Parker Lowell
One would be wrong.
You see, one thing that tends to slip a person's mind is that sometimes even the smallest of celebrities seem to travel incognito so as to avoid fans. And, for some reaon, it always seems to slip our minds that they do this even at the most inappropriate of times.
One of these more inappropriate times would be on a late (early?) flight from Oklahoma to New York when hardly anybody is on the plane and probably nobody of that crowd would even recognize them anyway. It certainly makes it a lot harder for you to spot them.
Not that I was really looking. I was too tired to look, the only thing keeping me awake the whole time being my thoughts. I just couldn't get what the doctor had said out of my mind. What he had said about... About Taylor trying to...
At first, it just seemed to impossible. The thought that Taylor had tried to... That he would be desperate enough to... I told myself that I could think up at least a thousand reasons why he wouldn't do something like that. But every time I tried to think of them, I discovered that none of them were good reasons. After a while of
not being able to come up with reasons as to why he wouldn't do something like that, I unintentionally began to think of reasons that he would have for doing it. After all, his life had been altered so much in the past year or so. First, he had suddenly had his privacy taken away from him when he had become famous with his brothers. And then me.
I had shown up and altered his life further. Maybe even in some ways ruined some parts of it. Maybe all of it had finally gotten to him. Maybe he really had tried to...
"Screw it. I'm going up to the desk to ask," Gina said after about forty-five minutes of pacing the waiting area of the airport. I hardly noticed her stalk over to the desk, almost as frustrated as she had been when they had taken so long
to tell us how Taylor was.
I sighed and sat back in the chair I was sitting in, staring off somewhere into space as I often did when I had some heavy thoughts on my mind in order to signal to the people around me that I didn't really want to talk at that moment. Gina says that I should
put a "Back in Five Minutes" sign around my neck.
Obviously, the Hansons don't know what that look means.
I felt a tap on my shoulder and looked around to see a figure in Men In Black sunglasses and a baseball cap of some kind staring back at me. I nearly jumped out my skin, scared to death as to who this stranger was. Then memories of Darien Lake began coming back to me.
"Isaac?" I said.
"Wow, you really are out of it, aren't you?" Zac asked me.
I smiled a little shyly, standing up so as to be able to face him.
"There you are!" I heard Mrs. Hanson before I saw her. She walked up to me quickly and embraced me into a hug. Then, abruptly she let me go as if she remembered who I was not. "How's Taylor?"
"The doctors are saying that he's going to be okay," I told her. "He woke up just before we left to come pick you guys up."
"Thank God," she said, letting out a huge breath of relief before turning her eyes Heavenward.
"What happened?" Zac asked carefully.
"We're not really sure," I said. I didn't think they needed to know that the doctors thought that it was a suicide attempt. I didn't want them to have to think the same thoughts that I was thinking. "I found him when I came home from school and right now he's a little too out of it to really be
able to answer any questions. They don't want to upset him too quickly after he's just woken up."
Zac nodded, accepting this.
"Where're the others?" I asked.
"Spread out throughout the airport looking for you and Gina," Mrs. Hanson answered me.
"Where have you guys been?" I asked.
"I don't know. We got off the plane. We didn't see you, so we started walking around a little and we just couldn't find you, so finally we split up and here we are, exactly where we were forty-five minutes ago when we got off the plane," she explained.
"And why are you incognito?" I asked, looking Zac up and down. Really, it was nothing more than the sunglasses and the hat, but he still looked pretty strange. "You look like you have a hangover, Zac. Besides, it is a late flight to Rochester of all places. There couldn't have been many people who would recognize you on the plane."
"You never know," he replied, shrugging.
I can't really go into much detail as to what happened after that. By the time Gina re-joined the group about five mintes later, I was practically falling over with tiredness. I know that somehow, we all found each other and then we traveled back to our house and somehow I ended up in my bed where I would awaken the next morning with very little to no memory of what had happened the day before until
I walked into the bathroom without thinking.
One would normally think that finding someone they know at least a little bit in a small crowd
on one of the late (early?) flights from Tulsa to Rochester would be easy. One would think it would be even easier if two of these particular people are celebrities
that, if you haven't actually known the family for all that long, you had at least konwn of them for quite a while and know what they look like.
I'm not going to say it.
Index
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-Two