Finally she shakes her head a little and says, “I will never understand your grandmother.”
I almost blurt out, Grams? Why her? but it hits me that she thinks I know something I don’t. So I just bite my tongue and wait.
She cocks her head. “Where is she, anyway? Didn’t want to suffer through ‘that racket,’ am I right? So she sends two thirteen-year-old girls in alone? I can’t believe she brought you here.”
But instead of answering, I nod at the champagne glasses and turn it back on her with “Forget Grams. Where is he, huh?”
She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. “None of this is his fault.” Her eyes flutter open and she says, “I’ve made so many mistakes. So many mistakes.”
I frown at her. “I think Warren would agree with that.”
She studies me. “It’s so strange to hear you call him Warren.”
“Well, I sure wasn’t going to call him Dad—not until I found out who my real dad was. But it looks like I won’t have to worry about calling him that anyway.” And even though the last thing I wanted was for her to marry Casey’s dad, all of a sudden I’m mad. “Warren’s a nice guy. How could you come here with him and just dump him? What is wrong with you? How can you just discard people?”
She gives me a pleading look. “I didn’t mean for this to happen! It’s been fourteen years since I’ve seen him! Fourteen and a half! I thought I was over him! I thought I was in love with Warren! I wanted to resolve things so I could move on! Warren offered to come along for moral support, and we were going to make a Valentine’s weekend out of it, but … but then I saw him and it all came flooding back and Warren could tell and … and … oh, Samantha I’ve wasted so much time. So much life!”
I was used to my mom and her dramatic explanations. Her woe-is-me rationalizations for being a self-absorbed diva. But something in my brain hitched.
It was like a locomotive thought had backed into a train car thought—c-clank—then started pulling forward.
Fourteen years, she’d said. Fourteen and a half.
Why did the half even matter?
The locomotive starts gaining steam and makes me a little weak at the knees.
The half did matter.
I sort of stagger to a chair by the balcony wall, and over the wall I can see the stage below me—the flaming-heart House of Blues backdrop, the dimmed stage lights, the drum kit and amps and monitors and microphones, all behind the closed stage curtain.
There’d been background music playing between bands, but now it’s off and musicians are taking their positions onstage. I recognize Drumsticks and two other guys from the greenroom, and there are a couple of guys in black T-shirts zipping around connecting cables and delivering water bottles.
And when the T-shirt guys are done doing their thing, Drumsticks clicks his sticks and the band starts playing. And without anyone announcing the band or anything, the curtain goes up.
The music is loud, and it’s shaking my chest, and the crowd is whooping and cheering and then goes wild when out onto the stage walks Darren Cole with a guitar strapped over what he’d been wearing all day.
A fringed maroon jacket.
TWENTY-FOUR
It took longer than it should have to sink in—maybe because it was so hard to believe. Still, everything about it made sense. From the fourteen and a half years to the way Grams got all uptight when I’d sing “Waiting for Rain to Fall” to the bizarre trip to Las Vegas to why my mother had refused to talk to me about who my dad was.
I turn away from the stage to face her, and over the music I shout, “You were a groupie?”
“No!” she shouts back. “How can you even say that!” I look at her like, Du-uh, so she shouts, “He was my boyfriend!”
“Did he know about me?”
“No!”
“Well, does he now?”
“Yes!”
And because I still can’t believe it and just need to hear it from her, I shout, “So Darren Cole is my father.”
“Yes!”
“All this time, Darren Cole has been my father.”
“Yes!”
“So why couldn’t you tell me this?”
“Because I hadn’t told him!”
“And that was more important than answering me all those times I asked?”
“At first you were too young to understand! And then I … I didn’t want you to think I was a floozy!”
“So instead you let me think that my dad was an ax murderer or maybe a child molester or the leader of a cult in the backwoods of Oregon!”
“I never gave you any reason to believe any of those things!” She squints at me. “And Oregon? Why would I ever go to Oregon?”
“Because you were in love with a cult leader!”
“But Oregon?”
“Of everything I’ve said, that’s what you’re fixating on? Oregon?”
She does some doe-eyed blinking but doesn’t actually say anything.
“Look,” I shout at her, “when something doesn’t make sense, I try to make it make sense! People join cults! Trees grow! I can’t help it! You made my dad a deep dark secret, so of course I thought there was something awful about him! But no—you were embarrassed. It was something you were ashamed of! I should have known because it’s always about you!”
She holds her head and shouts, “We really cannot have this conversation now. Can we please wait until the concert’s over? Then we can discuss the whole thing.”
I just stare at her.
She wants me to wait for the concert to be over?
The concert is more important than talking to me?
Plus it’s so stupidly typical of Lady Lana to want to put off talking about this that I just get up and shout, “You know what? I need to go get my skateboard before someone steals it.”
“Your skateboard? Your skateboard is more important than seeing your dad perform?”
I stare at her. “Seeing that guy perform is more important than talking to me?”
“I am talking to you! But it’s impossible with music at this volume!”
“And this is the only place we can talk?”
She doe-eyes me again.
“See ya!” I shout, and even though she says, “Samantha!” I go out the door, and of course she doesn’t follow.
The farther away from the skybox I get, the madder I get. Here I’d spent the whole day trying to find my mother, and now all I want is to get away from her. And I really do want my skateboard. I’m dying to get on it and escape.
One of the Gorillas who’d cornered me in the skybox is stationed at the bottom of the stairs when I find my way down. “I need to go outside!” I yell over the music.
He gives me a single nod, then walks me over to the loading dock door that Heather and I had come through, keys in the unlock code, and lets me out. “You comin’ back?” he calls as I storm off.
“No!” I shout, which I know is really, really stupid, but I’m so crazed from everything that I don’t care if I’m locked out in the dark in Las Vegas.
Anything’s better than being with my mother.
Now, part of my brain is trying to tell me to slow down and quit being stupid, but the rest of me isn’t listening. I march up to the bushes, look in the wrong bushes, start to lose it because I think my stuff’s been stolen, see that it’s buried in the next bush over, about break down over that, then strap on my pack, grab my board, get to the sidewalk, and take off.
And really, I don’t know why I’m so upset. I mean, come on. My dad’s not a serial killer. Or a crazy cult leader. Or a priest.
He’s a rock star!
But … I didn’t want a rock star dad.
Well, okay. It was better than having him be a serial killer or a crazy cult leader or a priest, but what I really wanted was someone … normal. A guy who could figure out how to be a good dad.
That is so not a rock star.
Rock stars make rotten dads. They don’t have time for their kids, they have grou
pies galore, and they think they’re all that with their guitars and their hair and their stupid fringed maroon jackets.
Who wants that?
Especially when you’ve already got a diva mom?
Normally, riding my skateboard helps me think. I get all my frustrations out by pawing at the sidewalk and jumping curbs, which frees my mind to sort things out, think things out, and come up with a plan. But this time I could barely even see where I was going because I was crying.
I’m talking crying with hiccups.
And I guess I was over the legal limit of emotions for operating a skateboard, because I wound up doing something I’d never done while flying along dry-eyed—I caught a wheel on the edge of the walkway and went catapulting into some plants.
Plants that had just been watered.
So yeah. I was an emotional mess, and now I was a muddy mess, too. And all of a sudden I was just so tired that I couldn’t seem to do anything but sit there on wet plants and sob like someone had died.
Which was stupid.
Nobody had died!
Still, that’s what it felt like. And I was too jumble-brained to figure out why, so I kept sitting there sobbing like a poor pathetic idiot.
What made me finally get up was water soaking through the seat of my jeans. “Great!” I moaned. But being wet on the bottom at least made me quit the waterworks on top.
Until I picked up my skateboard out of the little ditch it had landed in.
Right away I saw that one of the front wheels was crooked. Loose. “Great!” I moaned again, and had to really fight the tears. And I was so mad at myself! After all the miles my board had carried me, I ran it into a ditch and broke it?
I tried to figure out if I could fix it, but that was hopeless, too. And there’s only so long you can stand around in the cold in the dark in a ditch looking at your poor broken skateboard before you decide to do something—anything—else.
So I started walking.
Not back the way I’d come.
Forward.
I didn’t know where I was going or what I was going to do, but somehow it felt like there was no going back. So I just walked and walked, lugging my poor broken skateboard around the huge Mandalay Bay property, thinking about how much worse things were now than they’d been before. It wasn’t just my skateboard—everything about my life felt broken. Instead of having more family, I felt like I had less. Grams and I were in a big fight, and after what I’d told Candi … well, there was no way I could fix that. And my mother was even more of a stranger than she’d been before, and my dad was someone who was definitely going to resent me, too.
I mean, what rock star wants to deal with some surprise kid?
Oh, by the way, Darren, she’s yours.
Can you say paternity test?
Or gold digger?
Plus, now I was stuck in a horrible showdown about whose problem I was. My mother’d already pushed me onto Grams, so obviously she didn’t want the responsibility. And it’s not like she’d sat me down and told me who my dad was and let me decide what I wanted to do about contacting him. No, she’d gone to Darren Cole—a guy she hadn’t seen in fourteen years—and dropped the bomb without even giving me a hint.
And she’d done it shortly after her stupid soap had been canceled!
Coincidence?
I don’t think so!
So yeah. Instead of feeling like I had more family, I felt like I had none. Like I’d lost what was left of my mother, the potential of a father, and Grams, all in one day.
And my skateboard was toast!
So I walked and moped and just felt lost. And so defeated. When I saw an empty bench on a walkway leading over to the big pyramid, I thumped onto it and sat and moped.
I was clueless about what to do. I was cold and exhausted, and I sure didn’t want to go back to the House of Blues, but the only other choice I had was going to Heather and Candi’s room at the MGM. The scary thing is, I would rather have done that, but something about choosing Heather and Candi over my mother made me feel like I’d hit rock bottom.
Plus, I didn’t feel like I could talk to Marissa about it. She would not get why it was the opposite of awesome. Not when her own dad was making the whole family miserable. My problems would look like a dream next to hers.
And Casey?
What was I going to say to him?
Uh, we need to get a new song.
I mean, we’d kissed to “Waiting for Rain to Fall.”
Dis-turb-ing!
Besides, I’d stood him up on Valentine’s Day.
What kind of rotten girlfriend was I?
Still, even thinking about talking to Casey gave me a glimmer of not being alone, so I looked at my watch, wondering if I should call.
“Eleven-thirty?!” I gasped.
Well, at least he’d be home. And since his mom and sister weren’t, there was no problem calling him this late.
So yeah, I wound up going back to Mandalay Bay.
Back through the lobby.
Back through the casino.
Back past the House of Blues box office and the Darren Cole poster.
Back around the corner and, this time, clear through the mini food court to the pay phone.
I’d decided that I’d start with I’m sorry. But I couldn’t seem to figure out what to say after that. So after standing around for five minutes worrying about it, I finally decide that I’m sorry is a good start and dial his home number.
It rings.
And rings.
And somewhere in the fuzz of my brain, it registers that my heart actually hurts.
And after two more rings, it turns into a deep, hard ache.
One that seems like it could actually kill me.
And when he doesn’t answer, I just slide to the floor, and there they come again.
Tears.
And I’m just sitting there crying, feeling so completely alone, when I hear a voice shout, “She’s right there!”
I look over, and there’s Heather with a Gorilla.
The same Gorilla who’d let me out the back door.
He comes racing over like he’s just found his long-lost puppy. “Are you hurt?”
I fling away the tears and grumble, “I’m fine.”
He snatches a walkie-talkie off his belt and steps away while Heather swoops in and says, “I can’t believe you’re out here crying! The guy in the fringed jacket was Darren Cole!”
“Yeah, I know.”
“So? No wonder your mother dumped my dad!” Then she gets all flushed and excited and swoony as she says, “Instead of moping out here, you should have come down in the pit with me. The concert was amazing. And the bass player is so hot!”
I look right at her. “You’re serious?” And suddenly I get that I’m going to have to deal with a whole new problem.
A huge one.
Heather Acosta thinks we should be friends.
Then I add, “The concert’s over?” because really, I feel like I’m in some weird Möbius strip where I’m on one side of time and everyone else is on the other.
The Gorilla puts out a hand, and I let him pull me to my feet. “I need to take you back inside. I can’t transmit from out here.”
“I don’t want to go back in there!”
“Please. I’m in deep sh—stuff for letting you out.”
“Why?”
“I just am, okay?”
So I let him nudge me along, through the restaurant, down the ramp, past the velvet rope, and down the hallway tunnel into a wide area with small tables crammed against a railing that’s a little bit above the dance floor. And while he’s on his walkie-talkie saying stuff like “I’ve got her” and “Will do,” Heather’s whispering, “Do you think we’ll get to go to the after-party?” and “Your mom’ll want to introduce you to him, right?” making it so I can’t really hear what the Gorilla on the other end is saying.
“I can’t believe this!” Heather squeals. “This has been the best night of my lif
e.”
Drumsticks is coming toward us, and when he’s close enough, Heather jets forward and says, “My name’s Heather, by the way, and the show was awesome.”
He nods and gives her a grin and says, “I’m Marko.” Then he looks at me with one eyebrow cranked. “Lana was really worried.”
I snort. “Yeah, right.”
The eyebrow cranks up a little higher, but he doesn’t say anything back. Instead, he tells the Gorilla, “Thanks, man. I’ll take it from here,” and leads us through a gate and onto the stage, where a small crew is coiling up cables and shuttling gear offstage. And while Heather’s all excited about being on the stage, I’m feeling totally awkward. I mean, I don’t know this Marko drummer dude, but obviously he knows Lady Lana.
And I guess he’s feeling a little awkward, too, ’cause he finally says, “I’ve been with Darren since the beginning. This is some surprise.”
“You can say that again,” I grumble.
He eyes me. “You didn’t know?”
“I tracked my mother down and figured it out myself. Tonight. In the skybox.”
His eyebrows go flying. “Whoa.” Then he grins and says, “Well, you must be pretty stoked.”
“No!” I snap at him. “I am not pretty stoked! I’m pretty ticked off!”
“What is going on?” Heather says through her teeth as we pass by the backstage curtains.
I practically bite her head off with “Nothing, okay?” but obviously there’s no avoiding the truth.
Especially since Drumsticks takes us into the greenroom.
And Darren Cole is standing right there.
TWENTY-FIVE
There are about a dozen people in the greenroom. All the Troublemakers, plus some women.
And the Diva.
The food trays are open and so are a bunch of bottles of champagne. And I guess everyone knew the situation, because the minute we walk through the door, the talking peters out until it’s dead quiet.
“That’s her?” Darren whispers to my mother.
Only he’s looking right at Heather.
Now, Heather’s dressed like … well, like she’s been to the best stores at the mall.
Me, I’m dressed like I’ve been to the thrift store.
Because I have.