Worth the Trouble

by Selena Kitt

  “I guess I should get a gate,” my mother muttered, peering out the window. “That’s Ed from our little local paper—does he really think he’s going to get some sort of scoop?”

  “He’s just holding down the fort and waiting for reinforcements,” I told her. “Hopefully, we’ll be long gone by the time that happens.”

  “Is this really what your life is like, all the time?” my mother asked, incredulous.

  “This is nothing,” Tyler told her with a laugh. “You should see us going to Starbucks on a Wednesday.”

  Her eyes got bigger when another car showed up. “Who could possibly care that much about what you do with your life?”

  “The whole damned world.”

  While Tyler dealt with my mother, who stood by the window like our own internal reporter, telling us what the reporters outside were up to—local channel WKDB news had shown up—I texted with Jay.

  When it rained, it poured.

  I ran away.

  I knew it was only a matter of time before she pulled something like this. Her home life had been deteriorating for years, but it was far worse now than when I’d met her on my first tour with Tyler and Trouble. She’d been just thirteen then, breathtakingly beautiful and naïve, hanging out with girls who were older than her and able to get into a lot more trouble than she would have been capable of on her own.

  Including flirting their way onto Trouble’s tour bus and getting their hands on an 8-ball of heroin. Ah, youth. It had been my first tour with Trouble, and while I was nowhere near as naïve, three underage girls with hard drugs, all three of them ready to spread their legs for payment, had shocked me. I’d given all three of them a good talking-to—reminding myself eerily of my own mother—and then I’d put them on a bus and sent them back to their hometown in the middle of the country.

  Except Jess. She was the littlest one—actually just twelve, although she’d lied and told me she was thirteen—and so in love with Rob Burns of Trouble that she was willing to run away from home to meet him. Like any star-struck kid, she was certain that just showing up on Rob’s doorstep would be enough. One look at her, and true love would kick in—he’d whisk her away with him to his castle in the sky. Or in the Hollywood hills. Same difference.

  Problem was, Jess had no idea that Rob Burns, recently almost-divorced, was madly in love with my best friend, Sabrina. Who also just happened to be pregnant with his love-child. Because while Jess’s fantasy hadn’t happened to twelve-year-old Jess—it had happened for my twenty-something, elementary school teacher friend, Sabrina.

  Sabrina had won the rock star lottery, while Jess was being sent home to parents who loved her, but clearly weren’t paying enough attention to their wayward daughter. And they had their own problems, I would soon find out. Dad was an alcoholic. Mom was oblivious, rather neglectful, and seemed to be the type of woman who picked the worst sorts of guys. The kind of guys who struggled to keep a job, the kind of guys who liked to hit their women—and their teenaged daughters—when they were drunk. Which was almost all the time.

  Tyler knew I was talking to Jess—her friends called her Jay, and that’s what I called her, now, too—and thought it was sweet. A few times, I’d been on the verge of asking him if we could just adopt the poor girl—and Tyler had headed that off on each occasion with, “Katie, we can’t keep her. This isn’t a stray puppy.” I knew he was right.

  Besides, every time, something had changed, the situation diffused, and Jay had calmed down enough to go back to school and resume her tumultuous life as a teenage girl. She wasn’t the first, and by no means the last, girl who would deal with a horrible home life she longed to escape from. But she was my girl—our girl. I did what I could, from a few thousand miles away, and over the past few years, a sort of bond had developed.

  Then, her father had left. At first, I thought it was the best thing that could have happened to Jay and her mother. With her alcoholic father out of the picture, I imagined a single mom and her daughter making their way in the world, sort of an idealized Gilmore Girls, without the rich parents. Jay’s mother came from solid, middle-class roots, including a typical broken home and parents who lived on opposite ends of the country. Just like me, really.

  What I hadn’t counted on was Jay’s mother, and the hole she felt she needed to fill once the man of the house wasn’t living in it anymore. Jay started complaining about her “new daddy” almost right away. He was big, he had a face tattoo like a Celtic half-moon on the side of his face, he rode a motorcycle, and like Jay’s father before him, he had a love affair with alcohol. Jay didn’t like him, and not only because he had stepped into her father’s shoes. She didn’t like the way he looked at her when her mother wasn’t around—and even though I wasn’t there, I didn’t like it either.

  She never said he did anything to her—maybe she knew, I would have called the cops in a heartbeat. But he was always this looming presence in her life. I found myself talking with Tyler about her more, as time went on—I think I was getting him ready for this moment, sort of priming the pump, wearing him down with the devastation of her life. Because I knew this was going to happen, eventually.

  Once a runaway, always a runaway.

  Where are you?

  She answered me with one word—California—and I couldn’t help but shake my head at the irony. We’d roughly changed places. She’d run to California for help, and here we were, stuck in the Midwest with the press camped outside our door.

  So, while Tyler called Rob, and Rob figured out how to get us home, with the help of Celeste—his personal assistant and the woman who singlehandedly ran the details of all our lives, when necessary—I dealt with the Jay situation.

  She’d hitchhiked her way across country. She was dirty, hungry, broke, and standing on the corner of Hollywood and Vine. I told her to walk down to Capitol Records and wait. Someone would be there to pick her up.

  Then, I called Sabrina. We’d been best friends since we were Jay’s age, and we’d been inseparable ever since. Our lives had moved forward on this strangely parallel track, like some sort of mirrored image of light and dark.

  Sabrina was the good girl—who didn’t come from a broken family, who finished school and got a decent job, who was sensible and responsible and smart. And I was her dark foil—the bad girl, the one who got herself in trouble more often than not and dragged Sabrina with me.

  Somehow, we’d both ended up with a fairy tale, married to rock star brothers—but our journeys couldn’t have been more different. Hers involved babies and marriage and her own career as a singer. Mine involved jumping on a bus to go on tour with the band, a dizzying spiral into drug addiction, from pain-killers to heroin, and a long road of relapse and recovery until it ended with me married to Tyler, the two of us battered and bruised, but so much in love it hurt.

  Funny, I wouldn’t trade places with Sabrina, not for all the money in the world. Not that either of us needed money—not anymore.

  I was still talking to Sabrina, giving her the details about Jay—it was something I’d never shared with my best friend before, so it was all news to her—telling her where to pick her up, when Tyler told me our car had arrived.

  “Is she… I mean, is she dangerous?” Sabrina asked me, sounding doubtful.

  “She’s just fifteen-years-old,” I told her, rolling my eyes and nodding to Tyler, holding up one finger in a wait-a-second gesture. “How dangerous could she be?”

  “I just mean… you know, is she going to steal us blind?” Sabrina sounded reluctant to even say it, but sensible as she was, she couldn’t help herself. “Should I put her up in a hotel somewhere instead?”

  “No.” I scoffed. “She just needs a safe place to stay. Keep her with you until we get home. Then I’ll take her off your hands, I promise.”

  “Okay…” Sabrina still sounded reluctant, but because it was me, I knew she would do what I asked. “Come straight here.”

  “We will,” I promised.

  “There w
ill be press at the airport. It’s already all over the internet,” she told me. “Everyone knows where you are.”

  “We won’t be here long. Car’s here now,” I said. “I’ll see you when we get home. Thanks for this, Sabrina.”

  “Anything for you, Katie. See you soon.”

  In spite of the fact that we were on a private jet this time, the flight home was nowhere near as fun or adventurous as the commercial flight we’d taken from California to Michigan. Tyler and I sat alone in the giant cabin, side by side, holding hands but lost in our own thoughts.

  I knew he was thinking about what waited for us at home—a barrage of questions from hundreds of paparazzi, and a bevy of screaming, crying teenaged girls desperate to hear that it wasn’t true, rock god Tyler Cook couldn’t be leaving their favorite band.

  It was time to turn rumor into fact. He was going to have to disappoint them all.

  I was worried about teen girls, too—one in particular. Sabrina texted me just as we were boarding the plane that Jay was safe at their place, already having fun playing with the babies. That was a relief, at least.

  Now I just had to convince Tyler that we needed to keep this particular stray puppy—at least for a little while.

  “Katie…” He sighed when I told him my plan. “This is the worst timing ever. Can you imagine the spin on this when the press gets hold of it?”

  “No one else needs to know,” I assured him.

  He shook his head. “We might be able to fly under the radar sometimes, but the spotlight is going to be on us for the next couple weeks at least—we won’t be able to take a piss without some reporter following us.”

  “Someone will do something stupid and the spotlight will shift again,” I told him. “We’ve been through this before.”

  “In the meantime, you want a fifteen-year-old runaway to move in with us?”

  I sighed. “She doesn’t have anywhere else to go.”

  “She could go home.”

  “No.” I shook my head vehemently. “She can’t.”

  “Listen to me.” He turned my face toward him. “For a minute. Just try to look at this rationally.”

  “Rationally?” I cried, knowing I was going to have to tell him something to move him in the right direction. “There’s nothing rational about a fifteen-year-old girl being abused by her stepfather. We can’t send her back there, Tyler. We can’t.”

  He pursed his lips, thinking. “Okay, I agree with you.”

  I relaxed a little.

  “But we can’t keep her, either,” he said, and I tensed again. “We have plenty of resources at our disposal. We can get her help. Good, professional help—that doesn’t involve her squatting in our living room.”

  “Tyler, please…” I begged, wrapping my arms around his neck and snuggling close. “She’s counting on us. On me.”

  “I’m not saying no.” He sighed, and I felt his body relenting, at least a little. “I’m just saying—let’s think about this.”

  “I have thought about it,” I assured him. “If we call the authorities, she’ll never speak to me again. And you know, if we do, they’ll just send her back.”

  “They won’t put her back there if it’s a dangerous environment.”

  “Oh, come on. You know how broken the system is.” I rolled my eyes. “And even if they don’t send her home—you grew up in it, Ty. You know what it’s like, being a foster kid. Do you want to subject her to that?”

  He looked thoughtful. “No.”

  “So, does that mean… can we keep her?”

  “Maybe.” He sighed again, then laughed when I kissed his cheek over and over in thanks. “Look, let’s just take this one step at a time, okay?”

  “Okay,” I agreed, happy that the answer was ‘yes, for now,’ instead of an emphatic ‘no’. I could live with that, and we could take it one step at a time.

  The next step involved getting off the plane and into a car without the press tracking us down. Thanks to Celeste, it turned out to be a breeze. Jesse—Rob’s driver—was waiting for us in a Rolls-Royce on the tarmac when we came off the plane.

  I hugged him and kissed his cheek, relieved to see someone familiar, and equally relieved to be home. In spite of the fact that I’d lived in Michigan my whole life, I hadn’t realized how much I thought of California as “home” until my feet were on the pavement and I could see palm trees in the distance.

  Jesse loaded our bags into the back and we got into the car, finding Celeste sitting up front in the passenger seat.

  “So, what’s the damage?” Tyler asked her after she and I exchanged a one-armed over-the-seat hug along with basic pleasantries.

  “Not as bad as it could be,” Celeste assured him as Jesse got into the driver’s side. He leaned over to kiss her, and I smiled. Sometimes it still didn’t compute—Jesse and Celeste. They were so opposite.

  She was straight-laced, buttoned-up, perfectly poised and in control. He was this big, blonde surfer-type dude who wore board shorts and flip-flops—when he wasn’t driving, anyway. And even then, Rob didn’t make him dress up in a monkey suit, unless he was taking us somewhere formal or meeting someone new.

  Still, they were happy together—who could argue with love? Certainly not me. Cupid drew his bow, and we were all at the mercy of his strange aim. Or we could blame the oxytocin hormones. Either way, love was oddly inexplicable, how and where it struck, like a tornado that missed one house but destroyed the one next door.

  “What’s that mean, exactly?” Tyler asked, and Celeste started filling him in on who had reported what and when, how they were working to spin his decision to leave Trouble and reassuring him that no one knew the real reason. That last was important to him, I knew—he didn’t want anyone to know his diagnosis, especially the producers of Album. He was afraid they’d get spooked and believe it would affect his performance.

  I half-listened while I texted with Jay.

  Katie, these babies are so cute!

  I know-how are you doing?

  This house is amazing! Huge! I’ve never been in a house this big!

  I know but how are you doing?

  Sabrina’s a doll. Rob is so nice. Thank you for having them come get me. I can’t thank you enough.

  Jay-HOW ARE YOU?

  Better. Really. I wish I’d run away a long time ago.

  Okay then. Denial—not just a river in Egypt.

  Not that I didn’t understand and sympathize with her reaction. Stepping into Trouble’s world was like entering a whole new plane of existence. Houses behind gates, drivers, cooks, housekeepers, giant swimming pools. For a small-town Midwestern girl, it was like an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies, except Jay wasn’t quite as naïve as Elly May Clampett.

  Hang in there--we’re on the ground and coming to get you.

  Jay texted back—Thanks.

  “Hey, Jesse, can we go to Rob and Sabrina’s first?” I asked, slipping my phone back into my purse.

  “That’s the plan,” Celeste told me, flipping down the visor mirror and smoothing her pulled-back, dark hair. It was always like that, up in a perfectly-coiffed bun.

  “You look beautiful, as always.” Jesse smiled over at her, a light in his eyes, and I caught a glimpse of what he saw in her—he was the only one who knew what this put-together woman looked like with her hair down. The only one she trusted enough to let it down with. That made me smile, too.

  “Why are we going to Rob and Sabrina’s?” Tyler frowned, sitting back in his seat and putting a casual arm around my shoulder. I snuggled closer to him.

  “So, we can pick up Jay,” I reminded him.

  “Family meeting,” Celeste said, at the exact same time. Our eyes met in the visor mirror before she flipped it up. “Daisy’s making brunch.”

  “Well, at least we get some good food,” I said when Tyler groaned and rolled his eyes.

  “What’s there to talk about?” Tyler protested. “It’s done. I’m out. My decision’s made.”

  �
��Come on, Ty.” Celeste turned to look at him over the seat. “You don’t get out of it that easy. You got to run away for a week—now it’s time to come home and face the music. So to speak.”

  “More like the firing squad,” he grumbled.

  “No one’s out to get you,” Celeste told him gently. “They just… they want to hear an explanation. From you, personally.”

  “So everyone wants to hear me say I’ll never play guitar again?” Tyler scowled. “Great. Couldn’t we just send out a memo?”

  “This is your family, Ty,” I reminded him softly. “They’re all family—even Arnie and the guys.”

  He nodded, relenting, but his jaw was still tight. “Fine, but I’m only doing this once.”

  “Fair enough,” Celeste agreed.

  “That means I want my mother there.” He dropped that bombshell and the car went dead quiet. I could count on one hand the times Tyler’s mother had been in the same room with Rob. Tyler and Sarah had come to forgive her, but Rob? He simply couldn’t, it seemed.

  “Oh… Ty… uhhhh…” Celeste looked at Jesse, then at me. I shrugged. What did she want me to do about it? “That’s not a good idea. Rob…”

  “Fuck him,” he snapped. I winced. I knew he loved his brother—they were incredibly close—but Tyler couldn’t understand Rob holding out like this. Their mother had paid her debt to society—that was Tyler’s argument. She’d spent years in jail and had come out changed. But Rob just couldn’t see that. Or forgive everything that had happened when they were kids.

  “Call her,” Tyler insisted. “Get her there. Or I’m not doing this.”

  Celeste shook her head, but she got her phone out of her purse. “All right.”

  “He won’t let her through the gates,” Jesse said, glancing in the rear view to meet Tyler’s blazing eyes.

  “Then I won’t be going through them, either.”

  “Ty…” I put my hand in his, squeezing gently as Celeste got Leanne on the phone. Tyler had bought my mother-in-law a home in the hills, nothing big and extravagant, but nice. “This is a lot to ask.”