Total pages in book: 28
Estimated words: 25833 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 129(@200wpm)___ 103(@250wpm)___ 86(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 25833 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 129(@200wpm)___ 103(@250wpm)___ 86(@300wpm)
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
1
LUCY
It’s best to plan your life. Don’t believe me, just look around you. You can see that those people who plan are better off than those who aren’t. And I’m not even talking about planning out your entire life – I mean I am – but even when it comes to simple things like planning out what you’re going to eat for dinner and making sure you have either a, dinner reservations or b, all the ingredients you’re going to need to cook with that night. Otherwise, what are you going to do when six o’clock rolls around and you’re hungry and you and your family have no idea what you’re doing?
Should have planned something, shouldn’t you?
This methodology has worked great for me for my entire life. It’s what made me a successful student all throughout elementary and high school. It’s what allowed me to also take on many extracurricular activities and succeed at them – which really made my parents happy, of course, and it’s why Yale accepted me early admission and why I’ll be going there this year as a freshman. That also made my parents very proud.
It’s why I found just the right guy and made him my boyfriend. We started dating at the end of freshman year and never stopped. He comes from a great family, he’s going to be a dentist when he’s finished with school, and I’m pretty sure that sometime soon, he’s going to propose to me. I’ll say yes, and then at the end of college we’ll get married. Everything will be perfect.
I decided to take a bit of a summer vacation before heading off to school. A trip to the Philippines where I would not only get a chance to relax, but I would also teach math to impoverished children in rural villages. Yale will love that, my mother had told me, but that isn’t why I’m doing it. I guess a part of me just can’t stop getting involved when I see an opportunity.
I woke up early this morning, said goodbye to the folks, grabbed my bags, and took a very pricey Uber to JFK airport from our house in Philadelphia. I made sure to arrive at the airport around forty-five minutes early, to give myself plenty of time to get to where I need to go, and also to give the airport some leniency (we all know how airports can be). I had my carry-on bag, as well as my little personal to-go bag, as I like to call it, with things like gum, water, a phone charger, my favorite snack bar, Band-Aids, toothpicks, and plenty of other things a person might need while going on a trip by themselves. But as it turned out, all my meticulous planning meant nothing when I arrived at the airport.
I’d been checking my flight’s status the entire ride there on my phone, and everything was fine. I grabbed my bag from the trunk, found my way inside, went through security (talk about a mega hassle), and walked all the way down to my gate, only to find that my flight had been delayed.
“Excuse me,” I ask a man standing by the gate, looking very official and also very frazzled. “Do we…know how long the flight is going to be delayed?”
“Hi.” He smiles. “No, we don’t at this moment. If you could just take a seat, we’ll keep you informed.”
I open my mouth to ask him how long he intends for us to just “keep our seats,” but before I can speak, he’s off marching away from me. So without anything to do, I take a seat in the corner of the room and break out my water bottle, which I’m very grateful I packed at this point. And that’s when it starts.
An hour goes by before people start to get really restless. I go up to one of the attendants to ask if there’s been any updates, but I just get more non-answers that sound like one of those Senate hearings you see on TV. More time goes by, and more passengers go up and come back to their seats looking discouraged. I text my parents to let them know what’s up. I even try to FaceTime with them, but I get no response. They’re probably on their flight to Hawaii by now. Their flight that actually went according to plan. God, I hate airports and airplanes.
There’s a really sweet-looking family seated a few seats over for me, and I ask them if they wouldn’t mind watching my carry-on for a few minutes while I go to the bathroom and grab something to eat. They smile and tell me of course they wouldn’t, so I do just that. The airport food is atrocious, so instead of torturing my body with a hotdog that looks like it’s been dancing beneath a heat-lamp for longer than we’ve been waiting for our flight to get moving again, I buy myself a fruit smoothie and another two protein bars, one to eat and another to make up for the one I wolfed down earlier out of my to-go bag.