A child laughing, a boy with tousled chestnut curls, topped by a pointed party hat. The number 9 is everywhere, from the candles on the cake to the banner strung between two trees. The park was teeming with energetic kids, playing tag, red rover, pin-the-tail. The boy with the curls leans over the cake, purses his lips, ready to extinguish the candles and make a wish. A girl no one noticed, and none would recognize, walks behing him. She turns, just as the flash of the camera immortalizes the moment, changing and entwining their two lives forever.
Cameron woke with a start, sitting straight up in bed. He looked around, and seeing that he was awake, he groaned exasperatedly, burying his face in his hands. Everything was laid out so clearly in the dream, like in a movie. Yet the question remained unanswered, as it had since the picture was first developed the day after his party. Who was she? Where could he find her? People always laughed at him when he mentioned the girl he'd been searching for. He couldn't blame them. 10 years of sitting in dark coffee shops meeting with private investigators or the occasional informative junkie, of crawling bars, eating in backwater diners, all in search of an image from a polaroid. A girl he'd never even met. If he could at least explain why he was so obsessed with finding her. But he couldn't. He felt a strange compulsion to know her every time he looked at her. But what he never told any of the people he still kept in contact with, was the feeling he'd get. Whenever he'd look at that faded figure, his skin felt electrified, and his heart sped up a bit. There was no in way in hell he'd tell anyone that. People don't fall in love with a photograph.
No way in hell.
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