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Harper

“Harper!  Can I have a photo?”

That’s the danger with these meetings in public places, the ones that last long enough anyway, they’ll always find you.  I’d just stepped out of the café and hadn’t even had time to put my sunglasses on before the first girl, who had been waiting patiently on the sidewalk for God only knew how long, wanted a picture with me.

Normally I’d be happy to. I believed in giving as much back to my fans as I could.  My career would be nowhere without them, after all.  Today though, I wanted to let go of the carefully crafted public image and throw a tantrum. I wanted to fling myself to the ground, kicking and screaming like a child.

I put my sunglasses back in my handbag and smiled.  “Sure!”

“Omigodomigodomigod!  Thank you!  I loved you in The Last Perfect Day!” she said.

The Last Perfect Day was an action-adventure-zombie-apocalypse movie that was a definite milestone in my career.  Before that, people would always tentatively ask me if I used to be Princess Sundancer, or if I played Bella from The Wych Elm.  After The Last Perfect Day, people would come up in the street and ask me if I was
Harper Bayliss
, and life was never the same.

“Aw!  Thank you so much.”

I leaned in close and we both looked at the camera held in her extended arm while my brother, Orson, hovered close by in case somebody got too grabby and my mother waited a bit farther back, engrossed in something she was reading on her smart phone.  The camera made a little clicking sound and the girl turned it around to make sure it was a good shot before beaming at me so brightly I felt my rage go down a few notches.

“Could you sign this?” her friend asked, holding out a photo of me in my Dark Fox outfit, a promotional shot for the movie-adaptation of the comic book, along with a felt pen.  I took the pen and signed the photo as she held it.

“And this?” another girl held out a blank piece of paper.

“Sorry, that’s enough, we’ve got to get going,” my mother and de-facto manager called out.

My brother stepped in and gently guided me back in the direction of our car, much to the disappointment of the third girl.  I wasn’t supposed to sign blank pieces of paper anyway, in case somebody then printed some kind of contract onto it afterwards.  It’s a crazy world.

“Sorry!  Bye!” I called over my shoulder, thankful that the news about my location had only travelled as far as a few fans, not a bunch of paparazzi.

I reached back into my handbag and put the sunglasses on, big ones that covered a significant portion of my face. It was a surprisingly good disguise.  My cloud of anger darkened again and I pulled out a bottle of water to suck back while I tried to collect my thoughts.

Mom tapped away at her little screen, seemingly oblivious to the daggers I was shooting at her from behind the sunglasses.  The whole meeting, I’d tried to get a word in edgewise but I had been shushed and ignored, and now it looked like I was going to be signed up for a movie I had little enthusiasm for.

Orson walked slightly behind, earning his keep as a sort of bodyguard for me.  At big events and at television studio interviews, where there were lots of people, we had to rely more heavily on the security of those event organizers and studios, but for the most part Orson was deterrent enough.  

My mother had decided that full-time bodyguards were sometimes too heavy-handed and often only solved the extra problems that they themselves created.  Besides, it was good for my brother to have a job, to be a cog in ‘our little machine’ and keep it all in the family.

“You should be able to read for that in June then,” she said, apparently looking at my schedule.

“I don’t want to be Estella.” I said.

“It can’t be
all
zombies and superheroes, honey,” she said, as if that was even close to the truth or enough of a reason.  “We’re not having you typecast, not at this stage of your career.  Don’t be silly now.”

My face burned at the phrase, the same one she’d used when I was a kid and didn’t want to pick up my toys instead of a twenty-year-old woman talking about my own job.  The role of Estella, a girl in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, hit a little too close to home for me and I wished I could tell her why, but that was a conversation I feared more than the role itself.

“Besides, it’s all done now.  It’s basically a formality, he wants you in and we’ve agreed.  You don’t want to get a reputation for being flaky in this business,” she finished.

I sighed, feeling deflated, and looked up the sidewalk a little bit as the dry heat beat down on us.  Standing in front of a restaurant, just outside the ropes that cordoned off an outdoor seating area, was somebody that looked like trouble if ever I’d seen it.

Head and shoulders over most of the people around him, I could already see the tattoos, the huge arms, and the scruffy clothing.  If he was in one of my movies, he’d be a henchman for sure.

“Look out for that one,” I said quietly to Orson, who nodded and moved in front and to my left so he would be between myself and the big guy when we walked past.

As we closed the distance I could see that he had plenty of scars too, all kinds of cuts on his arms as if somebody had tried to scribble out his tattoos with a knife.  Violence, all kinds of bad things, probably followed this man wherever he went.

He looked up from some pamphlet in his hand, first straight across the sidewalk, and then at me.  Right at me.  Despite my misgivings, my heart fluttered.  He had far too much presence for a mere henchman.

Under the stubble, the tattoos, and the scars, or maybe even
because
of them, was a hell of a handsome man. 
Every girl needs a bad boy in her past
, I thought, and he could be my bad boy any day.

I dropped my gaze to the ground and fought back a goofy smile. Now I really
was
being silly.  When I looked up again, I was sporting no more than a calm and collected Mona Lisa expression, but I kept my eyes on him from behind the privacy of my sunglasses.  Only a few more steps and he’d be just some hot guy that I saw one time.

“
You made me do this, you bitch!
”

The scream came from the right, the road side of the sidewalk, and caught me completely off guard.  I flinched and then froze on the spot as a man in a cheap-looking blue tracksuit rushed towards me with something in his hand.

Orson, who had been concentrating on the big guy almost as much as I had, was taken equally by surprise, hearing the yell but not where he expected trouble to come from.  The world seemed to go into slow motion as I heard my mom gasp in fear, but I couldn’t make myself react. I was a deer in the headlights.

A cup.  It was some kind of cup in his hand and he was pulling it back as if he meant to throw it right at me.  Was it coffee?  Was he going to burn me?

Please don’t burn me
.

I would have sworn the liquid, clear not black, was flying through the air before anybody moved, but maybe I was wrong.  Whatever it was, I was going to get drenched.

Moving faster than a man of his size had any business doing, the guy with the scars jumped in the way, taking a splash in the chest that would have hit me full in the face.  Sparkling droplets of the liquid hung in the air and caught the sunlight like crystals before the world returned to normal speed.

The man in blue took off like a rocket and a few drops of the liquid, water presumably, landed on my forearm.  The big guy who took the hit for me faltered as he recovered from his nearly headlong dive and then sprinted after the fleeing man.

I watched them go, feeling the cold grip of fear still squeezing my heart like a balloon it wanted to pop but wasn’t quite able to.  Something was stinging my arm and I looked down, expecting to see some kind of giant wasp there, but there was nothing like that, just the few droplets glistening there.

The pain quickly got worse, like these small beads of water were boiling hot or something, and I screamed as I pulled at the top of my water bottle and doused my arm.  Still, however badly I was hurting, the man who saved me had it much worse.

Before he could catch up with the man in blue, I saw him stumble and then fall to the ground, screaming and pulling at his clothes, which looked to be literally
smoking
and melting off.  Everybody was just
watching
as if this was some kind of street performance.

“Water!” I screamed.

Leaning over the rope in front of the restaurant, I grabbed a bucket off a table that had once held ice cubes and a bottle of wine but now held mostly water with a few tiny scraps of ice.

“Call an ambulance!  Police!” I yelled at the closest person as I arrived and dumped the water on the writhing man.  “Tell them it’s acid!”

I went back for more water, bringing my hand to my mouth as I ran and tears of shock started flowing from my eyes.  The noises he was making, so much pain being forced through a throat that sounded like it was almost clamped shut, I’d never heard anything like it.  I never wanted to hear anything like it again.

###

Read Nick and Harper’s story
here
.