The Rock Star's Daughter (The Treadwell Academy Novels)

by Duffy, Caitlyn

  "Was she pretty like you?"

  Maybe having a younger sister wasn't such a bad thing. I sat in Kelsey's bed and cried until she was snoring.

  Hours later I was awakened out of a deep sleep by a commotion. A cleaning crew was in the bedroom remaking Kelsey's bed with fresh sheets, and Jill was overseeing them. I sat straight up in bed, surprised that Jill would invite total strangers into my bedroom while I slept.

  "What's going on?" I asked, rubbing my eyes.

  "You let Kelsey eat alfredo sauce," Jill snapped. "That's what. She's allergic to milk and threw up all over the bed."

  Oops. I remained perfectly motionless on my side of the room, unsure if she expected me to get up and help clean, or just stay out of the way. When the hotel maintenance staff finally folded up the dirty sheets, smoothed a new set out on the bed and said farewell to Jill in quiet voices, she lingered in the doorway for a moment to address me.

  "We have rules for reasons, Taylor," she said, her voice sharply bitter. "If this is going to work out, you're going to have to be more mindful."

  I lie awake in the dark for hours after she closed the door. Kelsey was spending the rest of the night on the couch in the suite's living room. If it had been Jill's desire to make me feel lousy, she had done a good job. It had hardly been my intention to make Kelsey sick and I felt terrible; I knew she had a lot of allergies and had just been careless.

  But the way Jill had phrased her reprimand really got under my skin. I wasn't sure if Jill didn't get that the circumstances under which I had come to be living with my dad were kind of irreversible. Or maybe there was a part that I didn't get: maybe Jill had thought of other ways to get me out of their lives. The mere notion should have made me feel relieved, since I wasn't delighted to be the fourth wheel on their family unit, but instead it just made me feel miserable.

  The next morning my dad wore sunglasses and did not talk much. The whole traveling tour met for a big breakfast down in the hotel's main ballroom overlooking the ocean. We took up two huge long tables and rather than even try to wait on us, the hotel set up an enormous buffet. Wade and George seemed like they were delighted to be back on the road and couldn't wait to go hit the beach for a few hours.

  But Dad remained silent while the rest of us joked and drank coffee.

  Then I realized he was hung over.

  I never would have figured him for much of a drinker, but I guess it made sense. Jill was in a lousy mood, too, and while I originally thought it was because of the linguini incident, I wondered if my dad's state had something to do with it.

  Typically I'm not one to judge someone else's vices but I have a sore spot when it comes to alcoholism. More than once when I was in elementary school, Mom forgot to pick me up because she had overslept in the middle of the afternoon. When I was in junior high she got a DUI in the parking lot of a liquor store, which Allison had thought was hilarious but I failed to find comical. Once when I was in seventh grade we were going to Westwood for breakfast and I could tell by her wobbly driving that she hadn't completely dried out from her bender the night before. I had made her pull over to sit at Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf until she sobered up and she had told me, "Maybe you should drive us the rest of the way there."

  I was twelve years old at the time.

  She apologized profusely later once she could admit what an asinine suggestion it had been for me to drive, and even went to a few AA meetings. My whole life she had drifted in between being a complete drunk and a functional alcoholic. And I would give my dad the benefit of the doubt that this was a rare instance, but I got a sickly feeling in my stomach at the notion that this was probably not an uncommon occurrence.

  I barely saw my dad for the next two days while we were in Florida. He was out of the hotel room before dawn to go to the gym for his rigorous workout, then off to sound check, and ate lunch with the band and roadies. I would see him back stage before the show would start, but would barely even get to talk to him, as usually he would be greeting fans who had won contests from local radio stations, or posing for pictures with kids from charity groups.

  It's hard to be mad at your dad for spending more time with kids who have terminal cancer or who need heart transplants than he does with you. But by our last night in Florida I was feeling a little left out, which I know is petty, but still. I had never even officially agreed to come on this trip. My mind began wandering toward my little house on North Laurel Avenue. Even though the hotel was ritzy, I was missing the summer in Los Angeles I had been planning on just a little.

  Saturday afternoon I called Allison out of homesickness. "Oh, hey," she said, sounding distracted. "I'm on my way out the door to go meet Nicole."

  "Nicole who?" I asked.

  "Nicole Farley," Allison said as if I should have known better. "We're on our way to The Grove."

  Nicole lived down the block from the Burch's and was half a year older than us but had failed sixth grade and had to redo the year. There had been many times when we were all in public school together when Allison and I had dissed Nicole behind her back for being ridiculously trendy; she always said hella even two summers after people had stopped saying hella, and we had snickered when we saw her trip over her platform flip flops at The Arclight movie theater.

  "Oh," I said.

  "She took over your hours at Robek's," Allison explained. "She started on Thursday. And you know what? She's not so bad. And she has her license and her dad just bought her a new Miata."

  I resisted the temptation to tell Allison to have a hella good time. We said goodbye and I felt like I was going to start crying. I hadn't even said one word about Brice Norris or Florida and Allison hadn't bothered asking how my trip was going so far. I had only been away from Los Angeles four days and already it felt like my whole life there was being wiped away. I mean, I was the one who had just lost my mom, and Allison never even asked how I was feeling.

  So much had happened to me since the beginning of the summer that it was starting to seem as if Todd and Allison Burch and trips to the Grove and sunny days in Los Angeles existed in another universe.

  Back in rock band universe, we all boarded the bus bound for Atlanta. George strummed his acoustic guitar, I worked at my summer reading list, and in general it was kind of fun being together for a few hours while we traveled. Hours we spent on the bus were the most I got to see of my dad, and he was typically in an outgoing mood when we were all in a group. I got to know my dad's body guards, heard a lot of stories from Dusty and Wade about past tours, and best of all, was able to avoid making conversation with Jill.

  Our first afternoon in Atlanta, Jill informed me that we were going shopping to buy me some new clothes. We left Kelsey in the hotel with her nanny, a Brazilian woman named Cleo who I had never met before that day, and a limousine took us to downtown Buckhead.

  Jill's former life as a professional stylist came in handy as she tossed jeans and tops at me to try on.

  "You've got long legs. You can wear tight jeans. And detailed pockets on the rear will give your butt some shape," she said, pushing me toward a dressing room. "Green looks good on you with your eyes. And pink, with your complexion."

  I have to say, as much as I really did not desire any kind of a friendship or relationship with my father's wife, the attention she showered on me that afternoon was a little flattering. I made the mistake of checking out the price tag on one of the pairs of jeans she had me try on and almost choked. My mother would have killed me if I had ever asked for two hundred dollars to buy a pair of pants. My mom had always teased me for being fashion-handicapped but never made much of an effort to get me interested in clothes.

  Jill also insisted on buying me a Juicy Couture leather bag and told me it was high time I started carrying a purse and stopped tucking my wallet into the back pocket of my jeans.

  "We need to get this hair cut," she said, studying me in the dressing room of a boutique called Little Bird. "Maybe we can book an appointment in advance for when we're in New Orle
ans. I know a guy there who works wonders with curly hair."

  After she had put together no fewer than ten outfits for me, we stopped for salads and ice coffees and I didn't even grumble when she ordered me a vegan meal. "It's kind of nice getting away for a girls' day," she said. "Don't you think?"

  I reluctantly had to agree. She was much more tolerable away from Kelsey. But I still didn't know where I stood with her. I couldn't figure out why my dad had been hung over back in Florida when Jill had emphatically stated that she did not drink. Jill was kind of an enigma – on one hand she wanted to be friends with me, and on the other I got the sense that she completely resented me suddenly being part of her entourage.

  Throughout lunch I got the feeling that she was really making an effort to become friends with me. Perhaps my dad had suggested that she try a little.

  "I became interested in vegetarianism when I was about your age," she told me as the salads arrived. "I grew up near a farm and at an early age felt very sensitive about eating animals. Then, as I got older, I started reading more about the kind of pesticides poured into the grain that cattle consume, and the kinds of antibiotics and steroids that are pumped into dairy cows, and I made the decision to stop eating dairy as well."

  It made me feel very mature that Jill was explaining her belief system to me. While initially I had been daunted by her wacky eating habits, her logic about sympathetic eating and nutrition was well-researched. She seemed a lot less flakey and new-agey than my first impression of her.

  "When I met your dad, he was a holistic mess," she laughed. "He was drinking too much, smoking, his idea of an exercise routine was going for a twenty-minute run on a Saturday afternoon and then having a cold beer to cool off. He knew he was in need of a change and really dedicated himself to making it happen."

  There it was: she wanted to be clear with me that she was the positive glue holding my dad's life together. All right, I could recognize that if she wanted me to.

  "What about you? Are you involved in any social or environmental causes at school?"

  Jill picked my brain clean about my interests, life at Treadwell, what me and my friends liked to do for fun, and if I had a boyfriend. I found words just pouring out of my mouth like a flood; once I started talking, I just couldn't stop. It was so rare that anyone asked me about my life that I just kept going and going. I told her all about Mr. Ferris, our devastatingly attractive band leader who was rumored to be gay, the weekends we sold baked goods in Harvard Square to raise money for the orphans of Rwanda, about Emma Jeffries and her catalog cover, about the report I had written on the history of Native American music, and about the fire my roommate Ruth and I had started when we hung contraband Christmas lights up for decoration in our room and mistakenly left them on all day.

  "No boyfriend?" Jill asked again.

  "I go to an all-girls school," I said in my own defense.

  "Relax. You're only fifteen. A boyfriend is probably the last thing you need right now," she assured me. Although I definitely got the sense that Jill Cunningham (her maiden name) probably had more boyfriends than she knew what to do with at my age.

  "You're going to be in all the papers now," she explained quietly on the way back to the hotel. "I don't want them tearing you apart."

  Which I assumed was her polite way of saying that if I continued to dress like a big slob, the gossip magazines were going to have a field day with me. And it didn't matter if I was ambivalent about that possibility; what mattered was that Jill was embarrassed by my style.

  Her comment kind of ruined the afternoon we had just had. In the few hours we had spent together I had allowed myself to really want Jill to like me. I was beginning to wonder if my father had even consulted her before inviting me into their lives.

  *****

  Later that night, during the show in Alpharetta, no one seemed to notice when I left the back stage area in one of my new outfits and tucked my VIP pass under my t-shirt. I roamed around the amphitheater for an hour, wondering how weird it would be to live in Georgia and be attending this concert as a fan. At first I wasn't sure what I was looking for as I pushed through the packed crowd, but then I admitted that I actually knew exactly what I was looking for.

  I saw Jake doing precisely what he said he would be doing.

  "I'd like that wife beater in a small," I told him, pointing to a cheesy t-shirt with the POUND logo on it hanging up behind his table. There was no line at that point, half-way through the show. He was behind the t-shirt counter with two other guys, both a lot older than him.

  "Hey," he said, surprisingly happy to see me. "What are you doing out here?"

  "It's a free country," I told him. "I'm allowed to walk around during shows."

  He hopped over the counter to join me on the other side. "I'll be back in a few," he told his coworkers.

  We walked around the outer perimeter of the amphitheater, past all the beer stands and vendors selling nachos and hotdogs. When we passed windows, I got the sense that there was even a bigger party going on outside in the parking lot, where tailgaters were standing on the hoods of their cars and playing Pound songs at top volume on their car stereos.

  "How'd you get that job?" I asked, genuinely curious as to how or why someone my age would want to tour with Pound.

  "I didn't get it," Jake said bashfully. "It was just given to me. Basically, whenever Pound goes on tour, my mom and some of her friends follow. Sometimes we only do half the tour, sometimes just a couple cities. But two years ago when we were on tour, Micky asked me if I wanted to make some money selling t-shirts with him. My mom was all over it. It kind of gave her an excuse to come on this tour, even though, you know…"

  He trailed off.

  I didn't know. "Even though what?"

  "You know," he blushed. "She's kind of old to be a groupie for a rock band."

  Jake told me that his mom had been taking him on the road to follow Pound since he was a baby. And on summers when Pound didn't tour, they followed Phish. One summer they followed the Monsters of Rock reunion tour, featuring Metallica, Skid Row and Sepultura.

  "That's crazy," I told him in wonderment.

  The rest of the year, he lived with his mom in Michigan and went to high school like a regular kid, but he was on the fence about starting senior year. He was already working as a DJ on weekends, making pretty good money, and figured he could drop out of high school and just work, since he already knew that he wanted to be a DJ and produce dance music anyway.

  "Dance music!" I teased. "You're not a Pound fan?"

  "Not exactly," he said.

  His mom worked the school year as a substitute teacher and sometimes waited tables at a pancake house when she needed the money. She basically saved up all year so that she and Jake could follow bands. I guessed there was more to the story than Jake was telling me but I didn't dare ask.

  I was a little surprised at myself, the way I was behaving around him. I dismissed his desire to drop out of high school as completely practical. At Treadwell, I would have thought any guy who sold t-shirts at concerts and would consider dropping out of school to instead spin records at night clubs to be a total loser. But here I was, in Alpharetta, Georgia, wanting nothing more than for Jake to think I was cool. And I was terrified that I was anything but cool; I was a violin-playing bookworm with an authority problem (I was realizing) and just happened to have a famous dad.

  Jake's eyes were so, so brown, the shade of black coffee, and his teeth were really straight and white. Allison would have even thought he was a total babe, and she had pretty high standards. I resisted the urge to take a picture of him with my mobile phone.

  "What about you? You go to school?" he asked.

  "I go to the prestigious Treadwell Preparatory Academy," I informed him in a mock stodgy voice. "It's a boarding school in Massachusetts."

  "Fancy," he said. But he said it in a way that made me feel kind of bad, like perhaps he assumed I was a spoiled rich kid.

  "It's not like that,
" I explained. "My life with my mom, before, was nothing like this. At all. We… you know, we didn't have much. My dad paid for me to go to school, but that was it."

  I wanted to tell him more, about how sometimes in the summer I would ask my mom for bus fare to go to The Grove with Allison and she wouldn't have it because she would have spent her entire royalty check on liquor for a party. And about how in ninth grade I had wanted to go with my Treadwell class on a school trip to London and my mom asked my dad to pay for it, but then she spent the money on having her breasts surgically lifted and told me I was too young for international travel, anyway. I had to suffer through looking at everyone else's souvenirs from Kensington Palace and Portobello Road in a jealous rage.

  Instead I told him about our house in West Hollywood, and how beautiful it was in late spring when all the flowers were in bloom, and how my mom loved to grill shrimp kebobs all summer long. I told him about how I had always wanted to have a brother or sister but my mother never seemed to want to keep any of her boyfriends around for more than six months. I had no idea how long we walked around swapping anecdotes about our mothers. I was starting to feel like I had known Jake for a really long time and we had our entire childhoods in common.

  Unexpectedly, a flashbulb went off in my face.

  And then another.

  "Are you having a good time on the road with your dad?" a reporter asked me.

  A photographer took another picture.

  "Excuse me? Who are you?" I asked.

  "Russ Whitcomb, Expose Magazine. Are you adjusting to your new life with Chase Atwood?"

  Jake grabbed my hand and pulled me in the other direction. "You don't have to talk to them, Taylor," he told me.

  "I just want a quote," Russ said, pushing Jake out of his way. "Anything you can tell us about your new life?"

  Jake pushed Russ back on the shoulders and said, "Back off, man!"

  Just then, one of my dad's bodyguards, a big guy who the band called Moose, appeared and grabbed me by the wrist.

  "You need to get back stage," he told me sternly, leading me away. He gave Jake a dirty look. "Jill's worried sick about you. You can't just wander off during a show."