Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Beckett
I’m woken by the rumble of a car engine and shouts of laughter at four in the morning. Fucking Daisy.
I open the security app on my phone and watch her sauntering to the front door. She looks up at the camera with a ghost of a smile on her face and blows a kiss as if she knows I’m watching.
Her eyeliner is smudged, her hair looks windblown, and she’s wearing an ugly mustard-yellow cardigan over her dress that does nothing to detract from her beauty.
Where was she all this time? Did she end up with the guy she was dancing with? Did she get naked for him and let him fuck her?
She looks up at the camera with her bottom lip clamped between her teeth and holds up her hands, wiggling her fingers. As usual she has no phone, and it looks like she has no keys either. But I stay right where I am and watch her back away from the door, and then she spins and walks away.
No doubt she’ll try to get in through the French doors, but I’ve locked them from the inside, so she’ll be shit out of luck on that front too.
Not my problem.
I close the app and try to fall back asleep but I’m wide awake now so after fifteen minutes, I give up and pull on a pair of sweatpants.
I descend the stairs, cursing Daisy as I flick the switch for the hallway light and unlock the French doors.
She’s curled up on the rattan sofa, already fast asleep. She looks young and vulnerable, like the little girl I taught how to ride a bike. The little girl who invented games and always asked if I would play them with her.
She used to ask me to read to her, and whenever she’d try to sound out the words, they always came out wrong.
Daisy was always precocious and had seemed so much smarter than other kids her age, so I thought it was just another one of her games until one day she got frustrated and threw the book down.
She glared at me for laughing and crossed her arms over her chest. “Don’t laugh at me! My teacher called me lazy and said I need to try harder,” she fumed. “But I try harder than all the other kids.”
After I moved away, I wondered if anyone was there to help Daisy learn how to read. I got the feeling no one would notice or care.
And I don’t fucking want to care about her now. She’s not a child anymore. She’s twenty-five years old. An adult who is old enough to look after herself.
But I’m not completely heartless so I cover her with a blanket from the living room and leave the French doors unlocked before climbing the stairs.
“Hey, Beckett.” I glance over at Lauren standing outside her bedroom in a matching pajama set. Dark glossy hair falls around her shoulders and even at this hour, it’s still perfect. “Is everything okay?”
I push my hand through my hair. “Yeah, it’s all good. I was just checking on a noise I heard downstairs.”
She smiles. “I heard someone coming home.” She looks down the hallway then back at me. “I guess it was Daisy?”
I nod. Who else but the troublemaker? The very bane of my existence.
“Well…goodnight again.” She hesitates, and I think she’s hoping I’ll stop her from going into her own room, but I don’t. Even if she wasn’t looking for a relationship, there’s no chemistry and that’s not something you can fake.
So I close my door and try to fall back asleep but instead, I end up staring at the ceiling, thinking about the one girl in this house who does make me hard.
On a whim, I snatch my phone off the bedside table, and type Daisy Maja into the search bar. A few days ago, I signed for a delivery addressed to that name. Daisy’s middle name is May like her birth month, so maybe it’s a play on that? Who the fuck knows.
I’m not expecting to find anything, so I’m surprised when her Instagram account is the first one to show up. I’m even more surprised that she hasn’t made it private.
And would you look at that? I’ve just stumbled on her alias.
It looks as if she stopped posting to this account years ago, but her teen years are well-documented, so I scroll down to the bottom and start at the beginning.
The first photo is the Santa Monica pier.
I keep scrolling through photos of kids hanging out at the beach, teenage boys at a skate park, and a photo of Daisy riding a skateboard. She’s wearing cutoffs and a Nirvana T-shirt, her skin tan, and her hair sun-bleached. She looks like she’s around thirteen in the photo. Still just a kid with long skinny limbs and no curves yet, but she was already beautiful.
Scrolling through her Instagram is like watching her grow up right before my eyes as she transitions from early teens to her later teens.
I stop at a photo of Daisy kissing a guy who appeared in other photos.
The caption reads: Would you take a bullet for me, baby?
Her Instagram feed has the same dreamlike, vintage look as the photos taped to her wall—ethereal, muted, infused with pink.
I don’t know if they’re her friends or just random teens in the photos, but she’s captured youth in all its beauty and complexity and bravado.
Girls posing on a beach in bikinis with their heads cut off.
Life…through the lens of the male gaze.
Kids running from the cops down an alley where a homeless man is sleeping next to his dog.
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled…do better, America.
A girl with dark hair in a torn green dress curled into the fetal position by the side of a crystal blue swimming pool, her red lipstick smeared.
Boys will be boys…are we still buying that bullshit?
A guy with his head thrown back, hands clenched into fists at his sides with a black eye and a bruise on his cheekbone. A cloud of smoke hovers above his head from the cigarette clamped between his lips. He’s shirtless, jeans ripped and torn with holes in the knees, and the American flag draped around his shoulders.
Freedom…just another word for nothing left to lose. Celebrating the red, the white, the black and blues.
It’s the same guy she was kissing, one of the kids from the skate park who looked like trouble, and I can’t help but wonder if this is Finn.
Her last post is a photo of three duffel bags on the curb in front of a taco place.
Time to blow this taco stand. Goodbye, Santa Monica dream. If it was just a dream, why did it feel so real?
I check the date. It was posted eight years ago in July.
When Daisy was just barely seventeen.
I end up going down the Daisy Maja rabbit hole, clicking links like an online gambler in need of a fix.
Daisy got her big break at fifteen when she won a photo contest, and her work was featured in Teen Vogue .
According to an interviewer, Daisy is a “wunderkind,” a “prodigy” commissioned to shoot her first campaign for Converse at fifteen, had her first solo exhibit at seventeen, and shot campaigns for major brands before she’d even finished high school.
When she was eleven, she “borrowed” her stepdad’s Olympus OM10, which is still her favorite camera to shoot with, and she’s been documenting her life and the world around her ever since.
I click on a photo Daisy is tagged in and such is the power of the internet that it takes me directly to Finn. John Finnegan is the drummer for Ash Tuesday.
He has an aversion to wearing shirts, he’s been arrested on possession charges twice, and under a photo of him and Daisy sitting on the roof of a car with the desert in the background the caption reads: My ride or die. I’d take a bullet for you, baby.
I check the date—it was posted four days after Daisy’s photo of the duffel bags in front of the taco stand.
After clicking on her book of annotated photos and adding it to my cart, I throw my phone down in disgust and scrub my hand over my face.
What the fuck is wrong with you?
I have better things to do than stalking Daisy like a tween with a crush.
I change into running clothes, jog down the stairs, and bolt out the door just as the sun is rising.
Normally, running clears my head and frees me from distractions but not today.
The more I learn about Daisy, the more certain I am that my father is laughing at me from the grave.
If he wanted to punish me further, he couldn’t have found a better way than to force me to be in close proximity with Daisy Fucking Larsson.
As I run, my feet pounding the gravel road and the pale morning sunshine filtering through the leafy branches, I keep trying to remind myself of all the reasons why I should hate her. But my mind keeps reverting to all the reasons I shouldn’t.
Those damn duffel bags on the curb.
The look on her face when I sat across from her at that burger joint and she told me her mother left.
At barely seventeen, Daisy was out there on her own fending for herself with some shirtless asshole.
Driving across the country in a beat-up junker that looked as if it wouldn’t make it to the next gas station let alone across the desert.
Would you take a bullet for me, baby?
Even as a little girl, Daisy was only ever looking for one thing, the one thing her mother wasn’t capable of giving. Love.