The Rock Star's Daughter (16 page)

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 waiter nodded and said, "I'm a huge fan,
Mr. Atwood. I'll bring the appetizers out as soon as they're
ready."

Mid-way through dinner, I noticed while in
the ladies' room that I had managed to dribble butter onto Jill's
scarf despite my own nerdy plastic lobster bib. I sighed and rolled
my eyes at myself. Even the new, better-looking me was no less of a
slob than the previous non-famous iteration of me. Rather than even
attempt to blot the butter out of the delicate scarf in the ladies'
room, I took the scarf off my neck and wrapped it around my waist
like a loose belt. The fringe dangled around my legs, which was
probably not the most fashionable look, but I hardly cared.

When I returned to the table, luckily there
was a distraction preventing Jill from immediately noticing that I
had repurposed the scarf. Keith, surprisingly, appeared to be out
on some kind of a date. He and his middle-aged lady friend, who
looked a bit like a female version of Keith, had stopped by our
table to greet my dad and Jill. I took my seat, and was surprised
when Keith reached out to shake my hand as he and his guest were
leaving.

"Wonderful to see you, Miss Taylor, as
always," he said, looking me firmly in the eye as he shook my
hand.

Then, as his hand pulled away, it became
clear to me why he had insisted on the handshake. A small note, one
that had been folded a trillion times until it was a tiny triangle,
had been pressed into the palm of my hand. I let it fall to my lap,
and hoping that Jill and Dad had not noticed, and moments later let
my eyes fall downward to inspect it. My heart nearly skipped a beat
when I saw that my name was written on it. The note appeared at a
quick glance to be written on loose-leaf.

The handwriting definitely looked boyish.

When we stood to leave after dinner, I tucked
the note into the pocket of my jeans. My heart was beating so
loudly I thought for sure my father could hear it as we exited the
restaurant. All I cared about in that moment, more than anything
else in the whole world, was getting back to the hotel so that I
could read that note in private. The mere thought that Jake would
have something important enough to communicate to me that he would
take the drastic step of asking Keith to hand-deliver a note to me
made it difficult for me to breathe.

The second we stepped outside the restaurant,
however, we were mobbed by paparazzi and flashbulbs. It was yet
another reminder that my life had changed forever – even the most
boring family dinner was something that qualified for the top story
in the gossip pages.

"Give us some room, guys, thanks," my father
was a pro at being gracious and good-natured with paparazzi even
when he was not in the mood to have his picture taken.

Our limo pulled up to the restaurant and for
the entire ride back to the hotel, I sat quietly, hopefully, with
my hands folded over my knees.

Back at the hotel, sitting on the edge of the
tub in the bathroom that I shared with Kelsey, I unfolded the
note.

Dear Taylor,
it began.
I've heard
through the grapevine that you are grounded and can't leave your
hotel room. That really sucks. Can you find a way to let me know
how long you're grounded for? In three weeks when the tour moves to
Detroit there is something I want to show you. Jake.

I think I reread the note no fewer than six
hundred times. Technically I would still be grounded when we
arrived in Detroit. But how could I miss a chance to spend time
with Jake in his home town?

I tiptoed across the bedroom, as Kelsey was
already fast asleep in her bed, and withdrew several sheets of
hotel stationery from the desk in our room. Back in the bathroom, I
began composing my response. I confirmed that I was grounded and
added how sad I was that my grounding was going to prevent me from
going to the beach to collect seashells. I added that getting
grounded wasn't really my fault, and that I would make every effort
to break free in Detroit.

Then I read over the page I had just written,
and considered that Keith was probably nosy enough to read the
letter. After ten minutes of deliberating whether or not to tear up
my note and toss it in the toilet, I shrugged, folded it in the
same manner in which Jake had folded his, and wrote his name on
top.

The next morning, when Keith stopped by our
room to bring my father some of the stage plans for the show in
Cincinnati the following night, I handed him my note with a raised
eyebrow and he accepted it, no questions asked.

Moments later, when Tanya arrived and our
hotel suite became the band's business headquarters for the day,
she slid a print-out from her computer in front of me at the table
where I was picking at my yogurt.

"You're an internet superstar, kiddo," she
informed me.

I picked up the print-out and inspected it.
It was clearly a paparazzi shot from the night before, outside the
restaurant, and I cringed when I saw the scarf hanging around my
waist, forever preserved in a publicized image. I had managed to
rinse the butter from the scarf with warm water after obsessing
over my note from Jake, hoping that Jill had been oblivious to the
entire incident. What was most curious about the print-out that
Tanya had given me was that my dad wasn't in the picture at all. It
was a full-body shot, just of me.

"What is this?" I asked.

"It's from the Hollywoodland website," Tanya
said, as if I should know better. "The hottest celebrity gossip
site there is. You're a hit. There were almost two hundred comments
on that photo an hour ago when I printed it out."

I fought the immediate urge to go online and
find it for myself. But when I checked my email prior to us
boarding the bus bound for the overnight drive to Ohio after the
show in North Carolina, my new status as a fashionista had gone
international. Riddhi had found it on one of her favorite celebrity
gossip sites and had forwarded me the link with the email subject
line: OMG YR so famous!

The drive from North Carolina to Ohio was
long, and I was restless on the bus. Bijoux and Betsey were already
miles away from the Pound tour, soaring over the Atlantic in a jet
to Croatia, where they would be joining their mother and her rich
husband at a wealthy beachside resort for the remainder of the
summer. I reclined on one of the couches in the hope of snoozing
the night away, but my head was racing. I was tormented with
thoughts of whether or not Jake had yet received my note. From
where I was lying, I could see Keith stretched out in a reclined
seat, but his face gave away no clues.

We arrived in Cincinnati around four in the
morning. I gazed longingly out the window at all of the highway
signs that we passed announcing Cincinnati attractions I would
never see… the Cincinnati Zoo, King's Island, River Downs
Racetrack. We checked into the hotel on the city's outskirts in a
daze at dawn, the entire tour group mumbling and fumbling with
wallets and stumbling into the elevators. I finally fell asleep
when I climbed into bed and pulled a heavy comforter up to my ears.
The hotel bedroom smelled curiously of heavy cleaning solutions and
eucalyptus.

I slept til mid-morning. When I woke up I saw
that Kelsey had already abandoned her bed and I could hear the
typical noises of tour operations being handled from the living
room of our suite: Tanya tapping on her laptop keyboard, Keith
barking orders into his cell phone, Herschel leading Jill in an
impossibly complicated routine of stretches and poses. I dressed
quickly, anxious to see if Jill would allow me to head down to the
hotel restaurant alone.

"Good morning, sleeping beauty," Tanya
greeted me from her station at the suite's one desk. "Someone left
that bag in the hallway for you."

I followed the direction of her nod to the
counter top, where a brown paper gift bag had been left with my
name written on it in small letters. And when I saw what was
inside, my heart stopped.

The bag was filled with seashells.

Tiny conches in shades of periwinkle and
beige, speckled scallops and several missing a few chunks, there
were at least fifty shells in the bag, still smelling sweetly of
the Atlantic.

My eyes got a little wet and I couldn't help
but grin from ear to ear. To say that I was completely in love at
that moment would be the understatement of the century. This simple
act meant that not only had Jake gotten my note from Keith, but he
had driven to the beach and collected shells just to show me he
cared. I had never dared to imagine that any boy would ever like me
so much that he would do something so unabashedly romantic.

"What's in the bag?" Tanya asked, as if I was
really going to believe that everyone in the hotel suite hadn't
already taken a peek.

"Just something I left behind in Virginia," I
answered in a sing-song voice.

Jill would not let me peruse the hotel on my
own, and reminded me that I was grounded, but even that annoyance
could not darken my amazing mood. I day-dreamed all day. The bag of
seashells was wrapped gently in a blanket and tucked into my
suitcase so that there was no way any more of the precious shells
would be chipped.

We would be in Detroit in just three weeks. I
had no idea how I was going to slip away from the tour long enough
to meet Jake, but I knew that whatever it was he had to show me,
there was absolutely nothing in my life that I wanted to see more
than it.

Then something completely unpredictable and
insane happened. On our first night in Ohio, I was dragged forcibly
by Jill to attend the Pound show and sit quietly backstage. Walking
the short distance with Jill from my dad's dressing room to the
catering table, I noticed at least five women, all in their
twenties or thirties, wearing gauzy scarves tied around their hips.
Coincidence?

Backstage, Tanya motioned me toward her over
the earsplitting guitar riffs, and she pointed out toward the
crowd. There were at least a hundred girls in the first few rows
wearing scarves tied around their hips. Had I really caused a
fashion sensation with my dripped butter? I had always thought of
fashion trends as kind of silly. It was totally incredible to me
that women were wrapping scarves around their hips simply because a
picture of me, boring old me, had been posted to the web wearing
something similar.

And then, the craziest part of all… after the
concert as we exited the back door of the amphitheater and boarded
the bus, there were fans lined up with hand-drawn signs. This was
nothing new, there were always fans and they were mostly female and
usually carrying sheets of poster board with "I LOVE YOU CHASE"
written on them. But on this particular night there were several
teenage girls, just about my age, tearing at their hair and
screaming, "We love you, Taylor!"

I was so surprised I actually stopped
half-way up the stairs to the bus and peered out into the crowd of
fans to locate who had called out my name. My eyes came to rest on
a group of three girls who looked like sophomores in high school
wearing heavy eyeliner and huge earrings. My age. Just like me. And
of course, they were wearing scarves tied around their hips.

"Uh, thanks," I muttered in their direction
before climbing up into the bus.

"Don't let it go to your head," my dad teased
me once we were on board. He seemed amused, and oddly, kind of
proud, that his fans were taking such a huge interest in me
suddenly.

"It doesn't make any sense," I grumbled, a
little self-conscious about the whole thing. "I didn't do
anything."

"It never makes sense," Wade called to me
from across the bus. "It never does and it never will. Just go with
it."

Perhaps it was my newfound fame that inspired
Jill to send me down to the hotel souvenir store the next morning
in the hotel lobby.

"Are you sure? I'm grounded," I reminded
her.

"Don't be a smart ass," Jill warned me, but I
could tell she was just joking for a change.

I decided to take the long way down to the
lobby, which basically meant getting off the elevator on the third
floor to walk past the gym and world class spa before descending
the grand staircase to the lobby. I paused to linger in the hallway
to scan the spa menu out of curiosity about their specialty
massages, and nearly jumped out of my skin when one of the guest
room doors opened down the hall.