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Noelle was flabbergasted. Egads, just why in the world was the string of fate tied around her pinky finger BRIGHT YELLOW?! It was still red yesterday before she went to sleep.
In her head, she went through everything that occurred during the previous day but nothing had been out of the norm. It had been a typical school day and afterwards, she studied, ignoring the irritating laughs of children her age playing outside.
Noelle could not fathom the cause of this anomaly. She wanted to scream but her parents would reprimand her and tell her to focus on studying. So she squeezed the long snake plushie Diya had given her into a tight hug.
A couple of minutes was sufficient to calm her nerves before she started searching up the string on fate on the Internet. For the next couple of weeks, between studying, she researched possible causes for changes in coloration of fate strings, online and even in the local library.
Try as she might, she never figured out the reason why the color had changed and became resigned to her fate of whatever a yellow string meant.
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In a different bedroom – the day before Noelle had woken up and saw a shocking sight– Akarsha sat cross-legged on her bed with a neon yellow highlighter in hand. “Lmao that actually worked?” She marveled at the now bright yellow string around her left pinky finger. The yellow reached as far as she could see.
She had just been curious after her dad mused about some objects being able to interact with fate strings. “What if someone took a permanent marker and colored their string?” he had asked, holding a brown Sharpie marker as if he was about to demonstrate.
Her mother batted his hand away. “I don’t want my string to look like dirt.”
Akarsha was used to this sort of banter. She looked forward to this little experiment and once in her room, grabbed what was on hand: a yellow highlighter.
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Strings of fate were sometimes very long, to the point that it was hard to recognize your soulmate even when you met them. It was only after the two of them started dating that Noelle realized her soulmate was Akarsha.
After this discovery, she wasn’t surprised with why her string of fate was bright yellow. Akarsha definitely had a hand in it.
Akarsha told Min-seo and Diya about it too and in every other sentence, Noelle interjected just to say how absurd and irritatingly bright yellow their fate string now was.
After hearing the story, Min-seo immediately made a demand. “Give me a blue highlighter now!” they shouted. Akarsha smirked and handed them a highlighter from her backpack.
Min-seo gripped the highlighter tightly and moved it across the air next to her pinky finger. Noelle was speechless, already guessing what was occurring.
Diya smiled, her string of fate only visible to her and Min-seo. “It’s blue now. Like blue food.”
Min-seo puffed out their chest. “Anything for you, babe.”
Noelle was fed up with this. “Seriously?!”