"Why are you here?"
"I wasn't suppose to be."
She once had a left handed teacher. One girl had pointed it out when he was writing something about the water cycle. The class then spent three minutes finding out who their left handed classmates were and everyone tried to write 'precipitation' with their non-dominant hand before giving and moving on.
It's kind of the same thing (but not really).
She once had a left handed teacher. A girl had pointed it out with a victory screech like she had discovered gold. Everyone then spent three minutes frantically trying to find out who else in the class were left handed and wrote their name in their non dominant hand before giving up and moving on.
'It's kind of the same thing', Molly thinks as she stares at her slanted and crooked name, the graphite smudged against the side of her left hand as her right hand rubbed against her wrist. (But not really.)
Her mom and dad weren't soul mates. We met at uni, they say and smile as she stares at the mismatched initials. George and Alice Hooper, with the initials C and T on their wrists, respectively. They were in the same class and they just fell in love, her father exclaims.
Her mummy and daddy weren't soulmates. Her daddy has a C on his wrist and her mummy had a T on hers. Molly knew this like she knew that the alphabet started with a, the sky is blue, and the fact that she doesn't have a soulmate.
She's seven, and it doesn't really matter yet, the fact they aren't soulmates, because her parents smile as the other walks into the same room, kiss when they think she's not looking (she is and it's gross), and finish each other's sentences.
They repeat the story of how they met, her favourite story, as they sat on the couch. She stares up at them expectantly from the scratchy carpet, waiting for them to start.
"We met at uni," her daddy begins, smiling fondly as his hands played with her mother's hair. "I sat behind her in Econ 001-"
"It was the most boring class he's ever taken," her mummy cuts in, turning around to face her father with a teasing smirk on her face.
"It still is," her father exclaims and smiles good-naturedly. "Professor Binds made me fall asleep every class. Anyways, I sat behind her and everyday I would ask her for a pencil because I just wanted to see her face."
"If you weren't so cute and I didn't like you back, that would've been creepy," her mother nudges him playfully, "I ran out of pencils that semester thanks to you."
Her father rolls his eyes with a smile on his face, "I knew you liked it though," he smirks at her before turning and dramatically winking at Molly, making her giggle, "if you didn't, you would've said no a long time ago."
"Well, I liked you," her mother shrugs if that was the simplest explanation in the world.
"You liked me?" Her father gasps dramatically, "Past tense? Ali, what do you feel about me now?"
"I love you, you giant oaf," her mother huffs out, smiling despite herself as she saw the winning smile blooming across her father's face.
"I love you too," he says back easily.
They rub their wrists and Molly tries to imagine her parents with differently people. Jacob and C (Catherine Cam Carrie) and Alice and T(Tim Todd Tyler).
She realises that she wouldn't be alive if they had married their soulmates.
'Would they love their actual soul mates more than each other?' She thinks. 'Is their love any less than
what they would have with their soulmate?'
Molly slides her fingers over her own wrist, at the blank spot where her letter should be. She hopes not, she thinks as she stares at her mum and dad who are oblivious to the world around them.
"What's wrong with you?"
It's third grade, and she's wearing short sleeves because the weather has gotten too hot for her to wear long ones.
"Why don't you have a letter?" Her table mate questions with eyebrows scrunched in confusion. Lindsay turned her wrist to proudly show Molly her H(Henry Harry Howard), "What happened?"
Molly shakes her head, blinking her eyes slowly. She brings her wrist to her chest, holding it tighter around her. "No, nothing happened. I've just never had one."
"But everyone has one." Lindsay says, pointing at James' E(Eric Evan Eli) and Taylor's B(Bella Brittany Beth). Molly bites the corner of her lip.
"Well, I was never born with one." She shrugs her shoulders, staring at a spot on the table. She can see in her periphery that Lindsay lost interest and went back to writing.
I guess I don't have one.
The gravel dug painfully into her palms, and she was certain her knees were scrapped. The puddles made from last night's rain splash onto her, wetting her shirt. She can feel the sleeves itch against her wrists. Her covered, covered wrist. Her eyes blur, from anger and resentment and pain and she digs her nails into her already damaged palms.
Pain spikes through her palms as they connect with the gravel on the floor, and she can feel little pebbles lodging themselves into her scrapped knees. The puddles she lands in splashes against her hands and her face. Her eyes blur, from anger and resentment and pain and she digs her nails into her already bleeding palms.
"Come on blank, stand up. Always knew you were a failure." Jane's voice sinks to the ground where her ears are, her boots kicking at the pebbles and sending them into Molly's face.
"Get up, you worthless piece of trash," Jane says, "can you even do that, blank?" Her voice sinks down to the ground, taunting and biting and just SHUT UP ALREADY.
Molly pushes herself up with her clenched fists (she checked later that day and she had broken the skin with her nails.) She takes a deep breath in the cold, cold air and she swings at the girl, recklessly and not well planned and putting all of her weight into it. She misses, and Jane sends her falling to the ground again.
Molly pushes herself up with clenched fists and takes a deep breath from the cold cold air that surrounds them. She swings at the larger girl, badly planned and reckless and unfamiliar, putting all her weight into the one single punch. She misses and the loss of balance sends her falling t the ground again.
Blank. Failure. Not meant to be here. You're a mistake. You shouldn't be alive. Why are you here. YOU SHOULDN'T BE ALIVE. YOU ARE A FAILURE YOU HAVE NO PURPOSE YOU ARE A MISTAKE WHY ARE YOU HERE-
The nurse finds her and cleans her up before calling her parents. She gives Molly too many smiles as she bandages her hands and clean her knees.
She's still on the floor after recess is over, and despite her teacher's best effort she remains silent on the walk to the nurse's office. She stares emotionlessly in front of her, hearing the clanks of Mrs. Bradford's heels and tasting the blood in her mouth from where she bit open the inside of her mouth.
"Molly," Mrs. Bradford sighs, stopping in front of the closed door and sinking down to Molly's eye level, "I can't help you if you don't talk to me about it."
Molly blinks, and she almost talks about how she's perfected all her letters in cursive obsessively, how she cringes every time she reads a romance novel, how she felt when she found someone named Todd her mom was texting on her phone. She almost breaks, and she blinks, ready to spill everything, when the glint from Mrs. Bradford's wedding ring flashes in front of her eyes and the cursive H in her sleeve practically flaunts itself in front of Molly's eyes. She digs her nails a little deeper into her palms and bites the inside of her mouth a little harder and she stomps her feet a little louder, her silent rebellion without words.
(Before she leaves with her dad's hand in her left and her mom's in her right, the nurse tells her a secret.
"It's a gift," she says pointing to the blank space. "You get to choose what letter it will be. You can choose your destiny. You get to choose to fall in love with someone.")
"I get to choose, right?" She mutters under her breath as she holds a shaky pen up to her left wrist. She practices on paper what the block letters will look like and she writes an A.
Then a B.
Then a C and a D and on and on until her dad finds her with an ink bracelet filled with the alphabet.
"I love you sweetheart, you know that right?" Her dad whispers to her as he tucks Molly into bed, hands gentle and calm as he smiles at her. Molly's wrist had been scrubbed clean and the skin felt raw.
She grins, and nods. Her dad bites his lower lip as he says, "you're meant to be here, Molly. Just because you don't have a soulmate doesn't mean you are any less. You know that, right?"
"I know daddy," she crinkles her eyes and smiles a wide smile and hopes that her dad doesn't see the tears in her eyes.
"You should," her dad says, with finality and an air of absolute as he begins to leave. "Goodnight sweet heart."
"Alice, please. What about Molly?" She can hear her father's voice drift up from the vents in the kitchen to her room. His voice hushed and quickly whispered. "We weren't going to follow those silly letters. Think of Molly, what this will do to her."
"George, I'm sorry. I love you. I'll always love you, and Molly, but when I...when I met Travis it was like, there was something. Something more. Something I just, I couldn't lie to you or Molly anymore."
Her father grew louder and spoke even quicker, "Alice you can't just leave Molly. You can't just leave everything."
"I love her, George, but she... She doesn't have a mark. It was the final proof that this, this just wasn't meant to be. We weren't suppose to be, George. I love you. Some part of me will always love you. But I can't really love you. Not fully."
She hears a pause, a silence, and she can picture her parents in the kitchen. Her mother facing the front door and her father grabbing her wrist.
"Alice, don't leave me."
Another pause, and then she hears the doors shut.
She can't imagine the broken-hearted look on her father's face, because she has never seen it on his face. She'd think it would look something similar to when her gran died, having never forgiven her son for not marrying a match. She hears silence and then crying. The type of crying where it's ugly and you're gasping for air and you keep chocking on your sobs. She pictures tear streaks and desperate eyes and she crawls back into her bed, pretending to be asleep when her father checks in on her twenty minutes later.
That night, while huddled under burrow of blankets and holding her breath as the footsteps and sobbing get farther and farther away from her door, she realized that she would never find love.