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Long Term Plans

Alison Bullock

    When visualizing the future, sixteen-year-old June saw herself sitting on a train, the express train that is — the one that ran from Boston to New York City in only three and a half hours. She knew from reading her Starbeat magazine, that Connor MacMillan rode that train periodically to visit his brother, who lived in Cambridge. That was the way Connor was. Even though he was a big star living in New York, he still kept in touch with his family. He said it helped to keep him grounded. June would be sitting by herself on the train, caught up in her reading, when someone would slide into the seat next to her.
    “How’re you enjoying the book?” the person beside her would ask, and when she lifted her head she would see that it was Connor himself. Connor would have just finished reading the screenplay version of the novel and would be in the process of deciding whether it was a project he was interested in pursuing. He would look to June to find out what America thought of the story. It would be a very obscure choice, not a best seller. Connor would be impressed that she’d found it.
    There were two different scenarios that she played out in her mind at this point. In one, she was a person who was completely detached from the world of show business. She wouldn’t recognize Connor, and he would find that refreshing. In the other, she knew exactly who he was, and this would allow them to fall into an in-depth discussion of his life’s work. She’d impress him by knowing all of his independent films, in addition to the popular blockbusters.
    “I loved you in ‘Wait for the Light’,” she’d say. “Your portrayal of a gay, blind man really moved me,” and Connor would admit that he felt it was his best performance to date.
    “Do you consider yourself more of a method actor?” she’d ask next, not having any idea what that meant, or what the alternative to method acting was. June would ask only about the acting process itself, making sure to refer to it as “his craft” and avoiding the more intrusive personal questions. Eventually though, Connor would confide that Marsha Allen was a bitch to work with and never got to the set on time.
    “It must be so frustrating when someone doesn’t care about the work,” she’d soothe, and by the end of the train ride he’d be asking for her number.
    Her vision always stopped there, never moving forward to how they would handle the challenges of a long distance relationship. June felt that once he got to know her, the rest would be easy. As the weeks went on June began to seriously wonder how often Connor took that train, and if an actor’s schedule resembled a typical work week, making it more likely for him to travel up to Boston on a Friday and return to New York on a Sunday. June lived just outside of Boston and could get to the station fairly easily. How many train rides would it take for their paths to cross? she wondered, and what would be the costs involved? Eventually, June conceded that the plan was lacking, and probably too much of a crapshoot. Maybe I should try to get a job working on the train, she thought. But that wouldn’t work either. She didn’t feel she could be alluring in a conductor’s uniform.
    June thought of these daydreams as planning sessions, and they occupied most of her free hours throughout the day. If she wasn’t plastering her walls with pictures of Connor, she was logging onto his website at hourly intervals. This bothered June’s mother, who was constantly nagging her daughter to find “a real boyfriend”. Finally, in an effort to appease her mother (and in order to get back the Starbeat magazines she’d confiscated) June agreed to go out with the son of her mother’s hairdresser, a boy named Donald. Donald went to a private boy’s school and needed a date for the spring dance — something they called “The Wild Rumpus,” a term borrowed from a children’s book but which sounded perverted to June. On the night of the dance June was a vision in taffeta.
    When Donald arrived at her door, the first thing June noticed was his portly frame and ruddy, pink cheeks. Missing were the chiseled features that she’d come to admire in Connor. In comparison, Donald looked like a baby. As it turned out, he was a quiet baby, who practically ignored her the whole evening, preferring to listen to his friend Peter critique the girls in attendance and rate them with scores ranging from one to ten. “Six,” Peter might announce, to which Donald would ask “Body or face?”
    Donald barely spoke to June at all until the ride home, when after several swigs of Wild Turkey and with Peter driving; he let his fumbling hands do the talking. For a reason she could not quite pinpoint, June allowed him certain privileges. When she closed her eyes she imagined that it was Connor sitting next to her in the back seat. She tried to shut out all of the sweaty urgency and frenetic pulling of zippers, tried to ignore the pants that were bunched around his ankles.
    When they pulled into her driveway, Donald pushed the car door open with his foot and rolled to one side to let her out. June gathered her pink taffeta skirts and climbed over him, escorting herself to the front door. She thought she heard snickering as she got out of the car, but June ignored all of this, taking solace in the fact that she had long term plans. She didn’t know how or when she would meet Connor Macmillan yet, she only knew that it would happen. And when they did meet, he would find her fascinating.

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