A Chance for Sunny Skies (3 page)

Ken wrapped his arm around my neck and teased my frizzy hair so I'm sure it stuck out in all directions. I ducked away and looked down as I made a beeline for the elevator.

"Leaving so soon?" He laughed. "What about our date later?"

That was his thing. He and his friends pretended he and I were dating. Hilarious. Probably even more hilarious to them was the fact that I'd never said one word to him. Never. I did my best impression of Gollum shying away from the light as I jumped into the elevator and cringed until the doors shut. Talking to my boss was one thing, I'd worked on that, but I had never reached the part of my sessions where we worked on talking to jerks, to bullies. The quiet of the elevator calmed me a bit and I hobbled outside to Gerald.

As I drove, the sounds of the road and my radio had lulled me into a state of nothing-bad-is-currently-happening okay-ness, when my heart jumped into my throat. A dog stood in the road. A three legged dog. Directly in front of Gerald. I slammed down on the brakes. I couldn't freaking hit a three legged dog! I cringed, closed my eyes (I know, totally NOT what you're supposed to do), and clutched the steering wheel.

My ABS kicked in and, along with it, that terrible pulsing/grinding sound. Other than that, there weren't any sounds of hitting dogs or people gasping at a terrible sight.

I opened my eyes just in time to see the dog limping away (from the three legs, not because I'd hurt him). My heart hammered in my chest and after pulling off to the side of the road, I took a deep breath and rested my forehead on the steering wheel.

That was close. And weird. Hadn't I been thinking about three legged dogs earlier? I sat in my car and something to the right caught my eye. The house I had pulled over next to had a white picket fence.

The white fence.

The white picket fence with peely paint and a missing slat. The one from my non-recognizable flash before my eyes experience yesterday.

What. The. Hell.

I got out of my car and walked up to the fence. My fingers shook as they touched the weathered wood. A few more pieces of paint flaked off and floated to the un-mowed grass below.

This was it.

So the pictures weren't from my life... yet?

Were the seven images things I was going to see? How did this crappy old fence have anything to do with me? Questions berated me like insults from Ken and his friends, making me woozy and a bit wobbly. I grabbed onto the fence to steady myself.

Crack! A slat broke off and crashed onto the sidewalk. Shit! I looked around. A window in the front of the house opened.

"Hey! You breaking my fence?" A young woman stuck her head out and looked at me. I shied away and ran back toward my car. "Stop!" she called. "Wait!"

I'm not sure if it was something in her voice or the fact I had almost died yesterday or because I kept seeing this stupid fence in my mind, but I did. I stopped and turned around.

She looked to be my age, in her late twenties. Freckles covered her face, and her blond hair was wrapped up in some sort of red bandana or handkerchief. She smiled at me with big, white, non-offensive teeth.

"That's a super expensive fence, you know," she said, setting her elbows on the sill and propping her hands under her chin.

I took a few steps forward. I wanted to say I was sorry, but the words felt stuck in my throat just like the words I wished for at lunch or in the rest of my life around people. Plus, really what
could
I say? Sorry, but I saw your fence in some sort of crazy-person flash forward. Nope. So I just grimaced and began to back away.

When she saw my face, the girl's face softened and she looked at me in the "poor you" way Spencer had. Then she laughed and said, "Seriously! That thing's a POS. You couldn't make it look worse if you tried."

I squinted, then waved and started walking back to Gerald.

"Hey."

I stopped.

"You like tea?"

I automatically scrunched my face up in disgust. I hated tea. I saw her register my dislike and I felt terrible. Ugh. Now I'd hurt her feelings. My feet itched to move. Normal me would have run away at that point. But normal me had gotten twenty-six years into life without doing anything of importance, without forming any lasting relationships, and without making any memories worthy of a near-death-flash-back. Plus, terrible failure earlier or not, I had promised myself to make some major changes today. So I shoved normal me into my back pocket and tried something new.

Let's not get crazy here. I didn't start up a whole conversation with this girl or anything, but I didn't run. I just stood there, not leaving. Which was something, for me.

She smiled. My not moving seemed to mean something to her, too. "Don't like it, but willing to try. I get you," she said. She nodded and pulled herself back into the house. Seconds after the window slammed down, the door opened, and she motioned me inside.

I walked forward. (Like I said, baby steps.) As I approached the old blue house, I saw a sign I'd missed when I was focused on the fence. It read, "Curiosi-tea" with a graphic of a cat who looked super high and zenned out. I stopped, pointed at it, visualized myself saying something.

"It's just -- tea. Right?" I stumbled over the words, but they came out, which is what really counts.

The girl laughed a long, loud laugh and slapped me on the shoulder. "Of course!"

She pulled me inside what looked more like a frat house than a legitimate business. Unlike a frat house, it smelled lovely. The earthiness of tea scent sat deep in an antique furniture mustiness, like the springs were gone from all the chairs and the smell couldn't get up because it had sunk in too far. There were cool, funky couches and chairs all over the large parlor that seemed to make up the tea sipping space. I could picture people like her sitting cross legged, talking about animal rights or the government. She motioned for me to sit in a bright green chair and stood there, staring at me.

My pale cheeks felt hot, which meant they were turning red, which made me self-conscious, which I'm sure made them redder. I looked down, away, anywhere but at her, but she kept staring.

"So, you don't like tea, huh?" she said, finally, grabbing her chin with her stubby fingers and bitten to the nub nails.

I smiled, but it felt more like an apology than happy.

She squinted. Then she snapped her fingers, making me jump. "Got it!"

My eyes widened as her hair, bandana, and made-of-hemp dress flashed out of the room. Sounds leaked in from what I assumed was the kitchen. Spoons clanking, water boiling, tea leaves being scooped. I closed my eyes and smelled the space again. It reminded me of old books, but as far as I could see, there weren't any.

When I opened my eyes again, she was back. She carried a cool, earthy looking teapot from which steam escaped every possible crack and opening. In the crook of her arm, she balanced two mugs that seemed to be from the same potter. They were small, cylindrical, and didn't have handles. I smiled. I loved mugs I could wrap my hands around and sit in their warmth. I usually drank hot chocolate in mine, but a girl can try something new, right? Should try something new, in my case.

I reached forward, hands extended, ready to help with the armful she clutched, but she scoffed at me and said, "Please. Professional!"

I moved away, trusting her. However, as she set the teapot down on the table, the mugs fell out of her reach and flew onto the floor, one bounced under a chair and the other broke into seventy-seven pieces. Her freckled face turned red, making my shoulders relax a little more.

"Oops!" She shrugged and ran back to the kitchen, yelling, "Find that runaway for me. If it's not broken, I'll use it."

I scrambled out of the chair I had sunk into (I'm telling you, those springs) and crawled in the direction I watched the mug roll. I found it under an old orange chair in the corner, along with enough dust bunnies to create a whole family, heck maybe even a bunny herd. I also found where the book smell came from. Stacks of books sat under every chair, sofa, and table in the room. I heard footsteps behind me as I pulled the mug out and held it up in the air. Hair, dirt, dust, and other stuff I didn't want to think about clung to it.

"Ha!" she laughed and pumped a fist into the air. "Not broken!" She grabbed it from my hand, wiping it on her dress. "Five second rule." The dust and hair clung to her dress as she set the dirty mug down on the table and handed the new one to me. I tried not to be obvious, but I checked it over quickly for dirt or hair, not impressed by this chick's standards of cleanliness.

I looked at her as she sat down, then at the broken mess of mug on the floor, and back at her.

She got my question and waved a hand at me. "Don't worry. I'll clean that up later. I wanted to make a mosaic anyway."

I nodded and we sat in silence for a few seconds.

"Oh! I'm Rainbow Gold," she said, leaning forward to shake my hand.

Now, I told you about my father leaving and about my mother not being around. Nanny Marie raised me, that is, until my mother decided I wasn't social enough, sent Nanny away and me off to a boarding school. I was seven. Since then, no one had really hugged me, or touched me in general. Like, I could count all the times I had been hugged since on one hand.

That's all to explain why, when Rainy leaned forward, I freaked out. My arm pulled back, knocking the table and splashing boiling water on my knees in the process. My fingers swiped at the hot water as I tried to move the burning about a little.

She must've mistook my freak out and scrunched-together-ouchy-face as a comment about her name. She crinkled up her nose. "I know." She rolled her eyes. "It's a super weird name."

I felt my lungs contract. I know it's stupid to be out of breath because you've found someone else with a weird name, but we all know my life wasn't winning the race in things that make sense.

"What's yours?" she asked.

I shook my head. "Sunny Skies," I mumbled, her name seemingly loosening the death grip on my throat that didn't want to let words out.

Rainbow let her head fall back into one of her loud laughs. "Shut up! This is too good." She wiped her face as if she was trying to smooth the smiles out of it. She reached for the teapot and poured it into our mugs. The steam swirled around me. "You'd make a kick-ass weather girl, you know."

Really. Never heard that before. I waited for the anger and anxiety to build up in my chest like it always did, but it didn't come. Something about this girl made me feel... relaxed. I tipped my head to the side to acknowledge her suggestion, but I think the frown on my face was pretty clear.

She narrowed her eyes in understanding. "But you're not. Got it. What do you do then?" she asked.

I sipped my tea. Should I talk to this lady? She didn't really seem to need me to say anything, but refusing to answer flat out questions might make it stop. That damn fence did lead me to this girl. After having almost died, I needed to do something different and right now, it meant talking.

"I type captions." I looked at her. (Hey, I said talk, not gab.)

She nodded and then must have figured she'd gotten enough words out of me for now, because she started talking again. "I've owned this shop for eight years now." She watched me squint as I tried to figure out how old that might make her. "Since two years after I graduated. High school, that is. I never went to college; I didn't feel like it was really a place for people like me, more like people named, Robert and Claudia." Rainbow tucked her legs up under her and leaned forward. "In one of my more heated teen-arguments with my parents, I told them when they'd given me the name Rainbow they had all but sentenced me to doing something totally artsy and new age with my life, like owning a tea shop." She raised her mug and looked around. "And here I am."

I kept my thought that she'd also make a popular leprechaun to myself.

As if she'd heard my thoughts, she said, "Though I guess the leprechaun-ness of my name has been sort of cool. I have amazing luck. I mean, I stumbled on this place, and even though you wouldn't think of a tea shop as a lucrative business, it does pretty well." (I would have to take her word on that since the place was completely empty in the middle of the day.) She shrugged. "Plus, I think people with Name-itis should embrace it. Fighting against it just pisses off the universe."

I nodded and focused on a cobweb in the corner. I sipped again as I thought about my near-death yesterday. Maybe that's what happened. The thought of
me
being a weather girl made me almost burst out laughing right there, but it was something to think about. Had going against my name-destiny angered the universe? The prospect intrigued me, but something else had caught my attention even more. I tipped my head to the side and said, "Name-itis?"

Her freckles seemed to brighten as her brown eyes widened. "Name-itis is when your name dictates something in your life." She untucked her legs and scooted close to me. "In its purest form, it affects your career, like me. But sometimes you can get lucky and it tells you how many animals you're going to have a ridiculous amount of."

I put down my mug and rolled my eyes slightly.

"Seriously!" She put her hand out toward me. "Growing up, one of my best friend's last name was Katzmen." Rainbow watched me, her face frozen in a smile, as she waited for me to guess. When she realized I wasn't going to, she yelled it out herself, "Cats! They had eleven!" She jumped excitedly as she said it, as if it were the craziest thing she'd ever heard. Droplets of tea flew out of her mug and landed on the sofa she sat on.

I scrunched my nose up and shrugged my shoulders. Had this lady never heard of Hoarders? Those people had like three hundred cats and they're named things like Butler and Ford. My lips pinched together and to the side.

Rainbow raised an eyebrow at me as if she'd heard everything that had just happened in my head. "Challenge accepted!" She put her tea down. "My neighbors growing up. The Peacocks." She leaned forward and waited a few seconds before yelling, "Eight exotic birds!" She held eight fingers up and smiled like a fool, she even breathed heavily.

I laughed and shrugged my shoulders again.

"Oh. Okay." She rubbed her hands together. "When I was little, I had super waxy ears."

I wrinkled my nose. Gross.

"Shut up," she said, waving her hand in my face, even though I hadn't said anything. "Anyway, so I had tons of wax, like enough for ten little girls, and I had to go to a doctor to get it all sucked out." She even made a vacuuming motion with her hands as she said the last part.

I grimaced.

"Any guesses?" she asked.

I shook my head, still grimacing.

"His name was Dr. Eric Aaron Rasmussen." Rainbow leaned almost all the way across the coffee table toward me, her face like a big smiling balloon bobbing in front of me.

I was giggling so hard I couldn't guess.

"His initials were E.A.R! EAR! Ear, Sunny. He was an ear doctor." She leaned forward, grabbed my shoulders, and shook me back and forth. She sat down again and leaned back into the sofa, chuckling. We were silent for a few seconds.

"Call me Rainy, by the way."