening his mailbox to find yet another pamphlet for some educational camp or TED talk. He’s lived his whole life finding these around the corner, seeing more and more as he’s aged. Thank goodness. Imagine going through high school as ‘the guy who learns power poses so he can get what he wants with his body.'
“Funky Cats and their Feisty Stats?” He repeats, wrinkling his nose and taking the thick, black brochure with the rest of his mail (bills, bills, bills - ugh) inside his apartment. This goes in the file, already thickly stacked with signs from the universe. He’s not a detective for nothing.
This one goes into the ‘education’ folder, the biggest of them all.
It overflows with old math homework and paraphernalia from different conventions. The Crossing Guards’ Jamboree. Someone calling about his soulmate’s blog, the one dedicated to laminating (there are several: one about typography, one discussing time management, and another for budgeting.) Some seminar about how to shake people’s hands?
It’s ridiculous what his soulmate will pay for.
Seems like they need to read their budgeting blog, Jake thinks, before realizing he knows what seminars his soulmate attends without knowing who they actually are. He groans, tossing the advertisement into the folder and putting it away. It’s too much to handle at once. Jake used to write down all the conversations he’d have with his soulmate, before they went and abandoned him. It’s been years since their last proper talk, though he can always hear what they’re thinking.
Just a lot of miscellaneous talk about secretly smoking cigarettes and Daniel Craig’s hands (ew.)
Jake dismisses all these lonesome thoughts, ignoring the blatancy with which the universe continues to enter his life and leave signals sitting around. Life isn’t normal if he doesn’t shrug away the leftover Polish food in his refrigerator or pretend not to see the cigarette lighter that appears in the bottom of his bathroom drawer. His head nearly haunts him. He isn’t sure he even wants to find his mess of a soulmate at this point.
They’re eclectic. Pushy. Exhaustive. A million different reasons why he shouldn’t be with them, he doesn’t fit them the way soulmates should; he is a lost and jagged puzzle piece to them, and they’re probably halfway around the world wondering who in their right mind could ever fall in love with them. As he gets older, the signs keep coming and coming.
He snaps when a copy of a documentary about the font Helvetica arrives at his doorstep, perfectly covered in plastic-wrap. Who in their right mind would take time out of their day to watch something this senseless?! Rolling his eyes when he flips the cover open (after struggling to unwrap it for five minutes, of course) Jake finds a blue sticky note inside. The universe has figured out how to transfer personal notes on the inside cover of DVDs, he supposes. In impeccable handwriting, the dot on the‘i’ a perfect circle, a message is written.
Review for typography blog.
He’s had it with the mysterious signals. Midnight dreams about holding label makers. A binder full of weird facts, like someone’s favorite food being corn. An odd dislike of pilsners, German and Bohemian (not like Jake would care, but sometimes a guy just has to use Wikipedia when he’s sick and tired of mind games.)
Jake’s exhausted of dreading the first time he meets his soulmate.
His hands shake as he opens an incognito window and searches for his soulmate’s blogs. A subtle emptiness fills his chest once he’s on the fourth or fifth Google search. Is the universe up to its antics again, or is Jake just this useless? His eyes droop once he’s read ten different articles about the Palatino vs. Times New Roman vs. Garamond argument. His left hand’s fallen asleep by now, pins and needles pricking him from the wrist up. Who’d have guessed the office supplies fandom was this extensive?
He doesn’t know how to feel when he finds her.
His soulmate is a woman. User missmostappropriate, with just under ten thousand followers. Her posts are each works of art, he begrudgingly concedes, after scrolling through ten or fifteen. Good writing, nice photography, enthusiasm he wouldn’t have guessed would be this realistic…
Is this what he’s looking for in a partner? A soulmate, even?
The lingering thought that he could be wrong enters Jake’s mind, but everything clicks far too perfectly. The button-maker and its mirrorbacks. An old story about how she learned power poses (and promptly forgot them because they were too sexual.) Even the dumb Helvetica documentary is on the calendar.
In a weird, I-found-you-on-the-Internet-after-the-universe-nagged-me-to-find-you way, Jake feels like he’s done searching for them. For her.
His breath only catches when he sees the P.O. box ‘missmostappropriate’ has. And, no, he’s not surprised just because nobody’s used a P. O. box since 1991.
Amy Santiago
Box #32729
Brooklyn, NY, 11225
Fuck.
A few miles away, Amy Santiago wakes up in a cold sweat at the prospect of cursing.