Chapter One

Chapter One: Morgan

There’s a knock at the door.

“WHO IS IIIIT?” Morgan half-screams, as she stands there grinding her teeth, impatient for the reply so she can tell whoever it is to get lost as expediently as possible and get back to work. She is in her second bedroom a.k.a. ‘barely functional darkroom’ developing her latest roll of film, the pictures from her friend Bobbi’s fiasco of a wedding.

“Maintenance,” a male voice says in reply.

Fuck. She’s wired from caffeine and stoned out of her tree, still awake from the previous night – and the landlord’s at her door. Friggin A. She looks at the clock as she comes out of the room; it’s nine a.m. 

A quick, panicked glance around the apartment tells her she’ll need much more time than she has right now to make a difference in how the place looks. She grabs a bag of pot off the end table and buries it under the stack of magazines piled on the floor nearby. Wait, didn’t she have two bags?

Another knock.

“Just a secooond,” she says in a sing-songy voice, throwing a bathrobe on over her shorts and t-shirt. She hopes the surrounding clutter distracts her landlord so he doesn’t look at her too closely; and she’s pretty sure common etiquette will prevent him from staring at any one spot in her apartment too long. Here’s hoping he doesn’t see anything he shouldn’t, Morgan thinks to herself as she walks boldly to the door. She opens it, throwing her best “I’m not stoned and paranoid” type of look and finds Robbie standing there smiling.

Robbie. She didn’t expect that.

And suddenly she’s nine again. And Robbie is fourteen. And he’s Bobbi’s older brother, with the sweet smile and the kind eyes. The only boy who doesn’t laugh the day her skates get tangled up in the fishing wire tied to the back of an older girl’s bike – a girl who then drags Morgan crying down the street. The only boy who lets Morgan get away when the neighborhood kids play chasing games, even though she isn’t very fast. And the only boy who doesn’t find her quiet ways odd – who doesn’t find her odd.

And here they were again, with Morgan trying her damnedest to win the Guinness World Record for Weird and Robbie is her witness.

She winces ever so slightly and curses herself for not looking through the peephole before opening the stupid door.

“Robbie! Hey, when’d you get back?” She says as casually as she can, managing a weak smile and trying to act like it was normal to have paperclips in her hair. When she was working earlier, her hair kept falling forward and she didn’t have the time nor the patience to find bobby-pins, so she grabbed a couple of paperclips off the shelf and stuck em in. It wasn’t a big deal then, but it is now.

I can’t open the door for whatever reason, she could’ve said to him as she hunched hideously on the other side of the door. And then she could’ve asked him to come back tomorrow or later even, and she could have slept a little bit, taken a shower and cleaned the place up some too. But no, you couldn’t let it happen that way, could you God?

Instead, Morgan stands there trying not to exhale because she’s sure her breath reeks from the garlic and broccoli pizza she’s been living on the past couple of days.

            “Just this past weekend actually,” he says cheerily, tan skin and bright smile beaming back at her. Robbie is a merchant marine officer, has been for years - with the muscles to prove it. He travels the world on cargo ships, leaving for months at a time.

Morgan has been in love with him since she’s been little and she knows that he knows it, everyone did. But being five years younger makes a difference when you’re in your late teens. And even though Morgan has just turned twenty-one, the fact that he was Bobbi’s older brother made the thought of them ever being a couple ridiculous. Impossible. She still had hopes.