Happenstances

"Don't worry, as long as I'm alive and raising h-e-double diving boards those rat bastards aren't gonna touch us, trust me. I love this place too much not to fight for it." Set the summer before last around a series of happenstances at a community swim and racquet club in Yellow County, The Happenstances at the Yellow County Community Swim and Racquet Club the Summer Before Last is a bittersweet, nostalgic, but comic novella about a team of misfits, including a loser who secretly lives in the guard house of the club, a struggling artist with webbed toes, a timid teen with a concave chest, and the beautiful heiress of the Comfort Inn fortune. They have to win the impending Tri-County Relay Race and save the club from being run by a management company that only cares about money. The management company hires an opposing relay team of ringers including a girl with a prosthetic dorsal fin and a man named Carmichael Schmelps who looks suspiciously like a certain Olympic gold medalist.

It's a couple of semesters after the fateful Tri-County Relay Race that changed everything for the crew from Yellow County, Maryland. Charlie is treading water at a dead-end job, uninspired as a writer once again, and taking classes at the Yellow County Community College. Roheed is a successful app developer on the west coast, but his relationship with his girlfriend Florence is on the rocks. Jonathan is the swim team coach at the community college. He's not living at the Swim and Racquet Club anymore and he's never looked back. When Jonathan and his fiancée's wedding weekend brings the gang back together it kicks off another series of happenstances that could mean the end of old relationships, the beginning of new friendships, and the bottling of miniature pirate ships (well except for that last one). A villain threatens the wedding and the gang has to rely on an old traitor, a new flame, and a forgotten family member to hopefully wed Jonathan and his betrothed, keep Roheed and Florence together, and maybe inspire Charlie to get off his bum and follow his dreams. The citizens of Peter L. Harmon's wonderfully weird fictional Maryland county are back in this essential, esoteric new chapter in The Happenstances… saga.

"If I keep talking, maybe someday I'll meet someone who's listening." It's the very next spring break after the events that took place at the Yellow County Community College in Yellow County, Maryland the semester previous. Spring has sprung! Charlie Heralds confronts his nemesis Jerd McKinley about stealing his screenplay and is met with an interesting proposal: turn the story of he and his friends winning the Tri-County Relay Race into a movie. Jonathan Poole and his wife Chris are having twins and he has to take a job at a local chain restaurant. And Skip Trembles, a skateboarder and podcast fanatic, has a date with Destiny. The production of Charlie's movie brings Hollywood talent to Yellow County and Charlie watches his dream turn into a nightmare. He has to decide what's actually important to him while Jonathan has daddy drama and Skip learns about life, love, and the truth about happy endings and happenstances. Peter L. Harmon's fictional Maryland county is the perfect setting for this third chapter in The Happenstances... saga.