Collide. Megan Hart

heart.

      There were other pictures of him, too, most of the handshake variety. Johnny with the mayor, with a local radio DJ, with a president of some museum. And then, a little more surprisingly, of Johnny with celebrities. Row after row of clickable thumbnails enlarged into shots of him next to some of the biggest movie stars of the sixties and seventies. Rock stars. Poets, novelists. A bunch of familiar faces next to his. In most of them, they were both looking at the camera, but there were a few more candid shots, and in those, whoever he was with invariably looked at him like they wanted to eat him. Or be fucked by him. I couldn’t blame them.

      Maybe he wasn’t so ashamed of his dingle-dallying past, after all. More searching turned up a half dozen interviews done on blogs that didn’t appear to have very many readers. Not that I was surprised. Any monkey with a computer can make a blog, and even though Johnny might’ve achieved a certain level of notoriety, it was still within a fairly small realm. He didn’t sound like he regretted anything he’d ever done, at least not in the interviews he’d done in the past few years, and while those had focused more on his current work, inevitably a few questions would slip in about his early movie-making days.

      “I don’t regret any of it,” Johnny told me from a video clip taken at some awards show I’d never heard of.

      The film was shaky, the sound bad, and the people walking past in the background looked a little scary. Whoever was filming also asked the questions, their voice androgynous and too loud in the microphone. Johnny didn’t seem terribly interested in being interviewed, though he did answer a few more questions.

      I settled back onto my pillows, laptop on my knees. Wikipedia did indeed have an entry on him, complete with links to dozens of articles in magazine and newspaper archives. Reviews of the films and entire websites devoted to discussing them. Links to places his art had hung, or was hanging. There was literally a day’s worth of research collected in this one webpage alone. If anyone Googled me—and I did myself a few times a month just to see what was out there—the only thing they’d find would be a list of accomplishments belonging to some other woman with my name. The question was not why there was so much information available about him, but how I’d lived for more than thirty years without being aware he existed.

      I shut down the computer and set it aside, then lay back on the pillows to think about this. I was deep in crush, the worst I’d had since sixth grade when I discovered boys for the first time. Worse than the secret love affair I’d had with John Cusack inside my head since the first time I saw Say Anything. My feelings for Johnny were a combination of both—he was someone I’d seen in movies, therefore, not “real,” yet he lived down the street. He drank coffee and wore striped scarves. He was accessible.

      “Snap out of it, Emm,” I scolded myself, and thought about getting out of my warm bed and shivering my way to the shower. I couldn’t quite make myself.

      I didn’t want to think about the three fugues I’d had the day before, but thinking of the hallucination I’d had featuring Johnny in all his bare-assed glory, I had to think about the fugues, too. Two minis and one slightly larger. None had lasted long, but it was the frequency that worried me.

      I was thirty-one years old and had never lived on my own before these past few months. I’d never worked farther away from a job than I could walk, because I was either not legally allowed, or was too afraid, to drive long distances. I’d spent my life dealing with the repercussions of those few, fleeting moments on the playground, but now I’d finally had a taste of the independence all my friends had been granted.

      I was terrified of losing it.

      I knew I should call my family doctor, Dr. Gordon, and tell her what had happened. She’d known me since childhood. I’d trusted her with everything—my questions about my first period, my first forays into birth control. But I couldn’t trust her with this. She’d be obligated to report the possibility of a seizure, and what then? I’d be back to no-driving status, and I couldn’t have that. I just couldn’t.

      I did, however, call my mom. Even though I’d only spoken to her the day before, and even though I’d been so happy to move out of her house, to stop needing her so much, she was still the first person I turned to. The phone rang and rang at my parents’ house, until finally the voice mail kicked in. I didn’t leave a message. My mom would panic if I did, and she’d probably just check the caller ID, anyway, note I called and call me back. I wondered where she was, though, before noon on a Sunday. She’d barely ever left the house on Sundays. I liked to sleep in. My mom liked to bake and garden and watch old movies on TV while my dad puttered in the garage.

      I’d spent so many hours dreaming of days like this—waking in my own bed, my own house. Nobody around me. Just me, with no place to go and nobody to answer to. Nothing to do but my own laundry, using my own detergent, folding it or leaving it piled in the basket if that’s what I wanted to do. I’d dreamed of being an adult, living by myself, and now that I had it, I was suddenly, unbearably lonely.

      The Morningstar Mocha would help with that. There I was part of a community. I had friends. I hadn’t made specific plans to meet Jen there, but I knew a quick text message would tell me if she were going to show or not. And if she didn’t, I could take my laptop and settle in with the bottomless cup of coffee or a pot of tea and a muffin. I could play around on Connex, or instant message friends who were also online.

      Oh. And I could sorta-kinda-maybe-just-a-little-bit stalk Johnny Dellasandro.

      A quick text to Jen settled the plans. We’d meet in half an hour, just enough time for me to shower and dress and walk to the coffee shop, including the time it was going to take me to shave my legs, pluck my brows and figure out what I was going to wear. Because yes, it was important.

      “Hey, girl, hey!” Jen’s greeting made me laugh as she waved across the crowded Mocha. “I saved you a spot. What took you so long? Couldn’t find a place to park?”

      “Oh, no, I walked.” My teeth were still chattering. January in Harrisburg isn’t quite the Arctic Circle, but it was cold enough to freeze a polar bear’s balls.

      “What? Why? Oh, yeah. Snowplow?”

      “I love that I can follow that conversation.” As if parking wasn’t enough of a hassle on my street, when the snowplow came through and covered the cars and people dug them out, leaving behind their empty spots, it could get ugly when someone took one. That wasn’t why I’d walked, though. I shrugged off my coat and hung it on the back of my chair as I tried to casually scan the room for sight of the delicious, delectable Dellasandro. “But no. I just felt like walking.”

      “I’ve heard of taking a cold shower, but that’s a little overboard.”

      I blew into my hands to warm them and slipped into my chair. “I need to work off some of this ass if I’m going to keep eating muffins for breakfast.”

      “Girl.” Jen sighed. “I hear you.”

      We commiserated in silence for a moment about the collective size of our butts, though frankly I thought Jen had a supercute figure and had nothing to worry about, and I knew she thought the same of me.

      “Love the top,” she said after the moment had passed. Then she laughed and lowered her voice. “I bet he’d like it, too.”

      “Who?”

      “Don’t you even pretend you don’t know who I mean!”

      I looked down at the shirt, a simple sweater of soft knit that buttoned all the way to a pretty scoop neck. “I like the way it makes my collarbones look. And it’s not all cleavagy, like I’m trying too hard.”

      “No, not at all,” Jen agreed. “And that color is awesome on you.”

      I beamed. “I love your earrings.”

      Jen fluttered her eyelashes at me. “Are we finished being gay for each other? Because if not, I was going to say I think your necklace is pretty.”

      “This?” I’d forgotten what, exactly, I was wearing on my throat. I wasn’t