The Rock Star in Seat 3A Read online

  “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

  In 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

  Holyshitholyshitholyshitholyshitholyfuckingshit.

  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.

  Chapter 8

  Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters;

  united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.

  —Francisco de Goya

  The ding came quickly as we hit cruising altitude without much shaking, and I was about to exhale in relief when the pubes-less pilot came on once more.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, Captain Lord here again. It seems the front we were trying to avoid is right in our flight path, due west about a hundred miles. It’s gonna be a bit of a bumpy ride, so please keep your seat belts on at all times. Thanks.”

  “Gee, just what I wanted to hear,” I said to Finn, who was leaning back so I could see out his window. What had been a whiteout was now a textured thick blackening cloud with whirls of gray and black laced in like an ethereal, mushy marble. This did not look good.

  “This does not look good,” Finn said, which somehow sent me into a panic. He was probably Executive Platinum in mile count, and if he looked nervous, I was surely toast. Thank god I didn’t have that Activia yogurt from my fridge or I’d’ve surely shat.

  Lightning flashed as the plane bounced abruptly, causing the little girl across the cabin to shriek.

  I gripped my left armrest and exhaled as the plane started surging in an up-and-down roller coaster of clouds with no tracks.

  Silence filled the cabin as I noticed other passengers white knuckling the armrests or gripping spouse’s hands in sheer terror. I thought of Wylie, asleep in our bed. Our safe, nonshaking, firm-on-the-floor bed. I felt a beat of guilt about his thwarted efforts but was jolted from my vision of his sweet fluffy slumbering head with a drop that had to be fifty feet. Screams worthy of Munch.

  I turned to Finn, and my heart pounded even faster.

  “I’m really freaked-out,” I said, whitening away from my crush-blush into a fear-kissed pallor as my four servings of acidic OJ were sloshing inside me.

  “Don’t worry,” Finn calmed me, though I could see a flash of nervousness in his blue eyes as he continued to stare out the window at the menacing mist. “It’ll level out, we’re in the eye of it now,” he assured me.

  “I don’t feel so good,” I confessed, grimacing as I put a hand to my rumbling tummy of citrus hell. The plane suddenly plummeted what fe
lt like a hundred feet and SCREAMS filled the cabin and the lights flickered on and off. “Oh my god,” I added, trying not to cry. My obituary would say that I died on that doomed Finn Schiller flight. Great. My blue-state self would be in ashen shards scattered over some rectangular red one.

  Just then the plane dropped, and Finn grabbed my hand. He squeezed it, and I could tell it was a perfectly natural we-are-totally-about-to-die instinct. Though we were complete strangers, we were now bound to each other as we buzzed the doorbell on the Crypt Keeper’s cobwebbed lair. Here we go. Bye-bye world. Our fingers intertwined, and even with the tearing eyes that blurred my vision, his touch made me see stars.

  Trying to swallow hard as the plane jostled back and forth, up and down, with my free right hand I leafed past the magazines in the seat pocket in front of me and retrieved the dreaded barf bag. I’d never used one, except when I held it open for Kira on a flight to Colorado during one of her pregnancies. But from what I could hear around me—gagging sounds of upchucked chunder—I was not alone in my gut-gripping nausea.

  The next thing I knew, Finn had his hand on my rounded back, gently moving it up and down. “Just breathe,” he said in his trademark whisper. I could not fucking DEAL this was too insane. I felt the bottom half of my being melt into the cheesily upholstered taupe pleather airplane chair. Never had a body been through so much at the exact same moment—a tsunami of hormones for both sex and fear. Talk about Eros and Thanatos. During college I’d written a paper on sex and death enmeshed in paintings. Now I was coloring a canvas of my own as the man who personally brewed the potent teenage tea of my sexual fantasies had his hand on me when I was just seconds from my fate.

  “Oh my god, I am so sick. I—”

  Horrifyingly, an unstoppable wave of chunder was unleashed by my esophageal passageway and I hurled violently into the bag. Like, full-body racking with vom. Right there, with Spin magazine cover boy next to me. I envisioned a Stand by Me chain reaction barf-o-rama where the whole plane would deliver pavement pizzas because of a whiff of my toxic taco-tossage. I suddenly recalled, as my cool fourth-grade English teacher Miss Morse pointed out, you can always remember the word embarrassed is spelled with two s’s because when you feel embarrassed it’s as if your ass is hanging out. Okay, so my butt wasn’t exposed but my breakfast certainly was. And just when I was dying of mortification so intense I thought Brad Pitt-as-Death-personified-in-that-horrendous-movie would pluck me then and there before crashing our plane, I felt Finn’s fingers on my hair, delicately pulling it back into a ponytail, held together by his encircling hand. A hand that had held Grammy awards for chrissake.