Catching a Falling Star

If my life were a movie, it would start with this moment. The scene would open up with one of those expansive overhead shots of a vast, forested landscape, the bleached summer sky threaded with clouds. The music would be something rumbling, like thunder, or maybe more liquid sd the shot found the curve of our riving cutting through granite mountains, it waters famous for their inky green swirl, reflectting all the pine and sky. In that introductory, melting sory of way, the camera would dip in, fastening to the yellow line of the single band of remote highway leading into our small town tucked into the endless mass of Tahoe National Forest, zeroinf in on the passing road sign:
LITTLE, CA
3 miles
Next the shot would pass that sign and slide into the slender downtown of Little, California. My town. It would move along the pretty pastel rows of Victorian shops and houses, the corners of streets marked with wrough-iron lampposts, past gaggles of people at outdoor cafes or leaning their bikes againist storefronts or waving as they crossed the street. It would highlight the way our town had a sort of sunlit gaz in the summer, a slow ease that built the slimmest of armor between us and the rest of the world.
In the movie verison of my life, the shot would slow as a sleek black Range Rover turned the corner and made its way up out main street, people stopping to shield their eyes from the sunlight glinting off its perfectly washed windows.
The audience would know instantly that nestled inside that air-conditioned car sat someone bigger than our small little town.
But this wasn't a movie.
This was my life.
And I still ad three more hours before my shift ended.
My friend Casie, though, could make any moment feel like a movie. So Cassie would make sure to magnify it for both of us. "Carter, that's him!" She shrieked, clenching my arm as we cleare dishes from the patio of Little Eats, my family's cafe on the main street of downtown Little. A half-filled cappuccino mug slipped from her hand, breaking into two clean pieces on the cement patio, the handle separating from its white porcelain body.
"Ouch, Cassie." I unpeeled her death grip, quite sure my circulation had been compromised. "That's coming out of your payceck, not mine." We watched the onyx car glide by, our vafe a watery and strange reflection in its tinted back windows. In the front passener seat, a man in his forties rested his arm on the rim of the window, taping absently to the music we couldn't hear, his mirrored sunglasses miniature verisons of the tinted backseat windows.
The car came to a rest at the stop sign right outside our patio.
"Do you think he can see us?" Cassie breathed, drinking the Range Rover's idling purr.
As if in response, te back window slide open, and before we could blink, we had a full view of its famous passenger.
Harry Styles.
Movie star.
Cassie gasped, her face going slack with shock. Framed in the backseat window, Harry Styles peered out, his famous green eyes hidden behind sunglasses. Everyone in the cafe patio stilled, as if a mountain lion had entered a field and all inferior wildlife held their breath. There, framed in that car window, was the same curls of chestnut hair, the symmetrical face, the same pair of wide shoulders, the slouchy look on his mouth that always seemed to say, 'Yeah, this is how I look when I wake up.' The last time I'd seen one of his movies he'd been playing some sort of teenage James-Bond-goes-to-high-school. The plot escaped me. Still, seeing him there in the window I felt a strange ribbon of nerves move through my stomach.
He reached out the window, dumped a cup of ice, and then the window slid closed again, it tint reflecting our astonishment before the Range Rover moved away up the street.
Cassie shrieked, "Get me a cup!"
I shook my head, "Oh, you are not going to-" But before I could finish, a woman with a blonde bob tossed the remains of her iced tea into a shrub and thrust her glass into Cassie's outstreched hand. As if she'd unearthed a treasure of gold, Cassie hurried to scoop up the fallen ice.
The door of our cafe banged open, and my dad emerged with two plates of mango chicken salad for the women sitting near the small fountain in front, the dinner plates like saucers in his large hands. He checked to make sure they didn't need anyting elese before noticing that one of his employees was in the gutter scooping up dirty ice cubes.
He frowned and glanced at me. "Do I want to know?"
I grinned, "Nope."
He disappeared back inside.
Cassie held up the glass, triumphant, the melted bits of ice glimmering in the afternoon light. She blew a strant of her blonde hair from her face. "Take a picture."
Shaking my head,, I clicked a picture with my phonr sent it to her. You're ridiculous. Now get back to work before I have you fired." I nodded toward her empty busing tray. "You can stat with the glass you're holding.
Her look suggested I'd asked her to move to Yemen. "I'm not throwing this out." She placed it gently on a nearby table. "I'm keeping it."
"It'll melt, brainiac."
Cassie ploppe er nearly empty busin tray back on the rack. "I love you, Carter, but I worry about you. This ice belonged to Harry Styles. Harry Styles. That's going in my freezer. I don't care if your dad makes me ay for this glass, too."
I laughed, picking up the piece of broken cup Cassie had abandoned earlier, knowing Dad wouldn't make her pay for either of them. "You're a highly disturbed person."
She squinted after the departed car, wiping absently at a coffee spill on one of the empty two-top marble tables near the fence. "Did you see the guy in the front? That was Leroy Hill, Harry Styles' manager. He's forty-two, British, and a Pisces."
I tossed the broken cup into the garbage. "Why do you know that? I pulled my long brown hair away from my neck. We'd only been outside a few minutes, but already to heat was getting to me.
Cassie handed me a hair tie. "I know things.. And how can you not think that was exciting? Harry Styles just drove right by us. Harry Styles dumped his ice on our street." She pointed to the small pool of wet his ice had left, now quickly drying in the sun.
I frowned. "Kind of ride, if you ask me. When Crazy Jay dumps his ice on our sidewalk, you think he's disguisting."
She frowned at me. "You're hopeless."
"I know." I grinned, clearin a stack of dishes, "But that's why you love me."
Shaking her head, she leaned againist the fence, the tables behind her forgotten.
The cafe door banged open again, and Dad e erged with two more salads for a different table. Pausing , he caught Cassie idling againist the fence. "Funny thing, Cas - those dishes still haven't learned how to wash themselves."
She pused away from the fence. "I'm on it Mr. North."
"I'll be inside, not holding my breath." Dad disappeared back through the front door, wiping his hands on the burgundy half apron I almost never saw him without.
I filled the rest of my busing tray with the remaining dishes (sans Cassie's celebrity ice) and checked to make sure one of our regulars, Mr. Michaels, was okay on coffee. He smiled at me from his roost at the farthest table tucked back againist the side of the cafe, his wrinkled face even more dappled with the afternoon light coming through the leaves of te old maple that made umbrellas unnecessary for most of our patio seats. He raised his coffee cup, so I scooted over with a pot of decaf.
He gave my arm a nice squeeze and nodded towards Cassie. "What's all the excitement about?" His voice had that whispery sort of fatigue people got in their seventies, like they'd just gone and talked themselves out over the years and didn't have much left.
That car that just passed there," I told him, putting my hand on his flannel-shirted shoulder; it was pushing ninety degrees out, but Mr. Michaels was always in flannel. "It had a movie star in it. Harry Styles. The one who's filming here for the next few weeks."
Mr. Michaels swirled the remaining coffee in his cup. "I read something about that in the paper. He's filming a Christmas movie?"
I nodded. "Right for the next few weeks, Hollywood will be filming a Christmas movie. Even though it's June. And Cassie is freaking out because she got to touch Hary Styles' ice."I widen my eyes, clasping the hand that wasn't holding coffee over my heart. "His ice, Mr. Michaels!"
Cassie scrunched up her nose, a busing tray full of dishes againist her slim hip, her face a mask of disappointment at our sad lack of pop culture apperation. "You both should be freaking out. This is a big deal." She held up the sacred glass, the ice mostly melted now.
"That," I told her, not bothering to hide my amusement, "is a glass of water."
Cassie stomped inside with a huff.
_________
"He's filming tomorrow downtown. We have to go." Cassie squinted at her laptop, tucking her short hair behind her ears.
"I'm working tomorrow." I sipped some iced peppermint tea and waited for her to finish checking her various celebrity sites. We were late to meet her boyfriend, Alien Niall, for stargazing. But it was no use pushing her until she was done.
Chewing on my straw, I stared at the pictures plastered on the massive bulletin board of pictures above her desk, a layered collection spillled off in all directions. Pinned amid magazine cutouts of swoon-worthy actors, at least a dozen of the pictures featured seventeen-year old Harry Styles, his six-foot frame always muscular, his hair with just the right amount of curls, his eyes emerald. There were a few pictures of him smiling, his lit up, and one of him obviously laughing. But in the more recent photos, he looked gloomy and distant, his face showing the wear of his recent scandal.
Even I knew about how much trouble he'd been in. You'd have to live in a hole not to have noticed his face splashed all over Star and Celebrity! last November, documenting his reckless involvement with an unknown twenty-two-year old redhead, a fast car (also red), and an amount of cocaine the tabloids kept referring to as "substantial." In one of larger black-and-white photos Cassie had pinned up, I thought he looked just sad.
She had some other pictures up there, too - pictures of Alien Niall, some of me, and some of the three of us together, usually at one of our star-watching nights. These were my favorites, but it felt strange to see them sandwiched in between all the celebrities, like we could ever be part of the same galaxy. I squinted at a new one I hadn't seen before of me in profile tugging at the end of my ponytail, staring off over the roofline of Alien Niall's house, the sky darkening.
"When'd you take this?" I asked her, pointing to it.
"Hmmmm."
She wasn't listening to me, still focused on the screen in front of her. I scanned the rest of the wall, smiling at the glossy Harry Styles glass-of-ice print newly taped over an old photo of Harry Styles at a Green Bay game. Cassie never took anything down. She just kept pasting things over other things, papering her wall like some sort of room-sized decoupage project. Every so often, a pale purple wall peaked through, but only rarely. Many rolls of Scotch tape had been sacrificed in the name of Cassie's wall collages.
One of the things I loved about Cassie was she'd always been a fangirl, pure of heart and obsessed. Even though we'd only started hanging out in ninth grade, her room still held fragments of the girl who'd loved any book, movie, or game featuring fairies or superheros. Every concert ticket, every play, every actor crush of her past still existed somewhere in the layers of those walls. If you started unpeeling, you'd unearth Cassie's seventeen years of life. Even if we didn't shared her Hollywood obsession, I admired her loving for it so completely.
My phone buzzed.
Where the asterisk! are you guys?
I texed Alien Niall back:
C's drooling over Harry Styles - in case you've been livng under a rock, he's in town!!!!?
Seconds later:
Gee, hadn't heard. Tell her to bring a towel & get over here.
"Alien Niall's waiting." I picked up the quilt I knew she liked from her bed. Alien Niall was Niall Horan, my neighbor and best friend of twelve years and Cassie's boyfriend of six months. My phone buzzed again.
A cattle prod works nicely.
I laughed out loud. "Your boyfriend suggested I use a cattle prod if you don't get a move on. You ready? I'd prefer not to resort to violence."
"Almost." Cassie frowned at something on the screen, making no move to hurry. As usual. "He has an early call. I wonder what that means?"
Annoyance bubbled over me. I was trying to be patient but, seriously, we were going to miss my favorite part of the night, when the sky purpled and the stars suddenly jumped out from the velvet dark. I sighed in a sort of overdramatic way I hoped she'd notice.
She didn't.
As muc as Cassie was obsessed with this stuff, I was the exact opposite. Why should I care about actors? They just happened to be good at acting, the way some people are good at fixing cars or building bridges. Just because they were splashed all over magazines, television, the Internet, did that mean I shhould listen to their opinions about world energy crisis or hear what they ate for dinner? It was so weird.
"I think early call means he has to show up to work early," I told her, hoping to move her along. No wonder Alien Niall threaten to farm equipment. This girl has her own time zone. "As do I. As do you. So let's go. This is getting ridiculous." Nothing. "Cassie!"
"Fine." she slammed her laptop shut, flashing me her own trademark Hollywood smile, the one that usually came right before she needed someting from me. The one I could never refuse. "But you're coming wit me tomorrow to see him, right?" There it was.
"Of course I am." Anything to get her out of this room and up on that roof.
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Hey guys, here is my new fanfic! I hope you like it and the chapters are long enough! Sorry if there are any grammar and spelling errors I'm at a tablet at the moment so yeah. Once I get on a computer I'll go fix those mistakes. Subscribe and vote please! Thanks. If you make trailers or covers message me.
Natalia xx

Notes