Marked

Marks

Abigail Boylen (Cloud 9)

Soul mate. A person who is perfectly suited for another in temperament Webster dictionary explained.

So Abby always wondered why she had seven sets of handwriting on her.

Excuse me, ma’am… curled itself around her upper left arm in a clean sentence.

I am KIA declared a scribble that tattooed itself onto her left elbow.

Are you Abby? Vance said I could find you here… a soft cursive looking handwriting asked across her right shoulder.

This is beyond a bunch of trainees, you need to leave now. were the flat and blocky words that slashed itself from her belly button to her left hip.

We are the Scarlet Spiders! a more bold and stiff sentence proclaimed around her right thigh.

Who are you? A more elegant looking handwriting had written that phrase on right hip and could almost be the same as the polite phrase on her upper left arm had it not been for the additional curve on the tail of the A and more circular part of the A.

Name's Trauma. was written in a dark stark print that's only embellishments were on the T had planted itself on the back of her right leg, underneath her knee.

Her mom and dad had only said that having more than one soulmark meant she had a big heart. It meant that there were more one person who needed her and would love her for who she was.

But not everyone saw it like that. When she was in preschool, the teachers and helpers would quietly whisper behind hands about her marks.

Kindergarten marked the time that they all were starting to understand that the words on themselves. It made her insist to anyone who would listen that she was ‘Abby’ not ‘Abigail’ so that one of her soulmates could find her faster. (She would later learn that Abby was a common nickname for people named Abigail.)

In first grade, the parents of her friends ordered their children to stay away from the girl with more than one soulmark. It was a very lonely year for Abby and the year that her dad took her on a plane. It was the same year that Abby learned that she loved to fly.

Second grade was filled with ‘cooties’ and it became common that the girl that sat on her right would pass along ‘Abby Cooties’. That was the year that Abby got several model airplanes from her family and would spend recess pretending to pilot them past braided monsters and khaki superhero shirt wearing skyscrapers. That was until third grade when a girl purposefully tripped her then crush the plane underfoot.

That was the first time Abby was forced to sit out of recess. The teacher didn’t believe that Abby was not the instigator in the fight and had grabbed her by her right elbow and made her stand against a wall and watch the braided monster swing on the monkey bars.

It was the first time that Abby felt like her soulmarks were more of a curse than a blessing when the teacher stomped away with the broken model airplane muttering about soulmarked brats who obviously were trouble because they had more than one.

Fourth grade was hell. Her teacher was soulmark-less. Or more commonly known as a blank. The teacher took it as a personal offense that Abby was marked more than once, nonetheless seven times while she remained markless. It became common for Abby to leave school and enter her home in tears. It was also the year her parents considered permanently covering some of her soulmarks.

Fifth grade was so and so. While there were spectacular moments like Abby finally making a friend (someone who had barely moved into the area and also had more than one soulmark) and how her entire family chipped in to buy her a real airplane, a CESSNA 150 to be more specific. She was told in no uncertain terms to not really expect anything for Christmas or her birthday for this year or the next but Abby didn’t care. She loved her gift and had promptly pushed her dad in and made him fly her around until her grandpa flagged them down for dinner. It would stay with them because Abby’s little suburban backyard was no place for a plane and Evanston was too close to Chicago.

But there were bad moments too. That was the year that a lot of her peers started hitting puberty and just showed that Abby was a bit weirder because she wouldn’t hit puberty until the middle of seventh grade.

Sixth grade was torture because of all the hormones running wild, she experienced her fair share of bullying and would learn how to throw a mean punch from her own experience with them. To add to it, her friend had met one of their two soulmates and was obsessed with the concept of dating and there was now a lot of homework.

Seventh and Eighth grade were okay. She hit puberty around the middle of seventh grade and her friend had mellowed out about her soulmate by the end of eighth grade.

Freshman year brought about new issues…of the super kind. Abby had been at her grandparent’s house because that was what she had done since her family had bought her a plane (A real plane!), when a suspicious shadow passed her window.

She had opened it because the shadow had been soft and more cloud like rather than solid and inky like people’s shadows were. Then a pale yellow smoke poured into her room and flooded her lungs. She opened her mouth to scream without breathing in more of the smoke when there was a woosh and all the smoke rushed into her and she couldn’t remember hitting the ground.

She had woken up in bed with concerned relatives surrounding her.

She didn’t say word about what happen. She wouldn’t until War Machine brought her home so that she could pack some clothes before taking her to Camp Hammond. She wouldn’t know the extent of what had happened to her until she tripped at the bottom of the stairs and landed on an off white cloud that smelled slightly acidic.

Finally she could fly without any limitations. Her soulmarks be damned. She was FREE. There was no one in the sky who could judge her up there (except for a few birds who were wondering why there was a human among them). She wouldn’t leave the tree cover that her grandparent’s backyard gave. She promised herself that she would leave the open skies for after High School to celebrate her graduation.

At high school she was a loner. Her only friend was always with their soulmates (the couple had found their third the first week school with a softly spoken, pardon me but that's my handwriting on your hand...) and didn't have much time for their odd, quiet friend.

High School seemed to be the time a lot of people did not conform themselves to soulmates because it was common for Abby to see non-soulmates date and enter romantic relationships. It was then Abby learned of the existence of 'Platonic Soulmates' from her Freshman PE teacher who caught sight of her many soulmarks in the locker room.

Abby hoped that at least five of her soulmates were platonic (especially I am KIA soulmate and Name's Trauma. soulmate because Abby could only think of bad situations of which those words could be said).

It was that graduation flight that would force her to go to Camp Hammond.