Chapter 6
Six
A Curation of the First Viral Soulmail Posts
I can’t even take care of myself and now I have to worry about a soulmate
the TODAY show anchors look petrified lol wonder who theirs is
times are tough when you have a meteorologist and an intern breaking the biggest story of all time
Ok but I love this Olivia person??
check out her video from this morning it is ??
This poor Per Diem girl. My secondhand embarrassment is extreme
MY HUSBAND IS MINE! this shit is real, you’re welcome
The president is going live! #President #America
“President’s on,” a tech announced from the sound pit.
My fellow Americans and citizens across the world, I address you live with a situation I never thought I’d face. The White
House dictionary defines a soulmate as a person ideally suited to another, and I beg you, I implore you, to stop and think before you act today and all days . . .
I stared at Samantha. “What does it say?” I whispered.
Samantha bent low to my ear. “Don’t react,” she murmured, waiting for my nod before she continued. “When I was seventeen,
I had no idea, but I was pregnant. I thought I was just putting on weight the way you do when you grow up.”
I worked to keep my face passive, training it on the president’s broadcast. We weren’t live on air, but we were on the social
streams.
. . . While every government official in the land is working to determine the origin of these emails, this information, the
United States Military intelligence can indeed confirm they are real . . .
“My stomach hurt that morning. Bad. I was walking to school through this shortcut in the woods, and the pain brought me to
the ground. I threw up.” Her normally steady voice was unrecognizable. “By the time I got to the edge of the woods, this overwhelming
urge came over me . . . In retrospect, of course, I had to push. But I thought I was going to shit myself.”
“Oh, Sam.” I touched my hand to her forearm.
. . . I encourage you to live your life as you normally would . . .
“Do. Not. React.” Samantha’s voice was barely audible. “I had the baby. Flagged down a car to call 911, because the baby breathed
a few times and cried, but it—she,” Samantha corrected herself, her voice thick with unshed tears, “was so, so, small.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“She died on the way to the hospital. They estimated that I’d been seven months along. My parents never told anyone. And most
importantly . . .”
. . . We will meet this challenge as Americans, as one nation, as one world.
“I’ve never even said her name out loud,” Samantha whispered.
“Not even to my parents. Her birth and death records are sealed. So are my medical ones.” She pulled away from my ear, scraping her hand along the twin tear tracks flooding her cheeks.
“My daughter’s name and date of birth are listed as my Soulmail,” she said numbly. “Jayla Grace.”
Disbelief scrawled itself across my chest. If what Samantha was saying was true—and of course it was, Samantha was many things,
and a bullshitter was not one of them—then Soulmail was undoubtedly also true. A fact. A whole new world. Jayla Grace, a secret
only Samantha kept, was known somewhere else.
“Oh, honey,” I said.
“Places, everyone,” production called. “Going live.”
“Do you realize what this means?” Samantha asked, walking backward. “Come on, Olivia. Understand it.”
I furrowed my brow. Of course I did. It meant the official confirmation was correct. It meant Soulmail was real, that my boss
had been through some real pain in her past, that there was something so elevated about it that it was able to break sealed
records.
And then I inhaled, because I understood what she was trying to say. It meant two other things, at least. Two other new tracks.
First: A soulmate did not have to be romantic.
Second: A soulmate could be dead.
As the team readied itself to bring us back on air, I trapped a piece of my cheek between my molars. It made sense. There
were plenty of people who never wanted to fall in love, or wanted to and didn’t. People who preferred being solo. People with
the wrong partners. People who were already romantically in love with one person but had a gorgeous platonic bond with someone
else—a friend, a kid, a cousin—where their molecules seemed to orbit one another. Soulmates, soul twins, soul sisters.
I found my ring and pressed my fingertip against the sharp prong I had always meant to get filed down and hadn’t.
“Use that,” Samantha called. “No names, but tell that angle.”
Just before we went live, I wiggled in the chair, trying to dislodge the underwear that had ridden halfway up the cleave of
my butt. I took a deep breath and stilled.
Beside me, Richard frowned.
“You okay?” I asked.
“I am,” Richard said. “My wife texted me. Her sister’s soulmate was her husband.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?” I asked.
“It would be. They’re divorced.”
“Oh.”
“And she’s remarried.”
“Oh.”
He grimaced. “Y’know, I was here on September 11. There have been no other days quite like it, thank heavens. The interruptions,
the chaos, the trauma. At the time, it felt like it was just happening to New York, and of course, that wasn’t true. People
across the world lost loved ones. We all lost the feeling of safety.” He paused as we readied ourselves to return to air.
“This feels momentous in a different way. Like it’s going to change everything we know.”
The teleprompter started its scrolling. Richard volleyed me the first line of our canned commentary on the president’s speech;
I scanned my scripted teleprompter response.
[.>]
“This just in,” I said instead.
As my words rang in the air, the rhythm of the backstage crew encountered an immediate hiccup. Camera operators halted, sound
staff hesitated, and those in director’s chairs jolted upright.
My pulse raced. Sweat clung to my underwear waistband.
But the barest of smiles played at Samantha’s lips, and she gave me a nearly imperceptible nod. Tate Dimmock, the head of
the network, entered the set, his jaw arranged at a precise angle.
Tate Dimmock was never present on set.
Every one of my nerve endings screamed at me to get back on script. Read the teleprompter verbatim. Go home, see what cheater-flavored
garbage Wells had to serve. Call Natalie and drink coffee or water or wine and talk and talk and talk. Keep my job, the one
I loved, by nodding and doing, doing and nodding.
Tate folded his arms. I did everything I could not to look at him again.
“We have confirmed reports of a woman in New York City whose Soulmail named her infant daughter.” My throat thickened. “That
child unfortunately passed away.” A scurry of activity swarmed the backstage area. Beyond the lights, people made frantic
cutting motions, hands cupped around the mouthpiece of headsets.
Tate mouthed break, and Samantha put her hand on his elbow, pointing to the social media livestreams. The network head rubbed his hand over
his mouth then recrossed his arms, frowning.
I steeled myself. “This sheds a new light on who—or what—we might think of as soulmates. Our information indicates that not only can a soulmate be a platonic friend or family member, but they can also have already tragically passed on. It appears that these Soulmails have access to a fundamental truth: your soulmate can be anyone on earth.”
(12M REPOST: a fundamental truth: your soulmate can be anyone on earth)
Richard cleared his throat. A stab of guilt entered me then, because my deviation forced him to go off-script. Luckily, the
meteorologist knew how to dance.
“That is monumental,” he said. “You’re witnessing history right along with us, folks.”
Witnessing history. I thought of his y’know, I was here on September 11, of the way that Per Diem had given this man a career, of the way his hair used to be dark and now it was gray. The passage
of time marked by the photographs that lined his office. Per Diem was somewhat perfect in that way, an upper-mid-tier news
organization. Famous enough to be recognizable, not so famous that it was a mill, a tightrope. People planted careers here
and they grew. “Richard,” I ventured. “Would you like to share with our audience your decision on whether or not to open your
Soulmail?”
A consummate professional, Richard didn’t miss a conversational beat. “Of course,” he said. “Opened it right up. Found my
wife’s name.” He leaned toward the camera lens. “Guess I won’t be forgetting her birthday this year, eh?”
My smile was real. His energy was radiant dad, grandfatherly jokester. “Took you long enough.”
“And you haven’t opened yours,” Richard prompted.
I nodded. “Right.”
“I’m sure you join many others out there.” He tipped his hand in the direction of out there, where at this very moment, people across the world existed in various stages of shock and disbelief. “What made you choose
not to?”
“Huh.” I rested my chin on my fingertips, searching my temporary co-anchor’s face for the answer.
Everything around us fell away, like we were at a dinner party, like we were the sort of people who engaged in deep conversations on the regular.
That was when I understood that protocol was broken.
Bets were off. “Maybe it boils down to what you expect. Maybe you trusted your wife would be yours?”
“I did,” Richard said.
“I’m lucky that there are a few people in my life who I’d love for it to be.” Unromantically, Mom. Natalie. Sabrina? Clearly,
Wells was off the list. “But there’s no coming back from a non-perfect pair, you know? What if it’s someone who’s died already?
Or someone I haven’t met yet?” I paused. “If that was my circumstance, I guess I wasn’t ready for an email to dictate the
rest of my life.”
Fear, I didn’t say. Apprehension. For the time being, I was taking a chance on living with the unknown.
Richard pursed his lips. “This is going to change everything,” he said.
A few months later: A picture of me, with Richard’s head turned my way, would become the iconic cover of the first book on
Soulmail. SOULMAIL: THE WAY THE WORLD TURNS, a title publishing would crash as quickly as they could to capitalize on the occasion.