To avoid thinking about Kayla, Lucy tried to avoid seeing Kayla (out of sight, out of mind, right?). Lucy would go out of her way to take the long route to get to her next class if she saw Kayla walking towards her general direction. She saw Kayla in the cafeteria a few times and chose to sit in a seat where her back was purposely facing the girl who had invaded her mind and refused to leave.
Presenting the project with Kayla was one of the most awkward experiences of Lucy’s life. She and Kayla had to stand in front of the class and improvise the presentation because Lucy refused to meet with Kayla to practice. Lucy felt guilty about pushing Kayla away, but voluntarily talking to Kayla was like stabbing her own heart with a knife. Despite not practicing together at all, Kayla and Lucy’s presentation flowed well. While Lucy should have been happy to get a near-perfect grade on the project, she felt miserable knowing that she ruined her friendship with Kayla.
She had let Kayla get too close to her, an obvious mistake that she should have learned from falling for Danielle. Then again, the situation with Kayla was different because Kayla reciprocated the feelings and she happened to be Lucy’s soulmate. This time it was Lucy’s fear that prevented her from getting what she wanted.
For the rest of junior and senior year, Lucy avoided Kayla like she was a flu. Kayla wanted the exact opposite because she attempted to talk to Lucy several times. Lucy ignored Kayla every time she reached out, no matter how painful it was for Lucy to push her soulmate away. If Lucy looked into Kayla’s eyes, she would give in and yield herself completely to her soulmate, so Lucy continued resisting her temptations.
Lucy expected Ana to berate her for cutting Kayla out of her life, but Ana understood that Lucy’s circumstances were preventing her from chasing after her soulmate. To be fair, Ana tried coming up with detailed plans and motivational speeches to try to convince Lucy that there was still some hope for her and Kayla, but Lucy never bought into her best friend’s attempts, even though she knew that Ana was doing it out of the good of her heart.
Graduation was the second to last time Lucy had to see Kayla. Nobody was more excited than Lucy to graduate, and as Lucy watched the graduates walk up on stage to get their diplomas, she silently counted down the number of names left to read before the principal got to hers. Because she had forgotten that Kayla’s last name was before hers, Lucy was shocked to hear Kayla’s name get called and her mind went blank as she watched Kayla walk on the stage.
Kayla had a giant grin on her face as she walked up to the stage and accepted her diploma. She radiated confidence, and Lucy was suddenly reminded of why she fell in love with her. Her emotions overwhelmed her and Lucy nearly stood up to run to Kayla and ask her for one more chance because she thought she would never see her again after graduation. But Lucy remained in her seat and Kayla left the stage. Days after graduation, Lucy replayed that specific moment in her head and realized that when Kayla had posed for her photo, she had been looking into the audience, searching for somebody. Lucy never found out who she was looking for.
Throughout her time at college, Lucy was constantly thinking about Kayla. She wondered if Kayla was still cracking jokes and making her friends laugh. She wondered if Kayla’s eyes still glittered whenever she started talking passionately about an idea born in her head. She wondered if Kayla had found somebody new and moved on from searching for her soulmate. After all, if Kayla had been willing to throw away the possibility of meeting her soulmate to be with Lucy, that meant she didn’t really care about soulmates, right?
The last time Lucy saw Kayla was nearly ten years after graduation. Lucy had gotten a job at an accounting firm and, during her lunch break, she went onto the website FindYourSoulmate.com, a website in which people posted pictures of their soulmate tattoos and hoped that their future soulmate with a matching tattoo would find them. Even though she knew she shouldn’t get hung up on the concept of soulmates because she had willingly abandoned hers, Lucy still indulged herself in stories of soulmates happily uniting.
She was scrolling through the website when she saw that somebody had posted a picture of a blue star tattoo on their leg with the caption “Looking for a female soulmate who has a matching blue star tattoo.” Lucy’s hand instinctively flew up to her cheek, where she used to have her matching blue star soulmate tattoo. After Lucy graduated from high school, she convinced her parents to let her go to a tattoo parlor and get a new tattoo over her soulmate tattoo. They were reluctant at first but Lucy promised them that if she ever met her soulmate, she wouldn’t need a tattoo to determine it.
Lucy scrolled through the rest of the photos posted by the user and saw that Kayla posted the tattoo every week. Accidentally stumbling upon a photo of Kayla that Kayla had posted on the website, Lucy paused and touched the screen of her laptop as if she was trying to reach Kayla. Out of the blue, Lucy’s co-worker, Janet, sat down next to Lucy and Lucy clicked back to the website’s homepage.
“Are you on FindYourSoulmate.com?” Janet peered over Lucy’s shoulder as she took a sip out of her coffee mug. “You should post a picture of your soulmate tattoo.”
“Maybe. I have to get back to work,” Lucy gave Janet a strained smile before she closed her laptop, grabbed her lunch, and went back to her workstation. After that day, Lucy never visited that website again.
oh my god the ending