Page 34 of The Show

Beulah spun round to him again. “Wait, is he the reason you had the black eye last month? His elbow?”

“Yep.”

“Aw.” She leaned in and kissed him on the temple. “What a fucking douche.”

“Anyway,” Lauren stood back up, and thumbed behind her, “as much as I love this chat, Mom sent me down to get you all. You need to get dressed; we’re heading to Gramps for birthday breakfast.”

I rolled back and jumped up, feeling much more invigorated than I had when I’d arrived here. This field always worked. I looked up to the sky and quietly thanked my dad.

The girls were already walking off while I waited for Murray and Rafe to get up and follow.

“Shit, Murray, you know Pennington might actually get what he’s always wanted. He mightactuallyget Jupiter Reeves to play for him.”

Murray stopped in his tracks then grinned wide, before slapping me on the back and ruffling my head hard with his knuckles.

“I never doubted it wouldn’t happen one day.”

“Yeah,” I grinned back, patting down my hair that was now all over the place, “S’pose I better get myself to L.A.”

“Yes, you should.”

Rafe looked up from his phone, “You’re in luck; The Dodgers are playing at home on Tuesday.”

I nodded at him, even though I was deep in thought about getting something else I’d always wanted.

I added one more stop I had to make before I got to California.

7

Lowe

You know what’s bullshit?

Movies.

Specifically, movies where the female lead goes off to set up her own business, she slaps a bit of paint on a storefront, carries a few colorful boxes with cute little labels, and suddenly she’s got a best-selling product.

Had any of those things happened to me?

No, no they had not.

None of those things had happened to me.

Granted, I didn’t specifically have a storefront to sell from, but I had boxes and a product. The boxes were currently very useful to sit on - in my makeshift office, no less – because obviously my desk hadn’t arrived. And the product, well… it was somewhere. Or it should have been somewhere, but right now, I was staring at a blank lap top screen when I should have been staring at my website.

The one that was supposed to launch this week.

I swallowed down the frustration I’d been trying very hard to keep to a minimum and opted to call my IT guy instead of throwing my laptop through the window; though it was a very close second which one I wanted to do more.

“Josh…”

“Hey, Lowe, what’s up? What’s broken now?” he chuckled, because this may not have been the first time I’d called him.

Or the second.

“Are you nearby? Can you come and help me? Please? The website has vanished again!” I didn’t bother to hide the pleading in my voice.

“What did you do?”

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