Page 1 of It Started with a Sunset
Chapter One
Summer
Summer Graham breathed in the sweet morning air as she walked with her roommate from the staff parking lot toward the Student Center. As a student, she’d always lived for summers. As an admissions recruiter at Lake Baldwin State University—her alma mater—summers were the boring part. The part that lacked the energy of students milling all around campus.
This—students walking down the sidewalks, backpacks slung over their shoulders, stopping in groups to chat, hurrying to class, studying under the shade of a tree, setting up hammocks on the quad—was why she worked at a university. “Don’t you just love the smell of the first day of fall semester?”
“Nah,” Valeria, Summer’s roommate, best friend, and ceramics instructor in the Visual Arts department, said. “You’re just still living off the thrill of last night’s game night and having so many people hang out at our apartment until so late.”
Summer smiled just thinking about it. It was a pretty great night. Being around so many friends, new and old, fueled her like nothing else.
Valeria shrugged. “I prefer the second week of class, personally. That’s when we’re past the references to the movieGhostin my pottery classes, and we’ve moved beyond the ‘What did Clint Eastwood say before firing the ceramic bowl he made in pottery class?Go ahead, bake my clay’ joke that someone wants to tellevery single year.”
Summer laughed. “It’s definitely been a classic with staying power.”
Valeria stopped at the fork in the sidewalks where she and Summer would split up—Valeria heading toward the Fine Arts Center and Summer heading to the Student Center. Valeria fluffed her tight curls, smiled wide, and placed a hand on her curvy hip. “What do you think? Do I look ready to take on a class of freshman art students, while at the same time looking like I’m ready to move up from Instructor to Assistant Professor?”
Summer tapped a finger on her chin like she was actually considering the question when she had no doubt in her friend’s abilities or look. “You look like a professional who is small in stature but big in brains and creativity. And hair.”
“Like, excessively big hair or exactly right hair? Because I was going for ‘make people jealous of my luscious locks,’ not ‘make them think I stuck my finger in a light socket.’”
“Exactly right hair. You look ready to take on the world.”
Valeria seemed to consider it a moment and then nodded like Summer’s assessment fit. “Okay, let’s look at you. You’ve got your winning smile, your new, stylin’, spunky shorter hair, your LBSU Welcome Center polo, your dark wash professional yet stylish jeans, and—oh, no.”
“What?” Summer looked down, panicked. She didn’t see anything on her shirt, she hadn’t forgotten her lanyard with her school ID, nothing was wrinkly. She looked back at her friend.
“You’ve got most of the Welcome Center’s dress code down, but those are definitelynotsensible shoes.”
It made Summer smile just looking down at her red ankle-strap wedges and then back at Valeria. “But the way I see it, it’s my job to help potential LBSU students feel like they could be at home here, right? And people feel most at home when they’re around their people. Who is going to represent the fabulous shoe-loving demographic if all of us in the Welcome Center wear sensible shoes? I’m taking one for the team here.”
“You’re such a rebel.”
Summer’s smile was broad. “But I’m a rebel in stylish shoes.”
And she kept grinning as she walked the rest of the way to the Student Center. Shewasa rebel, and she was proud of it. Well, it was mostly that she just really didn’t like people telling her what to do. And that was one reason why she loved working at Lake Baldwin State.
Four years ago, her dad told her that she had one year to finish her degree or he’d stop paying for it. And, okay, she’d been in school for five years at that point, but it wasn’t like she’d been wasting those years. There were just a lot of interesting majors.
She’d have finished school at the end of that sixth year even if he hadn’t brought it up. But it was the fact that he told her to be done with college that made her find the loophole and get a great job at the university so she’d never have to “be done” with college. And now she got to enjoy being a rebel every day as she took this walk to the Student Center.
In fact, still working at the Welcome Center after three years was a rebellion in a way, too, since everyone expected her to quit and move on to something else challenging by now, since that’s what she did with everything. She mastered something and then moved on.
She stopped and took the perfect selfie—with her smiling face in the foreground and the six-foot-high metal letters spelling out Aquamoose in the background, complete with two students posing behind the letters with their faces in the double O’s, a friend taking a picture of them.
She captioned it withLiving my best life, added a few fun embellishments, and posted it. Then she headed into the Student Center and walked down the hall to the Welcome Center, which just happened to be the best part of the entire university. It was where all the excitement was.
She was early, of course—she had to be to get in a morning meeting with the student ambassadors before prospective students started showing up—so there weren’t many people in the office yet. But it didn’t matter how early she got there, Brock always beat her there. She could see him through the glass wall of his office—already meeting with a student, even.
Coming in early because it was fun was one thing. Coming early because you were a workaholic was unfathomable. She was definitely all-in for the fun.
Although she was in charge of fifty student ambassadors, only five worked at a time on most days. Technically, she and the five of them working today could all fit in her office for their morning meeting, but who wanted to be that squished? So she headed to the big meeting room—it was where they had all the students and their parents meet together before heading off on campus tours, so it was by far the room that was the most Ambassador Territory, anyway.
She should’ve guessed that Paige and Alejandro would already be there. They were the school versions of workaholics. Schoolaholics?
As she sat down on the table at the front of the room, chatting with the two of them, McKay strolled in, showing the tiniest little sliver of first-day jitters beneath his confident exterior. She heard Takeshi’s chortling laugh before she saw him walk in with Jessa, who seemed to always bring a gale force of excited air bursting into the room, swirling around and trailing behind her, and a part of Summer kind of expected a flurry of fall leaves to swirl around in her wake.
Jessa brought that gust right up to where Summer was sitting and said, “Oh, wow, Summer. Those shoes are my new favorite thing ever.”
