ONE
CHAPTER
July, a Saturday night
I was drunk.
Drunk dialing, I thought. Not just for ex-boyfriends anymore.
I snorted a laugh. It came out more like a sob and echoed around the stairwell.
I sat in the dark, narrow space, knees pulled up, trying to make myself small.
Invisible. On the other side of the cement wall, I could hear the muffled shouts and whistles of three thousand people waiting for Rapid Confession to take the stage.
Our manager, Jimmy Ray, had given us the ten-minute cue a good twenty minutes ago and my bandmates were probably looking for me.
I took a sip from my Evian water bottle, three-quarters filled with vodka—because I’m clever like that—and contemplated my phone.
I dared myself to call. I warned myself not to; to just put it away and join the band in the green room.
We’d hit the stage, play for yet another sold-out show.
I’d get hell famous, make some serious money and continue to screw a different guy every night.
Because, rock and roll .
What a joke. I wasn’t rock and roll. I looked the part, especially tonight in my miniskirt, thigh-high boots and bustier.
My hair—bleached to almost white—curled around my shoulders in pin-up girl perfection.
My lips painted red and my eyes lined in black.
Tattoos decorated my skin, adding to the impression of a grunge rock chick, but they weren’t part of the costume. They were mine.
I looked the part, but I felt like a piece of glass, shattered and scattered all over. I didn’t know who or what I was anymore, but I glittered prettily in the spotlight.
I took another sip of vodka and nearly dropped my phone. I fumbled to catch it and when I lifted it up, I saw I’d hit that big green call button.
“Shit ...”
Slowly, I put the phone to my ear. My mother answered on the third ring.
“Hello, Dawson residence.”
My heart dropped into my stomach. My jaw worked but I couldn’t make any sound come out.
“Hello?”
“I…”
“Hello, may I help you?”
She’s going to hang up!
“Hey, Mom. It’s me. Kacey.”
“Cassandra.”
I hated that name and hadn’t used it for years. But wrapped around those three syllables, I heard the relief in my mother’s voice. I heard it.
“Yeah, hi!” I said brightly, too loudly. “How uh…How are you guys?”
“We are fine,” she said. Her voice was hushed now, as if she didn’t want to be overheard. “Where are you calling from?”
“Las Vegas,” I said. “Because we’re on tour. Me and my band? Rapid Confession? It’s a sold-out show tonight, our second night in a row. Actually, most of the shows on our tour have been sold out. It’s pretty great. We’re hitting the big time.”
“I am very happy for you, Cassandra.”
I heard my father’s influence behind my mother’s words, turning her into a goddamn robot spouting lines she’d been forced to memorize.
“And our latest single? ‘Talk Me Down’? Well….” I bit my lip. “It’s number six on the Billboard Hot 100. And I…Well, I wrote it, Mom. I mean, my band and I wrote it, but the words…they’re mostly mine. And ‘Wanderlust’? I wrote that one too. It’s number twelve on the charts.”
Nothing.
I swallowed. “How is Dad?”
“He’s fine,” my mother replied, her voice almost a whisper now.
“Is…Is he there?”
My mom sighed, a tiny exhalation. “Cassie… Are you safe? Are you taken care of?”
“I’m doing good, Mom,” I said. “And I’m a success. This band… We’re a hit.”
God, I hated this. The pathetic tone of my voice, the bragging of the band’s accomplishments, begging my mother to feel happy for our success when I hardly felt a thing myself, except the need to be loved.
It was like a hunger that was never sated.
A desperate starvation twisted and twined into my guts, tangled in ravenous knots I couldn’t unravel.
I could never quell that awful appetite. Only drown it in alcohol for a little while and try to puke it out the next day.
“Mom? Please, just tell Dad…”
“Cassie, I have to go.”
“Wait, can you put him on? Or just…Can you tell him you’re on the phone with me right now? Just do that, Mom. See what he says.”
Silence. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said finally. “He’s been…cheerful lately. No upsets. I don’t want to disturb him. ”
“Is he still mad at me?” I asked, my voice wavering. “It was four years ago, Mom. I’m not even with Chett anymore.”
Chett ditched me in Las Vegas four years ago, leaving me broke, heartbroken, and reeling. A cross-country tour, a record deal, countless one-night stands and two new tattoos later and here I was, a wayward kid again, begging her parents to forgive her.
I fought back the tears. “I told you this, Mom. But did you tell him? Did you ever tell Dad I was homeless and sleeping at the Y when he kicked me out? Homeless , Mom. I was fucking seventeen years old.”
I heard her swallow hard. Forcing down tears and emotions and everything she wanted to say but never would.
She hadn’t told Dad anything about me other than I was still alive, that she had heard from me and I was doing well.
She kept to her script, no matter how many times I begged her to try out some new material.
“You should have known better than to bring that boy home,” my mother said, mustering a little firmness. “You knew how it would upset your father.”
“Everything I did upset him,” I cried, my voice clanging around the stairwell.
“Nothing was ever good enough. Yeah, I knew bringing Chett home was a bad fucking idea, but I wanted to get caught. Do you know why, Mom? To force Dad to talk to me. And how goddamn sad is that? His own daughter. His own child. ”
“Cassandra, I have to go now. I’ll tell your father I heard from you, and—”
“That I’m doing well?” I finished. “Not well, Mom,” I snapped, and wiped my nose on the back of my hand. “We’re a fucking sensation. We’re the next big thing… ”
“You know I don’t care for all this foul language, Cassandra,” she said. Now her voice was turning to stone, walling me out. But I couldn’t stop.
“You tell Dad that, okay? You tell him I made it, and that I did it without his fucking help or approval or…or his goddamn roof over my head .”
“I’m going to hang up now, Cassandra.”
I sucked in a breath, instantly regretting every word. I needed to hear more of her voice.“Mom, wait. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry…”
The line was quiet, and I thought she’d hung up until I heard her draw in a shaky little breath.
I eased one of my own and closed my eyes. “I’m sorry. Tell Dad…” I swallowed down the tears. “Tell him I love him. Okay? Please?”
“I will,” she said, though I didn’t believe it. Not for a second.
“Thanks, Mom. And I love you too. How are—?”
“I have to get off now. Take care.”
The line went quiet for good.
I stared at my phone a few moments more.
A tear splatted onto its face, and I wiped it away with my thumb.
I thought about pressing the ‘call’ button again.
I could call her back and tell her I was sorry for swearing.
Or I could call back and say I wasn’t fucking sorry at all.
I was never calling again. I was as done with them as they were done with me.
Are they done with me?
The thought made my heart ache. No, not yet. My mother held on. She needed my phone calls. I knew that. But if I never called her again, she wouldn’t call me. I knew that too. She was still a bystander in her own child’s life.
I slumped against the concrete wall. I could hear the crowd on the other side growing restless. It sounded like a thunderstorm moving closer. If we didn’t take the stage soon…
I needed a smoke.
I pulled a battered soft pack of cigarettes from the top part of my thigh-high boot and lit it from a matchbook tucked into the cellophane.
I drew in deep, exhaled, and slumped lower against the wall, weighed down by all the tears I didn’t cry over the last four years.
They threatened to burst out now in my own thunderstorm.
I battled it all back, inhaled it hard, wrapped it in smoke and pressed it into my gut where it sat like a lead weight.
Dad won’t even talk to me.
I exhaled the thought back out. So what? Who cares what he thinks? He’s never given a shit in twenty-two years, why would he start now? Fuck him.
A brave speech, except I would’ve given anything to hear my dad’s voice, and not have it be laced with disappointment or anger. To hear him say he missed me or he loved me. To be told I could come home any time I wanted and the door would be open…
But he’d shut and locked that door, maybe forever, and the foundation on which I’d been built was crumbling to dust.
The crowd roared on the other side of the wall. They were clamoring for us. For me. They loved me.
And as Roxie Hart would say, I loved them for loving me.
I took another pull from my vodka and rose from my crouch just as Jimmy Ray busted through a door on the landing above mine, looking frantic and wound up.
Our manager was in his mid-forties with thinning hair. His suit—always Armani, since a mid-size label signed us three months ago—hung a bit loose over his lanky frame. His wild eyes landed on me, and he collapsed against the wall in exaggerated relief, his hand over his heart.
“Jesus, kitten, give me a coronary why don’t you? The gig was supposed to start half an hour ago.”
I ground out the cigarette under the heel of my boot and plastered a smile on my face. “Sorry, Jimmy. I had an important phone call. But I’m good now. Ready to kick ass.”
“Glad to hear it. This crowd is going eat us alive if we don’t get out there, a-sap.”
I moved past him, but he stopped me, his hand on my chin, studying my face.
“You been crying? ”
I sucked in a breath. Jimmy Ray wasn’t anyone’s idea of a father figure, but he’d been good to us. Good to me. I felt myself start to wilt under his kindness, wanting to tell him…
“Because your makeup is smeared,” he said. “Make sure you fix it before you go on, yeah?”
I nodded mutely.
“Thatta girl.”
He smacked my ass lightly, to get me moving, and followed me out of the stairwell, back to the green room where the rest of the band was waiting.