CHAPTER 1
My boobs don’t look any different. Not that I expected them to melt or explode or turn into origami swans. Are they a smidge bigger? That’s just what I need. It took me six months just to find a proper wrangling bra that doesn’t give me uni-boob and also allows me to run in gym class without getting a black eye.
Gym class. There’s some bullshit I will never be forced to endure again. No more lunchroom shenanigans, or hall passes, or “I swear I turned that in!” when I know I didn’t. All those insignificant, overdramatized moments end today the second the final bell of high school rings.
How fitting that it’s also my eighteenth birthday.
I examine my reflection again. It’s not like the Name is going to pop up on my nipple. At least, I don’t think so from the other Names I’ve seen: on my mom, on my best friend, Lish, and on countless celebrities wearing shirts low enough to show off the glamorous script above their impossibly perky décolletage. Supposedly it will materialize over my heart, near the center of my chest, favoring the left side. Countless Instagram stories exhibit the variations of Name locations: smack-dab in the center of collar bones; written in loop-de-loop cursive like a carefully designed tattoo; horizontally, or diagonally, or arcing like a rainbow, or haphazard and scrawly like the signature of a serial killer.
“Where the hell are you?” I ask my chest. It itches back its answer. Something is going on underneath that pasty white skin of mine.
I try to distract myself by digging out my clothes for the day. From the depths of my t-shirt drawer I select a shirt with a once-red Monkees logo, one my mom gave me from her childhood when it was already considered vintage. The fabric is nearly worn to sheer, and my black bra peeks through in certain light. It’s a look I’ve worn before, mostly because I like the t-shirt, but also because I could get away with it. Before I turned eighteen. Before the Name emerges.
Maybe it won’t happen.
There have been cases. Not many, but they exist. A Name doesn’t materialize on a body, and those lucky individuals never have to deal with figuring out who the person is, spending way too much time trying to find someone who may or may not be that person. Maybe I’ll luck out and be one of those freaks.
Or maybe it’s over. Maybe this preternatural phenomenon that blew in out of nowhere a mere six years ago to wreak havoc on the very soul of humanity will stop with me. No one will ever have to read a Name on their eighteenth birthday again.
But, no, I can feel it forming. I have all the typical signs: redness, itching, a warm, tingling sensation over my heart.
Lish claims it’s like getting your period: One minute nothing’s there, and the next you have a coppery stain in your underwear and your mom is taking you to the grocery store for pads and crying about how you’re not her little girl anymore. Only this stain is permanent and isn’t just something that makes you feel extra snacky once a month.
This is etched into my skin. This is real. This is forever.
This is a stranger’s name.
I scratch at my chest, egging on the words. Maybe if I squeeze the area like a zit, it’ll pop out. My skin forms a minuscule mound as I push together the space under my collar bone. “Arise!” I shout dramatically. Definitely one of those moments when I hope no hidden cameras are in my bedroom.
“Aggy! Birthday breakfast!” my mom calls from downstairs. I keep forgetting it’s my birthday. I let go of my flesh, now blotchier than ever, still void of the Name. There’s too much going on for this to be taking so damn long: the last day of school, turning eighteen, the wheel of fortune that’s supposed to magically show up but seems to be taking its sweet time. Who can eat breakfast under such trying circumstances?
I walk into the bathroom. Once a mere closet, my uncle Jim converted it to allow me more privacy. Or so he said. I think it got too awkward once I went through puberty to see me walking around in a towel. Can’t complain. I have my own bathroom. My cat, Rugburn, a grunchy old mackerel tabby who can’t decide after ten years if he likes me or loathes me, curls up on the wet bath mat.
I check myself in the mirror again. Nothing visible through the shirt. I tie my shoulder-length hair into a messy topknot and slide in some earrings shaped like arrows, my favorite pair. Look at me, getting ready like it’s any other day.
But it’s not any other fucking day.
I lift my shirt.
“Asshole,” I chide the Name, then elicit help from my boobs. “Can’t you do something about this? Use your massive girth to bully it out of me?” My boobs don’t answer. “Thanks a lot. See if I let Jesse Rothem touch you again anytime soon.”
I sit on the toilet and force myself to pee. Only ten minutes have passed since my last go, but I tend to pee more when I’m anxious. I cut my nails. I attempt to apply eyeliner in a sexy cat-eye fashion, only I don’t ever actually wear makeup and I end up looking like that Egyptian king from Night at the Museum. It takes forever to wash off the mishap, and by the time I’m done the area around my eyes looks like I lost a brawl with my Build-a-Bear.
And then I see it. A shadow through my shirt. It’s faint, but it’s there.
My heart plummets into my gut, and I fight the urge to kneel in front of the toilet. Hands trembling, I peel up the bottom of my Monkees shirt. I think about a slow reveal, like they always do when someone first sees their Name in the movies, but this is real life and I’ve had years of anticipation. Or is it dread? I fling my shirt over my hair, and Rugburn complains loudly, zipping out of the bathroom when the shirt lands on top of him. Undeterred, I examine my chest, and there it is: a name written on my body. The font is neat, his handwriting at age eighteen (one fact scholars agree on). I can’t imagine what he thinks of the mess that is my signature. The Name is smaller than I expected. An H starts below my left clavicle, where my cleavage begins its long descent. The letters continue in a horizontal path over the top of my left breast.
I don’t hate how it looks. It’s like my first tattoo that I accidentally got while drunk. Idiots do that all the time. What they think reads love in Chinese really spells out moo shu pork. But I’m not a heavy drinker, and these letters are in English.
I read the backward Name in the mirror.
Hendrix Cutter.
Am I reading that correctly?
I say it aloud.
“Hendrix Cutter.”
Interesting? Weird? Kind of cool? Does it even matter? I sigh.
“Nice to meet you, Hendrix Cutter,” I speak to my reflection. “I’m Agatha Abrams, and I’m your soul mate.”
CHAPTER 2
Soul mate is a stupid term. Six years ago, before Names began invading the human body with no discernible explanation, soul mate had implications of sap. People believed or didn’t believe, and it more or less felt like a concept made up for rom-coms and Hallmark cards. How could there possibly be only one person on this bloated planet whose destiny it was to be with another person?
Until the idea becomes science. Or an act of God. Or a blip in the evolutionary chain.
The world is full of hypotheses. Scientists tried to prove it has something to do with pheromones and hormones and homophones. Maybe not homophones. It’s so blahblahblah, I stop listening. The religious zealots are no better. God, tired of seeing humans destroy a planet with murder and crime and all manner of catastrophic hate, created the meant-to-be (the preferred term over soul mate, so as not to be confused with its prior connotations). The True Lovers (the zealots’ name for themselves, which I find ironically sexual-sounding for a group of religious devotees) believe that God wanted us to discover our meant-to-bes in a more direct fashion than, say, online dating or Craigslist ads, making it much easier to find contentment, procreate, and bypass all the suffering that comes with heartbreak. And think of how much faster everyone will have babies! The population will explode! Love will flourish! We’ll all be so fucking happy and sexually satisfied that there will never be war again!
I call bullshit. There are so many things wrong with this logic (logic? How is any of this ever going to be logical?), so many holes in this fabric of reason. One of my theories, and I have many, is that somehow a sinister corporation determined a way to taint our water supplies, or vitamins, or the air we breathe to disfigure the entire population with random letter configurations. It would explain why the term soul mate turned into meant-to-be, turned into MTB, officially trademarked by the world’s largest and most commonly used search engine. Now everyone calls the names on their bodies Names, and the people MTBs. And instead of mass quantities of research and billions of dollars being thrown at science facilities to figure out why we suddenly have MTBs (I like to call them MTs, pronounced “Empties.” Maybe I should trademark that), Urban Outfitters sells YOUR NAME HERE shirts for thirty-five bucks. The majority of the world accepted its cruel and unusual fate and stopped caring about why the hell it’s happening and how we can stop it. Like in the beginning of The Walking Dead, where everyone wants to know why people are all of a sudden zombies and if they can find a cure. Eventually they realize it doesn’t matter why and instead have to figure out a way to survive in the new world without starving or being eaten.
I’d rather have a zombie apocalypse.
While it may make a modicum of sense for anyone who was under eighteen when the MTBs hit to learn they’d acquired a soul mate, it sure as hell rocked the fuck out of a lot of worlds for people older than that. Millions with marriages and partners and promising second dates had to learn that the person with whom they were cavorting, possibly for decades, wasn’t the person with whom they were meant to spend their lives. Sure, some people could pretend they disregarded this brand-new development in their petrified existences, but a good portion of them couldn’t ignore the temptation. Let’s take, oh, I don’t know, my mom and dad. Ellen and Arnold. High school sweethearts who followed each other to college, married soon after, and gave birth to the most adorable, hilarious, slightly-obnoxious-but-in-a-good-way daughter. Me. Their marriage wasn’t perfect, but whose parents don’t fight from time to time about dinner or where to go on vacation or who forgot to sign who up for soccer?
The second my dad discovered what Florence Hildebrand meant after it mysteriously appeared on his chest, he skedaddled to Atlanta and cohabitated with the hag. My mom was left to wonder about her generically named MTB, John Taylor. A quick Internet search listed millions of possibilities, from an economist to a jazz musician to a member of the ancient band Duran Duran. Overwhelmed, she gave up on her search before she even started. Mom wanted nothing to do with “this BS soul mate business” anyway. Her brother, my uncle Jim, younger by six years and battling crippling agoraphobia since his teens, moved in with us to help with the bills and fill the void that Empties created in our home. Uncle Jim was satisfied setting up his bedroom in our finished basement and his office in our attic, ensuring he wouldn’t have to leave the house and, god forbid, connect with another human being. He is far more content writing romance novels under the pseudonym Savannah Merlot. They’re wildly popular, even though he refuses to write any in the newest, beloved MTB genre. “I write about true romance, not some zit formation that happens to resemble a name.” I do so love my uncle Jim.
The fact of the matter is that a Name is here. My Name is presumably somewhere out there. People believe that if the Names match (and they pretty much always do), then that person is your MTB. My best friend, Lish, had been obsessively counting down the days until her Name appeared, and when it did she paid big money to use the Signature Analysis Website. You’ve seen their commercials on TV. “We scan so you can find your man. Or woman.” Clever. But the product sells itself: For a small (read: first-year-of-college-tuition-sized) fee, Lish entrusted a “trained technician” to scan her naked top half with a lubed-up wand in order to enter her name into the International Database of Signatures. Currently, the database only includes signatures of registered voters and military personnel, but governments around the globe are gunning for mandatory signature entry from every person over the age of eighteen.
It’s like being drafted into love.
That’s why I just can’t get myself to buy into all of this. I don’t want to be forced to do anything, be it scan my Empty’s Name, wear sunblock, or go to college. I like having choices. Or, I like the idea of having choices.
It’s been the one point of contention in my long friendship with Lish, which began the second she moved in two houses down and her dog pooped on our mutual next-door neighbor’s lawn.
“He always gives out circus peanuts for Halloween,” I informed her. “They’re not even wrapped. He totally asked for this poo.” Instant friendship. When in fourth grade her family moved to a new subdivision with homes twice the square footage of my family’s modest 1989 classic, we stayed best friends through cell phones, bike rides, and slumber parties.
The arrival of MTBs screwed up marriages, but it also wedged a chasm in the friendship of two little girls who used to merely want their Equestria Girl dolls to make it back to Ponyville.
Lish was smitten with the concept of meant-to-be, while I grew more skeptical. She believed the word fate was the antithesis of hate. Destiny was the final destination.
Fuck fate. Screw destiny. I’m team free will.
CHAPTER 3
Lish and I sit at a cafeteria table during first period. We officially have classes we’re supposed to be in, but when an ass-backward administrator sets the date for the graduation ceremony three days before the actual last day of school, I think we’re golden. The only reason we’re here is to pick up our report cards during final period. And for the ritual of it all, I suppose.
“Show it to me now.” Lish is tugging on my shirt, not at all taking into account how many other seniors are ditching first period to hang out in the cafeteria.
“Dude. I’m not lifting up my shirt here. I don’t need everyone crowding around me pretending to read the name of my Empty but really ogling my tits.” My brain flashes to the last person who saw me topless: one Jared Mason who charmingly dumped me on his eighteenth birthday. I wonder how many people have been dumped on someone’s eighteenth birthday in the last six years. What do the True Lovers have to say about that? Probably, “It’s all for the greater good. When you meet your meant-to-be, there will never be pain again.”
Gag me with a spoon.
“Can’t I just tell you the name and show you when we’re alone?” I wrestle the bottom of my Monkees shirt out of Lish’s hand. “You’re strong for a midget,” I tell her.
“Little person is the correct term.” She lets go of my shirt but remains ready to pounce. “For which I am not. Nor are you.”
“Hey, don’t drag me into your old-timey circus act. I am a whole half inch taller than you. It’s an entirely different world up here at five feet one inch.”
“Wow, I bet you really thought talking about my height for the six trillionth time was going to make me forget about your MTB.” Lish dives for my shirt again.
“Okay. Okay,” I concede, grabbing her wrists and twisting upward. Lish yelps and crosses her arms into a pout. “I will tell you the name of my Empty”—I emphasize the derogatory word—“and then we sneak off to the bathroom and you can fondle me there.”
“I’m not going to fondle you in the girls’ bathroom!” Lish announces a tish too loudly, drawing the attention of everyone within a thirty-foot radius. I laugh at her indiscretion. “You can lift your own shirt,” she whispers, then says, “Besides, I showed you mine.” She winks at me. We laugh at our titillating conversation, and Lish prods me to disclose the name.
“Are you ready?” I ask.
“Do you see me salivating?” Lish confirms.
“His name is…” Pause.
Long pause.
Excruciatingly long pause.
Lish punches me in the MTB.
“Ow! I think you punched my Empty off.”
“Tell me the name, or I am not inviting you to my wedding.”
“You do realize that’s not really a threat to me.”
“Aggy, I’m about to take an X-acto knife out of my art box and cut a bitch, so you best be telling me his name.”
“Hendrix Cutter,” I cough.
“What?” Lish scrunches up her nose.
“Hendrix Cutter,” I enunciate each sharp syllable.
“Really?” She looks disturbed.
“What? What’s wrong with his name? Do you know him?” I panic.
“No. No, I don’t know him. It’s just … interesting, you know? Intriguing. Mysterious.” Lish changes her face from distressed to aroused. “Sexy. Domineering.”
“Lish!” I chide her. “You can’t get all of that from a name. I will remind you that his parents gave it to him when he was a tiny baby who was most definitely not sexy or domineering.”
“Is his signature cool?” Lish’s eyes attempt to burn a hole through my shirt. “I can’t make it out enough through that crusty shirt of yours.”
“It’s not crusty. It’s classic,” I defend the ancient, frayed assemblage of fabric.
“Just make sure you don’t wear that when you meet Hendrix for the first time. Or the second time. Maybe it’s time for the Monkees shirt to go into retirement.”
“Considering I’m not going to meet him, I guess the Monkees shirt doesn’t need to worry about retirement.”
“Aggy!” Lish scolds. “We’ve talked about this.”
Since the MTBs first appeared, Lish and I have debated what we would do when ours materialized. From day one, Lish knew she wanted to find hers. Back then, of course, she assumed it was her latest YouTube obsession. I secretly wished for Rupert Grint in his Goblet of Fire years. As we aged into our teens, and real dating prospects materialized, Lish was constantly guessing which schoolboy would ultimately be her MTB. The thought that any one of these gangly douchecarts might be the guy I am supposed to spend the rest of my life with paralyzed me for years. Until I decided I wasn’t going to let a wacked-out version of destiny determine who I want to hang out with.
You’d be surprised at how open teenage boys are to helping me rebel against society’s constraints on companionship.
Or maybe you wouldn’t be.
I will admit that I used my newfound stance on free will somewhat liberally my sophomore year and made the pool of guys who hadn’t seen my boobs practically kiddie-size. But that’s as far as I let them go. Until junior year. I really thought Jared Mason and I were in love. I sapped out and dreamed of the day his name would manifest across my chest as my MTB. Lish was on best-friend cloud nine, cutting out articles on MTB weddings, decoupaging lamp shades with pictures of us and overlaid wedding dresses. I don’t think I was as ready as she was for marriage, but I let Jared go further than anyone before him. So we said I love you. We had sex. We made plans for our future: to move to Australia and pick fruit and roll around with wombats.
I shit you not that his Empty bulged out in the middle of us doing it. Not rolling with wombats; having sex. He was on top of me, and I watched, mystified, as the name “Alanna Silverman” bubbled forth. He had no idea, of course; he was too busy enjoying himself. It took Jared a good three minutes to notice I was crying. I pointed to his chest, not wanting to say the Name, and he bolted off his bed to examine himself in the mirror.
“Alanna Silverman.” Jared spoke her name aloud, and by the excited hitch in his voice, I knew we were over. And so was any commitment I had to the idea of One. True. Love.
Guys are fickle. My dad can’t even bother to remember my birthday since he left my mom for his Empty. Every year he calls me exactly one day before, which I suppose I could be grateful for. I mean, at least it’s early, right? But it’s fucking wrong. He abandoned our life because of some stupid biological or celestial anomaly. I refuse to let it rule me.
“No, Lish, I don’t want to meet him. I want to find love based on personality and common interests and sexual chemistry—”
“But I’m sure you’ll find all of that in your MTB. That’s why he’s supposed to be your meant-to-be, right?”
“Who can really say for sure, Lish? It’s only been six years! That’s not enough time to know if what these people’s names represent is about ‘forever’ love. What if it’s actually the name of your future assassin? Or the person you think you love but after x number of years you hate more than anyone else on the planet? What if the Names go away? Or change? Nobody knows the answers, and I don’t trust anyone who claims they do.”
The second period bell rings, and Lish gathers her bag, plump with remnants of overused school supplies and an underwashed gym uniform. “Way to keep an open mind,” she jokes.
“Yeah, well, I hate people telling me I don’t have a choice,” I counter.
“I get that. So don’t try and find Hendrix Cutter.” She says his name with a sultry breath. I laugh. People pass us as we exit the cafeteria, people I have seen every day of my life and am completely okay with never seeing again.
As Lish and I depart for our respective classes, she calls down the hall to me, “Just because you don’t want to meet Hendrix Cutter doesn’t mean he’s not going to try and find you!”
Well, shit.
Copyright © 2017 by Julie Halpern
