Moiety

I got this idea from a post I saw on tumblr by a user named 'psyducked.' The whole idea about the necklace is his and i'm just creating a story around it. 

It started with a burning sensation at the base of my neck.

When I was to the age of understanding things bigger than me, I was thirteen years old. I was shown the pictures from the ceremony of The Necklace. When I was just a few weeks old, I was granted a necklace that would allow me to find my soul mate. The necklace grew warmer when we were within states of each other, but colder as we got any farther than that. Of course, I wasn’t a special case; everyone got these necklaces.

I was seventeen and had gone through three boyfriends who didn’t take our relationship seriously. They all ended the same reason; you aren’t my soul mate, so why should I treat you special? And in my eyes, I didn’t need the person I was with to be my soul mate to treat them like I wanted them. There were two kinds of people in this world and sadly I was on the side that had fewer each day.

The day I felt my bland blue stone necklace burn and glow, I ran to my mother. It was mid August and I was sitting out in the middle of the backyard, enjoying the cool breeze along with the hot sun shining down on me. I was spending my few minutes before I had to go work for six hours at Pete’s Pet Store outside.

“Mom, where are you? This is important,” I shout out the house, running up the stairs and immediately going for my parent’s room. I knock twice before barging in and I hear my mother tinkering with the pipes under the sink. “Mom, are you in here?”

“Bethany, what do you need?” my mother asks, turning at an awkward angle so she can look up at me. People say I look just like my mother, big brown eyes and blonde flowing hair. What they didn’t say was that I was also the less wrinkled version and I wasn’t as pale as her.

“I go by Sawyer now,” I mutter and cross my arms over my chest defensively. Ever since I turned sixteen I demanded everyone to call me Sawyer, not that Bethany crap. I think my parents took it harder than they really needed to. “Anyways, I felt my necklace burn. What should I do?”

“Nothing,” she says calmly from her position under the pipes. At first I think I hear her wrong, nothing?

“What do you mean by ‘nothing’?” I can feel my arms flex instinctively,

“Have you been away from school that long? Jesus, Bethany. I mean you don’t do anything, don’t you have a shift at Pete’s?” she doesn’t twist at the painful angle to try to see my reaction, she just keeps tinkering. We both know she isn’t helping the pipes and that she will have to wait until dad gets home.

Her answer didn’t follow the stories I heard. When other girls found their necklaces burning, they would drop everything and go on a journey. Then again, those were the stories that were banned. The stories that were getting burned and made to be forgotten now. The government wanted no big deal made about finding each other’s soul mates. Since the necklaces were a culture thing, they figured they would wait it out like last decade’s fad.

“Bethany will do nothing, but I’m not guaranteed I won’t,” I whisper as I leave her bathroom, exit the empty bedroom; and start walking to the pet store. It didn’t make any sense. When my older sister Marilyn’s necklace started burning, my mother was thrilled. Marilyn was twenty and attending college. Was that it? The fact that I was entering my last year of high school had her worried? I could convince her that I didn’t need school, that I felt like I was teaching them more anyways.

As I made my way closer to the store, I felt my necklace burn just a degree hotter. These things weren’t supposed to cause third degree burns but the tingling wasn’t too comfortable. It made ignoring this thing that much harder. If she hadn’t wanted me to go out and find my soul mate yet, why would she have the ceremony for me when I was weeks old? My mind kept going in circles about this as I walked in the store, making the bells chime. Amy was tapping her foot impatiently, staring at the clock above the door. When she looked at me as I came in, her expression turned from annoyance to instant relief.