The Rock Star's Daughter
Read The Rock Star's Daughter Online
Authors: Caitlyn Duffy
Tags: #romance, #celebrity, #teen, #series, #ya, #boarding school
The Rock Star’s Daughter
Caitlyn Duffy
© Caitlyn Duffy 2011
Published by Lovestruck Literary at
Smashwords
Smashwords Edition
This is a Treadwell Academy Novel
All rights reserved.
http://www.lovestruckliterary.com
ISBN 978-0-9833980-2-8
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the hard work of this author.
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.
Table of
Contents
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 pool. 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.