Disclaimer: That '70s Show copyright The Carsey-Werner Company, LLC and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, LLC.
Author's Note: This story was written for the 2017 Zenmasters Anthology on tumblr.
CHAPTER ONE
THE COSMIC TOWER
Hyde winced at his first taste of Orange Julius. Its Creamsicle flavor wasn't his favorite, but Kelso had paid for it. He'd also paid for Forman's and Fez's. It was a bribe to keep him company at the mall. Hyde would've preferred a cherry pop—or a Schlitz—especially considering his view. The Orange Julius store sat directly across from the Cheese Palace, where Jackie worked. Their table offered a clear line of sight, allowing them to spy on her every move.
Kelso elbowed Hyde in the ribs and nodded at Jackie. The skirt of her Cheese Maiden uniform covered only the top half of her thighs, leaving most of her legs exposed. She couldn't be warm in that thing. The last day of September had brought a chill to Point Place. Despite the mall's central heating system, the temperature inside resembled Alaska more than Tahiti.
"Man, Jackie's hot in that outfit," Kelso said, and Hyde's clutched the cup of his Orange Julius. The liquid inside stole what little warmth his fingers had. "And she doesn't know how good she has it, either. I bet the cold's brought out the best in her boobs, if you know what I mean." He pulled out his shirt to resemble two sharp points at his chest.
Forman gestured at him with a pen. "Put those away. I don't want to imagine Jackie's … anything." He slid the pen behind his ear and rummaged in his jacket. "Why do these pockets have to be so big? Can't find—ah." He yanked out an index card, one of those index cards, and the tiny hairs on Hyde's neck shot straight up, as if trying to escape his skin.
Kelso released his shirt, and the simulated nipples snapped back to his chest and flattened. "All I'm saying is the cold does bad stuff to a man's junk, and I—hey, Fez, could you quiet down? Trying to talk here."
Fez was slurping Orange Julius through a straw and making a ruckus. "So orange-y," he said after swallowing. He wiped his mouth of foam. "If only I could write a love note on one of these cups and have it poof! to Rhonda."
"That would be awesome," Kelso said. "Anyway, modeling underwear in the cold's rough. Halverson's paying a lot of dough for my natural bulge, so the photographer's getting me an electric heater from Greene's Office Supply … but if I watch Jackie long enough, I won't need it." He gulped down some of his Orange Julius. "God, she is so hot in that outfit!"
Hyde couldn't disagree, but hearing it repeatedly from Kelso shoved energy into his knuckles. He cracked them, hoping to ease the tension in his hands. Jackie had dumped Kelso over a year ago, but Kelso seemed to think he had some claim on her. Didn't matter that she was less than interested. Every other month, Kelso tried to change that fact and failed.
"Can we move onto a more important subject?" Forman said and flicked his index card. "Donna and I are actual soulmates. Jackie's just a naïve, obnoxious girl you bamboozled into doing it with you."
"Yes." Fez pointed at Kelso with his Orange Julius then at Jackie across the mall. "You two mean nothing to each other. Move on!"
Kelso half-shrugged but stayed quiet. Jackie's break-up with him and Donna's break-up with Forman occupied opposite ends of the cosmos. Maybe Kelso was smart enough to recognize it, but Hyde wouldn't gamble even a belch on what Kelso might've understood.
"Can you believe it?" Forman said and continued to flick his index card. "I've used up four of these babies since we broke up. That's one thoughtful message a month, and she's giving me nothing."
"Not nothin'." Hyde swallowed his second sip of of Orange Julius and shuddered. He really hated how this crap tasted. "She gave you back your promise ring."
"Ha-ha. Not funny, Hyde." Forman tapped the index card against the table. "These cards are limited and irreplaceable. Doesn't she know that? I mean, how lucky is she that her soulmate lives next door to her?"
"How lucky is she? How lucky are you, man?" Hyde shifted his eyes in Jackie's direction but allowed himself only a glimpse. "You're all scrawny and Forman-y, and she's freakin' Donna."
Kelso licked Orange Julius foam from his upper lip. "Yeah. You could've ended up with Sister Mary-Ellen of Transylvania. Celibate, a vampire, and from another country. Jackpot!"
"Sure, Kelso. Sure." Forman quit treating the index card like a tambourine and studied it. "I've got only eleven of these left. I need to put something down that'll convince Donna she's an irrational maniac—who should accept my ring so we can get on with our lives." He grabbed the pen from behind his ear and pressed it to his lips. "What to write. What … to … write."
Hyde ran his tongue over his teeth. His last taste of Orange Julius lingered in his mouth, and he pushed his cup aside. Like the drink, the idea of soulmates had never appealed to him. Not everyone itched to be stuck with someone he didn't choose himself. Being born to a shitty set of parents was bad enough.
He and Donna had talked about the concept more than once. Her parents weren't soulmates, and neither were his, and their marriages croaked. But cosmically arranged relationships had an equal chance of dying. No partnership could survive without free will and good choices.
"Damn!" Forman grasped a fistful of his hair. He hadn't written a word on his index card. "I've already appealed to her logic and begged her to accept the fact we're meant to be. What else can I do?"
Fez held out his hand, palm-side up. "Give to Fez"
"I don't think so, pal. I'm not having some perverted message showing up in Donna's bathroom."
"Do you think I write my Rhonda perverted messages?" Fez slammed his cup on the table and stood. "You have insulted me, sir."
"But, Fez—"
"I said insulted!" Fez marched out of the Orange Julius store and toward the escalators.
"Good job, Eric," Kelso said. "You pissed off Fez. You should tell Donna to have sex with him as an apology—oh!" He jabbed two fingers at Forman's index card. "Write that down! Your generosity'll get Donna to take you back and Fez to forgive you."
Forman looked straight at Hyde. "If you were me, what would you write?"
Hyde adjusted his shades on his face. He wouldn't write anything. He'd talk to her.
"Come on!" Kelso gestured at Forman's index card again. "Telling your soulmate to have sex with one of your friends is romantic."
"How could she put me in this position?" Forman said, still looking at Hyde. "How can she see a future without me? We grew up next door to each other, for God's sake! What is she thinking?"
"If being with her soulmate means being in prison," Hyde said and forced himself not to glance across the mall at Jackie, "them maybe she'd rather be free."
"You and your conspiracy theories."
Forman didn't get it, but Donna had flipped the cosmos the bird by breaking up with him. She'd tried to assert some control over her life while they were together. But he'd tried just as hard to seize that control for himself, so she wrenched it back. Hyde would've done the same as her had he been in that position.
Relationships, cosmically arranged or otherwise, gave no guarantees of a smooth ride. Being in one usually meant the opposite, but through compromise and mutual respect, people could end up pretty damn happy.
The Formans were his best example of that. They'd written messages to each other during World War II and the Korean War, experienced hardships that might've destroyed less solid marriages. Without knowing them, Hyde would've chucked his own index cards into the trash. His dad's soulmate turned out to be booze, and his mom's was a trucker who drove her out of Point Place for good.
"Hey," Kelso said to Forman, "let me borrow your pen."
"Are you gonna stick it in your butt crack?" Forman said.
"Not this time." Kelso produced a stack of index cards from his jeans pocket. Plastic-wrap surrounded it. "Bought these on the second floor, Greene's Office Supply." He ripped off the plastic wrap and held up the top card, as if comparing it to Forman's. "They're close enough, right? I'm gonna write Jackie a message and plant it somewhere in the Cheese Palace."
Forman handed Kelso his pen. "Go ahead. I'm completely blank."
"Cool." Kelso recited his message as he wrote it. "Your soulmate's waiting for you in his underwear outside Halverson's."
"Yeah, that'll work," Hyde said and cracked more energy from his knuckles. Kelso's scheme had become clear, but Jackie would never buy it. After she caught him cheating on her, he couldn't prove he was her soulmate, and she was done with him. That was one useful trick those cosmic index cards had performed: wising her up.
Kelso returned Forman's pen. "She won't be able to resist. Jackie was always on about soulmate this and soulmate that when we were together. She even thought I was the one who'd written those messages she got as a kid until..." He examined his palms. A pen mark stained one of them, and he wiped it off with spit and his finger. "Until I told her I lost the rest of my cards and couldn't write her new ones. But now—" he kissed his stack of index cards, "maybe she'll believe I finally found them and that I've been her soulmate all along."
"What actually happened to your cards?" Hyde said.
"Dog ate two. Baby brother got poo on one. Casey stole some, and I got no idea what he did with them. I set one on fire to see if something cool would happen. It didn't."
Forman's forehead wrinkled. "Did you ever write on any of them?"
"Sure I did! I asked, 'Are you hot?' And I got back a message, 'Il fait trente degrés.' Well, after seeing that alien language, I dropped my cards into my uncle's wood chipper. I'm not marrying an alien—" Kelso sliced his hand through the air and knocked over his Orange Julius cup. Liquid spilled onto the table in Forman's direction. "No way, no how."
"Kelso!" Forman grabbed napkins from the dispenser and scrambled to soak up the liquid oozing toward him.
"I don't want my kids having green skin and antennas," Kelso went on. "Plus, aliens gotta have some weird chemistry that'll shrivel my love gun."
Forman continued to sop up Orange Julius with napkins. "Got new for you. Your soulmate's not—"
"Leave it, Forman," Hyde said. Kelso had killed his chances with his soulmate. Lucky chick.
Kelso hiked his thumb at the Cheese Palace. "Okay, I got a barrel full of cheese and sausage to tip over. Need Jackie distracted while I put this card in the right place."
He raced from the Orange Julius store, bumping into several people in the process, but Hyde focused on Forman. Jackie wasn't desperate or stupid enough to believe Kelso's latest stunt. She'd be fine.
Forman started writing on his index card. He breathed heavily as he wrote, punctuated his last sentence with an obvious exclamation mark, and the card vanished in a burst of sparks.
Orange Julius patrons applauded, and a sneer tugged at Hyde's lips. Scrawling to one's soulmate in public shouldn't be a spectacle, but people enjoyed peeks into others' romantic lives, whether it was marriage proposals or cosmic messages.
"And I just wasted one of my cards." Forman touched the table. "It'll probably arrive all sticky, too. Damn Kelso and his clumsiness." He bit the cap of his pen. "I'm not using the ten I've got left. No, siree. I'll save those for my old age, for when I'm dying and Donna-less."
Hyde's sneer fully surfaced. All this angst about cosmic index cards was sickening. Each person got only thirty cards in a lifetime. They added up to sixty total between soulmates, but the entire system was bonkers. Forman needed to talk to Donna in person.
"How'd you use your cards before she dumped your ass?" Hyde said.
Forman slapped the table. "Why does everyone think she dumped me? It was mutual … due to her insanity." He snatched his Orange Julius cup and drank what was left, highlighting a major difference between him and Hyde. Forman indulged in bad flavors and bullshit.
"When Donna I first started dating," he said, "she asked if I thought we were soulmates. I said, 'Let's find out.' Neither of us had written on our cards yet. I'd loved Donna since I was three, so the cards didn't mean much to me, and she … well, let's just say she was a soulmate agnostic.
"Anyway, later that night, I wrote, 'Hey, pretty lady, why don't you come over to my house with that red shirt I like.' The index card zapped off my desk, and I thought I was high. I mean, how does that shit even happen? But she got the message. Boy, did she ever.
"She climbed the trellis beside my window, entered my room, and tossed the shirt at my face. 'If you like it so much,' she said, 'you wear it.'"
Hyde chuckled. "I remember that shirt." Donna had last worn it during a summer rainstorm. Its thin material got soaked, becoming virtually transparent. Her black bra was visible for all to ogle. She never put on that top again.
"I used my second card to apologize," Forman said. "Eight more were for apologies, too. I wrote an angry message on one, when she left me waiting at the Nugent concert. The other four were used for fun and games." He leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head. "How I miss our fun and games. I had it all, Hyde."
"That's your problem, man. 'I had it all.' How's about Donna? Every time she tried to get a little for herself, you freaked on her."
Forman sat up straight. "What the hell do you know? When you've met your soulmate, you feel it here." His fist smashed the center of his chest. "When things are good between you, nothing feels better. And when things go bad, it hurts worse than you could possibly imagine. So before you pass judgment, why don't you write on one of your cards and see what happens, huh?"
"Nah. I'm cool."
"That's you..." Forman wiggled his fingers, "always 'cool'. You're so cool I bet you didn't even get any index cards. No magic materialization for you. Just a pile of empty space."
The muscles of Hyde's right forearm flexed, but otherwise he was motionless. A stack of index cards had appeared on his ninth birthday, in his sock drawer. He'd gleaned their significance from his parents, usually during their fights with each other. The rest he learned from TV, the Formans, and experience.
"But you're too cool to feel a real connection to anyone," Forman said and pushed himself from the table. "So it doesn't matter if you have a soulmate or not. You'll end up alone because that's what you want."
He left the Orange Julius store, but Hyde remained seated. A half-dozen tables stretched between two wooden support beams. They were all occupied, and the store's standing patrons periodically glanced at him. They probably hoped he'd vacate his chair, but he yanked the straw halfway out of his Orange Julius cup and rammed it back inside. He wasn't going anywhere yet.
Yards away, Kelso stood in the line for Jackie's cash register. The Cheese Palace was full of customers, an advantage he likely hadn't realized. Instead, he'd wait until he could implement Mission: Tip Over the Cheese-and-Sausage Barrel with Jackie's full attention.
His idiocy was equal parts amusing and exasperating. Forman's tantrum was less amusing, but at least it hadn't been personal. Donna wasn't available, so he'd unleashed his anger on the most convenient target. It was a role Hyde seemed to play for a lot of people.
Years ago, he'd asked Edna about the index cards: couldn't she write Dad a message on one, telling him to come home? A few months earlier, Bud had hightailed it out of town with his secretary.
"Oh, honey, your father and I aren't soulmates," Edna said. "No one is. That's just a myth, like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy." She ruffled his hair, but the gesture lacked any affection. "Those cards you found in your room? I put them there. You might as well throw them out."
He ripped up three cards thanks to that conversation, but she'd lied to him before. Even at nine-years-old, he knew acting on her say-so wasn't a wise decision. The surviving index cards went into an empty shoebox, and he tried not to think about them.
But days after his tenth birthday, an index card appeared on his radio. He'd gotten up from his bed to crank the music louder. Edna was nailing the mailman in her bedroom, and their voices vibrated through Hyde's wall.
He picked up the index card and read it. "Are you real?" it said. The handwriting was slightly loopy and more than a little messy.
Numbness spread through his chest at the question. Every time Edna brought a new sex partner into the house, Hyde asked himself the same thing.
He dragged the shoebox from under his bed. He grabbed one of his own index cards from it and wrote, "I don't know."
A flash of light consumed the card. The sight detonated a series of explosions in chest, disintegrating the numbness. Unless Edna had become a pyrotechnics expert in secret, cosmic index cards were very real.
He waited for a response, but days turned into weeks, and those became months. His handwriting might've been unintelligible. Or his message had scared off whoever had written him. He received no message back, not for another four years.
Over the period of a week, eight index cards showed up in random places: his school locker, Forman's bathroom, a comic book he stole. The writing on them was loopier than before, but it was also a lot tidier.
"I'm _. What's your name?" the first of the eight messages said. "I live _. Where do you live?" His soulmate might've been trying to be mysterious with those blank spaces, but he doubted it.
The next two messages though, revealed his soulmate's likes and dislikes in tiny handwriting. She'd utilized both sides of the cards, sharing her favorite color and food. What TV shows she watched and terrible music she listened to. He learned about her dream of being a model or an actress. But info about her parents' jobs was blanked out, as was her birthday. Anything that would help him identify her in a concrete way.
The cosmos couldn't let this damn process be simple. It had some sick need for humans to bumble through their existence.
His soulmate's fourth message apologized to him and said, "What do you like? What are you like? Tell me everything."
The fifth message came two days later, when he'd written nothing back. "Are you getting my cards? Did they get lost? Are you illiterate? If you are illiterate, you can draw me pictures. Oh, but if you can't read, you won't know what I just wrote."
The sixth message came later that night. "Am I annoying you?" it said. "My friends say I talk too much, but I really want to know what you're like. Who are you? Here's how I envision our wedding..."
He skimmed her lengthy description of a wedding that would never happen. Each of her messages was a paper cut, reminding him of what he didn't want to consider. He'd just started high school. His voice had broken, unlike his friends', and he was taller than them, too. His sideburns clinched the image he hoped to project, that he was older and more experienced than a freshman.
Living in the present offered dozens of distractions, like making out with sophomore girls, getting hand jobs from junior girls, and being sucked off by senior girls. The future offered only pain.
He hadn't planned on ever writing his soulmate again. But her ideal wedding forced him to think about adulthood, about the high probability of leaving his wife or being left by her. He couldn't let his soulmate live in a fantasy, and he wrote her one word.
"Stop."
Her seventh index card appeared the next day, in his Algebra I textbook. "You're real!" it said. "We're going to meet someday. I just know it! And it'll be soon. Aren't you excited?"
His message clearly hadn't gotten through to her, but he wrote no follow-up response.
"Okay, I'll leave you alone..." her eighth index card said, "for now. But we're meant to be. It's destiny, soulmate. My mom says you're probably young and still think girls have cooties. So I'll let you grow up a little. But you better hurry. I'm very pretty, and I'm only going to get prettier, which means lots of boys will be after me."
It was the last message from her that year, but it stuck with him. She had a giant ego, and she believed in the bullshit called destiny. He was all about free will and choices. Soulmate or not, they weren't compatible.
For more than one reason.
Acrash drew his gaze to the Cheese Palace. Kelso had finally knocked over the cheese-and-sausage barrel. He darted to the back of the shop as customers scattered to other parts of the mall.
Sausage and cheese had spilled onto the floor. Dozens of of links and wedges. Jackie began to pick them up, and Hyde chewed on his straw until his temples hurt. He'd let that crap happen to her, was letting Kelso hide that index card on a shelf.
He jumped from the table, but Kelso had already run off. Hyde tossed his cup and straw into the garbage, and an Orange Julius patron whispered, "About time."
She was right. He'd stayed put too long, but he strolled to the Cheese Palace. Sprinting like the place had caught fire would reveal more than he should.
In front of the register counter, Jackie was on her hands and knees, gathering cheese and sausage into a pile. Her cleavage peeked out from the top of her blouse, and his neck heated up. Seeing her like that inspired a fantasy that clenched his stomach, but he ejected it from his skull. She deserved better than a visual groping. Far better.
He crouched beside her, picked up a cheese wedge, and her gaze snapped to his. "Steven? What are you doing?"
"What's it look like? Joining the Havarti party."
"Shouldn't you be laughing at me instead? That idiot Michael pretended to dance with the barrel, and here I am. "
"I'm laughing on the inside."
"Sure," she said, and together they dropped cheese and sausage into the barrel. "Seriously, why are you helping me?"
He bent down and reached for a wedge of Gouda. "Made a bad choice. Making a better one."
They finished filling up the barrel without talking. She wiped her hands on her skirt, and he moved to leave, but she grasped the hem of his denim jacket. "What bad choice?" she said.
"Could've stopped Kelso." He rolled his shoulders. Her grip on his jacket had created a slight pressure on them, but the usual heaviness of his body was gone.
Nope. It was more than that. He was freakin' floating on the inside. Helium must've been injected into his bones. "Knew what he was planning," he said and held onto the register counter for stability. "Sorry."
"Now you're apologizing? Take off your sunglasses"
"Not happening."
"Fine." She released his jacket and cupped the sides of his face. "What's your name? Who sings for Led Zeppelin? When is Valentine's Day?"
"I didn't hit my head, if that's what you're getting at."
He fought the urge to shut his eyes. Her palms on his cheeks, her lips inches from his mouth—it was too damn much. Everything he was ached to be with her, but the feeling wasn't mutual.
She didn't want him. She'd told him as much, and unlike Forman, he wouldn't coerce the girl he more than liked to act against herself.
"Kelso—" he said, but the shop's manager disrupted his confession. He'd charged out of the refrigerated storage room, and Jackie let go of Hyde's face.
"Jackie, we don't have enough inventory to refill the barrel," the manager said. He was a short, skinny guy named Todd, who couldn't be older than twenty. His cheeks were red, probably from being in the storage room. "We'll have to sell the tainted cheese at half-price and say it's a special end-of-September sale. Get on it."
Hyde's jaw tensed at his tone, but Jackie retrieved a marker and a piece of paper from the register counter. Behind her, Todd reorganized shelves of cheese and sausage. His blond head was the perfect size and shape for a punching bag, but Hyde shoved his fists into his jeans pockets. Jackie never hesitated to speak up when she felt wronged. If Todd's attitude bothered her, she would've reacted.
"What's this?" Todd plucked an index card from between two plastic-wrapped salamis. He read the card to himself and tapped Jackie on the shoulder. "I've finally received my first soulmate message. My soulmate is in this very mall!" He waved the card in the air. "Glorious day! I'll be back."
He rushed from the Cheese Palace to the nearest stairwell. He'd obviously found Kelso's index card, and Hyde smirked. If fate lacked a sense of justice, at least it had sense of humor.
"Can you believe that?" Jackie said. She'd finished the September Cheese: Half-Off sign and taped it to the barrel. "Even he has a soulmate who cares."
"Sure yours does, too," Hyde said.
"Right. My soulmate's an ass."
"Mine's an egomaniac. Guess we both picked the short straw."
She went to the cash register and clutched the lacing of her bodice. "I can't believe Michael. He makes such a mess of everything!" She undid the bow of the lacing and redid it, adding two unnecessary knots. "You know, I actually tried to save myself for my soulmate. But then Michael came along, and I thought he..." She inhaled deeply. "Anyway."
A woman stepped in front of Hyde to the register, and Jackie greeted her. "Welcome to the Cheese Palace. How can I help you?"
"I need a non-salty cheese," the woman said, and Jackie led her to a shelf. She explained the flavors and textures of different cheeses. One was nutty, another was buttery, another was herbaceous, but the woman chose quickly.
Hyde stayed out of the way as Jackie rang up the woman's purchase. He should've left altogether, but Jackie needed to be aware of Kelso's latest plot. Hyde's silence equaled complicity, a mistake he wouldn't repeat.
"Kelso bought himself a bunch of index cards," he said once the woman was gone. "He's gonna try to convince you he's your soulmate again. The card your boss found was from him."
Jackie stepped out from the register, crossed her arms over her chest, and leaned her hip against the counter. "He'll fail, but thank you for 'ratting him out'."
Even though Hyde's shades, the light of the Cheese Palace were bright, like that of a police interrogation room. She'd just made reference to his silence on Kelso's cheating. Laying traps to get him caught hadn't been enough.
"I'm no rat," he said. "I've got my loyalties figured out. What Kelso did to you last year—I should've been straight with you about it."
The corners of her lips ticked up, not quite a smile. "Yes, you should have, but I might not have believed you anyway. Seeing it for myself hurt, but it was for the best." That not-quite smile seized her mouth, and he flinched. She appeared genuinely happy. "I thought about writing to my soulmate after I broke up with Michael … but then you and I happened."
His lungs struggled to suck in enough air, and he rubbed his jaw with his knuckles. "No, we didn't."
"Steven, I know you felt nothing when we kissed, but it wasn't the same for me. I..." She uncrossed her arms, peered up at the ceiling, and laughed. "I shouldn't have felt that way with you. Because you and I aren't soulmates, but I did—" she looked at him again, eyes mirroring the confusion infecting him, "and I still have no idea what it means."
"What are you tellin' me, Jackie?"
She moved to a nearby shelf and smoothed wrinkles from its picnic-print cloth. "Our kiss was more than hot, but you aren't my soulmate. So I lied."
Hyde's arms grew heavy at his sides. His legs were no better. The iron in his blood must've solidified and was weighing him down. "Who gives a shit who your soulmate is, man? Be with whoever you wanna be with."
"I give a shit." She went to another shelf but ended up adding more wrinkles to its cloth. "A soulmate's the only one who won't cheat on you or abandon you. I need that guarantee."
"Nothing's a guarantee. You see Forman and Donna lately?"
"They're both morons, but they'll get back together eventually. It's destiny."
Destiny. The word thinned his blood and allowed him to step toward her. "It'll be their choice to get back together. Not fate. Just like it was their choice to get together in the first place."
She turned from the shelf, fists clenched. "Whatever, Steven. This conversation's pointless. Our opinions are too different. Mine is right, and yours is wrong."
"Egomaniac."
"I am not your soulmate, so don't try to flatter me, you ass."
He laughed in spite of his frustration. They suffered from the same freakin' affliction: stubbornness.
"Steven..." Her fists unclenched as he continued to laugh. "Would you get out of here?" she said with a giggle. "I have to work." She slapped him on the arm. "Please?"
"Yeah, I'm goin'."
He left the Cheese Palace faster than he'd arrived, propelled forward by their disparate beliefs. Nothing else he could do.
The bare bulb of Hyde's room provided the same amount of light no matter the hour, making night and day indistinguishable. Inside, that distinction was fading away, too. The lengthening nights of fall had invaded his cells, creating an inescapable chill.
He shivered on the Formans' ottoman with his beat-up shoebox. He'd brought the box from his house when he'd moved in with the Formans'. Twenty-five of his index cards remained in it, and he took one out.
"Fell in love with someone," he wrote on the card. "Probably won't work out, but if you're waiting around for me to show up, don't. No such thing as destiny, so don't use me as an excuse to not live your life. You can find someone better. Someone great."
He stopped writing. The index card glittered on top of the shoebox and dematerialized. His soulmate had to learn the truth. She could be imprisoning herself in a cosmic tower, hoping he'd arrive with the keys. He didn't have the means to free Jackie, but his message might spur his soulmate to free herself.
Jackie slid into bed, but the lamp on her nightstand was still on. She reached toward it, accidentally jostled the lampshade, and something bit into her wrist. She checked her skin. It wasn't bleeding, but an index card lay flat on her nightstand. Her clumsiness must have dislodged it from the lamp.
She snatched the card as her pulse tightened. Her soulmate hadn't written her in years, and his last message wouldn't inspire any romance novels. But maybe he'd finally matured enough to try to connect with her.
"This better be your pledge of undying devotion to me," she whispered to the index card. She was sacrificing a lot for this boy. Her time with Steven today had reminded her just how much, but her soulmate picked a perfect moment to write her again. It was a reminder to trust in destiny.
"Fell in love with someone," the message began, and her eyes unfocused. She couldn't have read that right. She blinked, brought the card directly under the lamp for more light, and mouthed the letters that composed each word: "F. E. L. L. I. N. L. O. V. E. W. I. T. H. S. O. M. E. O. N. E."
Her heart throbbed in her fingers, and each beat obscured her sight, but she read the rest of the message: "Probably won't work out, but if you're waiting around for me to show up, don't. No such thing as destiny, so don't use me as an excuse to not live your life. You can find somebody better. Somebody great."
She fanned herself with the index card. Her cheeks were burning, as were her eyes. He hadn't fallen in love with someone else. He couldn't have.
