As an up-and-coming social media influencer, Sadie Dwyer has had enough of the expectations thrust upon her and is finally ready to start living life on her own terms. Goodbye cushy corporate finance job, goodbye Los Angeles, and hello fresh start...
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Standing on the sidewalk with my powder blue suitcase, I heard my Uber pull away from the curb behind me, finally understanding why he'd double-checked if I'd gotten the address right when I'd slid into his backseat twenty minutes earlier. In my hand, my phone had the GPS app open and I flickered my gaze between the screen and the building in front of me. I was definitely at the right place, but instead of the cozy, rustic apartment I had recently signed a lease for, a pit of unease opened up in my stomach as I stared at the neon welcome sign of a local bar.
Shit, I thought. Please let me not have fucked this up.
Though given my recent streak of bad luck, it wasn't entirely out of the realm of possibility.
First, it'd been my previous apartment out in Los Angeles. Five days ago, I'd been in my kitchen, making myself a salad as I took a break from packing up my belongings, when I'd felt water begin to drip from above. After a call to the landlord, it turned out a pipe in the unit above me had broken, and I was being asked to vacate my place a few days earlier than expected.
Which I understood. These things happened.
Thankfully I'd already sold some of my furniture and knickknacks and had been planning to toss the rest, considering the place I'd been given a virtual tour of in Seattle was coming mostly furnished. Though I was still left whirling frantically around the apartment as I threw the rest of my things—mostly clothes, shoes, books, a variety of art prints, and camera equipment—into a handful of boxes and suitcases. I'd managed to quickly find a storage facility that would ship everything to me once I settled in the Northwest, and with only one suitcase in hand, had booked myself one night in a hotel and bumped up my flight to leave the following afternoon.
Which is where my second dash of bad luck reared its head.
With my last-minute change of plans, I'd been forced to endure the dreaded middle seat. Squashed between a lanky kid who'd been no older than sixteen as he white-knuckled the arm rests for the entirety of the flight, appearing to be one bout of turbulence away from emptying the contents of his stomach, and a middle-aged white man in a suit who'd had the gall to pull two hard boiled eggs out of his briefcase to snack on as he typed out a few emails, I was on edge the entirety of the time we were in the air.
But the good thing about flights was that they eventually came to an end, and when we touched down and I stepped off the plane, I felt comforted by the fact I'd likely never see the two characters I'd had for seatmates ever again.
My last bit of bad luck, however, likely couldn't be defined as luck at all, but rather a situation I'd willingly put myself in knowing it wouldn't wield the greatest outcome. Because I'd arrived in Seattle five days before I told my new landlord I would be moving in, I'd been left with three choices. I immediately vetoed the idea of asking to move in early, considering I didn't want to ruffle my landlord's feathers before I even lived there, and staying at a hotel was out too, given the fact that I no longer had a steady income and wanted to save as much money as I could.
