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Chapter 1
Lucy
Chula Vista / San Diego
There was nothingI loved more than mornings where I didn’t have an alarm blaring at me or copious amounts of pinging noises coming from my phone, lovingly reminding me thatLucy, you have purpose in this world.
This morning however, it was the lack of not only the familiar buzzing or vibration, but the complete absence of any notifications that fooled me into a false sense of comfort. But then I remembered that there was no reason to set such a time restraint or be reminded of anything because I currently had no work scheduled.
Being a freelance destination wedding and elopement photographer had its pros and cons.
The pros: traveling all over (I never limited myself to geographic restraints), and capturing the intimate beauty that oozed from couples that were in love.
The cons, though? The jobs were unpredictable. I could usually bank on the upsurge during the wedding season, but after that petered out, there were only the occasional elopements left in its wake.
I had never been much of a planner, never one to sit down and calculate a budget for myself within a penny of its value, but even I knew that if I didn’t book at least three more clients by the end of the year, I’d have to figure something else out on the side.
Because my only other option would be to hit up my sister, aka roommate, for a little cash. Deciding I’d rather grind my teeth down a dusty chalkboard, I pinched my cheeks for some blood flow and threw off my duvet, determined to make the day a good one.
After using the bathroom and brushing my teeth, I was delighted to hear a notification sounding from my phone. And then another. Followed by at least seven more.
Ha ha!,I thought to myself.The universe heard my very un-adult like pity party and is throwing business my way! Because that happened in real life, didn’t it?
Except when I slid the screen open, I saw it was my sister texting me.
I rolled my eyes when I saw her name, but began to read the string of texts.
E:SOS
E:Help
E:I need your help
E:I know you’re not doing anything!
E:Hello??!
E:Lucy! Fine. I’m calling you!
Out of the two of us, E was the planner. The level-headed one. So, as much as I wanted to be annoyed with her for using the acronym SOS (I couldn’t get the Abba song out of my head now), my curiosity was piqued and I answered on the first ring when she gave up texting and indeed called me.
I climbed back on my bed and pulled the comforter over my bare legs. “Top of the morning to ye!” I greeted with a crappy accent that was somewhere between cockney and something unrecognizable; if Jason Statham or Paul McCartney heard me, they’d cringe in horror. I found it quite funny.
“Lucy! Why didn’t you answer my texts? I need your help,” she relayed to me in a rush.
I couldn’t control the way my mouth contorted in satisfaction, so I settled for, “Calm your tits, I was in the bathroom. And I’ll ignore the comment about me not doing anything—clearly, I was. But do tell—”
She cut me off. “I need your help. Today. Now.” She sounded desperate and very unlike herself.
“Aren’t you at work for that nerd thing today?” I asked, twisting an embroidered rosebud between my fingers. I recalled her rambling on and on last night about how she would be MIA the entirety of the weekend because she was working at an obscure sounding convention thing. I heard her when she had spoken, but whenever she started with her foreign geek-slang, my brain turned off immediately.
She sighed and it was louder than her aforementioned plea. “Thecon, Lucy, it’s called Comic-Con,” placing extreme emphasis on the title that was completely lost on me. And not for the first time. “That’s why I need your help. I need you to come and play interference.”
I snorted. “Me and sports? E, asking me to do that would be like asking André the Giant to do needlepoint.” I released a halfhearted laugh.
“Not literallysports,” she exhaled, sounding exacerbated and running thin on patience. “My ex is here and I wasn’t expecting it and I just don’t know what I’d do if I saw him or ran into him and—”
What was this? My cool, calm, collected big sister had her britches in a bind because she was afraid of running into her ex-boyfriend? This was too easy.
