AstroTurf Missionary

The AstroTurf Missionary

You can absolutely fall in love with someone you've never met. It's easy, just follow them on the Internet. Not that I was in love with him then. Loving someone so much bigger than you—someone you'll probably never even meet, not without a body guard standing beside him at a fan meet and greet anyway—just didn't seem worth the effort.

Now I stare at the ceiling thinking of him. My arms pinned to my sides, hands heavy as kettle bells, blanket only covering one leg as the fan beats in the corner like a metronome for everything I forgot to do. He is smart, free; someone who gets "daddy" comments on Instagram with the kind of irony that lets you know they really mean it. I am being offered a part-time research assistant job writing obituaries for celebrities who might die soon: Queen Elizabeth, Jerry Lewis, Regis Philbin, Pope Francis. "We pay pretty well, and you can do the job from anywhere as long as you meet our deadlines," writes a charitable acquaintance who heard about the news.

It's three in the morning and my phone is illuminated with the cool blue buzz of a notification. Don't check it, I think. Get back to a regular schedule. Lull yourself into the fatness of sleep. It's midnight in Los Angeles, and he is out with other people who are famous and nervous and young: privileged as the moon in November but not as lonely. It's my first summer in New York.

I didn't know much about him then. He, nothing about me: first name with some kind of blurry, meaningless surname attached. Age, although at first he thought I was older, pleasing and concerning like eating an entire pint of ice cream in one sitting. Maybe I carried myself with more confidence than someone only 24, I rationed. Maybe I had premature crows feet. I knew his age, his tweets, the elevator pitch version of his career, that I thought he was funny, that he had wanted to sleep with the prettier models who had been with us all night but had decided to go home instead of coming to the after party.

"Do you watch Broad City?" One had asked. 

"Um, yeah," he hesitated, trying to mask his disappointment that they did not know who he was before turning to me with a "What do you do?" 

"Blogger," I replied. "Mostly food, some pop culture stuff for money." He likes raw shucked oysters on the half shell and tagiatelle with truffle oil from some restaurant in Los Angeles with a monosyllabic name that sounds like Cunt. "You should go if you're ever in town," he says with a smile. I wonder if he's trying to impress me. I like apples and cheese, peanut butter toast and Chipotle but I keep this information to myself and smile.

We fall onto the couch in his friend's apartment, gathering like tired babies with shiny eyes and pass around a forty of Bacardi.

"Sorry, I don't have any cups except these mugs," the host I'm told is a Vine star explains, worried as he realizes there are seven of us and only four mugs. "Vine gave them to me."

"It's fine," we say and chug straight from the bottle. The rum burns incandescent, sloshing like my exposed skin against the sofa's white leather as I maneuver my thighs to seem smaller than they are. I'm wearing short shorts and he's taking a long drag of a joint so that the edges of our extremities blur into a laughing tangle of arms and legs, neckless heads and eyes rolling back. I realize my legs are over his lap where he strokes them in wiry shadow, stubble prickling his palms before leaning in.

"I can't," I say.

"Why?" He asks.

"I have a boyfriend." I say it under my breath, legs still resting over him in a strange buffoon cuddle as I wait for him to tell me I'm the worst.

"It's ok," he says after a beat, leaning in again, this time with a searching tongue, cocktail of rum, weed, cigarettes and jolly ranchers on his breath.