Chapter Text
It’s funny, growing up knowing your parents don’t care about you. The kind of funny that would get Evan uninvited from sleepovers, which is why he always changes into his pajamas in the bathroom. The kind of funny that he’s not allowed to ask his parents about. The kind of funny that makes Maddie look at him so sadly sometimes, when she doesn’t realize he can see her out of the corners of his eyes.
It’s Maddie, of course, who Evan goes to when he needs answers. She’s doing homework; she always seems to be doing homework, now that she’s in high school. But she lets him climb into her lap every day anyway when he gets home from kindergarten, and Evan looks at the squiggly letters and numbers under her pencil that he’s learning to puzzle out at school.
“Maddie,” he says, letting his head fall back heavily against her shoulder. “Brian P. told me my hands are weird.”
“What?” Maddie says, lifting her pencil and looking down at him. She puts an arm around his stomach, squeezes him like a seatbelt. “That wasn’t very nice of him. Why did he say that?”
“‘Cause they’re blank,” Evan says, lifting his hands.
“They’re not blank,” Maddie says, after a moment. She takes his hands in hers, spreading his fingers out. “For example, you’ve got dirt under your fingernails. How did that get there, huh?” She squeezes him again, and Evan laughs, wriggling in her hold.
“They are so ,” he says, flopping back against her. “I don’t have any marks.”
Maddie quiets behind him. “You’ve got this one,” she says, and kisses his forehead, just above his eyebrow, where the little pink soulmark on Evan’s face is. “What do you need marks on your hands for?”
“But it’s my only one ,” Evan whines. “Everyone else has way more than me. Next after me is Katie, and even she has four. And Jess has thirteen, and Brian F. has twenty, and Jason has, like, a hundred .” Jason brags about them a lot, his forearms covered up and down with fingerprints from his aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, great-grandparents. His skin looks like the time that Evan left a bunch of crayons out in the sun in the driveway during the summer and they all melted together into one big multicolored blob.
“Those are some big numbers,” Maddie says softly. “But I don’t think it makes sense to compare them like that.” She strokes her thumb over the spot she had kissed. “You’re loved, Evan. Remember that.”
Evan crosses his eyes to look up at her hand. The tips of her index and middle fingers are pink, just like the spots on Evan’s forehead and near his eye. He likes that they match. But Maddie has other marks, too, like the yellow one that matches their father’s thumb on the back of her neck, and a blue splotch on her shoulder from their mother’s palm. And there’s a bright magenta mark wrapped around her thumb. Not blank.
His parents have other marks too. Some of them, Evan was pretty sure, must be from him. They did touch him, occasionally, so they must have touched him for the first time. They just didn’t leave anything behind on him.
Evan amuses himself with his markers while she finishes her homework, and sits on the counter while she makes dinner for both of them, pasta with peas because it’s the only way Evan will eat anything green. Their parents get home afterwards. Usually, Maddie whisks Evan upstairs to his room so they’re not in the way when their parents make dinner, but they ate later than usual because her algebra homework took forever, so Evan is still helping clean up.
“Hi, Mom,” Maddie says, waving a soapy greeting. “We’re almost done.” Evan waves too.
Their mother frowns. “What’s that on your hand?” she asks. “Is that a bruise? Did you hurt yourself?”
“It’s just marker,” Maddie assures her. She smiles down at Evan. “He’s still figuring out how to draw on the paper and not himself. I’ll wash it off before he goes to bed.”
“Evan, this is ridiculous,” his mother says, and then stops.
“Look!” Evan says. “We match now!” He sticks his hand next to hers and shows off what he drew. The shade of green isn’t exactly the same as the green on her fingertips, but it’s not bad. Evan drew four big dots across the back of his hand, one for each of her fingers.
“What is this,” his mother said tonelessly. She yanks her hand away from his, clenching her fist tight as if to protect her green fingertips from him.
Maddie blanches. “Evan,” she says. “Did you draw that?”
“I wanted to match,” Evan says, confused. “Like me and Maddie.”
“Honey?” his father says, stepping in to put a hand on Evan’s mom’s back. He still has his coat on. “What happened?”
“He -- He --” his mother says, gesturing at Evan and his still-outstretched hand. Her face is very pale, her hands trembling. “It’s like he’s making a mockery of--!”
“Maddie, take Evan upstairs,” their father says. He glances down at Evan’s hand, mouth thinning. “Maybe give him a bath.”
Maddie obeys wordlessly, scooping Evan off the counter into her arms. He can hear their parents talking as she carries him up the stairs, and he clings to her, sniffling.
“It’s okay,” Maddie tells him, setting him down on the toilet lid. “Mom was just surprised, that’s all.”
Surprise is when you were hoping for a Gameboy for Christmas and you get a book instead. Evan scrubs at his damp face with his un-markered hand. “She’s mad,” he says piteously.
Maddie gets a washcloth and scrubs at his arm with water and soap. It’s uncomfortable, but better than having to take a bath. “It’s okay,” she promises. “She wasn’t mad. Just don’t do it again, okay? We don’t want to make her upset.”
By the time he’s a little older, Evan’s done the research. In the United States, the average number of marks for a ten year old is seven. The average number for an eighteen year old is twelve. The average number for a twenty-five year old is fifteen. The average number for a fifty year old is nineteen. The average number at death is twenty-two. The percentage of adults in the United States with three or fewer marks is just under two percent, or just about five million people.
That sounds like a lot, but Evan doesn’t know the percentage of people who only have one, because he can’t find numbers for it.
It’s not an indicator of love, his research tells him. People have argued for centuries about what it is an indicator of, but the general consensus these days is significance. Not love, not hate, just importance.
So there it is. Evan is nine and he’s only met one person that he matters enough to for the evidence to show up on his body. He has one year to get six more marks and catch up to the national average. He goes home that day and finds Maddie sitting on the front porch in tears.
“Maddie?” he says, plopping down beside her. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” she says, choked. “Mom and Dad are angry, but nothing’s wrong. Evan, look.” She thrusts out her arm towards him, and Evan sees it because he can’t miss it. A new mark stretches around her wrist, a blue so dark it’s almost black. “It’s Doug’s,” she says, and sort of smiles, even though there are still tears rolling down her face. “He was convinced we would mark each other, and he was right.”
Evan has only met Doug a few times. “Why are Mom and Dad mad?” he asks.
“Because they disapprove,” Maddie says, rolling her eyes. She hugs her knees to her chest. “They think I’m too young. They just don’t get it. This is special.” She strokes her fingers over the mark -- the fingers with Evan’s pink mark on them. “Doug says it means we’ll be together forever.”
Evan doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like the shape of Doug’s fingers imprinted on his sister’s skin. But Maddie’s finally stopped crying, and she reaches around Evan to squeeze his shoulders. He leans into her. “Are you coming in?” he asks, adding generously, “Grace let me borrow her Tamagotchi for the weekend, I could show you. It's pretty cool.”
Maddie wipes her face off. “Thanks,” she says. “But Doug is coming to pick me up. Make sure Mom and Dad don’t see the Tamagotchi.”
“Duh,” Evan says. If he lost it, or if his parents found it and threw it out, he would have to give Grace all his allowance savings to pay her back.
“You’ve mentioned Grace a few times this week,” Maddie says, smiling. “Do you have a crush on her? Do I need to be giving you a talk about how you’re too young to be exchanging marks with girls just yet?” She pokes him in the side, grinning.
Evan squirms. He did have a crush on Grace, actually, and he’s pretty sure she had a crush on him, right up until they were hiding together behind a bush during a game of sardines and she leaned her bare knee into his bare knee. Evan had held his breath, but nothing happened. “Oh,” Grace said, flushing under her freckles. “Sorry, Evan.”
The Tamagotchi had been a consolation prize. Evan sticks his hand into his pocket to at least show Maddie before she leaves, but Doug’s car is already pulling up.
Evan’s lucky, in a way, that his one mark is right there on his face. It’s not like other people don’t have marks on their faces, but it’s unusual. He’s not the only one or anything; there's a girl in his math class who has a baby footprint on her cheek from her twin sister, and Evan’s favorite elementary school teacher had a kiss mark on her forehead. It’s not unheard of, at least, and it means that everyone looks at him and knows he has a mark. It means that when he’s meticulous about wearing gloves, no one thinks he’s hiding an absence of marks; if anything, they think the opposite.
Evan kisses a girl for the first time when he’s thirteen. They’re at a girls-and-boys birthday party, the first one Evan’s ever been to, and she’s new to their school, doesn’t think Evan’s a loser because this is the year other kids have started wanting him on their team in gym class or when they’re playing four-square at recess. Evan’s not cool, exactly, but he’s not not cool. Her name is Jane, but she goes by just Jay, which Evan thinks is awesome. He’s always wanted a nickname.
The group plays truth or dare, and Evan gets dared to drink as much Sprite as he can in thirty seconds, which turns out to be a lot. He ends up spilling it all down his front and it’s sticky for the rest of the party, but everyone is laughing and cheering, so he doesn’t even care.
“That was cool,” Jay tells him afterwards, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. It’s pink, because her mom lets her dye it, which is also awesome. They’re sitting in a corner of the basement, waiting for a turn with the XBox.
Evan burps. He’s been burping a lot, because of the Sprite. “Thanks,” he says, puffing up his chest.
“High five,” Jay says, and Evan realizes neither of them are wearing gloves. He took his off because they were soggy with Sprite. But Jay is holding up her hand insistently, and Evan is still buzzing all over from the success of essentially winning truth or dare, so he just does it. High fives her.
Nothing happens. It’s a good high five, the kind that leaves his hand stinging, but his palm is still the color it was before, and so is Jay’s. Evan feels his face fall.
“It’s okay,” Jay says, and takes his hand. She smiles at him anyway. “I don’t mind. I just wanted to make sure we had touched before I did this.”
“Did wh--” Evan starts to say, and then she kisses him. So it’s not too bad, really, even if he still has just the one mark.
Evan touches more girls after that. Just to see. He kisses some of them, too, if they still want to after they haven’t left a mark on each other. It’s okay; Evan doesn’t really want to be anyone’s boyfriend. But it’s getting weirder and weirder that he’s only got the one mark.
When he’s sixteen, there’s a girl named Tara who has a pickup truck with a backseat big enough for them to stretch out in. She’s going off to college soon, but it doesn’t really matter, because they didn’t leave a mark on each other. He likes her anyway, thinks she’s funny and beautiful and lots of the things he would want in a girl who did leave a soulmark on him.
“I think something might be wrong with me,” he tells her one night after a football game when she’s plastered on top of him in the backseat. He’s always wired after a game, and hooking up takes the edge off. “One mark is crazy, right?”
“I think it just means you need to go somewhere that isn’t Hershey, Pennsylvania,” she says, scratching her nails idly against his bare shoulder. “Maybe you’re just not where you’re supposed to be, you know?”
It’s maybe the smartest thing he’s ever heard. Evan needs to get the fuck out of here.
It’s what he tells Maddie, when he’s begging her to run away with him. Him from his lack of marks and her, hopefully, away from Doug. Evan still hates the mark he left on her, and he thinks Maddie might too, the way she’s always tugging her sleeve down to cover it when they’re together.
“I have to go,” he tells her. “There’s no one who matters here except you.”
“I know,” she says, wringing her hands. “I know, and you deserve to see the world, to be free to find your people.”
“Come with me,” he presses, taking her hands in his, and when she nods, tears in her eyes, Evan is naive enough to believe she will.
Somewhere along the line, Evan stops expecting girls to leave a mark on him. He’s just passing through, he tells himself, so of course he wouldn’t matter to anyone in Virginia, or Florida, or Montana, or Peru. It’s just that he’s starting to feel like he might not matter to anyone, anywhere. Some girls are surprised when they see him naked and realize the mark on his face is the only one on his whole body, but most of them don’t care. Half the time, there isn’t time to get naked before Buck is eating someone out in a bar bathroom, so it doesn’t matter anyway. If some stupid part of him still hopes, deep down, that he’s going to shake hands with one of these girls and his skin will come away a different color, then it’s only because he’s never known when to quit.
It’s convenient that he ended up doing a job where he’s wearing gloves most of the time anyway. Not that he wasn’t warned in the academy that most firefighters end up marking each other, or getting marked by the people they’re helping. Lots of first responders meet significant others that way; it comes with the territory of needing to touch people in emergency situations. Not everything can be controlled all the time.
Bobby wears gloves too, but Buck’s seen his hands underneath, when he had to strip them off after sewage water soaked all of them. Normal marks, hands and wrist and fingertips. Tiny little baby fingerprints on his palm -- two sets, maroon and forest green.
Hen doesn’t bother with gloves around the firehouse; she says her hands get sweaty. The tip of her right index finger is lemon yellow where Denny grabbed her the first time she held him, and a dozen other marks visible when she pushes up her sleeves to work on inventory, from Karen, from her mom, from her best friend growing up. There’s a mark on her shoulder that’s been covered up with black ink; Buck, for once, has the good sense not to ask about it. Later, he finds out that it’s from Eva, a slash of brick orange across Hen’s skin that she couldn’t stand to look at anymore.
Chimney only has a few visible marks, but he does have a matching mark to Hen’s, evidence of a fist bump across the knuckles on his right hand and her left. Bright light blue, like a clear sky. Buck’s so jealous he could throw up when he notices, but it makes sense. They’re the kind of friends he’s always wished he could have, two halves of a set.
At work, Buck wears his gloves and doesn’t mention what’s under them. If people ask about the mark on his face, he just says it’s from his sister. And people nod and smile, probably picturing a baby reaching out to a big brother, her little hands landing on his face. It’s a cute idea, and it’s so much easier than telling the truth: Yeah, I’ve only ever mattered to one person, and she hasn’t spoken to me in years .