Chapter Text
She gets hers when she’s 13. Two days after she gets her first period, the name emblazons itself across the right curve of her collarbone. Just at the juncture of her shoulder.
Puberty’s a bitch like that.
She’s 13 and scared and folded into the fetal position when her dad gets home from work. To this day, she doesn’t know what the fuck she tells him, only that it takes little prodding and a bowl of Cherry Chip ice cream on his part to get it out of her.
When she’s done, he smiles. Same smile from the first time she rode her bike and fell off of it. Same smile from the first time she threw a tantrum in the middle of a Savers because it was becoming an indisputable fact that she needed to start wearing bras and she didn’t have a mom to tell her about it.
Says the same thing, too, that he always says when it feels like her world is ending because she has to crawl into a new skin.
“You don’t need to be so upset, baby. This is a happy thing.”
Sydney, like all the other times, doesn’t buy it. Frowns and says, “What if he’s an idiot? Like, what if he’s really dumb?”
“He might be,” Emmanuel allows, reaching across their tiny dining room table. He brushes the pads of his fingers across her knuckles gently, hiding a laugh. “He might not be, though. This means that you’ll be around to find out.”
“What if I don’t want to find out?”
Because that’s just it. Because this is a gamble she never wanted to play, and she almost got away with it, too, if it wasn’t for—
For what, she doesn’t know.
The best science around says this was inevitable, says there’s no outrunning fate when it burns itself into you. That Syd was stupid for ever believing she could beat what she’s watched eat her father alive for the last nine years: Ife, etched dark and proud along the bridge of his palm.
It’s what she watches, now, flicker and die in his eyes when he looks at her. He’s stopped saying it so often, but she can see a flash of it catch in the back of his throat. You look so much like your mother.
Instead, he says, “When the time is right, you won’t want anything more.”
And that strikes something in her, makes her feel cold all over and listen. Because she doesn't remember her mom, nothing tangible. Not really. But she remembers the minute she left.
Her auntie's voice, how Dad had taken her for a couple hours out of the hospital because Ife's condition is as stable as we could hope for, Manny, why don't you take Syd down the street for some ice cream?
The sound of his knees hitting the ground as they waited in line and she couldn't choose between soft serve or a milkshake or talking to the pretty blue-eyed boy a couple tables back. How dirty the floors were, for her father to get down on them like that.
More than any of that, she remembers the way he never laughed the same way. Never spoke like he used to, never took in air the way she knew him to. At night sometimes, after a nightmare or a particularly long day when she was little, she would lay on his chest and wonder if Mama didn't just up and take his lungs instead of half his heart.
Dad got scooped out of himself, and now he wants her to up and do the same?
Tough talk, she thinks, for a man who walks around with Love in his hands and no one to give it to.
+
For a few years, it becomes a hungry thing. The thought of her Mark gnaws at the back of her mind, bites at her ankles when she tries to move on to other things.
She thinks of him often, with the same sort of disdainful curiosity she would consider slime molds in her Honors Biology class. When she wakes up, some of her first thoughts are about his dreams and where he starts his life every morning. As she moves through her day, she constantly wonders if he’s doing the same thing she is at any given time. She constructs faces and realities that don’t fit anyone she knows.
(Ones that she hopes never fit into hers, either.)
God forbid she actually finds the guy, but she doesn’t make it more than six months before she can’t stand the curiosity anymore.
She doesn’t want to risk getting caught at school, but there’s a nice enough library three stops away from her apartment. She picks a random Saturday over Christmas break, loads a bag up with snacks, and sets out to hole up in the reference section.
In the end, it’s not much.
Just, like, a ridiculous amount of mobsters. A few kings, some saints. A surprising number of monks. There is one — a tragic lover, a great hero of Rome — who stands out, but it never stops feeling like just another word.
All-in-all, she’s fifteen when she decides it’s not the worst name to be Marked with. There’s no real rhyme or reason to Marks, according to experts. And nicknames count, so some people have to live with Dickhead, or Pendejo, or Skidmark forever and ever.
Anthony, by comparison, isn’t so bad.
But it is common. There are six different Anthony’s in her grade alone, seventeen in the school altogether. Most of them go by Tony, or Ant, or T, and they’re annoying as fuck anyway. So.
She keeps her head down about it. Every other girl she knows shows theirs off, goes looking for their match at special drives and dances — and the boys aren’t far behind. They all seem happy to stir up that kind of trouble, like they don’t have anything better to do.
By the end of sophomore year, more than a third of the kids in her grade are paired up. Meanwhile, Sydney spends half her birthday money on good concealer every year and says nothing about it to anyone. She’s pretty sure even her best friend thinks she’s blank.
The only person her age who ever learns otherwise is Phillip, the quietest kid in her Algebra II class. He really sucks at polynomials and pays her twenty bucks a week to do half his homework sets for him.
Syd likes him well enough, could see how someone might think he was cute if you were into the whole redhead and freckles and Gee Whilkers! thing. Mostly she just feels bad about him; his parents got divorced last semester, or he’s dyslexic, and that’s why he sucks at graphing functions. Every Thursday, Phillip swings by the apartment, performs a nicety about whatever she has cooking for dinner, hands her his weekly packet and ten dollars, and says he’ll be back Sunday for pick-up and the rest of her money.
This Thursday, however, there’s no packet.
This Thursday: daisies.
“Um.”
Today, Phillip looks nervous. He’s squirming a hole on the front stairs of her building like he pays bills here, and his hands are wringing the life out of the packaged daisies lying limply in them. He doesn’t look at her when she swings the door open, nor when she says his name three times.
“Okay,” she says after a minute, drawing out the vowels the way fishermen drag hooks. “Well, this has been—”
“Do you have me?”
The only time she’s seen someone tweaking this hard, she was on the L, and that guy had a literal crack pipe in hand.
“What?”
Finally, he stops and turns to her. “Your Mark,” he says, gesturing wildly. “I-Is it me?”
Ah, she thinks, Realizing everything all at one time. He’s one of those.
One of those who finds, but doesn’t want. She doesn’t know how he knows about her Mark, who could have possibly told him. Syd is quiet, but she’s not a fucking spy, okay? She’s not hiding nuclear codes. Maybe she smudged her coverup. Maybe somebody saw her changing in gym after a shower. It’s none of her business.
It’s not his, either. But, it turns out, he’s one of those who takes on the burden of fate just because he can see it, just because he thinks he can see it.
He doesn’t wear it well.
No. He wears it shit scared, shaking like a leaf on the front porch of her building while she lets the potatoes for her bhaji over-simmer.
What a little bitch, she thinks. But her hand is shaking, too, behind the safety of the door. Her toes are curled painfully tight in her house shoes.
This has never happened to her before. There are manuals on it, rituals and procedures largely abandoned by polite society. But she’s never even been asked on a date, let alone if her soul is tied to someone else’s.
So, sue her, but she stumbles. Stutters out platitudes and partial points about how there is a lucky person out there, but it just isn’t her — about how she doesn’t have a mark at all, actually. About how Phillip Anthony is a very good name, and he’ll find someone with it on them soon, she just knows it.
She gets maybe half of it out in one piece, but whatever he hears, he believes it. He says sorry three times very fast, and then leaves.