The Apple of My Eye

Wouldn't It Be Nice?

It's 2006. Star lives in a small town just in the outskirts of the southernmost capital of the nation. It's a twenty-minute train ride from a city that's not too big, yet it's big enough to have its own international airport and crazy gridlocks even on weekends. It's a reasonably sized industrial center that lays claim to the coldest winters in the country.

Star is all but seventeen years old. Her father is in the air force and her mom works in an office downtown where she does menial work. Star is an only child, and, as a result of her father's love of movies and music, is very much into pop culture. She's had her boy band phase and her Britney Spears phase, naturally, but has grown out of those quickly and now possesses astounding good taste in music. She has taken to watching old Etta James and Aretha Franklin videos on YouTube and talks about them to her girlfriends, who don't always understand.

Star is a tall girl for her age. Her fair skin and long black curly hair make her look like the girl in The Lost Boys who hangs out with a bunch of biker vampires despite the fact that she herself isn't one. And not unlike the girl in the movie, Star has that typical look of a teenage dream girl, one of those quintessential girls for men to fight over. A true natural beauty you would not want to spoil with anything stupid, like piercings or tattoos, for instance. They say beauty unadorned is adorned the most, and that may just be the case with Star.

Her family does okay, but their resources are limited, so she doesn't do a whole lot for fun. She goes out with her friends quite a bit, and occasionally makes out with some boy or other from school, though nothing serious.

Star does not want to spend her whole life where she has grown up. She nurtures dreams of packing up and traveling the world someday. She yearns to see sights, learn languages, meet people, live, and love. And as long as those dreams are still just dreams, she spends a lot of her time online. The internet is the closest thing to traveling the world she's going to get for a while. And that's okay for Star, really.

She listens to music online, she watches videos online, and she makes friends online. Like most girls her age—and younger and older girls, too—Star participates in several different social networks. She joins groups, clubs, forums, and communities to discuss every aspect of her life: from living in a small town and being acquainted with just about its every inhabitant to her unique tastes in music.

Soon she'll be communicating with people from several different parts of the country. Soon she'll start listening to more alternative kinds of music, too. That's when she first gets in touch with David.

David lives in the country's largest and most important city, roughly 700 miles from where Star lives. He is very much into music. An aspiring rapper-slash-deejay who happens to be only two years Star's senior, David first gets in touch with the girl when both leave comment after comment on some online forum about hip-hop music or something like that.

Before they know it, they will become close friends and will no longer share their interactions with every member of the forum. They'll be talking in private, and their conversations will last hours, often all through the night.

Three months of this and David has made up his mind: he has to meet this girl. She immediately agrees, but there is no way her parents are ever going to let her go to such a faraway place without one of them overseeing the whole endeavor. That and the fact that it would be significantly pricey, too. It's all right by him, he tells her. He'll go to her, then.

As David doesn't have a steady occupation and most of his earnings come from odd jobs here and there, among which is the money he makes deejaying at the occasional college party, he does not have the means to travel. He lives alone with his mother and, like Star, doesn't have any brothers or sisters. His mother dotes on him just as any mother would, but, in this particular instance, she goes a little bit farther than most. After all, he's all she has in the world. Therefore, moved by his enthusiasm, she gives him the money he needs for the plane tickets and sends him down south to meet the young girl she's heard so much about.