Page 2 of Clichés & Curses

‘Hey, little sis. Are Mom and Dad there with you?’ my sister had asked, her voice shaky as if she had been crying. It was a Friday night, and I was catching my parents up on my week. Dad usually came over to have dinner with us whenever he could, but Fridays were a constant.

‘Yeah, they’re here,’ I told her. ‘Is everything okay?’

The line was silent for a moment, and I was starting to get worried. ‘Eliza?’ I called out.

‘Can you put me on speaker please?’ Eliza answered instead.

I placed the phone in the middle of the kitchen island as Eliza started explaining why she was calling.

Eliza and Nathan were planning to move to New York City once they got married, living out their lives as journalists in ‘The Big Apple’ together. But while that was Eliza’s ultimate goal, Nathan didn’t share it so much. The downfall came when he got another job offer, the one he had been dreaming of.

The setback?

It was all the way in San Francisco.

The other side of the country.

It left Eliza and Nathan with a very difficult decision to make.

They tried compromising on things—making plans to visit each other, prolonging their engagement. But ultimately, they didn’t want to hold the other person back, not when they both perfectly understood the price they had each paid—the time and effort they’d put in, the sacrifices they had made—in hopes of having their dream offer to finally be within their reach.

In the end, they decided to break off the engagement, just three months later.

It was sad to think how their biggest similarity with one another—the one that had brought them together—would also be the one to rip them apart.

And that was strike two.

For a long time, I wondered if there truly was such a thing as ‘happily ever after’, or if that was just a concept created to give hope. Maybe love stories with cliché love interests weren’t meant to last after all; maybe they were just meant for stories, a thing of fiction.

Or at the very least, they weren’t meant to last for my family. I had enough proof to believe in that.

‘Happy Ever After’ is a part of fairytales, but we tend to forget that curses exist in the same stories too. What if my family was cursed to have doomed relationships because of who they choose to be with? Seeing it happen once had already convinced me of the curse, but watching it repeat made it harder to ignore. And what if the only way to prevent this from happening to me was to avoid these cliché love interests from entering my life?

If that’s the case, then I’ll just have to make sure I won’t be struck out.

Chapter One

Avoiding the curse is easy when you know what to look out for.

The key is to always be one step ahead. With my vast knowledge of all things clichés from all the romance movies I’ve watched and the endless Wattpad books I’ve read, I was confident I wouldn’t fall under the curse.

In all the romance stories, the cliché love interest has always been the same type of guy. The one that the main character will always brush off ever having a romantic relationship with, because it’s such an unrealistic scenario—a ‘never gonna happen’ situation. Whether it be the mysterious bad boy who doesn’t engage with anyone, or the rival they’ve been competing against, the two leads have either never crossed each other’s path or stayed away from one another.

And here’s where the catalyst comes in.

The catalyst is the one responsible for bringing the main character and the cliché love interest to spend more time with each other. In the case of how it began for my parents—with it happening again to Eliza—it was the ‘being partnered up’ scenario.

And so, the game plan was simple: identify the cliché love interest in every situation and ensure that the scenario doesn’t fall upon me, and whoever the curse decides to lay on my path.

While the years of middle school were spent rigidly following this plan, I had started doing it subconsciously once I entered my high school years.

At the start of any school year, I made sure to befriend, or at the very least make an acquaintance, with someone in each class. So if any partnered assignment came up, I wouldn’t be accidentally stuck with anyone that I had categorized as a cliché love interest. There were instances where the curse could’ve made its appearance, when the teacher decided to pair up the students themselves, but thankfully it didn’t.

And so, I had lived those years of my life unscathed from the curse.

When college came around, I was confident the curse would be avoidable, given the large size of the campus and the number of students that surrounded it. Attending a university where its highest pride was the baseball team, it’s no surprise that the cliché love interest would be the star athlete himself, Colton Reed.

You could tell God really took his time when he made Colton. On top of his great talent at the sport itself, the Big Man had also decided to give him romance hero swoon-worthy features—with his tall frame and messy hair that I never saw tamed. Though, the latter might have to do with the fact that I had only got to see his hair during those split seconds of him not wearing a cap or a helmet when he was on the field.

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