IMAGINES: Celebrity Encounters Starring You (9 page)

“Morning.” He stretches, all long, toned muscle and wide smile and adorably mussed hair. A ball of sunshine and unrepentant beauty and . . .
Fuck.

“I’m a wreck,” you say without thinking. And you surely are; you never once thought of taking off your mascara or combing your hair or using that blasted toiletry bag you bought expressly for that purpose.

You duck under the blanket and pray for a quick and timely death.

“You’re adorable.” He pats you somewhere in the vicinity of your head. “But I gotta pee. Meet me back here in ten?”

He rolls out from under your little shared cocoon and gives you the privacy you need to grab your bag and dart off to the ladies’ room.

The damage isn’t as bad as you feared. You look . . . sleepy, but—dare you think it—cute, maybe? Not a single raccoon eye or matted curl in sight. A little freshening up and you’re not quite as good as new, but not half-bad, either. And besides,
George
is waiting.

Waiting with two cups of coffee and cheese Danish, proving he’s just as perfect as you suspected.

“Hot dog girl is back.” He grins.

“Oh, for the love of Pete,” you mutter with a laugh. “Face it. Not everyone appreciates a superhero.”

“You shut your mouth,” he gasps in mock horror.

You’re halfway through your Danish and a chance to redeem yourself at checkers when you hear, “Chris Evans to Gate Three,” called over the intercom. It’s then that you notice the activity outside the window. Runways have been plowed and planes are being deiced.

It’s time to go home.

IT’S WEIRD, YOU THINK,
how you can meet someone and in an instant know them completely. You’ve never believed in reincarnation
or other mystical, fantastical things, but something about how easy the past fifteen hours have been feels real. Maybe a little bit like fate.

“I got you a Christmas present.” Chris Evans holds out a newspaper-wrapped object.

“What?” you ask dumbly, taking the lumpy package and feeling the sting of tears behind your eyes. Which is ridiculous; you’ve known him less than a day. Stupid jerk. “But I didn’t get you anything.”

He kisses you before you even have the chance to recognize he’s going to. His lips are soft, and the height differential is perfect; his thumb strokes your cheek, and in that instant you reconsider fantastical things. Then he’s stepping backward, and just before he turns away, he gives a little wave.

He’s gone before you remember how to breathe.

YOU SHOULD BE SURPRISED
to see sorority girl at your new gate, but you’re not.
Fantastical things.
She still looks perfect. It doesn’t bother you like before.

While you wait for your boarding group to be called, you peel away the day-old newspaper from the package on your lap, saving the hastily written square that reads
To Daisy, From George
. Inside a styrofoam take-out container is a bag of nacho cheese Doritos.

Centered across the front in thick, black strokes is a phone number.

You look at sorority girl and smile.

T
he bus you take is crowded to the point of standing room only, and the guy closest to you smells like stale cigarettes and too much cologne. His unshaven beard is full of white flakes, pieces of paper from a napkin, you assume. His brown eyes flick to you and he catches you staring at him. You quickly look out the window, catching a massive billboard advertising a new movie. The movie star’s face is pale, his jawline is sharp, and his blue eyes are keen, questioning the thousands of small people who lay eyes on him. You continue to stare at the billboard until it disappears from sight and you’re forced to find something else to distract you from the cigarette box of a fellow passenger until the bus stops.

The bus driver hits the breaks roughly, throwing you into the window. You grip your bag tightly and promise yourself that you’re going to do whatever you have to do to get a car within the next month. You can’t keep taking the bus, and Los Angeles doesn’t have a functioning subway system like New York. You’re beginning to question your choice of city.

You grew up in a quiet town where the biggest accomplishment was having all of your children by the same man and living a nice, quiet life. The typical goal of existence there seems to be to stay undisturbed, have an easy life, pay your bills, and die. But you don’t want to pay your bills and die. You want to disturb
and be disturbed. You want adventure. You want something more than having children with a man who may treat you well but doesn’t think the same way you do. You know that no one there thinks the same way you do—or they would have left too. You don’t want to have the same routine as your mother, packing some second husband’s work lunches and organizing luncheons for the other housewives. Actually, you can’t remember the last time your mother even talked about herself in a conversation. It’s always him, him, him, his job, his son from his previous marriage, him again. You watched as she lost her identity to the gray of the sky there, her flare disappearing with the jobs when the plant closed down. The town was sucking everything out of her, pulling at every string inside of her. And one by one, her strings had snapped, and you swore that you would never be a puppet.

When the bus stops again, you jut forward, barely catching yourself on the rail next to you. Your supply bag drops, scattering your markers onto the dirty floor. The entire array of colors—blue, violet, red, green, orange, yellow—slides backward down the angled floor. As you scramble to grab at least a few of them, a couple of people make a generous effort to help you. You shove your small pad into your bag and graciously thank the few kind strangers who hand you the markers. Five of them. Five you got back out of a new pack of twenty. Certainly the strangers around you assume the markers are just plain old Crayolas or something, but they aren’t. You picked up two extra shifts just to be able to buy the nicest set you found, and now you’ve lost most of them.

But focus on the positive: five people on the bus were willing to get their hands dirty to help a stranger. This makes you smile, and when the bus doors open at your stop, you couldn’t be happier to get off. You breathe in fresh, non-cigarette-infused air and cross the sidewalk.

The community center where your art classes are held is only a ten-minute walk from the bus stop. Which is great, but doesn’t quite offset the three hours it took you to get there by bus. When you saw the ad for the class tacked up on a Malibu Starbucks bulletin board, you hadn’t realized it was actually
ten miles north
of Malibu. Which means a couple of transfers and nearly three hours by bus for you. You try to forget about this—
focus on the positive
—and you map the address with your phone so you don’t get lost.

You’ve never taken a class before, but you’ve always loved creating things and having new experiences, and you liked the simplicity and lack of care taken in making the advertisement—mechanical pencil on crumpled paper; it made you feel like it was more authentic, more your scene. From music to painting, you enjoy every form of art. Of course, you’re better at some than others. For example, you wouldn’t sing in public even if someone paid you, but you can create a colorful world, deeper than the one we live in, on an easel with only a few markers and a sheet of white paper.

You pass two men sitting on the sidewalk sharing a forty covered with a brown bag. The beer swishes over the side of the bottle and dribbles down the bald man’s shirt. The other laughs and takes their treasure back into his hands. He lifts the bottle, and you burn their faces into your memory for later.

The classroom is in the community center on the grounds of El Matador Beach Park. When you googled the place, the only posted review gushed over the beautiful view of the rocky beach below, so there’s that to look forward to. You cross the street in search of a small shop to find new markers. You assume that the community center will have some supplies, but you aren’t sure, and you don’t want to look too unprepared for what is going to be your first and last day of attending the class.

You find an eight-pack of Crayola markers and laugh to yourself while checking out. They’re better than nothing. You also buy a bottled water and a pack of gum. The small man behind the counter tosses your change into a small donation can without asking. You think about protesting, but decide it’s time to go to the class anyway. You’re thirty minutes late, even though you thought you’d get here an hour early. You cross the narrow street and read the list of small building numbers printed on a wooden sign. It’s like another world out here. The only time you see handwriting in West Hollywood is when restaurants stick their suggestive little chalkboards with their specials written in luscious cursive on them on the sidewalk.

Five small, identical white buildings are positioned in a half circle. You scan them, looking for building number five. You walk toward the building farthest to the right and count the cracks in the sidewalk on the way to the small porch. The door is slightly ajar, and you push it the rest of the way open. The lobby area is empty, so you follow the first hallway you see to the end. A flimsy sign hangs on the door:
CLASS IN PROGRESS
. Entering, you find a small room with endless shelves of cans and bottles lining the white walls from floor to ceiling. Paint-splattered aprons hang on wooden pegs near the door. Eight, maybe ten students of all ages and races sit behind easels. An elderly man sits in front, his hair white and wispy. His apron is much cleaner than the ones on the wall, and his glasses hang heavy on his face. He looks bored; his attention doesn’t even sway to the door when you walk in. No one even makes a peep when you bump into a desk, sending a folder full of papers to the floor. You bend down and pick them all up; each silent second feels like an hour, and you keep your eyes on the empty stool in the back corner of the room as you put the folder back on the desk. No eye contact with any other students. No introduction from the instructor. No greeting of any kind.

You park your ass right on the empty stool the first moment you can. You don’t look up from your bag as you dig the markers—your five good ones—and the pack of Crayolas from the bottom of the bag. You lay them out on the small table next to you and turn your cell phone to silent. When you look up, you look directly at the instructor’s work. You can feel eyes on you, but you would rather not awkwardly look around the room to find their source. You stumbled in thirty minutes late; of course someone is looking at the lazy one. You would be too.

On the instructor’s easel is a bowl of fruit drawn in pencil. It’s shaded in harsh lines and not very well blended around the edges. This is definitely a beginner’s class; you learned to shade this exact same bowl of fruit when you were taking Freshman Art 101. You sigh before you can help it. You had slightly higher hopes for this class. Painting, screening, something . . . you had hoped for more than shading fruit or shapes. You probably should have investigated further before signing up. But you needed something to do.

An accented voice comes from your left: “It’s pretty lame, huh?”

You turn to him and meet a pair of deep blue eyes. The man they belong to is tall, really tall. He’s taller than the canvas that rests on a wooden easel before him. His white T-shirt is covered in gray pencil marks. The V neck is stretched slightly, causing the fabric to hang loosely under his collarbone. He raises a thick brow to you, inviting you to respond.

“The lesson?” you ask, just to be sure he’s referring to the class, not your tardiness.

“Yes—well, the fruit bowl sketch. I’m positive that everyone in here has already done that once or twice.” He smiles, lighting up his slender face. His smile is almost too big for his face; his jaw extends to show even more of his teeth. A dimple marks his cheek—of course it does.

You smile back at him, grateful that at least something here is a tad interesting. “At least it wasn’t the shapes—you know, learning to draw and shade the perfect set of cones, cubes, and spheres,” you reply.

He smiles again. It seems to come very easily to him.

He lifts his hand in front of him and points to his easel. “Oh, it happened.” He lifts up a few blank sheets to get to the one that’s drawn on. “You just missed it because you were late,” he says with mock disappointment, and you laugh along with him. He’s really friendly, more so than anyone you’ve met of late.

“I did it purposely,” you fib. Turning to the front of the room, you partially cover your mouth with your hand and whisper sideways that you had planned to miss the beginning all along. You can tell he doesn’t believe you; you’ve never been good at lying, joking or not.

The instructor clears his throat, and you steal a quick glance at the man next to you. His paper is still blank, and he has a pencil between his teeth. He’s looking toward the front of the room at the instructor, but you’re positive that he’s not listening to what the older man is saying about blending the center of the apple.

The stranger beside you chuckles. “I’m going to sketch you.” He raises his leg to rest one foot on the stool’s metal bar. The toes of his tan boots are faded, etched with angry gray marks. He leans over, his pencil still in his hand, and he taps his blank paper with the tip of his finger.

“Sketch me? No, thanks.” Somewhat nervous, you stand. You look at his blank paper before finding his eyes. The blue of them is deep, intimidating, and somehow familiar. You’ve never spoken a word to this man before. You wouldn’t have forgotten his easy smile, or the way he stares directly into your eyes when he looks at you. You notice the paleness of his eyelids; hints of blue veins span their skin when he blinks them closed.

His eyes open again, and you shake your head at him. A lock
of hair falls over your cheek, and his eyes follow your fingers as they tuck the hair back behind your ear and travel down to touch the ripped leather seat of the stool. Without missing a beat, his eyes go directly to yours. It’s unnerving, but you can’t help feeling like there’s something larger-than-life about this guy.