Ever since she can remember, Maggie's thought about her soulmate in two totally different ways. In one way, she loves her soulmate. She stopped being scared (mostly) of snakes for her soulmate, she's the best in her grade in science because of her soulmate. She likes thinking about her soulmate surfing alongside dolphins and turtles in Hawaii, before plopping down in the sand and reading a novel. When she thinks about her soulmate, it's not really a person or a clear figure. It's an idea, but there's no body or face really attached to it.
But in another way, she hates thinking about her soulmate. It makes her skin crawl to think about any of the boys she knows being her soulmate. Thinking about getting married, being someone's wife, sharing a house and bed with a boy, and kissing him and having sex with him…no. Just, no.
And her parents aren't soulmates and Tomás said to stop thinking about her soulmate, and so she never looks around at the boys and wonders what it would be like for any of them to be her soulmate. Her parents never say the word, so they don't joke about every boy who starts with A like Cassie's mom does.
Maggie both desperately cares, and also hopes to never think about it again.
She doesn't understand why until a couple months after her thirteenth birthday.
Her fifth Revelation is greatest fear. And she wakes up in the morning and she's totally confused. Her right arm says "girls," and she doesn't get it. Girls? Since when is she afraid of girls? Snakes, sure (she's trying, but they don't have legs). Heights, yes. Those boys who clearly still want to pummel her, definitely.
But girls?
She likes girls. She loves girls. All her friends are girls. She doesn't ever even look at boys or think about boys, so how on earth could she be afraid of girls?
Her left arm says "failure," and at least that one makes sense. Maggie's competitive; she likes to win, she likes to succeed, she likes to be the fastest and the smartest and the best at everything. So, yeah, failure is a good fear.
Girls, though, doesn't make any sense.
But then, a couple of months later, she's sitting at lunch with her friends. They're almost done with eighth grade now, and people are going on dates. Usually in a big group – a group of boys and a group of girls and one of each are "on a date" and just sit next to each other – but still. They're dating.
Maggie has no interest in dating.
Trysta is asking Cassie, who has already gone on three dates with three different boys, which is the most of any girl in their class so she's basically a dating expert, how you know when you have a crush on a boy.
"It's simple," Cassie tells her. "Think about the boy, and picture yourself holding hands with him. If that feels nice, you have a crush on him. If it doesn't, you just like him as a friend."
The very idea of holding hands with any boy she's ever met gives Maggie the willies.
She turns that sentence over and over in her head for days. Something just isn't fitting, and she can't figure out what it is.
And then, that summer, a new girl moves into town and joins the summer soccer league Maggie plays in. Her name is Eliza Wilke, and she has long blonde hair with the tips dyed pink and she wears a lot of eyeliner and halfway through the summer she goes to Lincoln with her cousin and gets her nose pierced. And she's tall and glamorous, but that doesn't seem to matter to her.
Instead of all the other tall white girls with blonde hair, she picks Maggie to be her best friend on the team. And they start hanging out after soccer, and they take over Eliza's basement as their primary spot because it's fucking hot in Blue Springs and the basement is always nice and cool.
And Maggie feels something swoop in her stomach when they're alone together and she can smell Eliza's shampoo, or when she says something that makes Eliza laugh, or when Eliza puts her arm around Maggie's shoulders and calls Maggie her best friend.
And one night, when she's walking home from Eliza's house, and the sun is just setting, Cassie's words pop into Maggie's mind. And she's completely dumbfounded as she realizes.
She wants to hold Eliza's hand. She thinks about herself holding Eliza's hand – even, maybe kissing Eliza – and it's the best thing she's ever imagined.
Which, if Cassie's right, means that she likes Eliza. That she has a crush on Eliza.
A girl.
Maggie's heard all the words for girls who like other girls, especially the bad ones. She's never thought of herself that way.
But, she's never had a crush on a boy.
And she definitely has a crush on Eliza, who is definitely a girl.
Everything slots into place, and it terrifies her. Deep into the very core of who she is, it terrifies her.
She remembers her Revelation, that word that showed up on her skin almost six months ago.
She thinks about her soulmate, and forces herself to picture a boy. She hates it.
She lets herself, for the very first time, picture a girl. A girl who surfs and reads on the beach in a bikini, long hair dripping down her back, her tan skin glowing in the sunshine, her smile glinting white as she beckons for Maggie to join her on her towel.
And Maggie walks past her house and into the cornfield and she isn't afraid of snakes or heights or bullies. Just her own stupid, backwards, fucked up, totally gay heart.
They all start ninth grade, and a lot of boys notice Eliza and have crushes on Eliza because she's tall and gorgeous and looks like a model and she's new and they haven't known her since preschool.
But Eliza doesn't give any of them the time of day. She just spends time with Maggie.
They fashion themselves rebels. They make plans for the stick-and-poke tattoos they're going to give each other. They go to Lincoln with Eliza's cousin and spend all of their money at Hot Topic. Eliza steals a pack of cigarettes from her mom and they smoke them down in the basement, and sometimes they sneak cans of beer from the fridge and they sip them, acting drunk and giggling to each other at how desperately bad they are.
They pride themselves on watching horror movies while all the other girls in their class are watching romantic comedies.
Their class is so small that they're still friends with the other girls. But everyone knows that Maggie and Eliza are special, that they're a unit. Maggie loves it. It gives her a little thrill every time someone calls them best friends or says "MaggieandEliza" like they're one person.
And Maggie isn't positive, because they've never talked about it, but she's pretty sure Eliza might like her back, might want to hold her hand and kiss her too. Because Eliza never even looks at the boys, and she spends all her time with Maggie, and sometimes they cuddle while they watch the movies, and they have a lot of sleepovers.
And this is the first year they're old enough to go to the big dance in March, and everyone is going, and everyone is going with a date. And Maggie doesn't want to go with anyone but Eliza, and she doesn't want Eliza to go with anyone but her.
Maggie likes her so much. She knows Eliza isn't her soulmate, obviously, she's from Oklahoma and her name starts with E, but Maggie can't imagine ever liking anyone as much as she likes Eliza.
She's nervous when she puts the little yellow card in Eliza's locker on Valentine's Day, the note confessing her feelings and asking her to the dance. She's nervous enough that she asked her in a note, instead of in person. She feels very small that day, waiting for an answer. She's nervous Eliza will say no.
And, later, she feels like an idiot, but at the time she doesn't really think about it being a gay statement to go to the dance together. They already do everything together, they're always together. They're MaggieandEliza. It just feels like defense – they can't go with anyone else because they're going with each other. And yes, maybe in Maggie's fantasies they hold hands and slow dance and kiss, but it just never really clicks for her that this isn't just about her and Eliza. That it's about the whole school, the whole town.
She wonders later, if she'd really understood what she'd been doing – if she'd understood that she was asking both of them to out themselves, to openly tell everyone they're gay, by walking hand in hand to the dance where everyone was expected to kiss – if she'd have done it at all.
But she doesn't really think about it like that.
So she's blindsided.
She puts the note in Eliza's locker during morning break, and she doesn't see her at lunch, which is weird because they always eat lunch together. And they have afternoon classes together, but they don't get the chance to talk because Eliza walks in and out of them in a group of other girls. And after school Maggie has softball practice and Eliza doesn't play softball. So Maggie goes home after practice to change her clothes, planning to call Eliza from her house.
But she gets home and her parents are sitting in the living room, waiting for her.
She drops her bag at the front door, cocking her head in confusion.
She starts to ask what's going on, and then she sees it.
Her note, in the sweet little yellow envelope she'd agonized over at the store, clutched in her father's hand.
He doesn't even give her time to pack.
Her mom doesn't say a word.
Maggie has never felt pain like this. Sadness and anger and fear, she's felt those before. But she's never hated like this before. Never hated anyone else like this. Never hated herself like this. She's never felt despair like this, not even close – never felt it threaten to crush her in an instant. She's shattered. It's a screaming in her ears, it's a disembowelment, an evisceration. She's on fire from the inside, she's drowning. The words ring in her ears, harsh and jagged and cruel, and they don't stop.
Tonio packs a bag for her and brings it over to their tía's house a few days later. He found her Revelations journal under her bed, and he made sure to wrap it in a couple tshirts so it didn't get messed up. He remembered to bring her softball bag and her soccer bag too, but he forgot all of her underwear.
She has to wear her tía's old pairs until she can save up enough money to buy her own.
Eliza never speaks to her again, not one word. Ever. She goes to the dance with Justin Beam.
Her parents don't speak to her. Tomás doesn't speak to her. Tonio says hi at school, but he drops out later that year. He's flunking nearly all of his classes but he's started working at the tire shop down the road and the owner says he'll hire him on full time without a diploma, so he takes the job.
And Maggie is alone.
She wishes she could opt out of the sixth Revelation. She doesn't want to know.
She considers wearing long sleeves and just never checking what's under them.
She's been living with her tía for almost a year. She's settled into a routine. Her tía doesn't have much money, much less than her parents, so Maggie tries to take up as little space and as little money as she can. She sleeps on the fold-out couch in the living room, and she's careful to have put it back into couch form before her tía wakes up every morning. Maggie works two jobs now to be able to afford her own groceries, so her tía doesn't have to feed her. She does her homework in the library during lunch and after school so she doesn't take up space in the apartment.
She'd tried to stay on the softball team so she could get a scholarship to college, but the other girls wouldn't treat her like a teammate. They wouldn't let her into the locker room while they were changing, they wouldn't partner with her for drills. She got hit with a lot of pitches and dirty slides in practice.
Her coach had finally pulled her aside and told her that she wasn't a good fit for the culture of the team.
Maggie had sold her gear and used the money to buy an SAT prep book.
Now she studies from it every night after her tía goes to bed. She has to earn her scholarship another way.
So she considers not looking at her arms, because what good could possibly come of it?
But she's a curious person, and she can't really leave a mystery unsolved, so she looks.
The sixth Revelation is what the three people closest to you think of you.
Her word is "abomination." She'd been expecting "dyke." This is worse.
Her feelings bubble up, but she shoves them back down, deeper and further than ever before.
She scares herself with how good at that she is, now.
Her soulmate's word is "brilliant."
Maggie tries to be happy for her, to be happy that the people around her see her and appreciate her. She tries to be happy that she's matched with someone so smart. She tries to be proud of her, instead of jealous of her.
She tries not to worry that her soulmate won't want to meet her.
She tries not to worry that her soulmate will believe it. That this girl will really believe that she's matched with an abomination.
That she'll hate her, too. Just like everyone does.
It doesn't work.
Her soulbond opens when she's sixteen, like everybody's.
She doesn't feel much at first, which is apparently normal. It takes time for it to solidify, for things to start Resonating regularly.
She feels worry, sometimes. Over the summer she feels a terrible pain in her head, and then a suffocating feeling like her lungs are filling up with water. The terrible pain her head fades after a couple hours, but it throbs for days.
It's weird, knowing that it's happening to someone else. Her soulmate has always been this kind of abstract concept before now – a person she knew existed but was sort of just an idea.
And now it's a real person, with a body, and a brain, and feelings, and she was just smashed in the head with something, and Maggie wonders if she was surfing and nearly drowned.
It makes her real in ways she never was before.
And Maggie's family was, it turns out, wrong about fucking everything in the world, so Maggie tries to shuck off the shame she's always felt for caring about her soulmate.
If her dad never cared about his soulmate, Maggie will care about hers more than anything, even if she is nothing more than an abomination.
If Blue Springs never expected her to find him, she's gonna find her.
Her final Revelation comes right after she's turned in all her college applications, but before she gets any decisions back. She has just one more semester of high school to go before she's free of this terrible place forever, and she can't wait. She has enough saved up for a bus ticket to anywhere in the country, and it's taking all of her discipline to wait until graduation before she shakes the dust from this godforsaken place from her shoes.
On her seventeenth birthday, like every day, she wakes up at 5:30am. She makes her bed, careful to fold the sheet and blanket flat so it'll collapse into a couch on the first try. She puts on her work uniform in the dark, careful not to wake her tía. She leaves the apartment and jogs to the grocery store, clocking in at 5:55 for the first half of her split shift. She works in the back, restocking the dairy fridge and taking inventory (the only jobs where customers can't see her and make a fuss about her contaminating their groceries with her lifestyle) until 8:30, when she hangs up her apron, clocks out, and trots to school, sliding into her seat just as the tardy bell rings.
It isn't until her free period after lunch that she remembers that today is her birthday.
She's the only person in the library, so she has privacy to slowly roll up her sleeves and look at her final Revelation. Her right arm says "to be loved."
Well, yes. Clearly.
Her left arm says "to be relieved." It takes her a while, but she gets it. Her soulmate has been Resonating a lot of stress lately, she must want a break.
Maggie hopes she's okay.
The librarian comes over, and she's a sweet older woman, and she's always been nice to Maggie. And Maggie is too slow pushing her sleeves down, and the librarian sees.
"Happy birthday, Maggie," she says softly.
"Thank you." They're the first words Maggie's spoken all day.
The librarian walks away and then comes back with an old polaroid camera.
"Take as many pictures as you want, sweetheart," she says, her voice a little thick. "I know you probably don't have any."