The Girl of Sand & Fog Read online

  The Girl

  of

  Sand & Fog

  Sand and Fog Series

  Book 2

  Susan Ward

  Copyright © 2015 Susan Ward

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1517326265

  ISBN-13: 978-1517326265

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ***Author’s note to readers reading all the books in the Parker Saga***

  Darlings, did you really think I’d tell you how the story ends a year before I released it? There are always twists and turns in the Parker Universe. Please note, this eBook includes the novella Rewind; however, The Girl of Sand & Fog is a full length novel, 110K words on its own. Rewind is included for the benefit of my readers not reading the Parker Saga in its entirety. Thank you for being the most wonderful readers any author ever had. You have made this a very special year for me~Susan.

  CHAPTER 1

  I curl my fingers around the edge of the desk and fight not to bang my head against it. Oral report day is nothing less than sanctioned child abuse. If I had my way, high schools across America would be prohibited from forcing their students to sit through torturous hours of drivel.

  My eyes fix on the black and white journal notebook. I’d outlaw senior year journals and time capsules as well. I don’t know why I played along with my homeroom teacher and started writing in it every day. I’m going to have to use my mother’s seal-a-meal to lock it from viewing when I turn it over to the principal to be buried in that lame time capsule we’re supposed to want dug up in ten years.

  Like, I’m really going to go to that reunion. Senior year with these kids is enough. When I graduate, I will never look back.

  God, I should probably destroy that journal. I don’t know if Pacific Palisades Academy is ready for that level of honesty. My mother sure as hell isn’t.

  I flip it open. It’s the truth of how I feel. I can’t ever risk anyone reading this. Page 1…

  There is really no place that I feel like I ever belong. By my senior year of high school I’ve lived in four cities, have known three different male parental figures, and now have a variety of siblings fathered by different men.

  My mother divorced her first husband, buried her second, and has managed to roll into the mix a stormy affair with a third man now in its twenty-third year.

  There isn’t a single thing about my family that I can keep private even if I wanted to. Not in Santa Barbara and definitely not in the glitzy neighborhoods of Southern California. We’re like the Kennedys of the music industry. Yep, I know that sounds ridiculous and conceited and full of shit, but it’s the truth. I’m a Parker and that makes me music industry royalty and A-list without effort.

  My grandfather, Jackson Parker, is a beloved music icon from the ’60s. My mother, Christian Parker, is the darling of rock music who manages to float onto the charts every few years without ever looking as if she intended to, and my father…well, no point going there. That is the question, isn’t it?

  My alleged father—is alleged the correct term for the legal name on a birth certificate?—is Neil Stanton, my mother’s first husband, and a much adored, dead alternative rock music superstar. I don’t really remember him that well. He died in a car accident when I was eight, and sometimes I wonder if what I remember is induced by the unending stories about Neil in the press. I’m pretty sure he was kind and sweet and a very gentle man. That I wouldn’t remember from clippings from the newspapers, would I? He was a good dad. Yep, that I remember.

  It’s not like I have anything against Neil. My memories of him are for the most part happy. Nope, that’s not the issue with him being my alleged father. The issue is I don’t think he is my father, for all that no one will tell me the truth, so dedicated as they are to pretending that he is.

  For what it’s worth, the tabloids don’t think so either. When I spring up in print, I’m usually tied to him…Alan Manzone, the ultimate rock god from hell, and my mother’s unending, stormy affair that she hasn’t been able to get right since she was eighteen. Yep, they’ve been hopping into bed together since my mother was in high school. Doing the relationship part, well, that’s always been no bueno for Chrissie. I don’t know why. Jeez, even I can tell that Alan Manzone loves her. But that’s my mom. She can’t get things right, even when they are already right. Go figure.

  Even worse than that, my mom also has a flexible relationship with the truth, but I’m not a little girl anymore and she should realize she’s not fooling anyone. I mean really. What kind of idiot can’t figure this one out without being told? I have black eyes and black hair. I’m tall and long-limbed. I’ve got freaking olive skin, a totally Mediterranean look about me. I sure as hell didn’t get that from the blond-haired, blue-eyed Parker gene pool. My alleged dad had a fair complexion as well. An all-out California surfer boy. Sort of hot for a guy in his day. But I am the mirror image of Alan Manzone. Isn’t it time to tell me the truth, that that son-of-a-bitch is my dad?

  I arrived for my first day of high school and found that the girls in Pacific Palisades were pretty much bitches like teenage girls everywhere. For two-and-a-half weeks they stared, whispered behind my back, and no one spoke a word to me.

  The way I stared back at them had scared the shit out of everyone. It is an old habit; a trick of black eyes to keep inquisitive people away. In Pacific Palisades the way I stared the world away only fueled the gossip about me, speculation that I have lived with for seventeen years: did the girl know who her father was and would she tell them?

  Not that my mother knew it, but there had been speculation over my parentage even in Santa Barbara, among girls completely outside the mainstream. The Internet is the great equalizer of geography, lifestyle and wealth. The protective bubble Mom thought she’d constructed by forcing us to live in protected isolation on the side of a mountain in a small coastal city simply doesn’t exist anywhere.

  Even Mom should have been able to figure that one out given how social media drove revolution in the Middle East. Any moron with a keyboard could virtually invade a person’s life or a country. They could virtually spy, virtually pry and virtually bully. Teenage girls and oppressive regimes are always fair game.

  But Mom lives in her own world and thinks that her children live there with her. I should have never trusted her to fill out the huge school document packet or the personal bio form for the Pacific Palisades loop, my high school’s private social network site, because Chrissie checked the damn box authorizing it to be posted, and before I had ever stepped foot on campus everyone from the head cheerleader to the janitor had read my page.

  What they couldn’t find to satisfy their curiosity on the loop they found on the Internet. The Internet is a trove of speculation about me and my mother’s complicated past, more than enough to enable the socially powerful girls to devise in advance how to make my senior year miserable.

  After many days of being left alone and not too subtly studied, the girls began to approach me. I learned two disappointing life lessons then. First, if one was considered notorious enough or close enough to the truly famous—even in Pacific Palisades the speculation that I am the unacknowledged daughter of a rock music legend and billionaire is instant status among the children of the most impressive parents—then one could be socially accepted regardless of strangeness, unpleasantness, or even complete unwillingness. Second, that if one was desperate enough to forge a friendship with you they’d accept pretty much anything you tossed their way.

  I was purposely nasty and cruel to everyone, but
this made the popular girls only more determined to succeed in friendship. I wanted to drive them away. I’ve always been more comfortable as a loner only interfered with by the curious stares. It was how it had been in Santa Barbara among that cross section of teenagers that thought being a bastard, unacknowledged, was a humiliating thing and that I was duty bound to feel embarrassed. How is it possible that my sordid family history and the wrongness of my behavior only increase my popularity here?

  That I could do what I want, say what I want, and with no negative blowback has made it nearly impossible to shut off awfulness within me. Try as I might, I can’t recall what it had felt like not to have the power of behaving badly. It is really quite an intoxicating drug: not giving a shit, saying what you want, and knowing people will take it.

  In contrast to my increasingly foul behavior, I receive from the kids at school daily doses of assurance that my life is a lucky one and I am destined to do great things. They talk about me in the abstract as if who I am is merely the subtotal of the external.

  How lucky Kaley Stanton is, how lucky she is, how lucky she is about everything! What is it about people in Southern California that makes them determined to work ‘how lucky’ into every phrase? The world has given unto me and I am expected to feel fortunate about every aspect of my life and have empathy for the vast world of people less fortunate than me—sincerity in that not required.

  If the world had righted, if anyone had noticed the wrongness of my behavior, I might have been able to contain it. But probably not. If anyone had asked its source, I would have most likely snapped that it was out of contempt for their empty and meaningless perspective of the world. But no one ever asked. They simply took it. Even the faculty turned a blind eye as though my emotional unpleasantness is the reasonable result of having moved at the onset of my senior year.

  They all think they know my intimate details, the workings of my mind, the impact of my external issues, and they forgive me my foulness and reinforce my absolute right to be as relentlessly malicious as I dare to be. It is completely illogical and irritating in every way.

  But then, what should I have really expected from people who think about nothing? Pacific Palisades Academy is like a bad episode of Seinfeld. In the post-9/11 world of two wars, unemployment, poverty and fear of a near global economic collapse, I exist trapped in a narcissistic cocoon of rich kids who think about nothing and survive on synthetic empathy.

  They are more concerned with what music I have loaded into my iPhone than what is in my head. The conversations that swirl around me on campus focus mostly on who is having sex, what drugs they are taking, the parties they’ve been to and the occasional resuscitation of pop culture ideology probably learned from TV.

  As for the esteemed reputation of this elite private school, after the first day I contemplated asking Mom to demand the tuition back since the shitstorm of stupidity I hear in class each day definitely makes the case that they’ve violated the truth-in-advertising standard.

  I don’t want to listen to them, faculty and student alike. I sure as hell don’t want to talk to them. Unpleasantness seems the only protection left against the relentless floodtide of dim-witted human interaction and even that is only partially effective…

  That irritating, droning voice is swallowed by clapping and I slam my journal closed. Thank God she’s done. After two months of somewhat competent teaching of global economics, that was the best the girl could come up with: a completely moronic perspective on the social benefits of wealth redistribution presented in oral report format, with a PowerPoint no less.

  I can’t stop myself. I smile nastily at the self-satisfied girl making her way back to her desk. “Do you really believe all that liberal guilt over wealth or is collective, national poverty the new chic we should all strive for here? Have you ever considered what you’d be without Prada, you irritating twat?”

  Oh shit, silence. I don’t like the way Mr. Jamison is staring at me at all.

  He leans over his desk, scribbling frantically on the dreaded pink sheet. He holds it up to me and points to the door. “Principal’s office now, Miss Stanton! If you can’t be respectful of the opinions shared in class then keep your opinions to yourself. We don’t criticize each other’s ideology. Not in this class. We encourage open and respectful dialogue.”

  I gather my things, feeling the heavy stares and smirks of the silent room, and strangely I realize that I am even more irritated since I haven’t been booted from class for the British vulgarity, but for showing disrespect for liberal politics.

  I snatch the pink slip and smile, but then again, what should I have expected? I mean really. I’m in an affluent city in Southern California.

  I shove the door open a little too hard, not giving a shit and not even provoking comment from Mr. Jamison. I must have really rocked his world and I think I’ve finally found where intolerable conduct goes over the line with my teachers. Any language that isn’t politically correct speak crosses the line and will be dealt with! No one even seemed to notice that I’d call the girl a “twat.” It’s not on the description of my infraction, and the twat comment is where I would have started listing my crimes and offenses.

  I show the pink slip to the office secretary and am instructed to sit down on the waiting room sofa outside the principal’s office. After five minutes, the door opens and in meanders a boy, pink slip in hand, who is directed by pointed finger to the seat across from me.

  He drops heavily on the bench facing me and says nothing. He closes his eyes and crosses his arms.

  There is something strangely familiar about the guy, but I chalk that up to probably having passed him in the hallways. He isn’t exactly cute, but he isn’t exactly unattractive either. He is interesting, quite a unique specimen at Pacific Palisades Academy. He has that guy’s guy intensity that radiates an air of not giving a shit, though somehow in a strangely intelligent way, and I am surprised to find it mildly thrilling.

  He is taller than me, a good thing since I rarely find guys of adequate height for my five-foot-ten-inch frame, and he has a lean, nicely muscled body like a surfer, a slightly worldly aura somehow accomplished by his clothes that are more European style than American, and the most penetrating green eyes I’ve ever seen.

  Interesting. I can’t tell what he is, since he’s such a hodgepodge of mismatching things that it is impossible to identify the group he falls in with at school.

  I sit there staring at him, fiddling with the pink detention slip, and when the office secretary leaves, those green eyes open and he asks, “You’re Kaley Stanton, aren’t you?”

  Shit, not this again. And it’s such a disappointment because there was a slight prick of interest before he spoke and his voice—well, I never expected that—but it made the hairs on my body stand up.

  “Oh, fuck me,” I snap, letting loose my fallback response, the knee-jerk reaction that comes from perfect strangers knowing my name.

  “Not on the first detention.”

  That is the first quick comeback I’ve heard in two months here. I try hard not to smile and can’t stop myself. Arching a brow, I counter, “I’ll probably be here next week. Maybe you can fuck me then.”

  Those green eyes sharpen on my face. “You don’t recognize me, do you?”

  I tense. Why would he think I’d recognize him? “No. Should I?”

  The guy shrugs. “What landed you in here?”

  “Fomenting political insurrection. You?”

  “Jerking off in the gym.”

  It is hard to tell if he is serious or just trying to shock me. Masturbation is a perfectly acceptable topic of conversation at PP Academy. PP Academy…I laugh, stare at him hard and say, “I’m glad you didn’t offer to shake my hand.”

  The boy doesn’t smile and I bite my lip to stop my laughter.

  “You look and sound just like your dad. Sans accent, of course,” he says in a heavy, all-knowing way, irritating me and sounding as though he’s irritated by his own discover
y.

  OK, it’s time to stop this now. The boy is messing with me, but unfortunately I’m a little off-kilter from my bizarre internal response to him and whatever it was I heard in his voice when he made that annoying assumption on my parentage.

  I snap, “How would you know?”

  “I just saw him a month ago in Munich,” he replies casually, twirling his own pink paper around his finger.

  “Did you really? Do you have a psychic hotline? Do you speak with the dead as well as see them? Neil Stanton has been dead over ten years.”

  The guy shrugs again, leans his head back against the wall and closes his eyes. “You’re funnier than Alan Manzone. He’s a real prick these days.”

  Before I can stop myself, yet again I respond to his baiting. “Alan Manzone is a prick every day.”

  The boy just shakes his head. “No, he’s actually a really cool guy.”

  “He’s a narcissistic asshole.”

  “You really hate him, don’t you?”

  “Wouldn’t you if you were me?”

  “Probably,” he says. “Do you want to get out of here? If we stay, Williams will keep us until after six cleaning the bleachers. We won’t get in trouble, you know. No one wants to deal with my mother so they won’t call her. I don’t think they’ll call your mother either. I never stay for detention. Do you want to get out of here?”

  I stare up at him apprehensively. Who is this guy? He says everything with such an air of knowing unenthusiasm. Debating with myself over whether to leave with him, I ask, “If you don’t stay why were you on the bench?”

  “I saw you leaving class with the pink slip.”

  That pleases me more than I want to be. Direct and honest in a no-bullshit type of way. Another rarity at PP Academy.

  I give him the stare. “You know, you could have just said ‘hi’ to me in the halls. You didn’t have to be a stalker about the whole thing.”