The day of the brunch, Max woke up at five in the morning. Sketchy, of course, was already awake – five o'clock on a Saturday morning being the only time that no one would catch him lighting up a joint.
"You've got bedhead," he remarked from his seat on the floor.
"You've got dilated pupils," Max grumbled back. Sketchy rubbed his eyes as Max grabbed some of her clothes from the closet (which she'd transferred everything she owned into – seeing as how Sketchy never used it).
She then took a shower and proceeded to get dressed in the new clothes that she had bought special for the occasion. Describing the clothes would take an unprecedented amount of time, so it's better to say this:
They were new. And they were possibly the best clothes she'd ever invested in.
Following the clothing, Max started on her hair – which took a good hour and a half to set and curl; and then she finished it all off with doing her make-up. When she was done, she forewent breakfast (it was a brunch, after all) and did what she would have done on any other Saturday.
She watched cartoons in the living room.
After a few minutes (it being around eight in the morning and all) Alec came down stairs as well, still clad in pajamas and Homer Simpson slippers, and sat down on the couch next to her.
"Big date?" he asked.
"Not exactly," Max replied. "Big brunch." At Alec's confused look, she added, "It's a mix between breakfast and lunch. I'm just waiting for Brin to pick me up."
"Where at?" Alec inquired.
"I have no idea," Max said.
"With who?"
"Um… Brin," Max repeated. At that moment the phone rang. Max picked it up, expecting one of Renfro's colleagues on the other end. What she did not expect was: numerous hiccups.
But let us digress onto another side of the story for a moment – to get the full perspective of what was going on.
Brin Sung was 5'4 and the daughter of a half-Chinese, half-Korean detective and a Chinese hostel owner who taught some aerobics classes on the side. Life until she was six years old was pretty stable: she was a kind, innocent child with a pure soul and a heart of gold who cheered for the Houston Habakkuks (a tiny-tot church-run cheer squad) in Houston, Texas. And then when she was six, everything would change.
Detective Sung, Brin's father, was transferred to LAPD, so Brin and her mother had to go with him leaving behind the family-run hostel that had been in her mother's line for generations and moving into a small, cramped apartment. Brin herself had to transfer to a new school: Suzuki Public Elementary, where she had to join a lesser cheerleading group (the Suzuki Elementary Salmons) and make all new friends with the fast-talking Californians that her grandpa had warned her were all "smart-mouths" and "devil children". Needless to say, she wasn't very happy with the switch.
And then of course her mother switched full-time to becoming a fitness trainer, gaining clients of all races and sizes. She was featured in fitness magazines as the trainer with the fastest results, and it was after the February 4th issue of Fitness that she got a call from a career woman named Elizabeth Renfro. And it was in May of that same year, after Renfro had become fast friends with Brin's mother, that Brin had to attend the birthday party of a Renfro's seven-year-old son, Calvin.
Fast forward three years, one very nasty divorce, six cheerleading competitions and press play when Brin's mother got off the phone with a very distressed Renfro. She told Brin, Brin's stepfather and her half-brother Charlie some very unsettling news: they were moving again, to Seattle this time.
Later, ten-year-old Sketchy would tell Brin the entire story: the heists, the burglaries, the money, the drugs, the clothes and the last failed heist that resulted in them getting caught.
Add this to the fact that Brin was now in her last year of high school, she'd had to protect the secret of one of her mother's best friends' daughters' for the last four years, she was still dateless for prom, her best friend was getting all huffy because of a simple failure to remember, and there was a good chance they might not win Nationals this year…
It was a great deal of stress on one seventeen-year-old girl. And then her shrink (her mother signed her up for counseling following the divorce) suggested that she find something to do where she didn't have to be vaguely trained at all and she couldn't possibly have any anxiety.
So, when she was sixteen, Brin started competitively eating. And being skinny and Asian – she won. Very few people had been in her room before, so very few people were privy to the numerous t-shirts, certificates, and free burger coupons she'd won and hung up on her wall. And very few people were privy to the fact that she had her own fan club in Korea.
That is, until she got the hiccups.
It was towards the end of a hamburger plate – which usually would have taken Brin about six minutes flat or so depending on how many condiments it had…
Hic!
Only, it didn't stop there. The hiccups overwhelmed her, eventually causing her to lose the race against another small Asian girl. She managed to get home without swerving her SUV off the road, though, and that alone was a blessing from God.
But, when she finally got home and (despite the hiccups) got to sleep, she woke up in the morning and started hiccupping again. And just like any other girl would do when they woke up at six in the morning after having hiccups for an entire night.
She decided to completely bypass telling her mom about her hiccups and instead talk to Dr. Carr at his private practice.
"So, can you prescribe me some sort of medicine to suppress them or something?" Brin asked when Dr. Carr came back with the x-rays and hung them up.
"I can prescribe you antibiotics for you to take after the surgery," Dr. Carr told her.
Brin did a double-take at that. "Wait – surgery? For hiccups?"
"There's a small tear in your throat," Dr. Carr explained simply. "It'll take a little more than some pills and tea to heal. We're going to have to operate." Brin sat back on the cold hospital chair.
"Or?" she asked. "Don't I have another option?"
"Or," Dr. Carr continued. "You can try leaving it untreated, eat something bad and tear up your entire throat." Brin thought about the consequences of that action for a moment.
And of course, she had her brunch today. What would Celebrity Guy say if she missed her brunch?
"Can't you get, like, a throat transplant or something?" she asked. Dr. Carr shook his head.
"I'll get you a phone so that you can call your parents – so they won't worry."
The phone call from Brin changed everything. Suddenly, Max wasn't so worried about her promise to not use her 'skills' for 'evil' anymore. Now, she was more intent than every on meeting the Celebrity Guy and finding out who he was than ever before.
"Can't your parents drop off your invitation on the way to the hospital or something?" Max asked.
"Well, my parents don't really know I'm in the hospital right now," Brin said. "I didn't get a chance to tell them. I thought it was nothing!"
"'Thought it was nothing,'" Max mocked under her breath. "Well, how about if I go over there and ask to see you, then get the invitation from your room? Then Jondy and I will be able to go – "
"The invitation is for me, remember?"
"I can get past that," Max shrugged.
"No you can't," Max could practically hear Brin's sneer over the phone. "You may be the Max Lydecker - you may be a cat burglar, most likely to become prom queen, and keeping the Red Bull industry afloat to boot - but you cannot sneak into an invitation only brunch being held by one of the biggest celebrities on this side of the continent."
Max shrugged. "Try me."
"Okay then. Get into my house undetected, find the invitation and somehow find a way to be me by ten and I'll finally admit that you deserve all of the things you've been given."
Max accepted the challenge.
A/N: Yes, yes, I know! "It's been, like, three months, what the heck are you thinking that you could just come back with a less than spectacular chapter?" but pity me, all right? I wrote several horrible drafts of this before coming up with something that I thought I wouldn't get shunned for. You do get the story on how Brin came about to meet Max in this story, though.
Oh, and my computer decided to go psycho and start deleting everything I put on it, so I had to tread carefully. And now I've got exams, so my updating might be a little bit sporadic for the next few weeks.
In the next chapter: Max does what she has to do to be right! But will she need a certain someone's help?