The Eight-Point Arc

iv. surprise

iv. surprise

The next step that should be followed for the story to unfold properly is the surprise. The surprise will usually take most of the middle part of the story. The surprise can be made up of fun events, but they're also often obstacles, complications, conflicts, just your run of the mill shit hitting the fan moments.

The tricky part about the surprises is that they shouldn't be too random but they shouldn't be too predictable either. They need to be unexpected, but they also need to be plausible. People should not see things coming, but they should think that they should have seen it coming.

It's a very fine line, where the story has to function. This is the make it or break it moment. It is easy to have an idea, it is easy to create a problem, to write a nice ending, but it's a whole different game to come up with everything in between.

The in-between, that's a tricky part.

And it's a tricky thing for Abrielle because she doesn't want to deal with the trigger. She doesn't want to acknowledge the fact that she might be in love with on of her friends. She prefers to just ignore it altogether.

Still, Abrielle needs to be doing something. So she goes on that date with the man she met at a bar. His name is Geoff. He made a point to spell it out for Abrielle so she knows he's not just the average Jeff. He's the special kind of Geoff.

They go to a little hipster café, where everything is pricey for no good reason, and the décor is minimalist but looks like it comes straight out of an Insta-famous account.

She has a nice time with the man. But the problem is, she nitpicks. She over analyses absolutely everything that he does, the way he doesn't hold eye contact for long enough at one point in the conversation and the way that he holds it for too long at another moment. The way he sips on his coffee and keeps pushing on his glasses. He wasn't wearing glasses at the bar and now he's suddenly is. What is that?

Obviously, Abrielle is trying to find something wrong with the poor man. In other circumstances, she would find the pushing-the-glasses thing to be quirky little habit, not a deal breaker, but she's trying to sabotage herself. She knows this part. Again, she won't admit it, but she knows it.

Because even if she doesn't want to pursue either of her best friends, she actually kind of wants to.

After her failed first attempt at moving on, she decides to call one of her exes. She thinks that maybe rekindling with an old flame, someone she knows worked at some point might be a good alternative. She thinks that maybe her relationship with her exes didn't work out because she was always in love with one of her best friend. And that now that she knows, she can change that.

This sort of back fires for her though because her two roommates are absolutely against her calling back the guy that cheated on her with her cousin. Her male cousin. Harry told her that it's not because you ski once that you become a skier. And it's not because you have sex with a guy once that you're gay.

Ace and Chief are obviously right though. Out of all her exes, she really didn't need to be calling her most catastrophic failure.

"Why do you guys hate on Harry so much? Do you have a problem with dude that sleeps with dudes sometimes?" Abrielle asks. Even she realizes that after saying that out loud, it doesn't exactly sound right.

"None the least, I don't have problems with gays. I'm hanging out with Ace aren't I?" Shanahan tells her.

"My asshole is exit only Chief," Duncan retorts.

"Okay so you'd be the dude in the couple?"

"That is a misconception. It's not about being the dude or the girl in the couple," Ace explains.

"You know that from experience?" Chief asks, smirking.

"Shut up."

"You're both morons," ABC tells them.

"We might be saying-stupid-things morons, but we're not calling-our-exes who-cheated-on-us morons," Chief tells her.

"Yeah, what's up with trying to find yourself a new boyfriend? Statistically speaking, you're kind of young to have your biological clock start ticking," Ace points out.

"What's wrong with trying to find a significant other?" she tries to defend herself.

"Nothing. There's just something wrong with being so desperate that you need to be calling Gay-Harry," Ace answers.

"We call him Gay-Harry," Chief adds, all proud.

"He's not gay," ABC says, exasperated.

"Oh, he's gay, it's okay, but he's totally gay," Chief goes on.

If she was honest with herself, she'd probably admit that calling Harry was just her sick twisted way of angering her roommates, of getting a reacting out of them. To make them act with her the way someone who is jealous would react.

Of course, she does not realize this. Or if she does realize it, she completely ignores it.

Against her friends best wishes she goes out with her ex. He's confused as to why she would give him a second chance. Rightly so.

She spends the entire date trying to have him admit that their failed relationship was because of her unrequited feelings for Ace or Chief. He tries to convince her to not tell anyone he slept with her cousin. And that, really, no really, he's not gay. Really not gay.

When she gets back from her date she hides in her room. The boys try to comfort her, but that just makes her even sadder.

She doesn't want to be in love with either of them because she loves them. She loves them and they're the closest thing to a family she has and she doesn't want to lose them.

But she can't keep going on like this. She has to do something.

That night, sitting on the floor in the middle of her room in the dark she decides that she needs to figure out which one of her friends she actually likes. And then she needs to do something about it.

Because they're the closest thing to a family she has. If she's in love with either of them, and if either of them doesn't love her, their friendship can survive it.

At least, that's what she tries to convince herself.