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.