Authors: Lynda Sandoval
Who's Your Daddy?
LYNDA SANDOVAL
Simon Pulse
New York London Toronto Sydney
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
For Terri Farley, a talented author and excellent travel buddy, but most of all, my cherished friend.
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SIMON PULSE
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
Text copyright © 2004 by Lynda Sandoval Cooper
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
SIMON PULSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Designed by Ann Zeak
The text of this book was set in Oranda BT.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Simon Pulse edition October 2004
10 9 8 7 6 5 4
Library of Congress Control Number 2003116407
ISBN-13: 978-0-689-86440-7
eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-2152-8
Here’s what blows:
Sometimes, through no fault of your own, but based on who happened to bring you into the world, you become a social mutant with no foreseeable remedy beyond changing your identity and disappearing forever. How fair is that?
Take my best friend Meryl. Named after Meryl Streep, I suppose. But really, when you’re sixteen it’s just a weird name, and it makes no sense that she’s named after Meryl Streep anyway because Meryl’s parents don’t even own a TV, much less patronize the theaters.
Meryl
Meryl, that is. Not Meryl Streep. I’m sure Ms. Streep’s parents go to movies—seeing as how their daughter
stars
in them and they’d want to be supportive—and they probably
have a TV, too. Probably a fifty-inch HDTV flat screen. Probably a gift from their daughter.
Whatever.
The point is, Meryl
Morgenstern’s
dad comes with the triple whammy mutant-making qualities of (1) he’s the VP of discipline in our school, i.e., if you’re a trouble-maker or a rebel, he knows it and you’ve probably spent quality time in his detention center, and (2) he’s also the driver’s ed teacher, so you can guarantee HIS daughter isn’t going to get in the car with any of the guys, because he knows how incredibly bad they drive. Finally, (3) he’s the assistant football coach, so none of the jocks want to piss him off.
Couple the triple whammy with the fact that Meryl’s family is so anti—pop culture that you can mention the name BUFFY and Meryl’s like,
blink
,
blink
, “Who?”, and I can guarantee you the word DATE in Meryl’s life refers solely to fruit.
Then there’s Caressa Thibodoux, my other best friend, who has a few marks against her as well. First, she’s the late-in-life daughter of a very famous, semi-retired blues musician from Louisiana and his third wife, who doesn’t seem like she’s much older than us but is
probably fairly old, like in her latish thirties. I mean, I don’t think Mr. Thibodoux totally robbed the cradle in a creepy way when they got together. Caressa’s dad is the richest and most famous person in our town, even though, to us, he’s just some old guy who comes down the stairs every now and then, in his bathrobe and these grandpa-looking slippers, to grab a piece of cold chicken from the fridge and stick his head into the family room to tell us to “keep it down.”
Meaning the noise.
We can get a little loud.
Their house is the closest thing to a mansion in all of White Peaks, which is mostly made up of your typical Colorado mountain homes—cabins, the stone or cedar-sided types, the occasional A-frame or prefab. The Thibodoux house is sort of log-cabinesque, but it’s the kind of place you’d move into if, say, you were Christie Brinkley and you survived a helicopter crash over the Rockies, had a romantic epiphany, and decided to stay west instead of moving back to your estate on Long Island.
Like, a log cabin
mansion
.
It has a portico and a recording studio. Need I say more?
Caressa’s also some kind of reluctant musical prodigy and, at least in my mind, the girl most likely to blow this town and become someone famous (even if it’s not in music) after we make it through the Seventh Circle of Hell which is White Peaks High School. (I swear, if one more adult tells me these are the best years of my life, I’m going to shave my head and tattoo a four-letter word on the back of my bare skull, and—oh yes—it will start with an
F.
)
To make matters worse, Caressa’s also beautiful. The kind of breezy beautiful that makes high school guys dumber than they already are organically, what with all their blood rushing south on a regular basis. She’s the kind of beautiful that’s intimidating. Like,
Vogue
beautiful. Fly girl, J-Lo beautiful. But she doesn’t even know it. So, you see, she’s pretty well hosed in the guy department, despite what you might imagine. But think about it. A gorgeous, poised, rich, musically gifted daughter of a famous musician?
Yeah, the date thing? Not likely.
Not in high school, at least. Not in White Peaks, freakin’ Colorado, for cripes sake. Mind you, Caressa
does
attract the attention of older guys, but like, have
they
not
heard the term “jailbait” before? Please.
Then there’s me, Lila Moreno. I have the lovely distinction of being the only daughter of our town’s zero-tolerance-for-screwups police chief, and the little sister of four nosy, meddling brothers who intimidate every guy in town. Bad enough already, right? Well, sit back. It gets worse. Not only is my dad the aforementioned Intimidating Authority Figure, but—and I must cringe while I admit this part because the BLECH factor is SO off the scale—he’s a hottie.
Yep, my dad. I mean, for an old guy.
He’s a hottie, and he’s a widower, and since that’s a well-known fact, all the mothers, attached or otherwise, seem to become even dumber around my dad than the high school guys get around Caressa. Which sucks! I ask you, what guy in his right mind would want to date a girl when his own MOTHER has the hots for the girl’s FATHER?
It’s so gross! Really.
I mean, how much am I supposed to take?
For example, how would YOU like to go bra shopping with your FATHER, and then have the stupid bra lady pay more attention to him than to the fact that it’s
excruciatingly heinous to be browsing bras with (1) a man, who is (2) your father, in the first place?
Anyway, the whole bra thing? A psychic wound perhaps, and worth exploring later in my journal, but so not the point.
The point is that Meryl, Caressa, and I are White Peaks freaks, and there’s nothing we can do about it except wait to grow up, move away, and forevermore lie about the identity of our fathers to any potential dates. Right?
HELLO! We’re sixteen!
We have eons before we can blaze, and frankly, we wouldn’t mind having a little guy action
before
the big exodus from White Peaks. Is that so much to ask?
It’s not that we don’t love our fathers. We do. But we are ostracized directly because of who they are, rather than who WE are, which is why we’ve come to affectionately refer to ourselves as the “
Who’s Your Daddy?
” club.
Caressa made it up. She’s creative that way.
My brother, Luke, claims the name has vague porno flick overtones, but (1) he shouldn’t eavesdrop on us, and (2) I’m 99.9 percent positive he doesn’t have any
direct knowledge of the porn industry, because my dad would wholeheartedly thrash him if he did. So, how would he know?
Luke’s my only brother still at home (thank God). He’s a senior and a cretin to boot and, although he’s got the high school girls snowed into believing he’s as much of a hottie as our father (lemmings), the ugly truth is, Luke indulges in, well, gross bodily functions more often and louder than any human being I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter in all of my sixteen years. He’s no catch, trust me. And I will use this information against him if need be.
So, yeah, his opinion matters. Not.
Anyway, back to us.
My whole point (my teachers say I have a hard time getting to the point,
blah blah blah
whatever, so here goes) is that in the string of mediocre days and weeks that added up to our full-on mediocre freshman and sophomore years at White Peaks, no day was quite so bad as that particular day in September of our junior year.
You know, the day when all hell broke loose.
The whole thing actually started the summer before
my sophomore year. Bored one day, I found myself thumbing through some of my dad’s training materials from a fraud and forgery conference he’d attended, and that’s what gave me the idea.
Throughout tenth grade, I had gained quite a rep as somewhat of a groundbreaking entrepreneur in our school, using the knowledge I’d gained from my dad’s info. Don’t wig—it wasn’t anything THAT illegal. It’s not like I was floating checks or printing up phony money. My foray into the slightly illegal was really more of a public service, if you ask me. Teenagers are the silent oppressed, and my skills were an equally silent way to fight the oppression. Plus, we are given certain gifts in life, and I think it’s almost a sin not to use what we receive.
My gift was this: I could, after studying a parental signature only once, perfectly forge said signature on an absentee excuse note, report card form, or what have you, and I would perform this valuable service for my fellow students at the bargain price of five dollars per John Hancock.
Really, I think I could’ve raised my prices to ten bucks a shot and people would’ve still flocked to me, but I didn’t want to go all inflation-crazy on my peers.
I’d had such a good thing going.
It had almost made me popular (almost).
The whole reason I’d started the forgery service was because Dad had promised to match however much money I had saved when it came time for me to buy a car (which was NOW, but he kept ignoring that fact), and as a babysitter in White Peaks, I was firmly second string. I’d already stockpiled two grand from my, ah, business. Plus another thousand from my more legitimate pursuits, i.e., the occasional babysitting gig, extra chores, bribing my brothers. Three thousand bucks, with the promise of much more to come before all was said and done, because I was never hurting for clients when it came to forged parental signatures.
Until I got busted that day.
I won’t go into detail about how it happened because it’s a way ugly memory for me to relive. But it was mostly coincidence and pure bad luck. Suffice to say, questions were raised by key school administrators after a certain parent called claiming no knowledge of a note she’d supposedly provided, and one of my clients rolled on me.