Hold On To Me

by Taylor Holloway

  Three months in summer and every other December,

  Calls on your birthdays, and maybe cards if he remembers.

  It’s a perfect arrangement for a part-time father,

  It’s a part-time arrangement without too much stress and bother.

  Take-offs and landings,

  taxi onwards to the gate,

  There’s an unaccompanied minor,

  flying in from out of state.

  It’s all fun and entertainment in Anaheim and Hollywood.

  It’s a picture-perfect time,

  a picture-perfect childhood.

  Then it’s back off to the airport,

  bon voyage, auf wiedersehen.

  When the tap turns off in August, it’s hand-me-downs and top ramen.

  Take-offs and landings,

  taxi onwards to the gate,

  There’s an unaccompanied minor,

  flying in from out of state.

  In the meantime, mom was angry,

  she said you never got the phone,

  But you can’t read a clock yet

  You don’t know about time zones.

  And he will never dare discuss her.

  But she won’t stop discussing him.

  The rules are set in stone,

  until they’re shifting on a whim.

  Take-offs and landings,

  taxi onwards to the gate,

  There’s an unaccompanied minor,

  Struggling beneath the weight.

  She hates it when you go, she hates it more when you come back.

  You grow up and start to wonder if you can dodge the counterattack.

  It’s a perfect arrangement until you hit the runway.

  It’s a part-time arrangement and you’re nothing but a stowaway.

  You can’t love him if you love her.

  You can’t love her if you love him.

  The rules are set in stone,

  Tied ‘round your ankle and you can’t swim.

  Take-offs and landings,

  taxi onwards to the gate.

  There’s an unaccompanied minor,

  Losing from your endless stalemate.

  Back on the other coast and Autumn won’t be good.

  She resents the fact you flew away,

  And had a different childhood.

  Because she hates him with a passion,

  That’s stronger than her love for you.

  And he must love that he’s set it all up,

  Because you know he’s playing too.

  I pressed the post button and felt like a weight I’d simply grown accustomed to had been lifted from my shoulders. There was no telling whether my parents knew about my YouTube channel. I’d certainly never told them, but they were both relatively resourceful. Still, I’d decided a long time ago that I wouldn’t let anyone else’s judgement censor my songwriting. If I ever opened that door, I’d never write a word.

  Part of me wondered if Ryan knew about my YouTube channel. What had my father told him about me? What research had he done on his own? I’d only known him a few hours really, but I couldn’t believe that Ryan wasn’t the type of man who’d Google the woman he invited home. I mean, I was Googling him within the first five minutes. But then again, there was a lot I didn’t know about Ryan. Maybe he wasn’t nearly as interested in me as I was in him.

  14

  Ryan

  I should have known it was inevitable, but I was genuinely surprised when I received a call from Calvin Ross as I was shaving that morning. I narrowly avoided slicing through my carotid artery with the razor when my phone buzzed. Carefully, I set down the blade and scooped up my phone. I suddenly wasn’t sure which tool was more dangerous to my health.

  “Good morning Ryan.” Ross sounded ecstatic, which made me instantly suspicious.

  “Good morning.” Perhaps if I replied with a minimum-necessary of information, I could make it through this conversation unscathed. I resolved to keep any details about what I was up to with Rosie confidential.

  “So, I hear from my daughter that you’ve made a positive impression on her. Good job.”

  I blinked at my reflection in the mirror. “What did she tell you?” I was too curious not to ask. I like gossip just as much as the next person. Especially if it was about what the woman I was obsessing over thought of me.

  “Not much,” he replied, going from ecstatic to grouchy in the time it took to sigh through the phone. “She’s a frustratingly private creature. Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but Rosie doesn’t exactly over-share. However, she did tell me enough that I think we should talk about your approach to phase two.”

  Ross’ fucking plan had phases? I wished I was surprised. He was a consummate schemer. “What’s phase two?”

  “You don’t need to sound so frightened, Conroe. It’s not complicated. Phase one was simply establishing your credibility with Rosie. You did that by helping resolve her plumbing problem. Phase two is convincing her to give up her whole singing-is-a-viable-career- plan thing.”

  Just that. Only that. Only Rosie’s dream for her future.

  “I see.” I paused. “Well, regarding phase one, were you aware that Rosie’s apartment has become totally unlivable? The flooding was much more intense than I expected based on our conversation last night. She was in some serious danger.”

  A brief period of silence told me the answer was no. His reply was softer. “Rosie just said she had an issue. Sometimes—a lot of the time—she underrepresents her problems to me. She wants to be independent. You know how teenagers are.” He huffed into the phone and I imagined him shaking his head in frustration. “She’s safe though, right? She’s not scared, is she? I can fly down there right now if it’s really bad.”

  Just for a moment, Ross transformed from a callous asshole to a caring, doting father. It was like he had a personality disorder. I’d long considered it possible, but it was still surprising to witness. More likely, he was just a bit of an asshole with moments of non-asshole-ness. Personality disorders were rare. Assholery was, sadly, much more common.

  “She’s totally fine,” I reassured him. “Rosie’s safe.” Not safe from me pursuing her, but otherwise, yeah, safe enough.

  Ross’ exhale of relief was the end of his random spurt of good nature. “Excellent. I sent her a new credit card, by the way. See if you can’t engineer some way to encourage her to activate it, will you? I worry about her. Sometimes I think she’d rather starve than listen to me. She’s so much like her mother…”

  I had no reply to that, so I didn’t attempt one. Thankfully, Ross was already mentally moving on. “I want you to work on exposing Rosie to the entertainment industry a bit,” he told me. “I’ve given it some thought and I think I might be approaching this problem all wrong. We need to make it seem like Rosie is reaching her own conclusions. Forcing it on her won’t work. It needs to seem like her idea. I’ve got a plan about how to do that, but I’m still working out the details. In the meantime, spend some time with her. Figure out a way to tell her about yourself and what your law practice is like. Maybe introduce her to a few particularly sad clients of yours. People the industry churned through and left broken and broke... hey, speaking of which, how’s Ian?”

  I cringed. Ross really was a grade-A asshole. “Ian’s fine. Clean and sober now for almost a year.”

  “Glad to hear it. Introduce Rosie to Ian. He’s perfect. I think maybe meeting him will help convince her not to pursue music.”

  Introduce Rosie to Ian? That was the opposite of what I wanted to do. Time to lie.

  “Ian’s been busy recording with his new band. In between, he has to fit all his continuing sobriety stuff. I’m not sure I can arrange a meeting.” I took a deep breath and tried to come up with something plausible. “I think he’s at an Ashram in Arizona right now. A yoga retreat or something.”

  Ross laughed into the phone, and I knew he bought it. “God, why do they all have to get so new-age about recovering from addiction? I just finished sending
yet another former Disney star to yet another Reiki-based rehab. Maybe they’d have more success if they used, you know, science and doctors instead of women named Crystal with crystals. But whatever. Even if Ian’s out, I have faith in you. What’s that singer’s name that was dating Jason Kane before he decided he wanted to go all family man on us? The crazy redhead whose band broke up and left her scrambling right after she got a big record deal?”

  I groaned inside. “Victoria Priestly?” That was actually potentially worse.

  “That’s the one. How about her?”

  “You really think she’d be a positive influence on Rosie?” I definitely didn’t. Victoria was wild, impetuous, and a bit on the crazy side. She had the quintessential eccentric artist personality. But it was really her apparent propensity for cruelty to men that concerned me. I didn’t want my brother Ian mixed up with her, and I was fairly sure I didn’t trust her around Rosie, either.

  “I think she’d be an excellent cautionary tale,” Ross was saying. “In a supervised environment, obviously.”

  “Obviously,” I parroted back. “I’ll think about it.” I’d already thought about it, and I positively hated the idea. In fact, I hated the entire idea of crushing Rosie’s dreams. I’d already resolved not to do it.

  However, the more I thought about it, and despite what her father thought, introducing Rosie to Ian and/or Victoria might not be the most horrible idea in the history of time. They both knew people in the industry—people other than me. People that could help Rosie find representation and grow her network.

  Victoria might be dangerous to my brother’s heart and his continued sobriety, but she could also be useful to Rosie’s career. She was well connected, and despite what Calvin Ross thought, doing just fine in her career. She had a new band and a solid cult following. As long as I impressed on Victoria that she needed to treat Rosie with kid gloves, maybe the prospect of them meeting wasn’t so bad. The wheels in my head started to turn. If only I had something to offer Victoria in return for her help…

  Calvin Ross wasn’t the only lawyer who knew how to scheme. With her father scheming against Rosie, it seemed only fair that I should scheme for her. And for me, too.

  15

  Rosie

  “Wow. That’s a shitload of pot.”

  It was Ryan that said it, but I couldn’t help but agree. This was so much worse than I expected. Our apartment looked like possession with the intent to distribute.

  Overnight, the soggy ceiling had partially collapsed Sasquatch’s living room into our own. A large chunk of it had fallen, like a pizza slice, right on top of ours. Now, for the first time, Trina and I could see what Sasquatch had been up to.

  Grow lights, drowned marijuana plants, and what looked like linear miles of drip hoses oozed out from above. It wasn’t the sprinklers that had flooded Sasquatch’s apartment—or at least, it wasn’t only the sprinklers. It looked like our upstairs neighbor had been running an industrial level grow-house out of his twelve hundred square foot apartment. His jungle was now our jungle. Actually, his jungle was now our living room.

  No wonder I always had such horrible water pressure! Sasquatch was growing a freakin’ rainforest of pot right above us. It explained so much about him. Or her. I suppose there was a possibility that Sasquatch was a she.

  Trina edged forward from the door and into the living room. She picked one of the deeply verdant green, characteristically star shaped leaves and danced back to the safety of the doorway. Carefully, she smashed it between her fingers and gave it a good sniff. Then, she licked it.

  “That’s not oregano,” she declared.

  Ryan smirked and grabbed a leaf of his own. He snapped a photo of it with his phone, another of the apartment, and fired them off in a text to someone. “Definitely not oregano, no.” He seemed to think this was all somewhat funny.

  Although I knew objectively that this situation ought to be somewhat comical, this was also my home. “Now what?” I asked.

  With Sasquatch’s living room now inside ours, there was no way to get to our bedrooms and see whether or not they were intact. My homework was in there. I had no Monday classes, but come Tuesday, I needed my music theory book, my math book, and my stupid TI-89 graphing calculator.

  “Now we call the police,” Ryan said. He was staring around himself in wonder and disbelief. I knew the feeling. “This is super-duper illegal. Multiple felonies are being committed in your living room at the moment.”

  Trina’s boyfriend, Chris, had accompanied her to the apartment this morning. He scooped up one of the better-preserved specimens, still safely enclosed in a little pot. “Before we call the police, I’m taking this baby and a few of its buddies to the car. I wish I knew what strain this was, but I’m not about to walk out of here without a plant or two. It would just be wrong. Wasteful, you know?”

  “It’s Indica,” Ryan replied automatically. We all turned to gape at him. He wasn’t wearing a suit on a Sunday morning, but he was wearing a grey blazer over a white t-shirt. Behind his glasses, Ryan still looked like a lawyer to me, even if he was rocking his casual ‘day off’ look. “You can tell because it has seven leaves. Sativa has nine,” He explained. Ryan pointed a short distance away. “That one over there? That’s Sativa.”

  Chris’ mouth was hanging open in shock. “Aren’t you, like, a lawyer or something?” He scooped up the second plant and held the two side by side like they were his twin infants.

  Ryan seemed unfazed by our collective shock. “I wasn’t always a lawyer.” He shrugged. “Besides, it’s harmless. It might be illegal, but we all know it’s a political decision and not a public health issue.”

  Chris extended a fist bump and the two grinned at one another. Trina smirked and looked excited. I rolled my eyes. Yuck.

  Smoking pot made me feel sick, paranoid, and out of control. The only thing worse than smoking it, was eating it. At least when you smoked it, the experience ended quickly. If I consumed the drug in food, it was much, much more potent and I never knew when the awful feeling would end. I hated it. I felt pretty much the same way about overdoing alcohol, although at least sometimes alcohol tasted good.

  “Well after we, um, harvest this bounty for its supposed medicinal value, and eventually call the cops to report it, then what do we do?” I asked.

  No one seemed to have an answer. The sight in front of us was overwhelming. And green. So very green.

  “Well, I mean, it’s not like we can live here again,” Trina said after a moment. “Our apartment isn’t even structurally sound. I don’t want to sound all doom and gloom, but all our stuff is probably toast.”

  She was right, of course. The ground was soaked through. I’d already warned our downstairs neighbor that she might experience some residual flooding, because the water was everywhere. If you took away all the pot, you might think our apartment had been hit by a hurricane. Our stuff was strewn all over the place from the collapse of the ceiling.

  Even if there was some way to get rid of the water now standing a few inches deep in our apartment, the fact that Sasquatch’s space and ours had merged in the middle was not a good sign. All that testing of the floor joists that Sasquatch did in the dead of night—which I now suspected was moving his massive pot plants around—may have weakened them. The four of us were standing at the door because moving any deeper into the apartment seemed dangerous.

  “All my books for school are in there,” I said helplessly. “I really should have gotten renter’s insurance.”

  The sound of someone clearing his throat forced us all to turn. A confused looking delivery man was standing behind us.

  “Does, um, Rosalind Ross live in this apartment?” he asked. “I need a signature.”

  “That’s me,” I told him, accepting what I already knew was the credit card my dad had sent. I knew I was going to need it to replace all my books, but I still felt like I was surrendering as I held the slim envelope in my hands. This was just one more way I was going to end up cont
rolled by my dad. And it was all Sasquatch’s fault.

  “That’s a lot of a pot in there,” the delivery guy said, looking over our shoulders and into the ruined apartment beyond. He seemed bored. I guess he’d probably seen it all delivering packages in the town.

  “It sure is,” I replied despondently.

  16

  Ryan

  While Rosie visited the campus bookstore with Trina to re-purchase their books for class, I dealt with the police and the property manager. I knew that Rosie was upset that her home was ruined, but in all honesty, she shouldn’t have been living in an apartment like this in the first place. It was never safe for her to be living here.

  The landlord was unreachable, absent scum, the property manager was tremendously incompetent, and the police seemed suspiciously unsurprised to be called out to the building. In fact, they seemed eager and uncharacteristically prepared for their visit. They rolled up promptly to Rosie’s address with three squad cars and a full crime scene investigation team. It wasn’t very long before I learned why.

  “This whole place is a cesspool,” Sergeant Alvarez explained to me as he used a metal pole to test the floor before stepping inside. He proceeded carefully into the apartment, one step at a time. “We’ve known there was something sketchy going on here for a while. Months, I’d say.”