Moiety

One

I make a quick call to a guy named Jason who sounded like he was busy, so I felt a little bad at the fact that I told him I couldn’t make it in. But as I stared back at Nolan, I couldn’t feel bad for too long. We were going on an adventure. “I have a bank account with money we can use, do you have a car?”

As I’m thinking through the things I should go home and pack really quickly, I put my hair up. The long blonde strands go to my waist and I think of how my parents will react. My dad won’t understand exactly, but he’ll be calmer and more rational about it then my mother. Elizabeth Evans was kind of a control freak. In all honesty I couldn’t tell what brought her and my father together. I’m sure as a kid I asked to hear how they met a billion and one times, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember a single detail or date. Since they met before the ceremony was created, how they met was considered the old fashioned way.

Nolan smirks at me, and it kind of hits me how gorgeous he really is. I mentioned before how he is in the perfect spot between not too big and not too scrawny. But now that I look at him, I notice that he’s solid. And for a second I imagine us, I don’t know, going out or something after this? Or during. But the idea was silly, date Nolan while I’m on the search for my soul mate? It was a little messed up, even for me.

“Of course I have a car. I drove here,” for a second Nolan gets this fearful look on his face and I wonder what seized his thoughts.

“Why drive? Isn’t it a long ways away?” I ask him in a gentle voice in case I’m somehow the cause for his freaking out. I crossed my arms over my chest as we walked outside, and I tried not to be obvious about me rushing him along so Jason wouldn’t see me and ask questions.

“I can’t fly; I’m too scared of it.” Nolan is watching the sidewalk as he admits this. And, apparently it’s possible; he got this blush over his cheeks that made him even cuter.

I look away and notice there’s only one car that’s parked on the side of the road that must be his, an older looking truck that barely looked like it was able to drive from here to my house; let alone from Minnesota to here. I shrug as I address his fear. “Well, I wouldn’t know if it’s scary or not because I’ve never been on a plane.”

That gets his attention, his head snaps up and he gives me a weird look. “Never? Really?”

I nod my head a little, embarrassed for some reason. “I was born and raised here, where else am I going to go? Who do I have to fly to? All my family lives here, you know that.”

Okay so maybe Nolan didn’t know that, and there was an edge to my tone that made him be quiet for a while as he started up his truck. I felt a little stupid for letting my jealous feelings show through, when I say I had nowhere else to go it made me sad. I wish I had family that lived in each state, or at least as many as possible. I wanted to travel and see things, because surely there had to be more to the world than Montana. Grassy fields, country themed Montana. Without a doubt I knew there was a place out there that would be the total opposite of my hometown, and maybe I would be homesick. But I just wanted the chance to feel homesick, to find new appreciation for this small town.

As we sat there in his old truck, driving along to the quickest highway to get us out of here, I thought about my necklace. It was still warm; it felt like a cup of hot chocolate that had cooled down a little. The ceremony of the necklace was simple and I’m sure was made to mirror some religious event I had no clue about. Few words were said, because nobody wanted to make this as cheesy as possible. When you brought your kid to have the ceremony down, the parents got to listen to what I think of as the terms and conditions; the part everybody skips passed.

It basically entails that my necklace may or may not have another part out there, if I’m lucky and I do whether it’s the same color or not is irrelevant. But when you’re within three states of the person who has the other half, your soul mate, then it starts burning. I guess I should find it troubling that not many people wonder how the people who gives these necklaces know who the other person’s soul mate is. For all we know, it could be a total guess. Yet everybody puts their love life into the hands of strangers. I guess this is the kind of thing that matches the definition of faith.

“So what direction are we heading?” I finally find a reasonable question to ask. I don’t know if the silence was awkward for him but I was actually curious to where he would think we’re going to start looking.

A small patch of red makes its way onto both of his cheeks, it’s adorable. “I just picked a direction; we’re heading southwest towards Nevada.”

The thing that sucked about this trip was that we would spend a lot of money on gas. We would have to leave at least one state to find out if we were heading in the wrong directions. And it would take longer to find out that if the necklace was still burning, which state should we go too? Maybe this wouldn’t be so easy, but I wouldn’t lose determination. So far the necklace hadn’t changed temperature and we were pretty close to the city limits of Idaho. Idaho looked like a mirror image of Montana with subtle distances to let me know exactly that this wasn’t Montana. Although I didn’t have a problem with that, I wasn’t homesick yet. Nolan kept the car rides fun with his jokes and good taste in music, making the car ride as enjoyable as possible. I knew we both rather be swimming or doing last minute summer activities. We talked about how life had changed for us, inevitably, as we both grew up. The little back stabs of middle school friends, when we really should have seen it coming, because you knew there was something about it. We didn’t linger on the old days because we barely remembered, and we both knew we were on the precipice of the supposedly best year of our high school careers. Funny that it would be the last year, which makes me agree with them there. As soon as we hit Las Vegas we decide to take a break. Since we’re both seventeen, we can’t fully enjoy the fun in and outs of Vegas. But I doubt we would have really gone crazy if we were of age. Instead we found the cheapest hotel we could on the outskirts of town and ordered some Pizza Hut.

“Do you think we would’ve still been friends if you hadn’t moved?” I question him as I avoid contact by peeling the pepperoni off my pizza slice. I know I broke the wall between past and present, and it’s pretty stupid. Everything is pretty much what if, I wonder, and it’s just something to ask him to pass the time. I like to think that we would have but don’t seriously think that we would. We probably would have hit an awkward moment where one of us liked each other and let it get weird.

He doesn’t seem bothered by the fact I asked, even though he explicitly said that past questions are stupid and there is literally no point in wasting time of the present on time of the past. “Maybe not. But maybe we would be the good friends you need every one in a while in the middle of the night,” his answer sounds so cheesy and something somebody would say while trying to be deep or super impressive. I can see his smile appear out of the cloud of seriousness the question didn’t really require.

“I bet you have the kind of English teacher that finds meanings in the color of the walls,” I can’t help but laugh so loudly at the look of confusion on his face. When he understand it he doesn’t bother giving me a response, instead he tries to look mad but ends up smiling.

“So how’s your necklace?” we both turn our gazes onto my necklace, hung on a silver chain, based in what seems like the border of a vanity mirror also in silver, is a navy blue gem where half of it is carved out. The ceremony has always made sense to me, but the part where your soul mate might not even have a necklace seems really foolish and kind of confusing. I remember all the times I questioned my family members and they could even really tell me, all I got were these answers that really didn’t answer my question.

It defeated the logic where I tried to come up with how they could do this; maybe both people had half of the same necklace? And that makes complete sense until you consider the other factor. Then how does this make sense? Does that mean that the ratio of people who actually have necklaces and the people don’t are so overpowering that they have to mix? Is this how it started?

“Same temperature, I think we’re going in the right direction so far,” I try not to think of all the questions I have. This reminds me again how it’s maybe a little foolish that I ran off from home to find someone who might not even want me yet. What if we’re the same age? What if he’s not looking for his soul mate right now? What if he is and we end up in different spots completely? “We should go to sleep so we can get an early start tomorrow, I want to find him as soon as possible.” Normally I would say this out of excitement, but the more we waited to find him the more questions I would be able to think of.