September

You see her for the first time in your junior year of high school. You’ve enrolled to an all-girls boarding school, and you’re one of the only students who chooses to wear the long-sleeved maroon dress uniforms as opposed to the more popular short-sleeved uniform. You don’t want them to see your pristine, unmarked arms, don’t want them comparing the beautiful messes that litter their arms to yours. You hide them in shame, behind the long sleeves, and your legs behind black stockings.

You’re virtually a statistic— one of the only people your age who have yet to start seeing the drawings from your soulmate start appearing on your arm.

During your first year, you used to get stares. By the end of the year, you were used to them and stopped caring. There were funny rumors back then too— something about you being an angel and too pure for this world? You laughed silently behind a dainty hand. You were untouchable, untaintable.

Yes, you’re sure that’s it.

And for a good two years, you remain as the single girl who wears the long-sleeved dress, and life goes on. People stop staring, and you make friends. 

Solar is a loud and boisterous girl, and she doesn’t care that you’re still holding out for a miracle. She’s got a soulmate of her own in the grade below you, and they turn red and flush every time they make eye contact— Solar and Moonbyul never expected to end up going to school together. You think it’s cute though, since they’re childhood sweethearts who have been writing messages to each other on their skin ever since they were in elementary school.

“Moonbyul’s getting awfully distracted during this basketball practice,” you murmur to Solar teasingly. The first day of junior year just ended, and Solar’s dragged you off to keep her company as she waits for Moonbyul to finish basketball practice. “Maybe we shouldn’t be here.”

Solar chuckles, and you giggle along with her. She flicks her newly-dyed pink hair over her shoulder with flair.

“Then let her be distracted then!” Your loud friend declares, and you keel over from laughter at the odd looks you and Solar receive from your racket. There’s a few other girls watching basketball practice— probably to ogle over petty crushes (you wonder if their soulmates are okay with them being here, but then again, there might be some unspoken agreement that you’re unaware of, being soulmateless and all). “It lets these other basics here know that Moonbyul is mine!”

You snort at the blatant emphasis on the last word, and Moonbyul turns around, blue hair flowing behind her, and shoots a finger heart Solar’s way, only for your best friend to stand up and blow a kiss at her soulmate.

You roll your eyes playfully, more than used to being treated like a third wheel.

“There are some new girls on the team, don’t you think?” Solar remarks once she’s settled down, and you nod. “I’ve definitely never seen some of them before.”

“A lot of seniors from last year graduated,” you remind Solar, and for a moment, your heart drops when you inadvertently remind yourself. The previous captain of the basketball team had been Taeyeon, a girl that you might of had a slight crush on. The crush, of course, had been more than fruitless. While you’d would never see Taeyeon with her soulmate, it was because the former captain’s soulmate lived overseas, and Taeyeon had vowed to stay loyal to her true destined one.

You’d managed to become close friends with her though, and with an aching heart, you’d been part of her farewell group at the airport, sending Taeyeon off to America to finally see her soulmate face-to-face for the first time. Smiling brightly, you waved to her with all your might as she finally disappeared behind security, all for Solar to take you into her arms, whispering comforting words about how everything was going to be alright as you broke down.

“They had to bring in a lot of freshmen, huh?” Solar observes, and you agree once more, engaged in your phone, where you were checking your Instagram. Suddenly, Solar grabs your arm, and you yelp in surprise. “Irene!”

You scowl at her. “What? And was that really necessary?”

She ignores the second half of your sentence, just shaking her head and jabbing her finger in the direction of one of the freshmen basketball players. For a good ten seconds, you try to understand what exactly she’s pointing at in such a rush before finally shaking your head and sighing.

“Yong, what am I supposed to be looking at?”

“That girl’s wearing a long-sleeved basketball jersey!”

You freeze, and then your gaze is locked on the singular girl running around the court in a long-sleeved jersey. It’s still the beginning of fall, and the gymnasium is still hot. And yet here’s this girl— no.

You refuse to get your hopes up— not that you’re suddenly expecting this girl to be your soulmate, there’s a good hand full of other people who surely have not received and drawings from their soulmate. It’s just that you don’t really want to get your hopes up that there’s somebody else out there that understands.

“Her soulmate probably just wrote something embarrassing on her arms or legs or something,” you reason, and Solar pouts at your stubbornness. “She’s probably just covering it up for today.”

Solar groans but gives in. You just gave a reasonable argument, after all. And what are the odds? Only 2.5% of the entire world’s population still don’t have their soulmate drawings on their skin as they near adulthood. 

You just shrug it off. So you’re special. A special snowflake.

You turn your attention back to your phone, scrolling aimlessly through Instagram again. You end up stopping, though, on one of Moonbyul’s posts from what must’ve been earlier during a free period.

It’s a picture of Moonbyul with her arm around the girl from earlier— you easily recognize her from her eyes. The new girl is outside of her basketball jersey, wearing the same long-sleeved maroon uniform as your own, on her face a beaming smile wider than any smile you’ve ever seen before. You don’t want to believe it, even as you double tap on the picture with shaking hand to give it a heart.

You pause before you resume your scrolling, before tapping the screen once, watching as the tags from the picture pop up in the little black dialogue-shaped box.

‘ksg0210,’ the username reads. You take a deep breath, shaking your head, locking your phone, and shoving it into your bag.

Don’t get your hopes up. Don’t get your hopes up.

It’s the only thing you can do to keep yourself sane.

(She’s beautiful though.)

~

It’s probably by sheer luck that you end up running into her at the dorms that night.

You’re rounding the corner, on your way back from the showers when you almost bump into her. You let out a little squeak of surprise, and while you’d like to say that it was your quick thinking that saved you from completely crashing into her, it’s probably her fast reflexes from being an athlete (you’d ended up paying closer attention to that basketball practice after all), and the hand that shoots out to stabilize you from topping backwards.

“Ah, sorry,” you softly apologize, sparing only a swift glance at the limb that now holds you, and you quickly right yourself and bow. “I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

The way that she shakes her head is hasty and nervous. “Oh, no, sunbaenim! It was all my fault! I’m sorry, I should’ve paid more attention to what was in front of me.” You smile softly at her cute response, and she turns red, sheepishly retracting her hand away from you and bowing.

“You’re a freshman here, right?” You don’t know why you’re suddenly making conversation, but here you are. “Are you finding your way around properly?”

She bites her lip. “I was, sunbaenim, but I’m not quite sure where the showers are,” she admits.

“No need for the ‘sunbaenim,’ if you wish. I prefer to be called Irene.” you clarify. She nods quickly, and you can’t help the gentle giggle that leaves your lips and echoes down the otherwise empty hallways. You point around the corner behind you, giving her a thumbs up after you’re through with telling her a few simple directions.

“Thank you, Irene,” she says gratefully, about to start down the hall, hesitating after taking only a single step. She backtracks, coming to a halt in front of you again. 

She fiddles with the ends of her sleeves that are long enough to fall over her hands, thumbing the end of one restlessly. You just watch her endearingly, waiting for her to look up.

And then she does, meets your eyes with youth and eagerness and vigor, and your heart just skids and skats and jumps, like a skipping record player that’s been put on the stereo after decades of not being in use. Your chest hurts, you think. Maybe. You’re not quite sure because you’ve never felt this kind of pain before, the kind that you don’t mind.

“My name is Kang Seulgi, and it’s a pleasure to meet you!”

~

You lie awake in bed for a while that night, sprawled out under your covers, thinking of all of today’s events. Surely, it’s going to be an eventful school year.

Rolling over, you sigh. The school board must’ve seen Seulgi on admission day and decided to torture you by making the only other girl wearing long-sleeves be rooming right across the hall from you.

If you were alone in this room, you’d be pacing, but you don’t want to wake up Hyojin – or LE, as she prefers to be called – especially on the first night back to school. Your roommate needs rest. You need rest, for goodness sake! You’ve already been assigned a quiz for Wednesday, and according to the digital clock’s red letters on your nightstand, it’s a good hour and a half into Tuesday.

Yet your mind continues to wander, creeping through this misty foggy maze. There’s a way out of this, you know there is. It’s just hard to differentiate between where you’ve already been and where you’re supposed to be going. You remember the stories of your classmates, and how the drawings just appeared one day on their skin, how they hadn’t remembered drawing anything but the next thing they knew, they were communicating with their soulmates via the artwork splattered across their skin.

You wonder if this maze will lead you to the pack of Crayola markers you picked up at the train station on the journey back to school. It’s pointless, you know it is. Back in middle school, you would write a message on your skin every single night, desperately hoping and praying that someone would see it and write back to you. You’d never gotten a reply.

By high school, you swore that you’d stop your attempts to connect, swore to put an end to your own self-disappointment— you’d lived your entire life without a soulmate, you could probably last the rest of it. And yet against your will, you’d bought a pack of markers.

The first thing you’d done when you’d gotten settled and found yourself in the room alone, LE having gone to the bathroom, was rip out the pack of markers and violently kick it under your bed.

You don’t want to think about them. You wish you’d thrown them away, but now they’re stuck under the bed and you can’t bring them out. What’s worse? You can’t stop thinking about them.

~

Eventually, you close your eyes, letting all thoughts of soulmates and drawings, and tests and a certain pretty new freshmen drain away, and you let the remainder of September sweep you up into its strong, steady hold, its new foundation and brick and mortar. You let the remainder of September sweep you away.

AN: Thank you everyone for reading! I’ll try my best to update well!