A Chance for Sunny Skies Read Free Page A

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