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Amy is fairly certain that, of all the ways that her life has gone down the toilet in her twenty-odd years on earth, this one certainly must take the cake. She’s spent the sum total of her adult life so far with bullish focus on research, getting into graduate school, managing to throw her weight around in grant meetings and paper-writing groups and academic conferences. This entire time, she’d summarily ignored the red heartstring that loops itself, gentle as satin, around her wrist. It led off somewhere into the distance, the same as it has her entire childhood, and she is frankly too busy becoming as kick-ass as she can make herself within her field to worry about finding some mystery person at the other end.
She watched her parents as a child, still besotted with each other decades after first finding each other, the thin gold heartstring of their match stretching and contracting between them as they go about their daily lives. Her mom had assured her as a child, that if she didn’t want to pursue her bond they wouldn’t care, but she could see that underlying sadness in her eyes at the idea of her child being without a bond. When the red string appeared at 18, there was a clear sigh of relief from her parents, which she tried not to be insulted by, the insinuation that her bookishness meant that she wouldn’t be a good fit for a soulmate. Nonetheless, she felt no need then, and feels no need up to now to seek out her person. She always thought that wherever they were, they would appear when it was the right time for her.
This belief is a little harder to believe when Rose is part of her life, her best friend since undergrad, who entangled herself in Amy’s life from the first time they met in the neuroscience lab. Rose likes to joke that she named herself for her rose-colored view on life, though Amy knows that she is a deep romantic to the core. Having Rose in her life means also having Johnny in her life, being there the first time that they were in the same room sophomore year, watching the red string snap taut and pull them together as if fate had decreed it (and in a way, hadn’t it?). Johnny was, and still is, both very sweet and very obsessed with Rose, willing to follow her to the ends of the earth, the two of them entangled with each other literally and figuratively all the time. She adores the two of them, even when they take her out to third-wheel them (at least they buy dinner), but there’s always the unspoken look in their eyes, the pity for her, still unattached, red string leading out into the ether. She ignores it as best she can, shuts down Rose when it comes up, and puts her nose to her books. She is getting into graduate school if it kills her.
Get in, she does. After grueling applications during her senior year, balancing writing statements and emailing programs with her thesis research, she starts to get her payoff – email after email inviting her to interview, to meet with faculty, to fly out, they’ll cover expenses, if only she’ll visit their campus. Rose watches her with a gleam in her eye, her cheerleader even as she waits for the final few schools to send back interviews for her translational psychology research. There’s always a small part of Amy’s heart that mourns that Rose wasn’t on the other end of her heartstring, with how well they get along. She knows it’s fruitless to mourn what isn’t there, with how strong their friendship is, with how much Rose and Johnny love each other. Still, at the end of the day, when her dreams betray her and offer glimpses of bodies tangled in red and gold, she wishes more than anything that whoever is her other half, she trusts and loves so deeply as she does her best friend.
In the meantime, she sleeps around – not a taboo, per se, but something she has to clarify early and often on the apps. She isn’t looking for her soulmate, this is purely physical, her soulmate isn’t even in their little college town anyway, or her string wouldn’t be pointing out west, slack to the ground like a trail marker. Her partners are similarly inclined, with red strings pointing out into the distance that she never comments on. One girl, particularly mournful, has a frayed black string. Amy sees it as she is taking her shirt off and hesitates just a second too long, stares a little too hard, effectively ending anything that would happen that night. She doesn’t want to talk about it and Amy, for all she threw herself into the books on this, isn’t sure she wants to listen. They sit in silence, smoking over the back porch and watching flies hit the porch light, and then Amy excuses herself and walks back to her apartment in the moonlight. She diverts her mind every time it returns to that frayed black thread, nestled like ash against the bird bones of her wrist, to the empty hollow look on the other girl’s eyes.
When she interviews, she notes that the interviewers are careful not to ask her anything about her bond. Several of them look at her with some surprise, clearly noticing the red string on their prime candidate in the neural correlates soul bonding and bond rejection, but clearly choose to hold their tongues. Amy preens, ignores them and their stares after her, and continues to prove herself worthy. If the string on her wrist twitches for the first time in her life, well, she ignores it well enough.
A few months later, she and Rose are sitting at the kitchen table in her apartment, an unholy amount of glitter and rhinestones spread across the newspaper. Amy stares at the blank canvas of her graduation cap, uncertain of her artistic ability, and looks up to see Rose watching her with kind eyes. Her cap is already covered with so many fake flowers that Amy has a moment of sympathetic pain for her neck, but she’s looking at Rose, at her wrist and the loop of twine there. In a drunken moment a few weeks back, Amy had confessed that she had felt something pull when she was touring the school that she had since signed an offer letter for, that she was both excited and petrified at the same time when she felt it. Ever since, Rose had been giving her annoying, knowing, soft looks whenever she thought Amy wasn’t looking. She shakes her hand, snapping her fingers until Rose’s eyes refocus and she chuckles, grabbing for the hot glue gun to add yet another fake flower to her cap. Amy thinks back to that weekend, touring her soon-to-be home city, meeting professors and other students. She felt the tug then, but hadn’t gone to check, and evidently the other person was just as much a coward as her because her heartstring sits there now, stubbornly red, stubbornly pointing to the west. She refuses to think about whether that tug influenced her decisions, it’s too late now anyway, she’s committed to this school.
Amy puts it out of her mind over the summer, about as well as she’s put it out of her mind for the last five years. She spends the summer packing, going to all her favorite places in her little college town, and traveling home to pack her childhood bedroom and spend time with her parents in equal measure. There’s a moment when her mom looks at her wrist and seems like she’s about to say something, but she seems to think better of it and just gives her a long hug instead. Rose is by her side almost this entire time, her and Johnny being disgustingly cute and looking at house listings in the city, debating the merits of Amy’s neuroscience program versus Rose’s translational psychology. They don’t talk too much about how they’re going to the same university – at the end of the day, Amy feels like that was always more fated than her heartstring.
And then, everything changes. It’s only on the first day there that she feels it, the gentle pull of someone in the same city as her – a feeling she’s only experienced once before. The next day, as she’s buying groceries for her apartment, she feels it again – someone in the same shopping plaza, closer than she’s ever been able to even conceptualize. She starts walking around the city like a bomb-sniffing dog, feeling the paranoia that comes from the sudden movement of the string that had remained stubbornly still for the first two and a half decades of her life. And yet, it isn’t until that first day of graduate student orientation that everything truly goes to shit.
The faculty at the program had mentioned Brook off-hand when she had accepted her offer, how lucky they were that they would have two brilliant, talented, promising soul-bond students joining their cohort in the same year. They had mentioned their name, said that they would be natural collaborators, what a pity it was that they were interviewing on a different day than her. Amy, at the time, had heard a mixture between ‘friend’ and ‘rival.’ Now, as she sees their sandy blond head bobbing across the room at the new student mixer, she realizes she may have underestimated their threat. They are an unassuming Adonis, the low lights glinting off of their gold septum ring and eyebrow bar, their smile instantly charming. Amy finds herself, for maybe the first time in her life, looking at their dimples as they smile and speak to someone. Almost as if in a dream, she looks down and the slack heartline is gone, replaced by a taut red line like a tightrope, pointing directly to them. Her heartbeat almost doubles, and she looks up as if to confirm it, the pull she feels on her wrist directly to her other half.
Brook looks delighted when she comes up to them, turning the full wattage of their sunbeam smile on her, and she’s sure she’s acting a fool, coming on so strong to them, but she feels her heartstring snap taut and she feels that maybe she’s allowed this indulgence for once. She lets them flirt right back, takes every advance and matches their energy, and by the time they’re getting drinks at a small lamp-lit bar a few blocks from the university, their foot is trailing up her leg and she’s leaning into their shoulder. It only takes a kiss outside, as the hum of the city mutes around them, for her to decide that she’s spent too long ignoring her soulmate, she wants to be with them now.
They are only too happy to oblige, leading her to their apartment, a small thing on the tenth floor of an old pre-war building. They laugh about the kind of rent they can afford on their miniscule stipend, even as Amy is kicking off her heels and backing them up against the door, nipping at where their gorgeous jawline connects to their neck, sliding her hands up their back under their shirt, digging her nails in when they press their knee up between her legs. She pulls away just for a second and looks at where their fingers are intertwined, at the red heartstring so tight she can barely see it, and lets Brook take her to bed.
Amy wakes up to Brook’s arms around her, a sea of red and gold, and feels as though maybe those dreams she had avoided through her senior year were a premonition, telling her how wonderful it will be someday. She stirs lazily in their arms, turns around to press a kiss to their nose. Brook is watching her, a worried crease in their brow. She reaches up a hand to smooth it out, to console her lover, her heart, her soulbond. They are looking down at her heartstring, pulled happy and taut to their wrist, to the thin gold band they have over their wrist.
Funny, Amy doesn’t remember even noticing it the night before.
Brook doesn’t say anything for a long moment when they pull the cuff off, just put their wrist down on the bed so Amy can see the gold string, looped gentle as anything and trailing off to the south. Her own heartstring shudders, and she realizes only when Brook looks up at her that she is shaking, sobs threatening to break open her ribcage.
“Amy, I swear I didn’t know. I would have told you if I had known, I thought you were just…”
“Just what, Brook? Just flirting? Just trying to be a homewrecker? Is that what you take me for, a bond-ruiner?”
She hears her voice shaking, rising dangerously in pitch as she tries to finish the sentence, but she can’t stop herself, staring down at her heartstring that pulls itself to Brook, where there is no companion to echo it. She feels out of her head, as they try to reach out to her bare shoulder, to smooth down her hackles, to placate her from this rage inside her head.
“What was your plan, to ruin me? To show everyone that I’m just some cheater? Is that what you wanted to do to me Brook?”
This at least gets a response from them, hands flying back to their sides.
“Amy, I told you, it isn’t like that. We have… an arrangement until they come to live with me here. We tell each other everything, I just didn’t expect this to be more than just, just a hookup. So sue me, you didn’t tell me what you were doing, you just came up real interested!”
Amy stares at them, already grabbing for her bra and shirt that are somewhere at the end of their bed. They don’t stop her, just watching her with a detached sad air as she stumbles into her clothing from last night, the stockings she was wearing torn beyond belief and stuffed into Brook’s trash can. It’s only when she sees the drops on her velvet skirt that she realizes that she is crying, ugly tears that splatter down her face and onto her clothes. She storms out before Brook can do something stupid like console her and makes it to the street before things truly come together. She sits on the curb, heels digging into the gutter, and pulls up Rose on her speed-dial. Before a word can come out of her best friend’s mouth, a taunt or quip about where she was last night, she shudders out the words, “Can you come get me?”
Rose stops her prepared speech instantly and yells something to Johnny in the background, and Amy cries into the receiver, blubbering non-words as she listens to Rose start the car, to Johnny in the passenger seat triangulating Amy’s location from the app. Within ten minutes, their car pulls up, and Rose is out of the driver’s seat with the hazards on, scooping Amy up in her arms and pulling her into the kind of hug that is meant to solve world crises. They get her into the car, drive in silence punctuated by occasional sniffles back to Rose and Johnny’s house.
In the end, she doesn’t even have to explain it. All it takes is for Rose to hold her at arm’s length and take her in, and her barely-concealed gasp of horror says it all. The ashen rope hangs frayed and cut around her wrist, and she curls into herself and sobs again, chest heaving until she every feeling she’s ever had is laid out around her and she just feels barren.