The Rock Star in Seat (3 page)

Chapter 5

True, I talk of dreams,

Which are the children of an idle brain,

Begot of nothing but vain fantasy.

—William Shakespeare

T
he next morning I woke up and began darting around in the darkness to get ready for my flight. I quietly gathered my toiletry kit, extra shoes, and baseball hat to shove in my mostly packed suitcase. I tiptoed, trying not to wake sleeping Wylie, and glanced at the ceiling, where his ignored proposal was still stuck, only not as brightly aglow, as early morning light was just starting to stream through the perimeter of our blackout shades. I exhaled in guilt and opened the bedroom door to sneak out and closed it behind me softly. I walked into the kitchen with my bags and peeled a fluorescent pink Post-it from the pad by the phone and scribbled on it in my trademark thin Japanese architecture pen and stuck it on the fridge door.

“Wy honey, thank you for such a beautiful bday dindin, angel. I love you xoH” it read. I looked at it against the matte silver door surface and thought of him waking up alone with the pale snot-green plastic galaxy above his sleepy head. I picked up my luggage and went downstairs.

The traffic to JFK was mercifully nonexistent as my Town Car flew down the highway, getting me to the terminal in plenty of time. The skies above looked rather threatening, but I’d signed up for texted alerts should my plane be delayed. The only problem was, I was so anal about travel, what with interminable security lines and all, that often by the time I received word of a delay I was already in Sbarro, jamming down a slice. But as this was the crack of dawn my tummy wasn’t quite up for pizza, so I hoped to happen upon some sort of nonvile breakfast sandwich in my two-hour sojourn to the gate.

“Good morning, Ms. Lavery,” said the chipper gal at the counter. Clickety clackety click clack went her secret counter-shrouded keyboard as I looked around at the infusion of fanny-pack-wearing travelers toting wheely luggage and neck pillows. “Anything to check this morning?”

“Uh, yeah, I have one duffel bag here,” I said, plopping it on her metal scale. I wasn’t a big packer. Kira literally needed four enormous Vuitton suitcases to even go for a weekend wedding within a striking distance of two hours and was always appalled by my small army tote. But I liked packing light, it was almost like a fun challenge to make all the outfits from a few separate staples. I liked my freedom though and didn’t want to lug my compact but still heavy bag, so I was happy when it was tagged and taken from me.

“Now, Ms. Lavery, I see here that you have several hundred thousand miles and we really don’t have a full flight this morning, so I can put you in for an upgrade, since this is a full-fare ticket,” she offered.

“Cool! That would rock, thank you.” I beamed. Awesome. I could arrive refreshed and chill in laid-back California.

“Check the monitor at gate fifty-one and they will set you up.”

“I really appreciate that, thank you!” I smiled. Wow. I guess all my crazy travels in the last five years had accrued me some serious points.

I wandered in search of some form of huevos rancheros or an eggsdilla-type breakfast—eggies with a Mexican twist. I already had four spots in L.A. where I would bolt for the same dish each morning, but for some reason in my anticipatory craving for Angelino food my mouth was already watering for one. Even if lame-o à la Mex & The City at LaGuardia. But no such luck. There was a sports bar–type place that looked promising but wouldn’t open until nine, when we would already be somewhere over Ohio. Then I saw an Au Bon Pain. Ooooh, Kira’s weakness—a microwaved pain au chocolat. There was such a huge log of butter in each one that when they heated it up, the paper was positively drenched with grease, and it burned my hands just picking it up. But each bite was ambrosia and I ordered it up with a huge orange juice. I plopped at a nearby table with my tray and scoped the
Times
on my iPhone as a young couple sat at the adjacent table with their toddling daughter who was whining up a storm.

“Why don’t we go to the first-class lounge?” the wife quipped, removing a leftover crust from the prior breakfaster at the Formica table. “This place is gross.”

“Daddddddddddeeeeeeeeee! I hungwee!”

“Honey, let’s just get Allegra fed and then we can go,” he said, ripping off a piece of Krispy Kreme for the kid.

Uh-oh. First class? Shizzle. Maybe I didn’t want my upgrade after all. I prayed this family was not sitting near me for six hours. I had traveled enough to know the neighboring passenger can make or break a flight. I tried to tune them out as I chowed my food and pounded my juice, leaving plenty of time for a magazine harvest at the newsstand before I cased the gate for seats near the boarding area.

I scored a seat and started flipping through one of the gossip rags when the din of the growing group of passengers bubbled to a white noise that I decided to block out via iPod. I plugged in my earphones and scrolled through the artists, landing on The Void and hitting play on an older tracked “Shadowed Veins” as I zoned out and closed my eyes. The industrial synth metal opening pitter pattered in violent but romantic swells until Finn Schiller’s voice, beginning with a seductive whisper, purred in the left side of my earphones.

You stitched my damaged bleeding guts

Choked and chained in muddy ruts,

In my fractured, searing soul

You try to burrow, render whole

You pull upon the thinning strings

Revealing little twisted things

Regret is all you’ll ever sow

Against thick tides crash waves of woe.

I’d rather stealth and slink astray,

And live alone inside the gray

Shadows in my veins

Shadows in my veins

You dig inside my gnarled past

Wishing you could make us last

Eclipsed in darkening shadows,

Shadows in my veins

So blink away those glassy eyes,

I’ll not again melt in your thighs

My contorted muscles ache

With every hallowed hope I break

I’m not the type who seethes to shatter

Lovesick dreams of those who matter

The trouble with my poison voice

Ink blotted out the word
rejoice
.

I’d rather simply peel away,

And live alone inside the gray

Shadows in my veins

Shadows in my veins

You dig inside my wounded past

Swearing to remain steadfast

Licked by menaced shadows,

Shadows in my veins

I ran my hand down my chilled arm as his words retreated from his trademark throat-rich growl back to a subdued hush, quiet but fiercely loaded with unbridled emotion. Never had a dulcet whisper screeched so loud. As always, I had goose bumps. This had happened before, countless times through countless years. In the most banal of settings, his sex-laced voice made me feel electrified, as if I were cut and pasted from a packed airport to a ship at sea, or a Corona ad, but with a cloud-kissed sky. A grisaille Zack Snyder movie. A moody tempest, which was so much cooler than clichéd sunshiney bullshit. There I sat once again, in the most asexual disgusting crossroads of Fanta-chugging humanity, feeling completely turned on.

Chapter 6

Abandon the search for Truth; settle for a good fantasy.

—Anonymous

I
n the hazy glow of my iPod, I came to when my earphones were trumped by the loudspeaker calling my name. I snapped out of my guitar-lulled dream and bolted to the desk, where I was greeted with a new boarding pass.

“Miss Lavery, your upgrade came through and you’ll be in seat 3B this morning.”

“YAY, okay, awesome, thank you so much.”

Delights!

“Follow me, we’re preboarding first class right now.”

I took two steps toward the ticket scanner.

“Have a nice flight,” the gentleman offered as I bounded down the jetway. It was weird being the first on board. The flight attendants were all lined up to welcome me and seemed supersweet, if not a little saccharine.

“Hello, I’m Trixie, I’ll be your first-class cabin attendant this morning. Can I offer you some water, orange juice, or champagne?” she asked.

“Uh, sure. I’ll take an orange juice, please.”

I’d already consumed a huge one, but what the hell, a little extra vitamin C might make me feel as healthy as the UVA-ray ’fornians I was about to look like a cadaver next to.

More first-class passengers streamed in, and mercifully the family with the whiner was on the opposite aisle from me. Soon enough the whole cabin was filled except for the seat next to me. Too bad the armrest didn’t go up so I could make a minibed, like I did in coach when I lucked out with an empty row. General boarding had commenced, and I watched as everyone wheeled bags, looked at tickets and overhead row markers, and looked generally stressed about plopping for six hours. OJ finished, I decided to pop my earphones back on and disappear into the narcotic moans of The Void until takeoff. Even though I was very used to traveling, when I was alone I felt a bit riled until the
Say Anything
ding. Once seat belts could be unfastened it wasn’t likely we’d be tossed around the cabin, so one could presumably breathe easy. But until then, I would have music to accompany my nerves through liftoff. I spied a woman across the aisle popping a pill, probably to calm her anxiety. Okay, I wasn’t alone. I closed my eyes and drank in the opening chords of “Black Wings,” which the shuffle function happened to happily land upon.

Black Wings

Impossible longing boils within

Unbridled wild urge to sin

To lunge and pounce upon your door

To coax and ravish you on the floor

Wish I could freeze this scorching pain

Scrub an eraser on my brain

So spread your black wings, black wings

Fly me to a different time

Where we can feast on pretty things

And never dwell upon our crime

Violet velvet drowned my thoughts,

Now rusted, fragile, frail, distraught

Spread your black wings, black wings.

Yearning grips me like a snake

Rewind the night you called mistake

My thirst has reached a fevered pitch

You teased, you preyed, you little bitch

So now I armor up with steel

The man who used to bend and kneel.

So spread your black wings, black wings

Fly me to a different life

Where I, to you alone, can sing

And never dwell upon the strife

Sepia postcards stained my thoughts,

Now rusted, fragile, frail, distraught

Fly off, black wings, black wings.

As the final staccato string plucks slowly faded, I heard rumbling next to me and opened my eyes. NOTHING in my thirty years had prepared me for the shock of whom I beheld.

My neighbor, boarded as the cabin door was closing, was the very man who had sung me through the airport: Finn Schiller. My fantasy, my icon, my rock god, in seat 3A.

Chapter 7

Fantasies are more than substitutes for unpleasant reality; they are also dress rehearsals, plans.

All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.

—Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

H
olyshitholyshitholyshitholyshitholyfuckingshit.

I felt seized by volts of stunned currents, as if all the amps from his recent North American tour were hooked up to the base of my spinal column. I sat up straight and looked down into my bag with a feigned curiosity, as if its contents held the mysteries of the universe. As I tried to control my breathing, I mimicked perps who try and beat the lie detector; playing it cool while in reality I was a pulse-pounding mess. An impromptu electrocardiogram would have revealed wild squiggles up and down, the needle vibrating as if recording a Richter scale over the delicate squares of powder blue–lined graph paper.

This can’t be happening.

As he tucked his bag into the overhead compartment, I got a peripheral glance of his black leather motorcycle jacket over a light gray T-shirt and black jeans. I felt a stinging insti-sweat burn the back of my neck, knowing I was now a shade akin to fuchsia. My eyes fell on my iPhone, which was on the shared armrest, and they widened in alarm at his lyrics on the screen! Quickly, I shoved my phone in my bag, praying he hadn’t already seen the image he’d commissioned from an Angelino artist, a graphic paper cutout with the words of the song written over it in a haunting calligraphy, as if rendered by a quill and inkwell.

Not only was this an artist so far beyond the realm of mortals, but he was also technologically way ahead of the curve vis-à-vis other musicians, embracing the Web and new gadgets in ways others only caught onto after the craze. He wasn’t an early adopter but a pioneer, seeking young companies to keep him on the cutting edge of what his fans were up to online. He was a guerrilla marketing genius, and I had ripped many pages from his book in terms of marketing our games in outside-the-box ways. The first to sell media-rich MP3s that came with accompanying images and lyrics, his poetry was right there on my phone.

I pulled my phone out quickly and texted my sister.

KI. U R GONNE DIE. SITTING NEXT TO FINN SCHILLER. FUCKING WIGGING.

He came back from the galley with a champagne in one hand and an orange juice in the other, and sat down next to me as I casually turned my phone off.

“Hi there,” he said.

Fuck, what do I do, play it cool? Yes. “Hi.”

“A little stormy out there.” He gestured out the window with a jut of his Bernini-carved jaw.

“Yeah, hopefully Zeus won’t chuck down too many bolts our way.” Where the hell did that come from?

“God, I fucking hope not,” he said, swigging his bubbly. “You headed home?”

“No, um, I live here. Just going for a few days for work. Business trip.” OMG DORK! Redundant. Dumbass. I felt like when my niece couldn’t pronounce
stupid
and just said “toopid . . .” I was so fucking toopid.

“Yeah? What do you do?” I saw him look me over with my charcoal T-shirt and black jeans. My gray Converse slip-ons were probably the giveaway that I didn’t have a normal desk-job.

“I work for Badass Games? We make—”

“You’re shitting me,” he said, angling himself toward me more. “You work for Badass Games?! Are you fucking kidding me? I play all your games on a loop! I shattered my Xbox when I got Road Warriors Two. The band and I were addicts, man. I’m so pumped for Pimps N’ Ho’s Five.”

Knock me over with a feather . . . we were on Finn Schiller’s radar? Little ol’ moi was, by proxy, as the Little Mermaid sang,
part of his world
? I mean, I knew countless celebs used our products, as they confessed nightly on their blogs or Letterman’s couch. Part of my job was pulling reels and clippings for Noah each week with all the mentions from those whose hands and feet had been pressed into the wet cement on Hollywood Boulevard—he was such a fame-fucker he practically got hard when he learned Pamela Anderson played our games with her sons.

“Wow, that’s great!” I said like a grade-A nerdling. “I’m actually flying out to work on our launch. We’re having a party in L.A. the day the game drops next month.”

“No shit!”

“Shit.”

He smiled. “I’m Finn, by the way,” he said, extending his hand.

“Yeah, I know, hi,” I replied, casually, shaking his hand as I thought I would swoon and keel over and do a faceplant onto my open tray table. “I’m Hazel.”

“Hazel. I dig it,” ignoring that I totally knew who he was. “Like witch hazel.”

“Yes, just like witch hazel,” I confirmed with a note of ice in my clenched reply.

“The kids call you that when you were little?” he asked, leaning back, exploring my face as I smiled shyly.

“What do you think?” I asked rhetorically.

“Man. Kids are cruel.” He shrugged. “But you certainly don’t look like a witch. You look like a good witch. The kind that’s beautiful,” he said as I looked away, dying. “The kind of witch who made them invent the word
bewitching
.”

Um . . . get me some defibrillators PRONTO. Did Finn Schiller, banger-of-models, just use the word
beautiful
relating to me? Or was it that I just wasn’t a hideous green be-warted crone? Breathe, Hazel.

“Thanks.” I smiled. “They actually made me check my wand in my suitcase, no more carry-on wands,” I deadpanned. “You know, if it fell into the hands of Al Qaeda, there would be hell to pay.”

I saw his brow crinkle a bit as the plane started to taxi down the runway. He smiled a mysterious grin as I felt the small hairs on my whole body stand on end, as if my palms were resting on a glowing glass nebula sphere with that blue light inside, like sixth-grade science class. Kira is going to die. Kira is going to frigging die.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Lord here on the flight deck,” a teenager’s voice said. I looked at Finn. “We’re next in line for takeoff so sit back and relax and enjoy the flight to Los Angeles.”

“Is it me or does he sound prepubescent?” I asked.

“He fucking IS,” my idol testified, hand-on-heart. “I got on board at the last minute and met him, the dude is twenty-fucking-four.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“ ’Cause he looked like fuckin’ Doogie Howser and I asked him.”

Great. I glanced out Finn’s window, which was now splattered by diagonal raindrops lashed by the wind before they hit the Plexiglas. The slanted drawn-out drops pelted the wing as I gulped. Here we go.