{{Dedicated to Sev for being the most amazing friend ever}}

It all started on the first day of September, a week before the dreaded Monday that marked the beginning of yet another school year.

Rhea hadn't expected to get them until she was forty and living with her three dogs; maybe not even then.

Alas, she was soon-to-be eighteen, living with her parents and she was getting them.

Her parents called them the snippets. Rhea always assumed it was some children's tale they told her instead of the actual, most likely ordinary, story of how they met.

According to said tale, Rhea's mother, Emily, had started getting the snippets when she was 22, exactly a week before she met Stephen, Rhea's father. The snippets were basically glimpses into Stephen's life, through his eyes. Exactly a week after the first snippet, Emily met Stephen at a college party. The misfortune was that Emily got so drunk at the party that she couldn't be sure who else she met, though the pull she felt towards Stephen was undeniable. (At this point of the story Rhea would often start making gagging sounds.) It wasn't after months of beating around the bush that Emily knew Stephen was the one in the snippets, and incidentally the one.

Before Emily and Stephen, it was Rhea's grandparents, and before them, great-grandparents, and so on, and so forth.

Basically it was a string of one happily ever after another through generations. No one knew how it all started, or why it started for that matter. It wasn't foolproof either; the risk of something going awry was in fact pretty high. You just had to cross your fingers and hope that you didn't meet a dozen new people when the day came.

...

The first day of September started out just like any other day for Rhea. She was dragging out the last days of her summer holiday by lounging around the house in her pajamas all day, and dreading going back to school.

People always thought there were two kinds of students in high school: Nerds who loved to study and got good grades because of it and Slackers who couldn't be bothered to study, making their GPA suffer.

Rhea knew better. She knew there was a third group of students: Endurers. They were the ones who did the necessary school work, studied for finals, got good grades, but hated every second of it. She knew, because she had belonged in that group ever since her first day of school.

So yes, she dreaded going back to school. The only reason she could tolerate it was because of Willa, her best friend of three years. They'd met during freshman year, hated each other's guts for a brief period of time for no fathomable reason whatsoever and then became inseparable shortly afterwards. Now, they didn't spend a single day without seeing or talking to each other.

Rhea was on the phone with Willa when it happened for the first time. She'd opened the fridge and was aimlessly looking through it when a sudden wave of dizziness hit her.

"So I told her that she could shove it−"

"Willa," she interrupted her best friend hastily as her vision darkened. A second later, she was looking at a white, immaculately clean kitchen counter. She saw five long and calloused fingers wrap around the neck of a bottle of milk and pour some of its contents into a large bowl full of cereal. She could almost hear the sloshing sounds of the milk in her mind, except she really couldn't –the point where the snippets could use a little upgrade was that they didn't allow for sounds to be transferred along with the vision. It was over before she could fully grasp what it was she saw, but then it hit her with full force.

"Holy– HOLY MOTHERF– OH MY GOD."

"Rhea?" came Willa's concerned voice from the other side of the line. When there was no response, she tried again. "Rhea, you are scaring me."

"It's happening," Rhea managed to finally choke out in between short and shallow puffs of breath. "Oh my God, it's happening." She was starting to hyperventilate. But then again, who wouldn't?

"What's hap–" Willa started asking but then the realization dawned on her. "Holy sh– the snippets?"

"Yes," Rhea said as her legs finally gave out on her and she sat down, resting her back against the fridge with her legs pulled close to her torso.

"Okay," Willa said, "Okay, just breathe. Okay? Deep breaths. You're going to be okay."

"If you say okay one more time I swear–" Rhea said through gritted teeth.

"Just do as I say, smartass," Willa scolded her friend, feeling a bit relieved at the prospect that Rhea's snark was still intact, meaning she wasn't going to black out any time soon. After they both breathed in and out, in and out for a couple of minutes upon Willa's instructions, she decided it was time for the questioning. "So, tell me what you saw."

"Uh, nothing much," Rhea said, closing her eyes briefly to try and remember any little details she might be missing. Then she took yet another deep breath and recited what she saw, "He was in a kitchen, whoever he is. He was pouring milk into a bowl of cereal."

"That's it?" Willa asked disbelievingly.

"Pretty much," Rhea said, shrugging her shoulder even though her friend couldn't see her.

"Well, that narrows it down to guys who like cereal. Easy as pie. What brand was the milk? That might help us out some more," Willa drawled sarcastically.

"Shut it, Rosewood," Rhea snapped at her friend, the assault to her senses from merely minutes ago having aggravated her to an unbelievable extent.

"Oh, untwist your panties," Willa said amusedly. "Look," she heaved a sigh after a moment's silence. "There is still a whole week before you meet this mysterious cereal-loving soulmate of yours; that's a whole bunch of snippets."

"I know, I know," Rhea said dejectedly, "It's just that I didn't expect this to happen for at least another– I don't even know.... Ten years?"

With her track record of relationships, Rhea didn't expect it to happen ever, but mentioning that would lead to another one of Willa's big motivational speeches about how she deserved the best and all good things came to those who waited and frankly, Rhea didn't have the energy for that. Besides, it was easy for Willa to spew out such sentences, seeing she had been happily dating Wade, the quarterback of the football team for the last two years. Willa and Wade. Wade and Willa. They were the couple around school.

"I get it, but you're gonna be–"

"Okay," Rhea took the words out of Willa's mouth. "I know. Listen Wills, I'm going to go and take a nap, or a shower, or something. I'll call you later, okay?"

"Okay," Willa said. After a beat of silence she added, "Perhaps okay will be our a–"

But she didn't get to finish her sentence, because at that moment Rhea hung up on her with an exasperated "Oh, shut up."

...