A Chance for Sunny Skies (2 page)

I pulled up to my apartment and parked. When I climbed out, I groaned as I noticed my wetness had left a large dark stain on my cloth seat and Gerald now held a distinctly "oceany" smell. Awesome. My parking spot was under cover, so I rolled the windows down a few inches to give things a chance to air out and locked him up before heading toward my place. Before I got too far, I got a whiff of the blanket I wore and I knew I couldn't bring it into my home. I stopped and pivoted toward the dumpster next to the parking spots. The stink of the wool blanket seemed to materialize into fingers that grabbed onto me as I tried to peel it off. Finally, I escaped and tossed the skanky thing into the bin.

There. I wiped my hands off, pushed my shoulders back, and headed inside. I'd had a bad day, that was all. I climbed the stairs to the second floor. I was alive, that's what counted. I had a good cry and now I was going to move on. I did have my online friends. I could tell them about what happened... if I wanted to. Plus, tomorrow I would start this change, become New Sunny.

Yes, no need to dwell on it. Melanie Carter didn't have to win. I was okay with my life. My cyber-friends were probably waiting for my next post on our online message board. That's right. They needed me. They appreciated me. I unlocked my door and shoved it forward, letting it swing in as I stood there proud, ready, okay with it all. I strode inside, plunked my keys into the dish on my counter, and dropped my purse on a chair. Benny merely cracked an eye from where he slept on the couch, then he went back to sleeping ninety percent of his life.

It only took me eighteen minutes and the strength of seven warriors before I managed to peel out of my clothes and hop into a hot shower. Once I stepped in, though, it was like I absorbed the shower water, turning it directly into more tears. Where were all of these tears coming from? I never cried. Seriously.
The Lion King
,
Harry and the Hendersons
, even
Wall-E
had produced not a single tear. Nothing. Nanny Marie had always marveled at the fact that I hadn't really cried as a child, either. I seemed to be crying twenty-six years of built up tears all at once.

After only a few minutes in that shower my positive thoughts had turned. Okay! became okay... became am I okay? became more crying. My shoulders shook, I curled down, wrapped my arms around my knees, and continued to cry my
Most likely to die alone
tears.

The slide show came back.

Picket fence.

Yoga bag.

Green shoe.

Old woman.

Lightning picture.

Dog collar.

Pond.

Was I dead? Dying again?

I peeled one eye open. Then the other. Nope, just asleep. The theme music from Downton Abbey
played from my phone next to me on my nightstand. I tried to curl onto my side, my usual kinda-thinking-about-waking-up first step, but all that salt water must have dried me out. My skin screamed when I tried to move, it was so tight. I felt like one of those mummified cats you see in creepy curiosity shops or Ripley's books. I think I might have been making the same kind of face as I grimaced through the pain.

Benny purred and stretched his legs out so they pushed on me. He was a red head, like me. Well, orange head (as close as a cat can get). His green eyes focused on me as he contemplated who-knows-what-goes-through-a-cat's-mind, his head resting sideways on the covers. I ruffled his fur and he whined a complaint.

"Oh, stuff it, Benedict." (Yes, I did name my cat after the actor on Sherlock, shut it.)

I tried to get up again. This time, I built up momentum by rolling back and forth a tiny bit each way, groaning as I sat up. My muscles screamed louder than a Jerry Springer paternity special. It must have been the swimming. I rubbed my arms. Going from no exercise at all to swimming for my life must have been a shock to my poor muscles, all three of them.

A plus-side to living alone was that no one saw me zombie-walk into the bathroom to get ready. I didn't just walk like a zombie; I looked pretty darn undead to boot. Sleeping on my hair wet had produced something alive and angry looking. I wet my fingers and ran them through the red mess until it looked somewhat tame.

The rest of the morning was pretty regular everyday. Put on pants. Pinched at muffin top while making nostrilly upset face. Covered muffin with loose shirt. Wrangled hair into bun. Found matching shoes. Shoved a bagel in my mouth. Walked as quickly (and stiffly) as I could to Gerald because, "holy goodness how the crap was I so late?"

I pulled an only slightly fishy smelling Gerald into the parking lot of the Henry Phillips building five minutes late and let my head fall forward to hit the steering wheel. I would have stayed there forever, but the work day called, so I peeled myself out of the car and shuffled in.

I graduated with a psychology degree, I guess trying desperately to understand myself, and maybe the people who teased me.  Sure, it helped me figure out that my oddness was indeed a disorder and got my butt into counseling (thanks to the student insurance benefits), but once I graduated and my insurance ran out, I regressed. A lot. Looking into jobs where I was supposed to help others like me sounded too much like the anxious leading the anxious.

I stuffed my degree and focused on things I
could
do, like temp jobs where other people did the searching for me. Though, none of them came with benefits, so I seemed to be sinking further and further into my silence as I moved from job to job, not feeling as if one ever fit me right. I helped as an archivist in the city's library, had done a quick stint as a transcriptionist, and now I worked as a close caption typist for a local news station's pre-recorded segments.

Yeah, I bounced around. I'd been at KMPO 4, Willamette Falls' only news station, for almost a year and liked it okay. Even though it was uncomfortably close to another sore subject from my childhood, weather forecasting.

You see, my mother admitted to being intensely under the influence of painkillers and thought Sunny rhymed nicely with Bunny. To this day, she still blames the nurse for coming in and asking her, "So Bunny, what are we going to name this little honey?" The name Sunny wouldn't really have been that bad, except that our last name seemed to have slipped her mind (as she still swears to this day). Our last name is Skies, yeah. So that makes me Sunny Skies. Which makes everyone gush and tell me I should be a weather girl. (You would, too. Don't lie.)

Unfortunately, for someone who is painfully shy, who could not even talk in front of her elementary school classroom, the idea of standing in front of a camera felt like a cruel joke. Rest assured that didn't stop bullies in school from taunting me about my name, from asking me about the weather, from laughing at the hilarity of picturing me on TV. Let's just say it had been the subject of more than a few of my nightmares.

So I ran far away from weather and found different ways to work with my quietness, my weirdness, my I-shouldn't-be-allowed-around-people-ness. This place was the best yet. (Librarians can be super chatty, ironically enough.) At the station I got to close myself up in my dark little office in the back (far away from the weather department). I did my typing and sent it off. When something new came in, I repeated everything. Alone. Perfect.

That morning, I walked in looking like the tin-man would’ve looked if Dorothy had never found his oil can. My muscles ached and would barely cooperate enough for me to feign normalcy. Luckily, even though you'd think my huge red mop of hair would attract attention, no one paid me any mind as a rule. Today was no different. Crazy hair. Weird walk. Nope. Pay no attention to the quiet girl who works in the back. I sighed. That was actually okay with me. I know I was supposed to start being my friendship-finding relationship-building new self today, but I could surely wait until lunch to really get it going.

Scuttling into my office, I sat down and got to work. I turned on my computer and while it booted up I thought about those images again. Why? That was the biggest question. I leaned forward and rested my head on my hand. Had I seen those things before? It was possible. I had been pretty sure they weren't from my life in the moment, though, but we see things everyday that never make enough of an impact to warrant remembering. The bigger question was why they appeared at such an important moment.

My computer beeped in complaint as it finished warming up and wanted me to sign in. I switched my work-brain on and lost myself in my job, in words, in checking over stuff, in rubbing my eyes every five minutes.

At lunch, when I bought a salad at the cafeteria downstairs (because I was still filled with terror at seeing my thighs in those second-skin jeans yesterday), I stopped before going back into the elevator to eat in my office like I usually did, because I remembered what I was supposed to do today. New Sunny. Making friends Sunny. There was so much not-wanting-to stuffed in my chest, in the lump in my throat. Talking to people was so hard for me.

Those seven images flashed before my eyes again, my body ached, and my heart clenched in on itself. I had almost died yesterday and not a soul knew anything about it, well, except the fisherman, but he didn't seem to give a fish's ass. Something was wrong with that. Well, there was a lot wrong with that and even more wrong with the fact that I seemed to be the only person in the history of near-death-experiences who didn't see a single image from her own life. This was a sign from the Universe. A chance to change. I couldn't go back to living my life in the I'm-actually-not-living-my-life way I had been before I almost drowned.

If I wanted to change, I needed to start now. I shook my head and turned on my heel and walked back into the cafeteria. Before I had graduated, my counselor, Tim, had started me on a series of exercises, going out into public and putting myself into social situations (albeit very controlled ones) where I could work through some of my more debilitating anxieties. I was still a temp without insurance, so starting up counseling again was out. But who was to say I couldn't start practicing what I had learned?

I stepped into the large, plastic and metal filled room feeling confident and happy, but immediately broke into a sweat. My instinct was to go sit by myself, hunched over, scarfing down my food so I could spend as little time as possible being the person eating alone. I pressed my lips together. I needed to go against my instinct. I needed to try something different.

I spotted a group of people who worked in my department, Molly, Greg, Francine, and Jesse. I knew each of their names, but my neck felt hot and red wondering if they knew mine. My heart ached with wanting them to know it, with wanting friends. I walked forward anyway and sat down in the seat next to Molly.

She looked at me, did a second pass, and her eyes widened. The group looked up and their conversation sputtered like a car running out of gas. Luckily they found their reserves and kept going. They were gossiping about people at the station. I could tell. I'd gotten really good at recognizing when people were being made fun of because it was usually me. I smiled at them and looked down at my salad. But my face heated up to an it-might-just-melt-off temperature. Holy goodness. I'd sat down without a plan! Tim and I had practiced for hours before going into a social exercise. I had planned
this
in all of thirty seconds. What had I been thinking? I was going to miraculously be able to talk all of a sudden? I couldn't talk to them.

My coworkers were eyeing each other in a "what the hell is this?" kind of way. I was freaking them out. So, talking was out. What else could I do? I needed desperately to act normal and quick. They picked at their food and a freaking spotlight turned on in my brain. Eat! I should be eating. That would be normal. I ripped open my salad and started shoving it into my mouth. This seemed to calm the poor people I'd sat with, a bit. My heart began to settle and my skin cooled.

Then I felt a piece of the lettuce I'd jammed in my mouth become uncomfortably lodged in my throat. Ouch. At first, I tried to keep the coughing quiet. I left my mouth closed and figured a clearing-my-throat sound might move it. When that didn't work, I coughed forcefully into my hand. The tactic moved it slightly, it started to tickle, and my body started a fierce bout of uncontrollable, open-mouthed, lettuce-pieces-flying-everywhere coughing.

Molly looked up and cringed at the mess of slobbery lettuce chunks all over the table. "You okay?" she asked, but it was as if she was in one of those kung-fu movies where their mouths and expressions don't match what they're saying, because I swear what she said instead was, "Eew. Gross."

I nodded and, yet again, when I went to open my mouth, all that came out was that terrible cackly-awkward laugh. I swiped up the mess, grabbed my salad, and ran out of there as fast as a flying piece of throat lettuce.

Luckily, when I reached it, I had the elevator to myself. What had I been thinking? I couldn't change. I was weird. I had no friends. I had no career. I should've just drowned. Tears started pushing forward like teenagers at a concert. I didn't even go back to my desk. Instead, I traveled to the upper floors and knocked quietly on my supervisor's door after getting the okay-head-nod from his secretary.

"Come in."

I took a deep breath and tried to remember the tips Tim had taught me in our sessions.
Visualize yourself talking. Plan what you're going to say. Keep it short.
I nodded to myself; this time I had a plan. The door creaked and I walked in.

"Um - er - Mr. Fredricks, I'm not feeling well. Do you think I could head home early today?"

Spencer Fredricks was one of those guys who had probably been hot stuff in high school. He was cute, but not in a jock kind of way. More of a scruffy computer geek from a major motion picture.

He looked up, his longish curly brown hair falling forward into his eyes. Swiping it away, he squinted at me. He must have been A.) trying to figure out who I was. Did I work for him? Or B.) trying to ascertain whether or not the pale, schlumpy look I was sporting was because I really was sick or if that's just how I looked.

"Oh, sure, um..."

"Sunny Skies."

"Sunny Skies?"

I nodded, saw him make a scrunched face that (from experience) I knew meant he was thinking I should be a weather girl, maybe even here at the station, saw him shake his head slightly as he realized my qualifications for that job stopped at my name, and I reminded myself to sue my mother for all she's worth.

"Yes, Sunny. Sure. Please let Amanda know on your way out and -- feel better." He smiled the sympathetic type of smile that he probably used when he saw a dog with three legs, a stray cat on the side of the road, or something equally sad. I sighed and walked out before he decided to donate money to the Humane Society in my name, my face flushed with relief at yet another social encounter done and over with.

But when the elevator opened, my throat dried up and fear splotched my face red. Kenneth Richards, my current Melanie Carter, sauntered out. He was the morning weather man at the station (yet another tally against weather people in my life). Schmarmy to the nth degree and God, he was mean. He was like eleven feet tall and skinny as a rail. He always had his hair slicked back into a baby pompadour and his giant white teeth were like a glimmering eye rape.

I rarely saw him since he worked on a different floor and because of the whole I-usually-hid-in-my-office thing, but  there was the day that Reggie called out and they needed me to type captions for the live news show. That's when I met Ken and he must've seen something terribly wonderful in my nonexistence, because after that he would seek me out. He was the exception to the rest of the office ignoring me. Yay. Lucky me.

"Cheeto!" He smiled and opened his arms wide as he closed in on me. Yeah, that was what he called me. Most days it was followed by the classy "crotch" (you know, red hair), but I supposed he was practicing some civility. Of course, he had nicknames for everyone at the station, but where other people got to be Debs and Big T, I got Cheeto Crotch.