There was no doubt that Kayla was the cause of Lucy’s strange behavior. Ever since Lucy first saw Kayla, Lucy had been thinking non-stop about her to a point where Lucy started to question her sanity. Lucy’s obsession wasn’t creepy; she was simply fascinated with Kayla’s confidence and desperately wanted to get to know her, even if Kayla didn’t know Lucy existed.
It didn’t take long for Ana to notice the shift in Lucy’s behavior, but, to be fair, Lucy was terrible at hiding her blatant curiosity. When Lucy walked with Ana down the halls and saw Kayla, she stopped mid-sentence. When she gathered herself enough to start speaking again, she stumbled over words, distracted by how Kayla grinned at her friends. During lunch, Ana complained about her teachers and the countless difficult assignments they gave while Lucy nodded absentmindedly. Her eyes were trained on Kayla, who usually talked animatedly while holding whatever she had for lunch that day in her hand.
At the end of their first week, Ana finally brought up Kayla during lunch, almost as subtle as Lucy’s attraction to Kayla. While Lucy watched Kayla, Ana stabbed her fork into the piece of meatloaf on her lunch tray and grumpily exclaimed, “I can’t believe Mrs. Thompson would do that to us! I mean, two essays in one week? That’s insane! I can barely focus enough to write one essay! Also, I know that you’re totally not listening to me right now and staring at Kayla like the hopeless lesbian you are. Staring at Kayla won’t help you get closer to her. You have to actually talk to her to become friends before you two can start making out in the bathroom stalls.”
“W-what? I wasn’t- I didn’t- I’m not staring at Kayla. I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lucy stammered as she looked back to Ana with an unbelieving expression. Ana laughed heartily, placing a hand on Lucy’s shoulder as the corners of her eyes crinkled with amusement. Ana’s gesture let Lucy know that it was okay for her to let her guard down.
She took her hand off of Lucy’s shoulder and went back to stabbing her meatloaf at a lethargic tempo. “You’re terrible at hiding the fact that you have a giant crush on Kayla. At this point, I’m pretty sure the whole school knows you’ve got the hots for her.”
“I don’t… fine. Yes, so maybe I do have a little bit of a crush on her, but it doesn’t matter. It’ll go away in, like, a week or two.” Lucy winced at how unconvincing and tense her voice was, though she had attempted to sound nonchalant, Ana chuckled loudly nonetheless. Clasping her hands together, Ana turned towards Lucy. “I’ve never seen you fall for somebody that hard. Maybe she’s your soulmate. You should talk to her.”
“Shhh, keep your voice down,” Lucy urged, lowering her voice and glancing around her to make sure that nobody had caught what Ana had said. “If somebody hears you mention soulmates, they’ll go insane. People around here make such a big deal about soulmates.”
“Fine, but you have to promise me you’ll at least talk to her. I can’t stand your constant yearning. It makes me sick.” Ana mimed gagging, and Lucy playfully shoved her while shooting her an annoyed look that had no genuine anger in it.
Finally, Lucy gave in to Ana’s pestering, her shoulder sagging as she reluctantly conceded, “Okay, I’ll try.”
“That’s the spirit!” Ana gleefully patted Lucy on the back and went back to eating her lunch.
Truth be told, Lucy knew that her best friend was right. She had a bad habit of being too shy, a trait she despised as it made her seem like she fit right into the stereotype of “shy, submissive Asian girl.” Without Ana pushing and supporting her, Lucy wouldn’t have been bold enough to get closer with Danielle and, eventually, ask her about being soulmates. As bad as that situation had turned out, Lucy was glad that Ana had pushed her — without it, she wouldn’t have learned her lesson about love and getting too close to people.
Now, when Lucy agreed to talk to Kayla, she didn’t expect that she would be talking with Kayla at the beginning of the very next day. She thought to herself, I’ll get around to it eventually. No need to try to pretend I have enough social skills to have a conversation with Kayla right now.
At the beginning of the second week of school. Mr. Zimmerman, the astronomy teacher, decided to properly introduce the project he’d mentioned on the first day of school. “This project is a report about constellations. You need to include accurate research as well as notes from your observations of the constellations. Now that you have a basic idea of what the project is about, why don’t you go ahead and choose your partners? I’ll give you guys five minutes. Pick your partners wisely.”
Immediately, the room erupted into chaos, as people hurried to their friends to secure their partnership. Lucy glanced around the room frantically, trying to search for somebody she knew. But the few people she knew had already found partners, causing Lucy to worry, I might have to do my project with somebody who’s going to make me do all of the work. I hate having the reputation of being a stereotypical Asian kid who does nothing but study. I’ve wasted my anger over too many lazy kids who took advantage of my work ethic to let it happen again.
Just as Lucy predicted, a boy she knew to be lazy started walking over to her. Panicking, Lucyhurried over to Kayla, the first person who came to mind, and loudly asked, “Hey, Kayla, do you want to be my partner?”
Kayla swiveled around to look at Lucy. She must have seen the wild desperation in Lucy’s eyes because she quickly answered, “I’d love to!”
Lucy let out a huge sigh of relief, glancing over her shoulder and seeing that the boy had wandered away to find somebody else to leech off of. But her relief quickly turned to panic, as she realized that she had used Kayla’s name, unknowingly revealing the fact that Lucy knew who Kayla was. Kayla seemed to be thinking the same because she had an amused smile on her face when she asked, “Hi, nice to meet you. How do you know my name?”
“Uh, well, my friend told me your name because I asked about you because I didn’t recognize you. I’m Lucy.” Lucy internally cringed at how unconfident she sounded, berating herself for coming off as an absolute idiot in front of the girl she really admired. Great, this second time you speak to her and you can barely keep it together. You have no chance with her at all.
There was a sparkle in Kayla’s eyes as she smiled so brightly that Lucy thought she was witnessing a supernova. “Well, nice to meet you, Lucy. I’m glad to hear that I’m already popular…It’s good to know that I’ve actually made quite a few friends during my first week here.”
“Oh, yeah, um, yeah, people like you a lot. I mean, I see you making people laugh, like, all the time,” Lucy explained, tripping over her words. She was too busy admiring the small smile wrinkles at the corners of Kayla’s eyes to realize what she’d just said.
“You’ve seen me around and haven’t said anything to me?” Kayla’s eyes widened incredulously and Lucy blushed so hard that she was certain her face was red enough to look sunburned. Before she could stutter a reply, Kayla placed a hand on Lucy’s shoulder and looked her in the eyes as she firmly stated, “Well, that’s going to change, because you’re going to have to get used to hearing the sound of my voice, partner.”
“I can’t wait!” Lucy mustered up enthusiasm even though she felt like she was about to faint and fall onto the disgusting floor of the astronomy classroom.
Kayla’s grin widened and Lucy’s heart swelled with a feeling she couldn’t name as Kayla cheerily replied, “Me too!”
–
“That’s awesome, Lucy! You can finally stop silently watching Kayla and start talking. I can’t wait to attend your guys’ wedding,” Ana sighed dreamily, her voice broadcasting through Lucy’s phone as Lucy finished up her biology homework. Lucy bounced the end of her pencil against her table as she leaned back in her chair, sighing in frustration.
“First of all, we’re not going to get married, we literally just started talking today. Second of all, I still don’t know if she’s my soulmate. We can’t make assumptions. Remember what happened last time with Danielle?”
Lucy dropped her pencil with a loud clatter as she made a face, recalling her painful experiences with Danielle, one of her old best friends.
A little before Lucy met Ana, Lucy had been good friends with Danielle during freshman year, but they had a falling out that resulted in Lucy starting sophomore year with one less friend.
Lucy sighed and admitted, “To be honest, the falling out was partly my fault because naive ninth-grade Lucy thought that Danielle might have been her soulmate and decided that it was worth the risk to ask her about the possibility of being soulmates. But I should’ve known she didn’t feel the same about me. Honestly, her cutting me off after that whole incident is the reason I still have trust issues.”
“I mean, after she broke my heart, I start covering up my soulmate tattoo. Obviously, it was mostly out of fear of my parents finding out about my sexuality and throwing me out of the house, but still.”
Picking up her pencil again and fiddling with it as she spoke, Lucy continued, “So yeah, I try not to think about Danielle.”
Essentially, Lucy had turned into one of those people who had their heart broken and paraded around declaring that they hated love. Except, Lucy’s way of parading around and declaring she hated love was by hiding her soulmate tattoo, the only chance she had at ever finding love.
Ana didn’t seem too bothered by Lucy’s anxiety and retorted, “Yeah, but that was Danielle. Sure, Danielle and Kayla are both super friendly but also don’t seem to think twice before acting – side note, I might have figured out your taste in girls – but Kayla is a chance for you to move on. The thing with Danielle is in the past now and you have a chance to actually get together with somebody!”
The way Ana was talking about Lucy’s chances with Kayla reminded Lucy of the way people discussed celebrities’ love lives, and Lucy made a face at the thought of being compared to plastic celebrities. Ana’s dogs were barking in the background and Ana’s voice grew distant as she called, “Teddy! Finn! That’s just our tío, stop barking!”
Lucy saw a chance to move the conversation away from the topic of her love life and asked, “Your uncle is at your place?”
“Yeah, he’s just picking up some stuff. So, back to Kayla, you should definitely ask her out by the end of the project. I mean, you two have to spend time together to work on the project so somewhere in the process you should just ask to hang out with her or something,” Ana suggested, oblivious to Lucy’s uncomfortable grimace. As much as Lucy loved Ana as a friend, she sometimes could be a little too insistent for Lucy’s liking.
“I can’t. My parents, remember?” Lucy was about to elaborate by mentioning how her ultra-conservative Chinese parents were mocking the LGBT community during dinner, the only time Lucy was forced to sit down and have to talk to her family. But before Lucy could speak again, she heard the front door of her house open and slam. “Speaking of my parents, I think my mom just came home. I gotta go. Talk to you tomorrow.”
“Okay, bye!”
Lucy hung up on Ana, placed her phone down, and picked up her pencil to start working again. She was acutely aware of her mother’s footsteps as her mother shuffled closer to Lucy’s room. As Lucy heard her bedroom door creak open, she gripped her pencil and stared down at her textbook, pretending to be focused on studying instead of being focused on the fact that her mother was watching her.
Only when Lucy’s mother left did Lucy relax. Since Lucy’s parents were super strict and emphasized how important academics were for her, Lucy was expected to constantly be studying so she tried not to get caught talking to her friends. She had almost been caught on multiple occasions but lied her way out so her parents wouldn’t throw fits about her getting distracted. Lucy hated constantly hiding everything from her parents but she had no other choice.
