The Girl of Sand & Fog

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.