I was doing a good job. I managed to get us back to the hotel parking lot in one piece, parked the car and marveled at not having had a heart attack during the experience once the engine was off. I was still shaking from nerves. I promised myself that I would never get into a driver's seat again until I had an actual driving teacher in the car with me.
Then the real trouble began.
Once we set foot inside the hotel's front doors, we ran into none other than Brice Norris.
"Well, look at you, Miss Taylor!" he greeted me. "Looks like you got a little sun today."
"She got a little drunk, too," Bijoux purred, putting an arm around my shoulders. Which was actually untrue. I had been completely sober when I had gotten into the driver's seat.
"Nice to see you again, Bijoux," Brice said with a smile, pecking her on the cheek. "I was on my way to the lounge to meet my boys for a few cocktails. Would you girls care to join me?"
Before I had a chance to say no, Brice took me gently by the hand. Bijoux raised an eyebrow at me as if to suggest that maybe Brice was into me. The rest of Sigma was already seated at the busy hotel lounge, raising beers in a toast. Brice ordered us gin and tonics at Bijoux's suggestion, and I temporarily forgot that twenty stories above us in the hotel suites, my father and his wife were probably taking delight in devising the ways in which they would punish me for disappearing all evening with the Norfleet sisters.
Maybe, I reasoned, just maybe, I wouldn't be in any trouble at all. It was true that Jill had encouraged me to spend the day with the sisters. So it could be reasoned that my consumption of cocktails at that late hour was actually Jill's fault.
Brice took me with him back up to the bar to order a second round for the group. He had his hand on the small of my back and was standing very close to me. His cologne smelled like a musky, exotic sandalwood, and he had a thick layer of stubble on his otherwise boyish face. He was either still wearing his stage makeup, or had fallen into a habit of wearing eyeliner offstage.
"Are you still having a good summer?" he asked, breathing a little heavily in my ear. His breath stank a little like stale alcohol.
When I turned to respond to him, I noticed that most of the guests in the lounge were pretty well-dressed, and that the Norfleets and I stuck out rather noticeably in our sloppy flip flops and bikini bottoms. "Yes," I said, feeling dizzy for the first time all day from too much sun and not enough water.
"I have a special feeling about you, Taylor," Brice whispered, and suddenly his lips were on my neck.
It felt good, but not in the way that it had felt when it had been Jake kissing me like that. I pushed Brice away as the bartender brought us our cocktails, and suddenly everything turned horribly wrong.
"Taylor," I heard my name spoken in a stern voice and turned to see my dad standing behind me and Brice.
Brice's hands were off me in a nanosecond and it wasn't until he removed them that I realized they had been firmly planted on my hips.
"Sorry, Chase," Brice muttered, moving away from the bar quickly, abandoning his drinks. "Sorry, man."
I cowered. My dad looked so angry it seemed possible that he might explode into gory pieces right there in the hotel bar.
"I'd like you to get your behind upstairs this instant," my father growled lowly so as not to create a scene. I could see Bijoux and Betsey across the lounge giggling into their hands and squirming because they had noticed my dad's arrival to discipline me.
As I exited the lounge I tried to pull my t-shirt down lower to more sufficiently cover my butt. Once we were in the hotel lobby and a safe distance from the sultry cocktail lounge, my father could contain his rage no longer.
"Just what in the hell do you think you're doing?" my father bellowed.
"Dad," I began, not sure to how begin my most successful chance for defense.
"Driving intoxicated? You don't even have a license, Taylor!" he yelled.
I noticed the concierges behind the desk attempting to look busy and not overly interested in this public argument. I wondered how on earth my dad knew I had been driving the Mercedes when we arrived back at the hotel. Did he have spies planted everywhere, even in the hotel parking lot?
"I couldn't let Bijoux drive," I stammered. "She was drinking all afternoon."
"Oh, so you decided to take matters into your own hands and put your life and the lives of others at risk? Good thinking, Taylor. I thought you were a lot smarter than that," my father berated me.
I was mortified. I had no idea he was so skilled at not only expressing anger but humiliating his target, as well.
"What was I supposed to do?" I yelled back, on the brink of tears.
"Did it even occur to you to call someone and ask for help?" He threw his hands in the air as if he were about to clap very loudly.
"Who would I call?" I screamed. I turned and took a few steps toward the elevator in an attempt to end the public spectacle. "You were on a stage! Jill would just yell at me!"
"There are no less than twenty people with us on this tour who you could have called," my father hollered. "What you did was just thoughtless and selfish."
Selfish! Thoughtless! I couldn't believe he would dare use those words with me mere days after what I had observed going on in his dressing room. I knew that the cocktail I had just consumed was loosening my tongue. When I am angry, the best thing for me to do is keep quiet, but somehow my mouth kept opening and words kept pouring out.
"Wow, you really want to go into thoughtless and selfish, Dad? Those are adjectives I could easily apply to someone else's behavior."
Out of the corner of my eye just then, I noticed the worst thing possible. Jake, carrying a huge cardboard box, was trying to slip through the lobby without me noticing him. But of course I did see him, and I was fairly certain that he knew that I had seen him.
"You are fifteen years old, Taylor," my father reminded me, so angry that his voice was trembling. "This is a discussion about the fact that you are underage – drinking and driving – and fooling around with intoxicated men far older than you – and there is no excuse in the world that you can use to get out of being in serious, serious trouble. Goddamnit! And just… what in the hell kind of outfit are you wearing?"
I cringed and seriously prayed that Jake had been out of earshot before my father made reference to Brice's hands being all over me. I reached the elevator bank with my father right behind me, and punched the UP button in the wall.
"What about Bijoux and Betsey?" I demanded. "You and Jill told me to spend the day with them. You thought it would be nice for me to spend some time with girls my own age. This is what girls my own age do all day when they have thousands of dollars to waste, Dad. In case you didn't know."
The elevator arrived, the doors open, and I stormed inside and stood in the back corner with my arms crossed over my chest. A middle-aged woman in a business suit also boarded the elevator and awkwardly smiled at both of us, aware that she was intruding on a very tense moment. I noticed, with a little annoyance, that my dad and I were both so angry that we were huffing and puffing in unison. Like father, like daughter.
There was no point in trying to convince my dad that I had initially tried to avoid drinking. Making the case that I had prevented myself and the Norfleets from ending up in a sleazy motel with a bunch of college guys was probably also not going to get me out of any hot water. My whole life of being a goody two-shoes wasn't going to spare me from my dad's wrath because those fifteen years of good behavior couldn't undo one rotten night of dumb choices.
"Bijoux and Betsey are not my daughters," my dad said, trying to calm himself on the ride up to our floor after the third occupant of the elevator stepped off and bade us goodnight. "I thought you had more sense than this, Taylor. I don't even know what to do with you at this moment. You don't even see the wrong in what you've done."
The elevator doors opened on our floor and I pushed past him to step off first. As I strode down the hall I snapped back, "First you don't want
me at the hotel, you don't want me practicing violin. You don't want me going off on my own, you don't want me at the hospital with Kelsey, and now you don't want me hanging out with kids my own age. Why did you want custody of me? You don't want anything to do with me!"
I realized once I reached the door to our suite that I didn't have a key card, which was a big hindrance to my raging desire to slam a door.
Dad used his key card to open the door to the suite and told me quietly, "We can finish this discussion in the morning when you've had a chance to sober up."
"FINE!" I screamed, and crossed the suite to my bedroom.
Only I didn't slam the door once I got there, because Kelsey had already been put to sleep in the room's second queen-sized bed, and as angry as I was, I knew it would be the start of a nuclear war if I woke her up.
I tore off Bijoux's stupid red string bikini and put on my pajamas. Even after I was motionless in bed for ten minutes in the dark, my ears were still ringing and my heart was racing with adrenaline from fighting with my father. And from seeing Jake and having him witness my father blowing his temper at me.
I could hear my father and Jill speaking in hushed tones in the other room. For reasons I couldn't comprehend, I was suddenly extremely scared that Jill knew all of the reasons why my father was upset with me in that moment. I strained my ears to be able to hear what he was telling her.
"…sunburned to a crisp and having cocktails at the hotel bar with Brice Norris drooling all over her," I heard my dad grumbling in the suite's living room.
And then, shockingly, I heard Jill giggling at him.
"Well, then. She's a normal teenage girl after all. I was beginning to wonder," I heard Jill say.
"This is not funny, Jill," my father corrected her.
I was afraid he was going to go on to tell her about the driving part, or that she already might have known about it, but to my shock, it wasn't mentioned.
"It is funny," Jill insisted. "Did you think having a teenage daughter was going to be a walk in the park?"
There was a long silence and then I heard my father say, "I am going to kick Brice Norris' ass tomorrow."
I drifted off to sleep, and in the morning woke up with the most killer headache I had ever had in my life.
CHAPTER 9
My father found me the next morning after his workout. I was stretched out near the hotel's smaller of two pools in an attempt to try to avoid Bijoux and Betsey. My father sat down in the lounge chair next to mine and cleared his throat.
"So, Taylor," he began. "I hope you have had a chance to think over the actions you took yesterday. I've talked things over with Jill and we're in agreement that you deserve to be grounded."
Grounded. Ha! Grounded at a luxury hotel. Rather than inform my father that his idea of a punishment was hilarious, I allowed him to continue.
"Uh, OK," I said.
"For the next four weeks you are not to leave our hotel suite, you are not to join the rest of the tour for meals, and you are not to attend any shows," my father informed me.
I listened on, eager to hear what else he thought he could take away from me. Moments during which I could step outside the hotel suite were really the only kind of freedom I had. And at the end of the next four weeks it would be August; the tour would be nearing its end back in Los Angeles and I'd be packing my bags for Treadwell.
"Cell phone calls for no more than five minutes," he added, as if anyone had been calling me recently.
"OK," I agreed. I stood up, stretched, and picked up my beach towel, ready to follow him up to the suite for my harsh punishment to begin.
"Look, Taylor, I'm sorry to have to do this to you," he said, and it sounded like he truly was. "Maybe I was stupid to think it would be all right to expose you to so much freedom all at once. I don't want our summer to be like this. I want you to be able to have fun but I need to be able to trust you."
"OK, Dad," I said. "Lecture over, please. I know I let you down yesterday. I'm sorry. But please do not ask me to spend time with your friends' kids. I don't want to be called a loser just because I don't want to do what everyone else is doing."
On the walk back up to the hotel suite, I mulled over the possibility that this weak punishment of my father's concoction might seriously obstruct my next steps with Jake. If there were even going to be next steps.
I also anguished over knowing the fact that I still had not really confronted him about his backstage behavior. I wondered if I would ever find the nerve to address that or if knowing about it was just going to be an ongoing part of my relationship with my dad.
Once we reached the hotel room, my father presented me with a gift. It was a brand new laptop. Someone really needed to give him some lessons in punishment technique, because although I had never really been grounded before, I knew that usually groundings are not accompanied by expensive electronic presents.
"Jill thought it might be good for you to be able to keep in touch with your friends from school," Dad said.
Spending the afternoon stuck in the hotel suite with a brand new laptop turned out to produce the most enjoyable few hours I had passed on the tour yet. I emailed Riddhi a short note, knowing that she was with her family in Mumbai visiting her grandmother that summer. Using the Treadwell student directory, I also emailed my roommate Ruth, who was in San Francisco enjoying a summer with her mother and stepbrothers, and a girl named Erin who played cello in the junior symphony.
To my surprise, within an hour Riddhi wrote back a long note expressing remorse over my mom's death. Her summer had been drama-filled, too. When she had arrived in India with her family they had quickly come to realize that her grandmother, who lived in a large house in a wealthy part of Mumbai accompanied by trusted family servants, was likely suffering the onset of Alzheimer's. Her parents were desperately trying to determine the best course of action; they didn't want to leave Riddhi's grandmother or the house in Mumbai unattended, but they didn't want to uproot their lives in Vermont to relocate to India, either.
Riddhi felt very strongly that her parents should relocate permanently to Mumbai so that her grandmother could remain in the family's ancestral home. She felt like her parents were acting irresponsibly and selfishly. It struck me as funny that she was on the other side of the world having the exact same realization as I was: that parents aren't any better at making decisions than kids.
I really missed Riddhi. Unlike Allison, who was a lightning rod for gossip and needed constant self-esteem boosting assurance, Riddhi was steadfast and even-keeled. She was always a voice of reason at Treadwell, someone who was almost matronly in her practicality. The previous year Riddhi had dressed as a slut for Halloween and couldn't understand why the rest of us laughed uncontrollably at her, in her costume of fishnet stockings and smeared lipstick.
"What, too much?" she had asked innocently.
By dinnertime on my first day of grounding my father was already bending his own rules, assuming (correctly) that it was less enjoyable for me to eat dinner with Jill and him than to order room service alone in the hotel suite. There was no show that night, so a limo would be taking us to one of the fanciest restaurants in Virginia Beach, and Jill ordered me to get dressed even though I was already fully clothed. Scowling, I changed into pink tiered tank top and a pair of white jeans.
"Cute," Jill complimented me, and added, "Oh! I have something that would make it even cuter."
She dug through her suitcase and pulled out a wild fuchsia scarf with fringe and sequins on it, and looped it loosely around my neck. It was definitely not my style, and when I looked in the mirror I barely recognized myself. The sunburn I had earned myself the day before had faded into the deepest tan I had ever had in my life. My hair was a good two inches longer than it had been when I left Treadwell at the start of May, and sun-bleached on top, too. I was both pleased and ashamed to admit, the celebrity lifestyle was agreeing with me.
Dad was in an irritatingly happy mood throughout dinner, tucking his lob
ster bib into his collar and grinning like a goon at Jill, Kelsey and me. "Now this is my idea of a good time," he said, knife and fork in his fists on the table. "A night out with all my girls."
I squirmed to keep myself from mentioning the other girls, the Pounders and backstage groupies.
The restaurant was unbelievably decadent and romantic. Huge floor-to-ceiling windows opened to the gentle rolling waves lit by moonlight just a few yards away. There was an outdoor deck where a fire pit roared, crackling and warming the night air as diners clinked wine glasses and laughed about how beautiful the weather was. I longingly looked out toward the ocean, wishing that I might have an afternoon to return to the beach and collect shells before we boarded the bus again and headed to North Carolina.
I couldn't help but imagine what it might be like to dine at a restaurant like this with a boyfriend instead of with my dad and his wife and a wiggling little girl who was asking why there was a fire outside. Or more specifically, what it might be like to be here with Jake, who in all reality would probably hate having to dress up and eat dinner in a fancy restaurant. But in my fantasy he would indulge me, just for one night, and comb his hair and put on a suit and tie. And we would giggle at the other patrons and feed each other strawberries…
My day dream was rudely interrupted by my younger half-sister, who had apparently been informed of my grounding by either my dad or Jill.
"Taylor's in trouble," Kelsey informed the waiter, who looked at me, surprised, for confirmation.
"He doesn't care, Kelsey," I grumbled at her. "Just tell him what you want to eat."
"She was a bad girl and got in trouble," Kelsey continued, giggling and throwing her hands over her mouth. She knew perfectly well that she was saying something she had been told not to repeat.
"That's enough, Kelsey," my dad told her. He turned his attention toward the waiter. "She'll be having the spaghetti."
Jill grilled the waiter about whether or not he could confirm that the vegetable risotto she was ordering was made without butter, which was on her list of unacceptable foods. Dad and I both ordered surf and turf.
The Rock Star's Daughter (The Treadwell Academy Novels) Page 11