The Rock Star's Daughter (The Treadwell Academy Novels)
Page 1
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
THE ROCK STAR’S DAUGHTER
By Caitlyn Duffy
© 2011
Copyright © 2011 Caitlyn Duffy
1st Kindle Edition
This is a Treadwell Academy Novel
Published by Lovestruck Literary
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Lovestruck Literary.
www.lovestruckliterary.com
ISBN 978-0-9833980-1-1
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is coincidental.
CHAPTER 1
I don't remember much about the first three weeks of the summer my mom died. I suppose those weeks passed in the same way most previous summers did before the year I was fifteen; my mom picked me up at L.A.X in her Benz, I totally pigged out on food I wasn't allowed to have during the school year at Treadwell Preparatory Academy, lounged around by the pool with my best friend Allison, and endlessly hoped for a few moments alone with her older brother Todd, who I wanted to fall in love with me. My mom would have been around, I'm sure, occasionally asking me to help her with her suntan lotion or walk over to Larchmont Village to get her a coffee smoothie. For the most part my mom was somewhat of a shadow in my summer days even before the accident. Allison, who I've known since I was in kindergarten, used to say my mom was a periphery character.
She was always in the background, usually nursing a hangover. There were a few summers when she was recovering from plastic surgery, padding around the house in a robe with her swollen face bandaged. On weekend nights she would appear in my bedroom doorway wearing an obscenely short or low-cut dress and ask me how she looked. "Embarrassing" was never the answer I gave her.
She was not the kind of mom who baked cookies. Or gave out motherly advice (unless you'd consider advising your daughter to pad her bra to be typical parental guidance). She never seemed especially concerned about where I was going or who I was going out with – maybe because I was rarely going anywhere with anyone other than Allison. I think my insistence on attending boarding school and genuine interest in schoolwork floored her; my mom was a bit of a livewire when she was my age and I don't think she ever imagined she would give birth to a violin-playing bookworm. But however atypical our mother-daughter relationship was, it worked. By the end of the summer she usually seemed sad to see me pack my suitcases and head back to Massachusetts, and usually around Halloween I would feel a little homesick and miss her knocking around in the kitchen with her satin sleep mask propped up on her head.
It was just me and Mom, the two of us, the only family I had ever known. We lived in a small but pretty bungalow in West Hollywood and Mom worked from time to time doing guest roles on soap operas or singing back-up on commercial jingles. Having a mother who has one foot in the entertainment industry and spends the majority of her time milling around the house and ordering stuff on QVC isn't really that rare for Los Angeles. But I would consider my life to be abnormal because of my dad.
My biological father is a rock star.
Possibly the most famous American rock star there is, or at least he was in the early nineties when his band, Pound, first broke the charts. Luckily my mother had the sense not to give me his last name; I've always gone by Taylor Beauforte, which is my mother's last name. It's bad enough that everyone at Treadwell knows that my dad is Chase Atwood. It would be pure torture having complete strangers guess my genetic lineage if my last name were to give them a clue.
Not like I had anything to do with Chase Atwood, anyway. Up until that summer I had only met him twice. Yep. That's right. Twice in fifteen-and-a-half years. Once, when I was seven, Pound played at a huge amphitheater in Orange County and my mother took me backstage. My father had long hair then, with garish blond streaks, and in the Polaroid that my mother snapped of us together he was wearing a white leather coat with fringe on the sleeves. And, I suspect with horror, eyeliner. Total fashion tragedy.
Then, when I was twelve, I had a very uncomfortable lunch with him at a trendy burger joint near the airport, where our waitress kept winking at him and refilling his water glass needlessly while he and I tried to "connect." This awkward second meeting was entirely my mother's idea. At the time, I thought she was innocently trying to help us establish some kind of father-daughter relationship but later I pieced together that it was a calculated step in her hitting him up for my tuition at Treadwell, which far exceeded the amount of his child support payments. He was already covering my clothes, doctor appointments, violin lessons and ballet classes, the latter of which had been my mom's idea.
What my father and I talked about during that lunch, I have no recollection.
Afterwards, he went back to his new wife and new daughter in New Jersey, and I packed my bags for ninth grade at Treadwell.
There were a few brief phone calls after that lunch in Los Angeles (mostly long stretches of deadly silence and nervous chit-chat about the weather and my subjects at school), but for the most part my dad was another periphery character in my life. He was just a ghost who lived on the East Coast. I figured out that the town where he lived was a four-hour drive from the Treadwell campus. Never once did he visit.
Don't get me wrong, I was never hurt or angry. My mother had told me a long time ago that she and my dad had just been an item, they were just having fun, and I was the end result. They had been engaged but never married. Neither of them especially wanted to be a parent when I came along. When I had to talk to him on the phone the summer that I was fifteen, I honestly couldn't remember the last time we had spoken.
What I do remember pretty clearly is that one night in early June before my junior year of high school, I was a few chapters into Jane Eyre (mandatory summer reading) when I heard glasses clinking out by the pool. Mom was throwing one of her trademark impromptu parties. I guess it's weird to think of your own mom being kind of a party animal, but my mom was. Her party friends included sleazy Hollywood executives, her good-time girlfriends from her wild days on the Sunset Strip, every once in a while a movie star, and a lot of guys who were a bit younger than my mom who seemed to especially like our pool and fridge full of food. Sure enough, an hour later there was funk music blasting and I could hear my mother's guests laughing and doing cannonballs into the deep end. Our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Earle, called to complain around eleven. She was at least a hundred years old and was the widow of an old time television star who had been in a popular Western show.
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Earle," I told her. Most elderly neighbors might assume that a ruckus next door was the fault of the teenager in residence, but Mrs. Earle knew that it was never me who was the source of the racket at our house.
"I'm going to call the police, Taylor," Mrs. Earle warned.
"Please do," I insisted. I knew from experience that nothing short of a uniformed cop knocking on the door was going to end the party before dawn. I could smell charcoal burning in the grill on the deck.
I hung up with Mrs. Earle and knocked loudly on my bedroom window, which overlooked the back yard and p
ool. I searched the crowd for my mother's cascade of blond hair and finally spied her sitting on the lap of a man from a TV show about cops that I was pretty sure had been cancelled.
My mother waved at me, over-enthusiastically (possibly drunk), and I raised my window.
"Keep it down!" I commanded.
I don't even think she heard me over the music.
"Come down and have some salmon!" she called up to me. "Rocco's firing up the grill!"
I rolled my eyes, shut my window, changed into my oversized Japanther t-shirt, and got under my covers. This was a typical summer night in our household and I was too distracted with the pathetic details of my fledgling love life to get worked up about my mother's pool party. Earlier that afternoon I had been over at Allison's and Todd had offered me a small glass of the wheat grass juice that he prepared for himself daily. I had been out of my mind with excitement that he had even asked me if I wanted to try it. It had taken me ten years of lounging around in the Burch family's kitchen to finally catch his attention.
I don't know how many hours passed before I sat straight up in bed. I heard the sirens of an ambulance in our driveway and heavy footsteps racing from the front of the house to the back. If I had looked out my window at that moment I might have seen someone pulling my mother's lifeless body out of the pool. But I didn't. Instead I crept downstairs in a daze and saw a lot of adults gathering around the sliding doors in the kitchen that led out to the back.
My mother's best friend Julia, a buxom brunette wearing a pink bikini that put her liposuction scars on full display, was wringing her hands in the kitchen.
"What's going on, Julia?" I asked.
"Don't worry, Taylor, everything is going to be OK," she assured me. Her breath smelled like rum and her voice was hoarse. She reached for my hair and smoothed it.
Then the paramedics came through with my mother on a stretcher. She was soaking wet, her hair was dripping on the kitchen floor, and an oxygen mask was on her face. She was wearing a batik bikini I had never seen before.
"What happened?" I kept asking everyone in the crowd. The partygoers followed the paramedics out to the front lawn and I pushed my way through them.
"That's my mom," I told one of the paramedics once I reached the back of the ambulance. "Is she going to be all right?"
The paramedic looked at me like I was a piece of lint on a sweater. He searched the crowd for someone who appeared to be responsible, or sober. "Can somebody drive this kid to the hospital?"
The moments after the ambulance pulled away were a chaotic blur of faces and colors. In the end I was driven to a huge hospital in Beverly Hills by a man in a Hawaiian shirt. I sat with Julia in the waiting room for what seemed like hours. One of the nurses brought her a lab coat to wear over her damp bikini and she howled and sobbed the whole time. I was under the impression, maybe from spending too much time in the TV lounge at Treadwell, that doctors frequently came out to the waiting room to give family members updates on the condition of their loved ones. This was not the case the night my mother died. Each time I approached the nurses' station for an update I was asked to have a seat.
It was hours before my mother's doctor came out to the lobby. The sun was up outside the waiting room windows. The View was on the overhead television. It was a freakish feeling, being so tired in the morning, with a strange sense of urgency as if it were not summer vacation and I was late for school. The doctor, who was very bookish in appearance with a thick gray beard, seemed to move in slow motion as he approached me and Julia. He asked me to follow him to a private room. Julia, who had been nodding off next to me on the striped sofa where we had been sitting all night, was suddenly at full attention demanding to know where my mother was and how she was doing. The doctor ignored her and led me to a small office down the hall.
"Taylor," he said, reading my name off of a clipboard. "Do you have any relatives in the area?"
"Is my mom OK?" I asked, my voice cracking.
The doctor shrugged and looked at the floor. I got the sense he wasn't accustomed to having to break bad news to kids. "I'm sorry, Taylor. We did everything we could to save your mom. She suffered a stroke, we think as a result of a drug overdose, in the pool, and took in a great deal of water."
My hands and feet started feeling numb. It just didn't seem real that he was telling me that my mom was dead. All I could think about was how badly I just wanted to go home to our house on North Laurel Avenue and crawl back under my blankets. I wanted to wake up later that afternoon to the sound of Mom banging around the kitchen, looking for Tylenol. I wanted to have a normal summer day of walking to The Grove with Allison to see a movie, or maybe her older brother Todd giving us a ride in his new Toyota. But I could tell, in that small bare-walled office that stank like cleanser, that my normal summer days were over. Forever.
"Are you in touch with your father? Grandparents? We need to contact an adult who can take responsibility for you," the doctor told me.
Looking back on those confusing, jumbled moments now, I guess I didn't realize how seriously in trouble I was at the time. My mother wasn't the type of woman who planned for the future. Sitting in that office, I thought my next steps would be as easy as just having Julia drive me home.
How wrong I was.
Two hours later after I tried to tearfully explain to the hospital's social worker that my dad was a rock star on the other side of the world who could not - and would not - drive right over to pick me up, Julia finally managed to talk her way into the office to see me.
"Can we have a moment alone?" she asked the social worker.
Once we had some privacy, Julia knelt down in front of me and wiped the tears from her eyes.
"Don't worry about anything," she whispered to me. "Your mother would want me to take care of this, and I'm going to."
"Where am I going to live?" I asked her. "Why won't they just let me go home?"
"I'm going to do everything I can just to get you out of here, OK?" she assured me.
She stood and patted me on the head and I realized that a woman who just six hours ago was totally drunk and possibly high, who was still wearing a bikini and a lab coat, was making me promises about my future. It was then that I got really scared. Up until that moment I had blindly trusted that adults always knew what was right, but Julia really had no more authority over the hospital staff than I did. I started having visions of being sent to an orphanage. It occurred to me that my mom's parents were still alive somewhere in Minnesota. I had never met them. I really didn't want to be put on a plane to Minnesota.
Suddenly when the social worked returned to fetch me in the office, he was talking nonstop about my dad. He had spoken to my dad on the phone, he was saying. My dad was flying to Los Angeles to pick me up. The Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services was sending two case handlers to retrieve me, and I was to wait at their office until my dad arrived.
"Wait, what?" I was starting to feel like I was going to pass out. I was lightheaded and dizzy. "Pick me up and take me where? I don't even know him."
"He wants to speak with you," the social worker told me, picking up the receiver of the phone on the desk and dialing.
"No," I said emphatically. "I have people I can stay with here. And I go back to school in September. I don't need to talk to him."
But the phone was pressed into my hand, and my dad was waiting on the other end. And that's when my new life began.
CHAPTER 2
Since I didn't know my father personally very well, I never could have known prior to our very short, very serious chat on that fateful morning that my father is a very emotional man.
"Are you all right?" he asked me. That was the first thing he asked when I was handed the phone, and it occurred to me that he was the only person all morning who had asked me how I was doing. And in that moment as I was preparing to tell him that I was fine, it all hit me. A huge volcano of sadness and fear erupted inside me. It all came pouring out and I started sobbing.
Then, incredibly enough, he started sobbing. "You just sit tight, Taylor. We're getting on the first flight to Los Angeles to come and get you."
To this day I am not sure how what happened next became reality, because certainly in my head I was dead-set against my father coming to get me. I had accepted the phone fully prepared to tell my father that his assistance would be unnecessary, that I could go crash at Allison's for the summer and continue on with my part-time job mixing frozen juices at Robek's and combing the Farmer's Market at The Grove for cute guys. But the idea of my dad coming to get me was comforting in a way that I can't even explain. It was overwhelming.
So instead of saying, "Don't worry about it, man. It's cool. I'm going to just crash with a friend until school starts," I heard myself say in a tiny voice, "Please hurry."
My father and his wife, Jill, were all the way in Turkey, the hospital social worker informed me. Little had I known that Pound was on a sold-out world tour promoting their latest album, Stagger. Unrelated to my situation that afternoon, the album was receiving rave reviews and the band was playing in over forty cities across Europe and Asia. All that meant for me, though, was that I was going to have to go to Koreatown with the two Department of Child Welfare case handlers who arrived to fetch me: Lois (the old one) and Connie (the one who wore large hoop earrings and smelled like beef broth). And with them I would wait at the Department's temporary living facility for my dad to arrive.