Rock My World (17 page)

“
Cici
, can you help me set the table?” Jenna asked, grabbing
cutlery and napkins.

“Sure, Mom.”
Felicity said. Jenna smiled, handed her a stack of plates, and kissed her
daughter on the head.

After
dinner, everyone sated and sleepy, Jenna and Felicity sat alone in the cozy
comfort of the living room. They looked at each other from opposite ends of the
couch, feet up.

Jenna
shifted in her chair, an indecipherable emotion flitting across her face.
Felicity sensed a change in the air, and straightened up slightly. The jovial
mood pierced by tension.
 
Jenna knew
it would be hard, but her maternal strength drew upon a well of faith she never
knew she had. She could do this, for her daughter and herself.

“Sweetheart,
you know your dad and I had a fight … right?” Jenna started.

Felicity’s
heart sank. She didn’t want to hear this.

“Well, I
needed to take some time to think about things. Decide what the next step was.”

Felicity
remained quiet, staring at her feet.

“An article
came out.” Jenna said, her voice shaky. “I’m afraid that kids may ask you
questions about it and I don’t want this to affect you … or your schoolwork.”

Since
when is she concerned with my schoolwork?
Felicity thought, not appreciating the condescension.

“What’s the ‘it’?” Felicity asked.

“It’s … about your dad and me … and rumors of him
with someone else.” Jenna looked down at her hands as she spoke. Felicity
gulped.

“You and I can spend the rest of the semester up
in Tahoe. You’ll be able to stay under the radar. You can start school next
week. It’s all set.” Jenna looked up, gauging Felicity’s reaction with great
interest.

Felicity
shifted in her seat, staring at the floor.

“Do you want
to ask me anything?” Jenna said, trying to decipher the twisted expression on
Felicity’s face. Felicity looked as though she’d seen a ghost. The color
drained from her face as she glared into her mother’s eyes.

“You have no
idea what’s best for me.”

“Sweetheart,
I’m just trying to protect you,” Jenna said. Her calm demeanor created the
opposite effect on Felicity. Her pale face turned red.

“You
actually believe this is better for
me
?
This is all about you! It’s always been about you!”

Jenna
recoiled as though slapped. Felicity never shouted at her. She hadn’t expected
her to take this change lightly, but she thought she could at least be
rational. Felicity continued, unperturbed.

“You’re the
one afraid of being embarrassed. Not me! I‘m not going with you. I’m staying
here.
At
my
school
with
my
friends.
I know you
don’t get it. You don’t know how to think about anyone but yourself.
I’m
not going to let my teammates down.
I’m
going to keep my commitments.
I’m
going to get into an Ivy League
college and I’m not going to repeat
your
mistakes!”

“I-“ Jenna
stuttered.
Is this how my own daughter
sees me
? She couldn’t muster a retort. She studied the face of the little
girl who used to love having her back tickled to sleep, who couldn’t go to bed
until she’d said, “I love you.” The face looking back at her now wasn’t a
toddler throwing a tantrum. She was a young woman. Jenna alternated feeling
hurt by Felicity’s words and proud she’d raised a confident daughter unafraid
to stand up for herself.

Felicity pulled
her legs into herself, arms crossed protectively in front of her. Jenna tried
to put herself in Felicity’s position. Was it fair to ask
a
sixteen
year-old to give up her life, her friends, and her sports in
order to spare her humiliation she couldn’t yet comprehend?
No, probably not
.

Jenna was acquainted with humiliation and the last
thing she wanted was for her daughter to be isolated the way she’d been. Her
job was to protect her child. She couldn’t always be a friend.

“I know
you’re angry. It’s unfair. But it’s not up to you. It’s up to me. I already
spoke to your school. And we can stay until this weekend, after your last
game.”

Jenna stood
up, desperately wanting to pull her little girl into her arms and make the pain
go away, but she knew she couldn’t. “One day you’ll understand.” She stood and
headed up the stairs, leaving Felicity to sulk on the couch.

Chapter
28

Alex opened
groggy
eyes, adjusting to the ethereal morning light
streaming through the windows. He checked the time: 9:15am.
Shit! Shit!
He shot up out of bed. The
bus was set to leave in fifteen minutes and he hadn’t packed yet. The post-show
adrenaline buzz turned Alex into a touring insomniac. Between staying up late
after shows and making it to early on-air radio performances, he felt like he’d
been run over by a truck.

Conveniently,
he’d fallen asleep fully clothed so all he had to do was brush his teeth and
hastily chuck clothes in his old suitcase. Jenna tried to buy him a new one
before the tour, saying that he needed something more durable for all the
traveling. “I’ve had this suitcase forever, and I love it. I don’t need a new
one,” he’d said to her.

Struggling
with the old zipper caught on a piece of
fabric,
he
thought maybe he’d been too quick with his refusal. Finally, he coerced the
cranky zipper to bypass the clothing and stick to the teeth. He sat on the
closed bag, pulled out his phone and was about to check his seven messages when
he inadvertently answered a call already in progress. Though he didn’t hold it
up to his ear right away, he could hear Simon shouting and could picture him,
red-faced, chugging espresso, pacing up and down in the lobby.

“Well good
morning, Sleeping Beauty.” Simon said. Alex could practically hear the veins
bulging in his forehead.

“Yeah, I
know. I overslept,” Alex said. He couldn’t force himself to apologize. He
didn’t forgive Simon for putting him in this predicament with the label. Seeing
him flustered was the best vindication he could hope for at the moment and he’d
take what he could get.

“We were
about to leave without you.”

“Keep your
pants on, mate. I’ll be down when I’m ready,” Alex said.

“Ditch the
diva act and get your ass down here. We’ve got a month left and we both know
you’re not going to fuck this up. Not unless
wifey’s
gonna
foot the bill. Is that what
you want?”

A pompous
blowhard Simon may be, but even Alex couldn’t say he was wrong. As he packed up
the remaining toiletries and double-checked the room for odds and ends, Alex
thought about how different things would be right now if he’d just asked more
questions.

He’d known
the money was too good to be true. He should have expected strings.
 
There were always strings. He’d been
gigging around the greater L.A. area for over a decade without a single
legitimate offer, and been screwed by promoters, stage managers, bar owners and
other bands countless times. His father-in-law’s label even tried to bribe him
with a deal to get Shawn out of retirement.

Alex prided
himself on not accepting charity or anything he hadn’t earned. Plenty of
musicians thought he was stupid—that he should take any offer, soul be
damned.
They
would.
 
Others whispered he could afford not to
care because he mooched off his wife’s trust fund. It was the same with the
haters in the blogosphere. That was the hardest part to swallow because Alex
couldn’t completely refute it.

The fact of the matter was Jenna’s trust fund paid
their bills. How was an eighteen-year old father supposed to support a wife and
baby by playing punk music? They needed help and her parents offered. After
Shawn and Anya established the trust and bought the house, it was easy to
maintain the status quo. In the back of his mind, he knew he’d pay it all back
as soon as he made it big. But making it took so much longer than he thought.

He only used the money he earned from music to
purchase equipment, fund tours, or pay for miscellaneous costs, though. That
was an important distinction in his eyes, one that the
gossip-mongers
didn’t feel inclined to mention.

Despite his
youth, he was a good father. He loved hanging out with Felicity, teaching her
to ride her bike, to surf, to play soccer. He was mesmerized by her strength of
will and capacity for empathy. She was smart and beautiful with a good head on
her shoulders. What more could a father hope for?

And with Jenna, apart from this stupid
misunderstanding with
Airika
, the marriage was great.
The last year or so had been crazy with all the traveling and recording, but
they had a strong foundation and he went out of his way to do little (and big)
things to make sure she felt loved by him—like the anniversary plan.

With
everything to lose, why didn’t he ask more questions about this anonymous donor
wanting to fund his career? The world was full of what-ifs and he’d go insane
entertaining them all, but this one thing—this one decision—if he
could take that back … he’d love to know how different it would have been.

That day
last spring began innocuously enough—just another sunny, seventy-degree
day in Los Angeles. He’d gone to Simon’s office to discuss a possible band
deal. Inside the glass and leather conference room, he sat at one end of a too
large mahogany conference table.

“Frank, how does it look?” Alex looked to his
attorney, Frank Fitzsimmons, sitting across from him.

“Apart from the handful of phrases I’ve flagged,
it is quite standard. I think the terms of renegotiation should remain open,
but Simon and I disagree on that,” Frank said, sliding a pile of paperwork
across to Alex with little red flags poking out of a handful of pages. Alex
flipped through the pages but couldn’t understand most of what it meant. He
felt like no matter how thorough he tried to be, it didn’t matter—he had
to decide whether to roll the dice.

Everything
was set. The only detail left was Alex signing on behalf of the band. Simon had
raved about the anonymous donor, heavily insinuating that it was a wealthy fan,
just interested in tying some of his taxable income into a passion project. It
sounded so simple.

 
The biggest lesson Alex should have
learned was that in the music business, nothing was simple. Deals were done,
not by men in suits sitting in offices like this, but in bars and
after-parties, casually over drinks. Smiles and sweet-talk covered up the
cutthroat reality of a say-anything-to-get-ahead business mantra.

In the end,
Alex signed his life (and, more importantly, copyrights) over to this new
“label.” He and his band headed straight to the studio, their wallets fat with
signing bonuses, hope lightening their steps, propelling them to creative genius.
The band was elated.
 
At the time he
couldn’t have named it—that prickle of doubt—but he couldn’t match
their enthusiasm.

Things
started out simple enough. They finished recording, with very little creative
interference, but just before the album dropped, he got the first call. Simon
said the donor had asked that they do him a “favor” by playing a few songs and
emceeing a book signing.
 
“Sure,”
Alex had said. “No big deal.” It was a memoir by one of those famous-for-being-on-a-reality-show
wives. Not his cup of tea, but who cared? He played his part—handing out
prize packs of free Botox treatments, silicon add-ons, and other
injectables
to women who would have been more beautiful
without them—then got his check and went on his way.

The second
“favor” was an appearance in a foreign commercial. He was promised it would
never air in the States. It was for a food company in the Netherlands. This
“favor” was going to make him enough money not to think about it. But then he
got there and realized the food product was a pair of edible boxers. “I’m not
wearing those,” he’d said. The director threw his hands up, shouting French
obscenities at his assistant director. He turned on Alex. “
Putain
!
 
I told them
non
!
Americans—they always too prude.
Pain in my
ass!”

From there,
the relationship between he and his label deteriorated quickly. He felt like a
snitch trying to escape the mafia life. The words “family” and “loyalty” were
batted around like they’d been pilfered from a
Sopranos
script. The analogy cropped up in Alex’s mind enough times
over the following months that he started to do some research of his own. He
never would have believed his findings if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes.

Chapter
29

Jenna, Anya
and Shawn sat in the cold metal bleachers, watching soccer balls fly back and
forth while the two teams warmed up. Felicity might not be speaking to Jenna
but she couldn’t stop her cheering her daughter on at the championship game.

Jenna had
never been a big sports buff and didn’t know much about the game. Felicity
played keeper, making her easy to find on the field. Jenna watched a dozen
teenage girls line up, rocketing balls at the goal, toward her daughter, which
Felicity easily punched away.