The Signs of Love

Chapter 1/1

Spencer discovered he was a freak the day he learned the entire alphabet, from A all the way to Z, on his third day of pre-school. Once home, he ran to the bathroom, tore off his shirt, and stared at the black tattoo curved horizontal along his arm just underneath his shoulder. His mother never told him what it meant, always looked a little sad when she saw his, but Ryan told him his tattoo displayed the first words his soulmate would ever speak to him. George Ryan Ross the Third never lied to Spencer.

He knew his father and mother were soulmates, and all the other mommies and daddies he knew were, too. Everyone said the soulmate bond was special, that it was possible to find love with someone who was not destined to be your love, but there was something magical about soulmates that just couldn't be described.

None of that made sense to him, nor at four did he really care about love and other such crap. But he knew he needed to find his soulmate. It was like a pull in his chest, and in his mind; a quiet whisper of 'please help me' on the wind. Somehow, Spencer just knew his soulmate needed him, and this tattoo was how he found them.

But when he looked at the black ink on his arm, none of the letters he learned matched the pattern he saw. His teacher said letters made up words. If there were no letters in his tattoo, did that mean there were no words?

Did his tattoo get messed up somehow, maybe lost in translation? Did this mean Spencer would never find his soulmate?

Miserably, he asked his momma why his tattoo was just a bunch of lines and dots and arrows. She had no answer for him, but told him not to worry about it. His tattoo was perfectly normal, she said.

"But mom, my soulmate needs me now."

She patted his head and said, "We don't get to decide when we meet out soulmate honey, but I'm sure your soulmate is just fine."

"But," he protested, seconds away from throwing a full blown temper-tantrum.

"You'll understand when you're older," she said, and plied him with cookies to distract him.

His mother was totally full of crap, because he was older now and understood nothing, and in the eighth grade, when he suffered his first crush, everything just got more confusing. Terri Carrington was the beautiful red head who sat next to him in biology. She hit puberty early, and somehow got away with showing far more cleavage than any eighth grader should despite the Catholic school's strict dress code.

While his momma taught him to always respect women, Spencer was 14 and curious, and could not stop himself from occasionally glancing over to see her breasts resting on the desk as she leaned forward while Mr. Barr lectured on amoebas and cell walls and other boring stuff.

Unlike most people who kept their soulmate tattoos hidden to prevent the wrong person from saying the right words, Terri proudly displayed the neat column of Japanese kanji down the back of her forearm. These were not Spencer's first words to her. Instead his first words were, "I'm in a band. My friend and I are gonna be rock stars one day."

She smiled politely, said "cool," before turning back to the board, even though Mr. Barr had yet to show up to teach class.

"Wanna go to the dance with me this Friday?"

"I'm saving myself for my soulmate," she said, yet that did not stop her from sticking her tongue down Robbie Macker's throat later that day, even though he was decidedly not Asian, nor did he know a lick of Japanese.

It would have been better if she'd just told him no.

"I can trip her with my cane for you," Ryan said after school, as he counted the steps from the front door to their kitchen. Ryan grabbed two cans of Pepsi from the bottom shelf, did an exact 180, walked the three steps to the kitchen table, and sat in the chair always reserved for him. "Perks of being blind," Ryan said, handing Spencer the second can. "No one ever thinks the blind kid did it on purpose."