Table of Contents
Author’s Note
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
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
THE BELIEVER'S DAUGHTER
By Caitlyn Duffy
© 2012
Copyright © 2012 Caitlyn Duffy
1 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 978-0-9833980-4-2
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.
Cover photo by Marie Killen
www.mariekillen.com
Author’s Note
When I began writing Grace’s story, I wanted to be careful not to inspire any readers to follow in her footsteps in running away from home. Unfortunately, for many teens, running away seems like the only option for happiness and safety. It’s estimated that approximately 2 million kids in the U.S. run away from home every year, many becoming involved in drugs and prostitution once they’re defenseless on the streets. Life as a runaway is dangerous and scary.
Grace’s story is highly fictionalized, and quite honestly, pretty unrealistic in terms of the success she achieves on her own. As a writer, I struggled with over-glamorizing Grace’s life in New York because in reality, her experience on her own would have been much different than it is in this book. If you or someone you know is thinking about running away from home, please talk to a teacher you trust, or the parent of a friend. If there is no one in your life with whom you can confide about what’s going on at home, call 1-800-RUNAWAY or visit http://www.1800runaway.org. There are people who are willing and eager to help you – whatever your reasons for wanting to run away may be. Please believe that there are people who care, and that your own life is precious.
PROLOGUE
Things I did my sophomore year of high school that I never expected to ever do in my lifetime:
1.) Run away with my brother to New York City
2.) Tattoo a unicorn on a pop star's back
3.) Fall in love a Russian graffiti artist
I had never been called Jesus freak before arriving at the Treadwell Preparatory Academy my freshman year. Of course, before leaving Arizona for boarding school, I had never been around kids who weren't Christian, and specifically, kids who didn’t belong to my father’s church. I guess you could say I was sheltered; so much that my brother Aaron and I had been home-schooled and were never allowed to go to other kids’ houses for play dates. We were raised, “behind the Religious Curtain,” as my brother liked to joke.
It may sound strange, but even now, I wouldn’t change a thing about that. Two years before my older brother Aaron was born, the infant son of a pretty famous evangelist preacher in Georgia was kidnapped and held for ransom. He was recovered by the FBI and not a hair on his head was harmed, but the event had sent a chill throughout the Christian evangelical community, and by the time my parents got around to having us, they had already decided to err on the side of safety when it came to our upbringing.
Looking back now, I try to justify why our parents kept us so hidden away from the world. We hadn’t always been so wealthy. When Aaron was very young and I was a baby, we had just moved to Arizona from Arkansas and lived in a very normal house in Tempe. After Mama and Daddy built the big house outside Phoenix, why would we have ever played at anyone else’s home? We had an enormous, sprawling ranch with our own in-ground swimming pool, stables, and a miniature train that ran on a two-mile track around our property. Maybe they kept us secluded so that we wouldn’t realize how much more we had than other kids.
Another reason may have been that our parents believed that the education we would receive in even the finest of private schools would not align with the word of God; that the teachers could not be trusted to prevent the corruption of our minds, and that no matter how diligently our parents tried to instill God’s grace in us, other kids, with other values, would influence us.
It was only after I left our compound that I realized the fences intended to keep so many evil things from reaching me were also what kept me from ever wondering what existed beyond them.
Once I left home for Treadwell, I began suspecting that our parents probably kept us from the real world for so long because they didn’t want us to question their teachings too much. Didn’t want us to realize that most kids in this world don’t grow up with ponies and private art tutors and televised Christmas specials, taped in their dining room.
So to be fair, the girls at Treadwell weren’t entirely unjustified in calling me a Jesus freak behind my back those first few weeks of freshman year. Truthfully, I could definitely have been considered a freak, because I had never before gone to a movie with friends, never eaten McDonald’s, never been to Disney World, or done a million other things that normal kids do. Freshman year away from home was full of a lot of “firsts” for me. But the Jesus part really got under my skin. Religion had been of vital importance to me throughout my whole life. I couldn’t understand why the girls at my school were so bothered by my relationship with God. I had never before considered my religion to be something I should hide or suppress.
I had grown up believing that God kept a special eye on me.
My sophomore year at Treadwell, so many horrible things happened that I began not only to question whether or not God cared about me, but if he even existed at all.
No one ever really believes that they’re going to end up a runaway. I mean, everyone thinks about running away from home, but you can never know how scary it is until you find yourself on a train at night, watching unrecognizable facades of buildings pass by your window in the dark, and you’re afraid of the destination that awaits you when it’s time to leave your warm seat.
Chapter 1
Daddy always used to tell me and my brother that life is a constant series of events during which humans try to break away from God’s plan, and God sets them back on the right course. In his opinion, people who have fulfilling lives are the ones who eventually figure out that God’s trying to help them and let him work his magic. People who struggle throughout their lives do so because they choose to ignore what God intends for them. Until my sophomore year, I had always thought of my dad as an authority on God and the best way to live one’s life. But that year I found out that people – even those closest to you – aren’t always who you think they are.
“There is a sickness spreading across this great country. A sickness called fame and celebrity. A sickness that is infecting our youth, it’s making them clamor for money and attention, lose sight of their morals, and the plans that their god has set forth for them.”
I glanced up from my advanced biology textbook at the television to get a better look at the eloquent evangelist on my screen. He was handsome in his late forties, with thick blond hair feathered on the sides. He had a commanding presence and wore a sparkling class ring on his right hand from Mt. Carmel,
the Christian high school for boys that he attended long ago in Arkansas. Many of his televised weekend afternoon sermons were about lessons he had learned while studying as a boy at that school, and every time I thought I’d heard them all, he surprised me with a new tale of taking the high road as an adolescent. He wore chunky silver cufflinks at the wrists of his finely pressed pink button-down shirt, which made me smile. For a televangelist and best-selling author with a thick, unapologetically Southern accent, Charles “Chuck” Mathison had a lot of class.
My brother and I had given him those cufflinks for his fortieth birthday. Our mother had helped us pick them out at a jewelry store in Kitzbuhel while we were on a skiing vacation. It never ceased to be weird to see my father on TV, the same guy that I spoke to almost every night on the phone, preaching to his thousands of viewers with the same patient, but firm, voice with which he counseled me. That afternoon’s televised sermon, about my generation’s preoccupation with wealth and fame, was a topic close to my father’s heart. My father was disgusted with reality television, gossip magazines, and anything that promoted the idea that people who weren’t famous didn’t matter. Which, one could argue, was a little hypocritical, considering that Chuck Mathison was a household name.
Whenever I flew home to Phoenix for school breaks, I was sure to avoid making mention of any celebrity gossip I might have picked up in the halls of Treadwell. I never let the television remote linger on a gossip news show about any young starlets, or even worse, music videos. There was no worse feeling on earth than the one I felt whenever my father cast a disapproving glance in my direction. My father believed that everyone my age aspired to be nothing more than rap stars or models; that we were an entire generation with shallow goals that would surely be the moral downfall of our nation.
“God, turn off that crap, Gracie,” my roommate muttered upon entering our room. Juliette was usually somewhat tolerant of my dad’s broadcast on weekends, but four weeks into the beginning of our sophomore year, she was the crankiest I’d ever known her to be. Sunday afternoons were the only time I dared to watch my dad’s show on cable in the suite we shared. She didn’t know that I also listened to his satellite radio program every morning before classes while I was running laps at the track. It was bad enough that girls in my classes hissed under their breath about my being some kind of religious freak; I really didn’t need any rumors being started about my also having some kind of unhealthy obsession with my father.
I dutifully responded by turning off “The Christian Power Hour with Chuck Mathison,” and returned my attention to my biology textbook. It was early October and mid-terms were just two short weeks away. Unlike my freshman year, when I was so excited to be away from home for the first time at Treadwell that I dreaded a break in my new-found freedom, I was finding myself feeling pretty homesick my sophomore year. I was looking forward to a week at home in Arizona after mid-terms for a number of reasons.
For starters, my art teacher, Ms. DiMico, had nominated me to submit a sketch to a national contest for a student show that would exhibit finalists at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As soon as she had mentioned it to me, I had been unable to concentrate fully on anything other than my sketchpad, which was not a good thing, because I was grappling with every subject in my class schedule – biology, trigonometry, Spanish II – other than Visual Arts Survey. The Empire State Emerging Artists competition allowed submissions by invitation only, and the fact that Ms. DiMico thought that I had enough talent to represent all of Treadwell Academy was both exciting and terrifying… but mostly terrifying.
On top of scholastic attention span issues, my roommate Juliette, with whom I had been best friends during freshman year, had become increasingly irritable and short-tempered with me. When Juliette and I had first met and become friends, she had been the kind of girl who was never in a bad mood. She could laugh off anything from a stubbed toe to a humiliating public break-up. Her parents were loaded, I mean, filthy rich, but you would never know it to hear her talk about her lifelong dream of becoming a veterinarian. There were a lot of girls at our boarding school who knew they could coast through life on their parents’ coat tails after graduation, but Juliette was really down to earth.
After being a little lax over the summer in my running training, I had returned to the Treadwell campus expecting to be the track team star, only to find out that Alyssa Ackerman’s father had hired a private trainer for her over the summer. She was peeling away my records from freshman year week by week, and was quite literally leaving me in her dust. Sophomore year was turning out to completely suck, and I missed my parents and our ranch. Even sharing a room with Juliette in the Colgate dorm, which was cleaner and fancier by far than our freshman rooms across the courtyard in the Rutherford dorm had been, was turning out to be a let-down because of Juliette’s frequent dark moods.
Juliette huffed and puffed and dug through our shared closet. From beneath a pile of shoes, she procured one of her larger suitcases, and set it open on her bed. She began placing underwear and t-shirts from her dresser into the suitcase, and then pairs of jeans from the closet.
“Are you going somewhere?” I asked, not wanting to incur more of her wrath.
“I’m sure you’ll hear all about it soon enough,” Juliette snapped.
Something about Juliette’s tone suggested that I was partially to blame for whatever events had led to her foul state of mind. I decided to ignore her for my own safety. I had other friends at Treadwell, but when Juliette was snubbing me I took it particularly personally. She was somewhat more popular than I was with girls in the junior and senior classes, and I knew that I was only welcome in certain circles if I was her guest. Some girls at Treadwell attend because their parents are rich, or famous, or they have won some kind of rare and amazing merit-based scholarship. Others, like me, are here because their parents are financially well-off and famous. And when surrounded by girls whose parents are models, singers, actors and investment bankers, being the daughter of the cable television evangelist gains a girl a little notoriety, and not necessarily positive notoriety.
I would be lying if I were to say that the rumors on campus that my father was a phony hick and that I was a Jesus freak didn’t hurt my feelings. Juliette knew the real me, and had sought out my friendship despite the nasty comments whispered occasionally in my direction in hallways.
Juliette was a lot of fun, but I felt comfortable around her because she never crossed any line I wouldn’t. We laughed our faces off when she pinched an unopened bottle of Chardonnay from a formal brunch thrown for the parents of prospective students. We felt like rock stars keeping it in its secret location on the top shelf of our closet. But stashing it there also terrified me a little. I had never had alcohol other than wine at church. Juliette often joked about cracking open that bottle of wine, but was always quick to mention that she would never be lucky enough to find a corkscrew on campus. That was her thoughtful way of protecting me, since you didn’t have to be especially lucky or smart to find a corkscrew or bottle opener anywhere on the Treadwell campus.
The thing I liked most about Juliette was that she was completely open-minded about me and my family. She had come home with me the previous spring for Spring Break, and I had initially feared that she would freak out about my father’s kind of corny way of praying before he did anything (he said a prayer of thanks before putting on socks in the morning to thank the Lord that he had found a matching pair, a prayer of thanks that the horses were healthy while he was cleaning horse dung out of the stables … honestly, sometimes it was a bit much). I considered that there would be a chance she would return to the Treadwell campus and spread hurtful rumors about our ranch, which is referred to in magazines as a compound, or about the people who line up at the gates of our property begging for my father to come outside and bless them.
But Juliette didn’t do either of those things. She respectfully bowed her head when my father led prayer before meals. She put on rubber gloves like me and
my mom and worked in the soup kitchen that we operated at the largest of my father’s churches in Phoenix, and doled out tapioca pudding without a single complaint. She was a great friend, someone I considered to be like a sister, since I didn’t have any sisters of my own.
With an impatient sigh and not even a goodbye, Juliette marched out of our dorm room, slamming the door behind her, carrying with her a tightly-stuffed Vuitton rolling suitcase. I sat silently for a moment with my book open, allowing her angry energy to dissipate. One thing at Treadwell I could never get used to was the disruptive nature of anger; my own family was completely devoid of temper tantrums. I was ill-equipped to suffer through the bad moods, cat fights and open hostility that raged through the dorm halls. When I was fairly sure she was not going to hastily push the door back open again and continue yelling, I turned my laptop on with the intention of watching the rest of my father’s sermon on his website to restore a little peace to my afternoon.
However, I was stunned when my eye caught a news caption on my web browser’s default homepage:
Northeast Ponzi Scheme Unravels:
Santangello Indicted for Embezzling Billions
Beneath the sensational headline was a photograph of a man I recognized. Thick dark hair, the shine of a balding head peeking through on top, handsome dark eyes, creased in the corners… He had been photographed scowling and rounding a corner on Wall St., followed by a small army of financiers in expensive suits. Something about his face appeared to be familiar and then it hit me like walking into a brick wall: he was Juliette’s father.
Suddenly her short temper and that afternoon’s maelstrom all made perfect sense. I devoured the article, barely able to breathe as my mind deciphered the letters forming words. Her father had been under investigation for the last six months. The federal government was accusing him of swindling billions – billions – from his investors.
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