Trouble followed Trinity everywhere she went. It had been that way since she was a kid. It didn’t matter how many times her mum told her to put her schoolbooks in the same place every day, they would always go missing the day she had an assignment due.
‘Where was the last place you remember seeing them?’ her mum would say with an exacerbated yawn from where she was cooking breakfast. Trinity would point her arms in frustration at the top of the completely empty desk. She was always the first to trip in a race or the last to figure something out.
Even with over two decades of experience with bad luck, Trinity was still panicking as her car’s check engine light flashed brightly from her dashboard on her way to her sister’s wedding. “No, no, no,” she begged, pulling over to the side of the road just as the engine sputtered pathetically to a stop.
She climbed out of the car into the boiling air to call her sister. There was no point staying in the car. She had forgotten to book a car air conditioning service before summer hit, despite setting a million reminders on her phone. The heat bore down on her in waves as she called her sister’s number.
“Where are you?” her sister greeted with her usual politeness.
“My car broke down near Toowoomba and—”
“The wedding is in twenty minutes!” The anger in her sister’s voice was palpable. “Phone someone. Heck, phone a team of mechanics. Toowoomba is still thirty minutes away.”
“I’m so sorry—“
“Don’t be sorry,” her sister cut her off. “Be here.”
The silence was deafening. Even the cicadas had stopped their tune after hearing her talk. Okay, she decided, fighting the burning feeling building at the back of her throat. There was still time to salvage this situation and be a good maid of honour.
She popped the car’s hood. The fan belt appeared to be in working condition. She had actually remembered to top up the coolant and oil that morning, which was a miracle because she had forgotten to bring the spare bottles in the boot. It didn’t seem like an issue that she could easily identify herself, but that didn’t mean that she couldn’t fix this.