Chapter 3 - You Don’t Know
“Okay, no.” Izzie stated firmly, her arms folded across her chest as she entered the living room to find her cousin planted on the couch and watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind, as he had been doing for at least three days straight.
“What does it mean?” was the only response she received, and it came from the television screen rather than the bum seated in front of her.
“Justin!” She exclaimed, and again received no response from him. “Holy shit. Okay, seriously. Enough.” She decided to take matters into her own hands and switched off the TV. This finally garnered a response.
“What are you doing?” Justin protested, not budging from his spot on the couch. “I have to find out what it means!”
“You know what it means! You have watched this movie at least twenty times in the past three days! You need to stop and get out or something. This is getting ridiculous.” Her exasperation was more than apparent in her voice.
“I want to be a film maker, and to make good films, you have to study good films,” Justin reasoned calmly, knowing full well that Izzie would not under any circumstances buy this excuse.
“Yeah, films,” the brunette emphasized the plural. “Not the same film over and other. That’s not studying to learn, Justin. That’s wallowing in self pity because you didn’t get accepted back into film school and don’t think I don’t know that. I’m not as stupid as you look.”
This comment resulted in a stony silence from Justin, who had been doing his best to avoid discussing this subject with anyone since the day he had received the rejection letter. At first he had just been pissed at the bastards for not immediately recognizing his natural talents, but anger had soon been replaced with a strong sense of sorrow and self-loathing, which had given way to the undeniable desire to sit on his couch watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind over and over again. Somehow he had been under the impression that Izzie hadn’t noticed until this very moment, when all of his dreams were shattered once again.
Both cousins stared silently at one another, arms crossed and eyes narrowed in an eerily identical manner, and neither willing to be the one to break the silence. Justin did not want to admit that Izzie was right, and Izzie wasn’t about to leave him alone. Finally, the elder of the two cracked.
“I’ll do what I want,” Justin mumbled, his lips forming a pout as he directed his gaze back to the now blank television set. Izzie snorted.
“Sure, if what you want is to get off the couch and get out of the house. You are driving me crazy.” She sighed and sat down next to him on the couch. He scooted away from her like a 4-year-old who was determined to pout and ignore his mother until she did what he wanted. Izzie rolled her eyes, but rubbed her cousin’s arm soothingly. “Look, I’m really sorry that you didn’t get readmitted to film school. But it isn’t the end of the world, okay? And sitting her pouting and watching the same movie to the point where it begins to drive me insane isn’t going to help. Why don’t you go out and shoot some stuff, just to get back into practice? Come up with a project that you want to film or something. You can reapply soon, yeah?”
“I hate life,” Justin responded, his voice echoing the pout that remained on his face. Izzie couldn’t help chuckling as she put and arm around his shoulders and gave him a squeeze.
“I know. But you want it to be exciting, right? So go make it exciting.”
“Your idea of exciting is attempting to force me to ask out girls at the supermarket,” Justin reminded her, finally cracking a smile.
“True,” Izzie agreed with a nod. “But it could have been exciting if you’d given it a chance. Maybe she was an assassin or something.” Justin interrupted with a snort and Izzie smacked him on the arm. “You don’t know.”
***
For a man who could be, as his ex-girlfriend had frequently put it, “infuriatingly oblivious,” Justin Timberlake was an extremely observant person when he wanted to be. It had been one of his biggest strengths in film school prior to his dropout.
This particular afternoon in early June as he sat seated on a park bench, taking pictures of children playing with their parents, couples walking their dogs, and teenagers playing frisbee, he noticed all of the little things about them. The way the sunlight brightened a woman’s features didn’t escape him as he took a picture of her, the loving glance one dog-walker threw to another became implanted in his mind, and the way toddlers giggled while being chased by their father was like an important scene in a movie he had yet to make. He took pictures to remember the way things looked and experiment with angles, later to be turned into stories and frames that he could film. For once, he was glad that he’d listened to Izzie and come out to do this. It was therapeutic.
As he gazed around the park looking for another moment to capture for future reference, his eyes fell on a mane of dark hair cascading down a delicate pair of shoulders a few feet away. The vaguely familiar woman was seated on the grass with her back leaning against the trunk of a tree, at least three books, various piles of paper, and what looked to be a cup of coffee from Starbucks surrounding her as she wrote furiously in a notebook. Justin brought his camera to his eye and looked through at her for a moment, watching as she bit her lip and adjusted the way her back was positioned against the tree. He didn’t know why she looked so familiar to him, but he was sure he’d seen her before.
The moment he snapped the picture, her head shot up and her eyes darted to him as he immediately dropped the camera from his eye. They both looked at one another for a moment, her seeming startled and he embarrassed that he had been caught in his somewhat voyeuristic creative endeavors. He glanced away sheepishly, trying to determine how to react. This had never happened before. Somehow people always seemed totally oblivious to his taking pictures or filming them. Either that or perhaps, he realized, he had always been too oblivious to realize that they noticed. Looking back up, he realized that the woman was still looking at him and he shifted uncomfortably before finally deciding to stand up. He did so and his long legs carried him over to the tree across the way.
“Hi,” he greeted her, trying to appear nonchalant.
“Hello,” she replied, smiling warmly at him in response.
“Um, listen, I just wanted to say...uh...” his voice trailed off and he fingered the strap that held his camera around his neck. She raised an eyebrow curiously.
“Yes?”
“Well, I’m sorry if I startled you just then. Taking your picture, I mean.” He found himself sitting down on the grass, feeling strange towering over her the way he did when he was standing and she sitting. She smiled again.
“It’s okay, I was just kind of surprised and-“ She paused momentarily, pushing a stray strand of hair behind her right ear. “Why were you taking my picture, exactly?”
“Oh, see, I’m trying to get back into film school and taking pictures of random people kind of helps get my creative juices flowing, so I’ve just been sitting here watching people and taking pictures of whomever catches my eye,” he explained smoothly. As he spoke, his eyes drifted over the books and piles of paper that sat near him. Several Harry Potter books and what appeared to be notes with headings such as “Positive portrayals of witches” and “Fictional relationships between wizards and non-magics” stared back at him, as much as books and paper can stare. The woman’s deep blue eyes followed his gaze and her hand slowly covered the notes from his view as though in direct reaction to his looking.
“And I caught your eye, huh?” she asked with a chuckle and Justin immediately averted his gaze back to her, simultaneously forgetting the words he had just read.
“Well, yeah.” He shrugged. “You looked really into whatever you’re doing here.” He paused briefly before voicing the question in the back of his mind. “What are you doing here?”
“Oh, you know, just studying.” She slowly gathered all of her notes up and brought them into her lap in order to fully obstruct Justin’s view of them. Most people may have found this strange, but Justin barely gave it any notice. He nodded.
“You’re a student then?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I am.”
“What are you studying?”
“Uh...” She paused as though this were a question that required a lot of thought in order to respond. “Sociology. Grad work. It’s fascinating, but difficult to explain.” She smiled and laughed almost apologetically. Justin grinned.
“I can imagine.”
“Yeah.” She bit her lip and glanced down at the papers in her hands briefly before returning her gaze to her companion and extending her hand to him. “I’m Mina, by the way.”
“Justin.” He shook her hand cordially, only now realizing that they hadn’t already exchanged names. The conversation had been flowing so smoothly that it seemed as though introductions should have been far in the past.
“Nice to meet you, Justin.” She began to smile, but her eyes suddenly widened and she shook her head ever so slightly at something behind Justin. He turned to see what she was looking at, but there was nothing besides the two teenage boys he had been watching play Frisbee earlier.
“What?” he inquired, confused. Mina shook her head and smiled to indicate that it was nothing important.
“Nothing, I just thought the flying...disc...thing-“
“Frisbee?” Justin supplied in amusement.
“Yeah, that.” She waved a hand dismissively. “Anyway, I thought it was going to hit a child that was playing near by, but it didn’t, so...yeah. That’s it.”
“Close call.”
“Yeah. Hey, I have to go.” She began to gather the remainder of her books and notes into her arms, silently refusing any help from Justin as she stood. He followed suit. “It was really nice meeting you.” And she hurried off.
“Hey, wait!” Justin called after her before she’d had time to take more than a few steps in the other direction. Mina turned back towards him, an inquisitive expression adorning her features.
“Yeah?”
“Do you want to maybe go out sometime?” he questioned as suavely as possible. She stood silent for a moment, contemplating the request.
“Sure,” she finally agreed with a nod. “You should just...call me. The last name’s McKinnon, it’s under my cousin Ivy’s name, you should be able to find us in the...what do you call it?”
“Phonebook?”
“Yeah, that.” She smiled, seeming pleased with the turn of events and gave him what small semblance of a wave she could muster with her arms full of books, notebooks, and paper.
***
“Hey, kid,” a bodiless deep male voice startled Mina as she entered the apartment, causing her to drop her books on the floor in surprise.
“Jesus Christ, Avery,” she muttered in contempt, kneeling to pick up her books as a head of bright red hair was revealed in the corner, followed soon by the rest of a 25-year-old male body.
“I prefer just Avery, if you don’t mind.” He grinned and flopped his tall figure down onto the couch, putting his feet up on the table. Mina rolled her eyes and sat down next to him.
“What are you doing here? And why are you scaring the shit out of me? And what in God’s name do you think you’re doing just popping up in the middle of a park in broad daylight? Someone could have seen you!” she scolded her older brother.
“No worries, little sis, no one saw me. I’ve had practice. Who was that guy you were with?” Avery wasted no time getting to the subject he was most curious about.
“No one, just someone I met at the park,” Mina replied nonchalantly. She decided to willingly supply the rest of the information before he tried to pry it out of her. “We’re going to go out sometime.” Avery raised his eyebrows.
“Wizard?”
“Nope.”
It was one simple word, but the heavy silence that followed testified to the effect that one simple word could have on a conversation. Mina stood and picked her books up, bringing them into her bedroom and letting out a sigh before returning to the living room and her brother. He was still sitting on the couch, looking decidedly unhappy, when she returned.
“Mina,” he began. She shook her head.
“Don’t start with me, Avery,” she warned him. She knew what he was going to say, she had known the minute he had asked her about the guy in the first place.
“It’s playing with fire, kid,” he told her, his voice labored with a combination of worry and aggravation at a younger sister who seemed unwilling to listen to anything those older than her had to say. She was obsessed with people different from herself, convinced that there was more to the non-magic world than those in her world thought. He suspected it had something to do with her close relationship with Ivy, who was the only McKinnon in generations who had not inherited the gift of magic. They all loved Ivy, but she came from their family, so it was different. Mina did not seem to make the distinction.
“Okay, one, don’t call me ‘kid,’ I hate it. Two, it’s a research project. And three, if it weren’t a research project, don’t you think that your attitude towards witches and wizards dating non-magics is a lot of the reason these things don’t work out?”
“No, I don’t, I think-“
“It’s called prejudice, Avery. It happens on both sides and it is bad.”
“It’s not prejudice, it’s a fact. These things don’t work out, Mina.”
“Sometimes they do,” Mina replied stubbornly. “That’s why I’m studying it, anyway, to find out why it does or doesn’t work. And maybe if you were a little more open-minded-“
“You don’t know,” he interrupted her, equally as stubborn. “This has nothing to do with being open-minded, it has to do with the facts, and the facts are that these things do not work, because guys who are not wizards do not want to deal with the fact that their girlfriends can use magic and do not understand that witch does not equal evil. However,” he held up a hand to stop her from interrupting as she clearly wanted to, “If it’s just a research thing...”
“It is.”
“Fine. But I don’t know why you waste your time with this shit. When the results are exactly what I’ve just told you, don’t be surprised.”
She shook her head in irritation. Secretly, Mina was worried that Avery was right, but she was determined to find something different, and this Justin person seemed like the perfect person to help her do so. He seemed just easy going enough for it to work.
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