A Beautiful Day for a Wedding

Jet

"Maybe this, Maybe this time."

Jet finishes running through the song with his band to the scattered applause of the Redonovich family setting up the reception. Jet turns and nods to his band mates in recognition for their hard work, just as Mr. Mazzara says from the sound booth, "Everything sounds good and I've got the presets all sorted so you should be good for the night, but if not there are about a half dozen people here with the technical expertise to adjust anything you need."

"Thanks Benny," Jet jokes bringing up Mr. Mazzara's old Six Below Zero name.

Mr. Mazzara does not look amused as he shoots Jet a look to watch what he says, especially when he's in a position to make the band sound like chipmunks if he wanted to. Jet laughs to himself as he reorganizes his keyboard setup to make sure everything's ready to go for the happy couple's first dance (he still couldn't believe that they chose Can I Have This Dance? as their first dance, so corny) and prepared to head back to the chapel to finish getting ready for the ceremony. He thanked his friends/band again for agreeing to do this before making his way back.

On the path back to the Chapel Jet sees the figure of Emmy ahead of him on and lightly jogs to catch up to her. Ever since transferring to East High Jet had forged a tight bond with Emmy. They were both new to East High, her as a freshman and formerly homeschooled, him as a transfer student, they both had the same group of friends from Shallow Lake, and he had come to the school to play Chad while she was playing Taylor in High School Musical 3, so they spent quite a bit of time together. It was during one of their running lines/hang out sessions that she had confided in Jet about how nervous she was to perform at East High. Of all his friends Emmy was one of his closest, only Maddox and Ricky outranking her. It had only been a few months since he'd last saw her when they met up in Vancouver, when they...

Jet could see Emmy's focus was on her checklist, making sure everything was on schedule and perfect so Ricky and Gina could focus on just getting married. Jet knew why Ricky and Gina had picked Emmy to be their wedding organizer, she was insightful and organized, had experience keeping things orderly and on schedule from her time as Ms. Jenn's assistant, and she could be trusted to know all the secrets. That said, Jet could see the pressure was actually weighing on her as she was hunched over her clipboard and muttering to herself. Trying to break her out of her hyper fixation Jet greeted loudly, "Hey Ems."

The young woman looked up in surprise at the sudden greeting and Jet could see a light blush go across her face. As Jet finished catching up Emmy finally said, "hey, Jet. It's been a minute."

"Yeah, it has." Jet felt a wave of embarrassment as he remembered the last time they spoke, "Hey...so...About that night...I meant to call, it's just that Maddie and Ashlyn broke up right after and things got busy and-."

"Don't worry about it Jet, it's okay. Really," Emmy interrupts him and says reassuringly." The pair walked for a minute in an awkward silence before Emmy asked, "speaking of your sister and Ashlyn breaking up, do you know what happened there? I thought they were solid."

"Asking like you don't already know the answer, super spy," Jet jokes.

"Contrary to everyone's belief, I'm not a spy," Emmy counters defensively whilst rolling her eyes, "of course if I was I would totally say I wasn't, so you probably don't believe me."

Jet chuckles and replies, "well, to answer your question, the short version is they were just living separate lives." Jet looks at Emmy's face and seeing her shoot him a look, and he realized it wasn't a very satisfying answer. "The slightly longer version," Jet continues, "starts with the fact they were actually engaged."

"They were?!" Emmy exclaims, her checklist now completely forgotten as her focus was on the juicy piece of gossip she was hearing.

"They were engaged for not even a day when they started fighting," Jet explains, "they had been doing Long Distance for so long that they couldn't agree on where to live. Ashlyn had her life and work in New York, Maddie was directing in Los Angeles, and even when they got to be together for more than a few weeks at a time they still felt distant. A few hours after getting engaged the topic of where they were going to live came up and...well..."