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

by Duffy, Caitlyn

  When we left the stall, a woman who looked like she was in her early thirties sneered, "Just take your time, ladies," implying that we had been in our stall far too long.

  "Go to hell," Susan retorted smugly, wiping her nose with the back of her hand.

  It was just after midnight. The club was becoming completely packed, as Jake had said it would be. Using an inexplicable sense of radar, Susan led me straight through the writhing mass of bodies on the dance floor to the other side, where she snuggled up to Glorius at the bar. Glorius was accepting three clear beverages in plastic cups from the bartender, and handed one to me and one to Susan. I was about to shrug the drink off but then happened to look up over the dance floor to the balcony of the club. From where we were standing I could see directly into the cage and saw Jake leaning over the DJ booth, one hand on his headphones.

  His shiny dark blond hair was glowing by the light on the DJ booth table. He was wearing a dark pink t-shirt that night which was frayed at the edges of its sleeves, showing off his taut biceps, biceps that were no doubt a little more defined than they had been two months earlier from lugging boxes of t-shirts across concert venue parking lots all summer. His tan was even noticeable in the low light. He looked up just once, briefly, out at the crowd, and even that quick flash of his brown-black eyes nearly gave me a chill.

  Then I happened to noticed that there were several people in the cage with him. Two other guys, possibly more, and at least two girls. At once I felt miserably in love with him, wanting to be up in that cage with him, and just plain miserable. Why had he told me to go explore when other people were up in the cage during his set? Was I just not cool enough to be seen in his company in this setting? I didn't know what I had expected to come of this special night with Jake when I had been back at the hotel earlier in the afternoon, but this sickening mixture of longing and anxiety was a brand new sensation for me. I had never thought that being so in love with a boy would also be so complicated.

  Susan informed me that the drink I had been handed was a gin and tonic, and I held it until I was able to place it among other abandoned plastic cups on top of an enormous speaker. One horrendous hangover for the summer had been enough for me; I just hoped that Glorius and Susan assumed I was a fast drinker instead of a baby. We hit dance floor and all heads turned; after all, we were in Detroit and Susan had been on the cover of major magazines.

  At two in the morning we returned to the cage so that Glorius could take over the sound system. The small cluster of people I had noticed lurking up there earlier had disappeared, and Jake greeted me by throwing his arms around my neck and kissing me gently on the forehead.

  "Are you having fun?" he asked.

  "Yes," I lied.

  "Great. I have to run downstairs but I'll be right back," Jake told me.

  I sat down on the vinyl couch feeling, for the first time all night, really tired. At first I thought when he said he would be right back that he meant in a matter of minutes. Then ten minutes passed. Then twenty. I anxiously checked the time on my cell phone, feeling increasingly ashamed and childish in the presence of Glorius and Susan that Jake had basically abandoned me. Adding to my anxiety were the six voicemails that had been left on my phone, presumably by either my enraged father or Jill. I didn't bother dialing in to listen to them.

  Forty minutes passed. I was officially angry and mortified.

  I left the cage to revisit the bathroom, and this time the line was even longer than the first time. My mind was darting back and forth between wanting to calm down and wanting to just step outside and call a cab to go back to the hotel. It was likely that I would have been crying if I hadn't been so tired or needed to go to the bathroom so urgently. I really wasn't sure which I wanted more: Jake to magically reappear and make everything OK again, or to just leave and try to banish thoughts of him from my mind forever.

  But leave and go where? I couldn't face my dad and Jill at that hour. And if I just left the club on my own, Jake might think I was being babyish and petty, or worse, might not even care that I had gone. The fear that if I left I would never see him again kept me in the bathroom line, inching forward every few minutes.

  By the time I stepped out of the ladies' room, it was nearly three in the morning. I navigated my way through the crowd rather than returning to the staircase that led to the cage, and suddenly, to my horror, saw Jake standing near the bar with the redheaded girl who had been behind me in line on my first visit to the bathroom. He had one hand placed on the small of her back, and was leaning in to listen intently to what she was telling him. There was nothing solidly incriminating about what I was seeing, but their pose was intimate enough to suggest, along with what I had overheard the girl saying in line, that I had cause to worry.

  And then, just when I was about to summon the courage to walk over and interrupt whatever was going on, my feet froze. Jake turned his head to lightly kiss the redhead on the lips.

  I turned sharply, having seen enough. Frantically, blindly, I pushed my way toward the club's main exit, and then remembered I had left my purse and cell phone up in the cage. Hoping to make it back up to the cage to retrieve my belongings and get out of there before having to face Jake, I rushed as fast as the thick crowd would permit. Once reaching the top of the stairs and the locked gate of the cage, I was dismayed that Susan was no longer there. Glorius was the only occupant of the cage, and she was thoroughly engrossed in her music, her back turned toward me. I eyed my bag on the vinyl couch wistfully, a little enraged that I was going to have to stand outside the cage like a fool until someone who knew the lock code appeared and could grant me access. In a matter of a few short hours this had gone from the best night of my life to one of the worst.

  After a few minutes, Susan stumbled up the stairs, her face and hair damp with perspiration. It took her three attempts to type the numeric code into the lockbox properly to open the door.

  "Where are you going?" Susan asked, slurring, when I hastily grabbed my bag and stepped back out of the cage.

  I wasn't even going to acknowledge her on my way out except that Jake appeared in the doorway, blocking my path.

  "What's up?" he asked, sounding concerned. He saw my bag over my shoulder and presumably also the frown on my face and tears in the corners of my eyes.

  "I'm taking off," I told him. "This is not my scene."

  I attempted to step past him, all the while both loving him and hating him so much. I couldn't wait to be out of his sight so that I could break into a full crying fit.

  "Whoah, whoah, whoah," he said, trying to calm me down. "Why are you leaving? I thought this was it. You and me. What about Japan?"

  Susan had taken a seat on the couch and was watching us intently, as if our squabble was high quality entertainment. She sucked on a lollipop with all her might.

  "Jake, come on," I pleaded with him. "You've barely spent even five minutes with me since we got there. Plus I am getting the feeling that you've already nailed every girl here."

  "What are you talking about? I barely know anyone here. Can we," he gasped, looking at me in disbelief, "can we just get out of here and go talk somewhere?"

  My gut told me to tell him no, and to go out to the parking lot and call Jill. But I didn't want things to end like this. I was hoping Jake held magic words inside of him that would reset this night and make everything all right again.

  He enlisted the assistance of one of the bouncers to carry one of his two crates of CD's out to the car. I sat in the front seat of the car in silence, staring through the windshield at the club as Jake and the bouncer loaded up the trunk, both relieved to finally be out of there and disgusted with myself for getting angry and insisting that we leave. Was I overreacting? I didn't think that I was. I knew for certain that if my future with Jake meant following him around in Japan and being ignored night after night, I would tire of it quickly.

  Jake's home was in the middle of a block speckled with cars parked in front lawns, shoes dangling from tree branc
hes, and windows patched over with boards and duct tape. It was a small one-story house with a swing on its porch, although the porch was missing a few floorboards and ivy looked like it might swallow the entire house up within a few years. A green garden hose straddled the front yard, and a large ceramic frog flanked the stairs leading up to the front porch. Jake parked the car in the driveway and we sat for a moment. The lights in the house were off.

  "I'm sorry you have to see this," he said finally. "This is where we live."

  I didn't have a response. I didn't want to say that I was sorry, because I wasn't; there wasn't really anything wrong with Jake's house. I might have felt the same way he did if I had brought him home with me to North Laurel Avenue and my mother had been in the middle of one of her parties. It was likely that I felt the same shame about never having even been invited to visit my father's house as Jake felt about the state of his mother's house.

  "Do you want to come inside?" Jake asked finally.

  It felt to me like agreeing to enter the house was a commitment to something far greater. I knew once I passed through the front door, the odds of me going too far with Jake were increased infinitely. My fingers were icy cold. As terrified as I was, and as dismayed at how he had treated me all night, I still hadn't given up on him yet. And he knew this, too, or he would have driven me back to my father's hotel rather to his house.

  CHAPTER 14

  "Is your mom home?" I asked.

  "Probably not," Jake admitted.

  The floorboards creaked as we entered through the front door. The living room was small and surprisingly orderly, and not unlike the living room I shared with my mom in West Hollywood in that a flowered sheet set had been spread out over the sofa. Someone, Karina, presumably, was in the habit of falling asleep watching late night television. The small house smelled a little bit like hot dogs had been boiled a few hours earlier for dinner.

  "This is it," Jake shrugged, turning on a lamp. "Our house."

  A small collection of Jake's framed school portraits were hung on the wall over the television. There was Jake with a regrettable bowl haircut, missing his two front teeth around age nine. Jake in his eighth grade graduation photo with short hair, a few zits and braces. And in a much smaller, older photo, there was a young, tan Karina posing in a cocktail dress next to a guy with a mullet who looked vaguely familiar. I took a closer look and recognized him as Tommy Castro. But there was something about his goofy grin, his coffee brown eyes, that I knew I had seen somewhere else.

  "Jake… was your mom…" I drifted off, not knowing how to ask the question that had lodged in my brain.

  "My dad," Jake confirmed my suspicions, nodding at the photo on the wall. "I only met him once, when I was a little kid. I have my mom's last name, Kaufman."

  "And so your mom… and my dad?" I asked, wondering for a split second if what I knew to be true perhaps might have been a presumption on my part.

  Jake sat down on the couch and shrugged "Look, my dad was already a mess when I was born. Your dad has always made sure that my mom and me had enough to live on. Even after my dad went off to rehab for the third time and my mom never heard from him again."

  I sat down next to Jake and dared to touch his arm.

  "I mean, I don't even know where he is these days. Whatever your dad has going on with my mom, I don't question it. It's none of my business. My life is basically a huge mess because of your dad's band, but then I guess I wouldn't be here without it, so…"

  He trailed off.

  I could hear my cell phone ringing in my bag, and ignored it.

  "Are you gonna answer that?" Jake teased.

  "You know I'm not."

  Jake looked directly into my eyes, deeply, searching. "They're probably really worried."

  I couldn't have possibly felt further away from my father and Jill and the tour bus and fancy hotels than I did on that moment, sitting on Jake's couch. I was glad that I had followed Jake inside. This closeness, this alone time with him, had been what I had wanted so badly since I had met him. But it was a fleeting relief. As much as I had been longing to spend time with him alone, I had to admit to myself that now that we were alone, I was terrified of what came next.

  "Should I call them and tell them I'm dropping out of high school and going to Tokyo with you?" I teased. "Surely that'll put them at ease."

  "Yeah, you're right," he said.

  Suddenly this whole plan of going to Japan seemed pretty shaky. Jake had said he was leaving next week. Where would we hide out until the next week? Probably within a matter of hours my father was going to have the entire Detroit police department surrounding Jake's house. And if by some miracle I eluded the law until our flight, I would definitely be stopped at the airport. I didn't even have a passport. How was I going to go to Japan?

  "Listen, about the club," Jake began, "I know that girl with the red hair from last summer when I started spinning there. We went out a couple times, but that's it. Whatever I had with her, it's over, and she just keeps showing up whenever I book a gig."

  I twiddled my thumbs, wanting to believe him, but knowing in my gut that he wasn't telling the truth. "So you thought kissing her was the best way to get rid of her?"

  Jake rolled his eyes and put an arm around my shoulders to pull me closer. "Taylor, come on. You know how much I like you."

  He tilted my face up toward his and began kissing me. I was completely conflicted. For a few seconds, I wanted him to carry me off to his bedroom, and then for a few more, I knew that nothing but heartache was going to come of this for me. The trip to Tokyo was a joke. Who was going to book a flight for me? I didn't even have a credit card. I had a strong suspicion that I had only been Jake's summer fling because I had been the only girl around during his summer job from city to city. There would always be a lot of other girls around Jake, and he would always have difficulty pushing them away.

  Just like, I realized, my father.

  "Let's go in my room," Jake whispered.

  "I don't think that's a good idea," I said, although part of me really did want to go into his room with him.

  "Taylor, come on," he said, a little louder. "You're it for me. I really like you. I want us to be together, like, forever."

  I looked directly into his brown eyes and realized that if I were to spend the night with Jake, and go off to Japan with him, I would always just be the girl with Jake. Just like I had been that night. I still felt ashamed at how I had been made to feel, killing time on the dance floor, and knew that the decision to stay with him that night was going to be one I would regret.

  And then I realized something shocking: maybe I had more in common with my mom than I had ever acknowledged before.

  Surely she had fallen head over heels for my dad because he was handsome and famous. And at some point early on, maybe when she found out she was expecting me, she must have acknowledged that if she stayed with him, she was always going to be the girl with Chase. If she had aspirations of starting her own band or having her own life, living in Chase's shadow wasn't going to make her happy.

  All summer long I had been comparing my mom to Jill, and had considered my mom the weaker of the two, the one who had gotten stuck with a kid outside of the warm glow of the limelight. The one who had to beg for tuition to send her kid to boarding school. But my mom lived life on her own terms. Jill lived her life on my father's terms. My mother had been the stronger of the two, because she had refused to stick around while my father fanned his ego with the attention of other women.

  All summer long I had been imagining that having Jake for a boyfriend would make my life perfect. I had convinced myself that he and I were like two peas in a pod because of our similar backgrounds, and had assumed an intimacy with him because he understood so much about me. But the harsh reality was that life on the road was a dream. As soon as he and I were in a different setting, a real setting, everything was different. Now that I had seen first-hand how he reacted in real life, I didn't like how I felt.

>   "I'm sorry, Jake, I really am," I said quietly. "But I think I want to go home. I'm not ready for this. I'm scared."

  "Taylor," Jake coddled me, kissing me softly again, as if trying to bribe me with kisses. "Come on, you know you want this. If you didn't want this, you wouldn't have come home with me."

  His manipulation was working. I was tempted to just keep quiet, and do whatever he wanted. But this wasn't how I had imagined my first time with a boy. I had always pictured being with someone like Todd, who I knew well, in a place where I felt safe and knew the next day that things wouldn't change. That I'd still have a boyfriend.

  With Jake, I had no idea what would happen in the morning. He could tell me that I couldn't come with to Tokyo just as easily as he had told me that I could. He was just a kid, like me. He could send me back to the hotel and I'd never see him again, and if I were to lose my virginity to him my heart would be broken all the more.

  Luckily, I heard my cell phone ring in my bag again.

  "Really," I insisted. "I want to go home. I really like you but this just isn't right."

  Jake leaned back a little, switching tactics. "I waited all summer to be with you," he claimed. "I don't understand what's going on. I thought you wanted to be with me, too."

  "I did," I insisted. "But this is just all wrong. I want to go home."

  A few more minutes of begging and resistance passed, and then I finally stood up and put my purse over my shoulder.

  "I'd like to leave, Jake, and I'd really like for us to stay friends," I added.

  Jake took his car keys off the hook in the wall near the door and we left the house. The sky was pink from the rising sun. It was almost 5 AM. I watched his house grow smaller as we backed out of the driveway, wondering how things might have turned out if I had agreed to spend the night there.