Chapter 16: Rock Stars Can't Go Home Again

Trace

Kat wags my phone with the picture of the VS model and snarks, "Why you laughin', Rock Star? Remembering some fun time with..." Kat pauses, "I don't even know her name, I just know she's an Angel."

I choke back my snort. "Her name is Sophie. She hung out with Leed for a minute."

"So this isn't the maybe girlfriend you mentioned at the Fox?"

"I was kidding. I don't have a girlfriend. We just established in the elevator that I'm trying to date you, remember?" I downshift as we swing through an intersection.

She smiles "Yeah, I know, but you could be...in transition. Or something."

Something is so right, Kat. Married to your sister definitely qualifies as a something.

I choose my words carefully. "I'm romantically unattached. That's more than we can say for you, huh?"

She rolls her eyes. "We aren't talking about Colin today, remember?"

"And yet he keeps coming up."

"Because you keep bringing him up!"

"If you cut him loose, then we don't have to discuss him ever again," I say. "I mean, what's the deal here? Why is it so hard? A few dates, didn't work out, no hard feelings." I say it lightly, but the text—the exchange of I love you's tells me differently. You don't say I love you after a few casual dates. I'm not the only one with a complex attachment, I think.

She's quiet. "It's not that easy, Trace. We've been dating for...a while."

"How long is awhile?" I ask.

"Officially...a year now."

"Wow," I say. I don't know what else to say. I imagined Kat as a love-em-and-leave-em kind of girl. She was certainly shaping up to be that way in her early high school days. Maybe I'm not remembering accurately because of the concussion, but I could have sworn last night she said she wasn't even sleeping with the guy.

"He's a good guy. We've had a lot of fun times. He and Maddie and Laurel are pretty much my crew, at my new school. They were the first friends I made when I transferred schools."

"So he finally fought his way out of the friend zone your senior year, huh? Must have been tough on him, seeing you date other guys before that?" I know it would have been hell on me, if I'd been around to witness it.

"No, I didn't really date anybody else. I guess Colin and I were more like a slow fuse. He liked me first, and I sort of liked him. Finally, he...grew on me."

"So you're telling me this guy is your first real boyfriend?" I'm getting a very different picture of Kat's social landscape than I had imagined. What happened to dating a lot of guys her age, having a lot of varied experiences? I guess that had been my plan, not hers. She's starting to get that terrified look on her face again, and I think I'm starting to understand why.

"I don't want to talk about this," she mumbles.

I take her hand and squeeze her fingers lightly. "You're right. I'm breaking our deal. Sorry. We don't have to talk about you and him, but I want to hear everything else I missed, Kat. What you've been up to, what your plans are, where you are going to college. I want to see your prom pictures—I won't even comment about Dickwad,"—she smiles at that— "and graduation pictures, and all of it. Let's just make a quick stop..." I veer into the strip mall that houses the sushi place where we used to eat.

"Shit."

You really can't go home again. Things change. Kat's a cautious girl with a serious boyfriend, and she's also technically my sister-in-law, and Maki Sushi is no longer here.

"They moved. More convenient actually...closer to our neighborhood."

I hop out of the car, and jerk open her door. "You drive there. I wanna see my hot girl driving a hot car," I tease.

She's nervous at first, but she doesn't back off the idea. By the time we get to the sushi place—a mile down the road—she's comfortable. I get out quickly and take a picture of her, smiling out of the window.

We grab some sushi rolls to go, and she rolls down the street to the old neighborhood. There's a van, a car and at least four paparazzi parked across the intersection. That's as close as they can get, because Kat's neighborhood—my old neighborhood—is a gated community.

We stop at the guard shack. Jeff is the guy's name on duty. I remember him. He remembers me, too—apparently more fondly than he used to. Before, he would give my friends a hard time about neighborhood access when they came through smelling like booze or weed. Now, he's all nods, telling me the paparazzi aren't getting in to bother "Ms. Ballard." I get the feeling he's a little excited, to actually be securing, for a change. Not much happens in neighborhoods like these, except for punks like I used to be raising hell from the inside.

I lean across Kat to talk to the security guy. "Listen Jeff, even if they leave, can you make sure the next shift is on point? 'Cause the paparazzi sometimes are...creative in the ways they try to gain access. Pose as servicemen, make up very believable stories—that kind of thing."

He assures me he's on it. Suddenly, I'm very glad Kat lives in a gated community. When I lived here, I thought the security was a pain in the ass. Now I'm glad Kat will have that buffer. No one will bother her at home, at least.

We drive around the neighborhood for awhile, Kat updating me on news about the neighborhood kids we used to hang with. A girl I graduated with is married, expecting a kid. Another guy is in law school at Yale. One of Kat's old friends is at NYU. Evan, the guy whose New Year's Eve bash we attended, dropped out of college. He scrounged some cash together and is opening a craft cocktail bar with some friends, Kat says.

I notice Kat doesn't talk about her plans. I don't press her, but I'm extremely curious as to why. Kat was always into art and crafts—both in traditional media and the graphic arts. She's probably going to an art school or maybe getting a degree in graphic design. Or maybe she's into that Etsy-entrepreneur type of career—although I bet her parents would still insist she get a degree.

She passes by my old house as we pull into her driveway. My chest tightens—the old familar panic. Damn, I hate that feeling. I haven't felt it in a few years now.

I stare at the house. New people live there now. They don't know the secrets that the house keeps—the secrets that my dad and my mom and I still keep. Probably a lot of people have secrets like ours. My dad was an alcoholic. Sometimes he was violent. It wasn't all the time, and it wasn't ever beatings, exactly, but it was sometimes scary and occasionally physically hurtful when he got very drunk, and I'm just glad that part of my life is over.

My mom divorced my dad, as soon as my career took off and provided her with the means and the motivation to do so. She moved out to LA with me. She has a job and her own life, but she takes care of my place when Riley and I can't be there. She's been in LA since shortly after Ashlynn, and she knows everything about me and Ashlynn. She is very non-judgmental. My mom says the way I married Ashlynn is not surprising given my "baggage." It's irritating when she says shit like that, but she's not wrong, so I can't get mad.

My mom doesn't know about Kat—that I've been planning to reconnect with her. She would probably tell me this is a stupid way to go about things, considering how volatile things are with Ashlynn right now. She could say that, and I would be okay with it. I've told her I think it was pretty stupid of her to stay with my dad all those years, considering how volatile things were, and she's okay with me feeling that way, too. She's had a lot of counseling, these last couple of years. She keeps trying to get me to go, but it's not my scene.

"Hey," Kat says softly, rubbing my arm, bringing me back to the present. "You okay?"

She's watching me stare at my old house. The look her face makes me want to brush off her concerns the same time I want to pull her into my lap and crush her to me. I never told her about my dad's violent outbursts, but somehow she knew something wasn't right in my house. And the kid I was doesn't want her to know, doesn't want to talk about it now, at the same time now that I'm older, I'm so fucking grateful for her gentle understanding.

"Fine," I assure her. That's all in the past. My dad has very recently gotten sober, and he's tried several times to reach out to me. He's to asked me to go to counseling with him, too. But he's full of shit. If he was really trying to make amends, he would confess to the police, not a counselor.

I came for Kat and for a fresh start between us. Kat doesn't need to be reminded of my dad. She doesn't need to know the extent of how he really hurt us all. If shhe doesn't remember the early morning of the New Year's--'m pretty sure she slept through it all--I'm not planning to remind her. In all the time we were together in the two days that followed—at the hospital when her dad berated me continually about the situation, and not even when the police questioned me over the 911 call—she never mentioned anything that happened at my house.

The cops that had responded to Evan's party were not assholes, surprisingly. They let all the minors go. Two of them were busy arresting Evan for contributing to underage drinking, because they really had no choice in that. He was the only one there over twenty one and it was his house. I was probably the only halfway sober person at the party, and I copped to the weed that wasn't mine with no more than a shrug, since the amount was only a misdemeanor. It wasn't like it couldn't have been mine, on any other given night. I just didn't plan to smoke while I was watching out for Kat. I asked the cops if they would give us a ride home, since I had no way to get Kat there safely and they agreed. When we pulled onto our street, I took a chance and lied to them. I told them my house was Kat's house. The house numbers on our licenses were so similar that they didn't notice--it was a long night for them, too.

Neither her parents nor mine were home, but I couldn't carry Kat into her house, passed out and without a shirt on. Her dad has goddamn security cameras on every door; she would have been totally busted. Ash and I had agreed to tell her parents that Kat was with her at Cam's place, and Ashlynn was already at my house, waiting for Kat. She opened the door to my house like it was hers, and in her completely sober state, and with ID to confirm that she was a legal adult and Kat's sister, the cops left Kat in her care. God, I wish they had stuck around and tried to locate Kat's parents. We would have all been "in trouble." Fucking kid trouble. That would have been nothing compared to what happened next.

We put a T-shirt on Kat and put her in my bed. By the time I covered her up, she was already relaxing into sleep.

She was probably totally passed out during the hissing argument Ashlynn and I were having in the foyer of my house when my dad walked in at 5am. He was stumbling drunk, still carrying a mostly empty bottle of Scotch. Apparently he'd forgotten that he was supposed to be staying downtown in a hotel, with my mom. She must have gone up to the room before he did, and he partied all night, and forgotten about her. Or maybe worse. Maybe she'd had to lock him out of the room. I never thought to ask my mom. Either way, he'd driven home drunk without her.

I'm pretty sure Kat didn't hear what happened next--how the argument Ashlynn and I were having escalated with my dad's drunken rage in the mix. When he learned that Kat was upstairs, he accused me of exactly what everyone else accuses me of—taking advantage of Kat. I hope she didn't hear the curses, the violence, the way we were thumping each other against the walls. Or Ashlynn intervening, begging us to stop. Or worst of all, the sound of Ashlynn's skull cracking on the marble table. Or my dad begging me to help him carry her next door, to Kat's empty house, before we called 911. She didn't hear my dad drunkenly pleading, telling me he could go to jail—we both could—if Ashlynn was really hurt.

Kat probably wasn't aware of any of that. Especially not the five minutes that passed after that.

Five minutes, before I called 911. Two minutes of that, I sat with Ashlynn unconscious in my lap, holding my shirt to her bleeding head, scared shitless, trying to figure out what to do, while my dad cried and ranted that we were both going to jail. The third minute I came to my senses, and I tried to appeal to my dad's humanity--Ashlynn was really hurt. Jail didn't matter, she could fucking die right here in our goddamn entryway. We had to call 911. Apparently my dad had no humanity when he was that drunk because he grabbed my phone from the floor where it had fallen and insisted we were taking Ashlynn next door. The fourth minute I argued with him, telling him the reasons we couldn't do that. It would take too much time; we shouldn't move her, and Ashlynn couldn't wait. Besides, the Ballard's security cameras. And two of the local cops had already seen Ashlynn in our home tonight. The fifth minute I realized two things: Ashlynn's phone was in her back pocket, and I was never letting my dad hurt anyone I cared about again.

Five minutes. How many times have I wondered if that five minutes made a difference. I know Ashlynn would have still needed the emergency brain surgery, but did that five minutes that her brain swelled and I did nothing make a difference in her outcome? Her chronic pain is a mystery to the doctors. What if five minutes of prolonged damage was all it took to make the difference in her full recovery and the pain she lives in now?

When I remember it, that five minutes seems like a lifetime to me, and I feel responsible for her injury.

I dialed 911 on Ashlynn's phone. Before I pressed send, I told my dad to leave for good, or I would tell the cops what really happened--that in a drunken rage, he grabbed Ashlynn by the head and shoved her so hard he sent her flying headfirst into the marble table . That he did that because she was trying to stop him from hitting me, like he had done dozens of times, like he had hit my mother, who still had some bruises from the last time, I thought. I told him to leave, or he would definitely go to jail.

He looked at me for one long moment, picked up the Scotch bottle and walked out the door. I pressed send to reach 911 fully prepared to go to jail myself. I had seen so much domestic violence in my life, I was sure the cops would know someone did this to Ashlynn on purpose, and assume the someone was me. It never occurred to me anyone would believe my lie--that she tripped down the stairs and hit her head on the table. But the same cops that had brought me home responded to the 911 call, and for some stupid reason, they believed me. Maybe because they had just been here and seen the vibe between me and Ashlynn, and because they knew neither one of us was drunk. Or maybe because I had been so chill over the weed charge, or so concerned about Kat. Or maybe because they saw no evidence of violence. My knuckles were not bruised. I had only slammed my dad against the wall, not hit him, and in his drunken state, he hadn't landed a single blow to me, because I knew how to avoid them.

Or maybe just because cops know DA's don't like to charge rich people with crimes in the face of no hard evidence. We lawyer up and usually get off. It wastes a lot of taxpayer's money.

They all believed the lie--my mom, Kat's parents, even Ashlynn, who has memory loss of the couple of hours before the fight. The last thing Ashlynn remembers is agreeing to meet me at my house to help me cover for Kat.

The only person who might not believe the lie is Kat herself.

Sometimes I think about Kat upstairs in my bed, when all that happened. How many nights was I woken up as a little kid, to the sound of anger and violence drifting up over the open balcony? Sound carries in a big house like that. I hope that Kat was completely passed out. That she doesn't have a hazy memory she's keeping secret like I am. Because the sound of Ashlynn's head hitting the table haunts me, and I hope to god that it doesn't haunt Kat.

"Trace," Kat says gently, and I realize that I am still staring at my house, and the car is still running. I shake my head.

"Sorry," I mumble, grabbing up the takeout. "Just thinking how you what they say is true--you can't go home again." Thank God, because I sure as hell don't want to. The only thing I want from my childhood is the best part--Kat.

I hustle around the car to open the door for her, and I turn my back on my old home and all the awful memories.

Wow, so now we know the WHOLE New Year's Eve story. EXCEPT...we don't know what Kat remembers. Do you think she has an idea of what happened or does she think her sister's injury was a total accident? How do you feel about Trace? Do you understand his need to help Ashlynn better now? Do you understand why he feels so much for Kat, his faithful, innocent childhood friend? Can you see maybe why Trace was driven to his music?

Biggest question of all--is Kat ready to take on Trace? Despite their incredible attraction and history, he's got a lot of "stuff". Do you think she and Trace will keep it fun, like their childhood, or will the traumas he avoids come back to haunt them?

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