0.3 Hurricane Season Comes a Couple Months too Early
If I were religious, this confessional probably would've hit a little bit harder, but— y'know. It's never too late to repent or whatever the Christians say.
I completely ditched Grover the second the bus made a complete stop. His bladder acted up every time he got anxious or nervous and this time was no different. He bolted for the bathroom the second he got off the bus.
He made me promise to stay right where I was and he'd be back in a second. But whatever happened, I had to stay there.
I felt so guilty starting my bike back up. I'd even hoped it would be loud enough to grab his attention and make him come running back out to stop me. But it was New York, and the roar of my engine just blended in with the other loud noises. He didn't come out. So I left.
He was out of sight and he was just freaking me out too much. And I had just finished a school year, which meant I was less than an hour from seeing my mother. The feeling of needing to see her just became too overbearing.
A few words about her, just before you meet her.
Her name is Sally Jackson and she is actually the greatest, most genuinely perfect person I've ever met. Which, by the way, just proves my theory that the best people have to worst luck. It was kinda sad really. Her parents both died in a plane crash when she was five, so she had to move in with her uncle. He didn't really care for her all that much, so she spent more than enough of her life feeling neglected and unwanted. She wanted to be a novelist, so she spent highschool working to save enough money for a college with a good creative-writing program. Then her uncle got cancer, and she had to quit school her senior year to take care of him. After he died, she was left with no money, no family, and no diploma.
The best break she seemed to have ever gotten was meeting my dad.
I have no memories of him, just this kind of... warm glow, maybe the barest trace of a smile. My mom doesn't like talking about him and she doesn't have any pictures. She said he was rich and important, so for all I know, I could've met him at an A-list party or something without knowing of any relation between us.
The only problem with that was: no one in Hollywood looked like me, which for the record is funny— because I've met almost too many who would pay every dollar they have in order to do so. I've had many plastic surgeons tell me my face was the most requested one for women who came to them.
RDJ, who played my father in the MCU as our Tony/Celeste Stark father-daughter duo, had once offered to be my fill-in father, once. I'd only laughed him off, but secretly wouldn't have minded. With how much advice I always asked of him, it was like he filled the roll in, anyway.
But aside from that, it also isn't an odd thing to say because I look nothing like my mother. Everything to do with my facial structure and features came from my father because my mom's features don't match mine and our hair and eye color are both different. And there is also the even bigger point of: my mother said that he'd needed to go overseas to do whatever he did. So he set sail over the Atlantic and never came back.
She'd always said he was lost at sea. Never dead, just lost at sea.
Either way, she worked odd jobs to provide for us, even though I could've done it myself. She always hated it when I spent my money on her, so she didn't let me buy an apartment, at least not one she'd live in, and she didn't let me buy my Harley. She paid for food and everything else because she is a stubborn woman and "doesn't want anyone's charity— not even her daughter's."
She took night classes to get her high school diploma because she'd gotten pregnant right after what would've been the start of the second semester of her freshman year of college (at least, if everything had gone her way). She couldn't go back to actual high school, so she did it during the night and online. She never complained or got mad, which was kinda crazy, all things considered. I was not an easy child, not by a long shot.
That, combined with paparazzi always following me around, combined with how awfully I got along with my asshole stepfather, her life was a trainwreck. She'd married Gabe when I was around 5 or 6. He'd been nice the first few seconds we knew him, but quite soon after revealed his true world-class asshole, misogynistic colors. As I grew up, I'd started calling him a range of nicknames, most including curse words that my mother always gave me a dirty look for saying.
I didn't know if it was just me being superstitious or paranoid or something, but I always felt gross around him. He stared at me like I was a piece of meat or a stack of 100 dollar bills or something. It always made me feel like I needed to take five showers and scrub a layer of skin off of my body.
Just to add salt to the wound, he smelled awful. Like so bad to the point where I'd have to apply perfume outside of my apartment because it would wear off the second I walked into the same room as him.
The two of us made my mom's life a living hell, with how much we hated each other and how awfully he treated her. When I get home is a really good example of how our 'step-father, step-daughter' "relationship" worked.
Our apartment was pretty small, mostly because it was coming from mom's money and not mine. When I needed a fix of seeing my mom, this is where I'd hunker down, but that didn't mean I lived there full-time. I had my own apartment in my name in the Upper East Side, almost too luxurious for a seventeen-year-old, but there were certain pretenses I had to set as "Hollywood's Shining Star". Plus, I needed a few bones to throw paps whenever they got too close to figuring out my mother's address. The absurdly large amount of rent I paid, in addition to giving me an escape whenever Gabe pissed me off too much, was another way I attempted to save my mother. I'd been used to the business for my whole life, she still didn't understand many of the ways my world worked.
But even as small as it was, Gabe mostly took over the living room so he could play poker with his buddies, so that always made it seem even smaller. I never knew why he enjoyed playing so often, since the times he won were few and far between. The T.V. blared ESPN, talking about an NFL player who'd hurt his hamstring during practice. I'd hoped my mom would be home, but I doubted it. Stale chips and beer cans were strewn all over the place. Oh, if only the cameras could see me now.
He hardly looked up from his cigar, but I knew he knew it was me. "Well, there's my darling step-daughter, home from school. I was wondering when you'd make it home. Got any cash stuffed up that bra of yours?"
"No. Is my mom home yet?" I asked, praying he wouldn't actually check.
He raised a greasy eyebrow. "She's still working. And don't lie to me, I know you love carrying cash around. I'd say you have a few twenty's in there. Maybe even a hundred or two. C'mon sweetheart. Just a little something for your step-daddy. Wouldn't want me to check now would you?"
Fuck. I sighed mentally. He could sniff money out like a goddamn bloodhound, which was funny considering his smell should've masked everything else. He was right though, not that I'd tell him; I did have a few twenties and two hundred dollar bills. And I definitely did not want him checking, considering the only time that happened was when I'd been close to getting sexually assaulted by another dude who came over to play poker with the asshole in front of me.
I gritted my teeth and pulled out some of the cash that's been there. I slowly counted it in front of him, $280 in total, and used a little sleight of hand to give him only $60. It was a little trick my instructor had taught me a few months prior when I was filming Now You See Me.
Gabe managed the Electronics Mega-Mart in Queens, but he stayed home most of the time. I never knew why he hadn't been fired long before. He just kept on collecting paychecks, spending the money on cigars that made me nauseous, and on beer, of course. Always beer. I may have enjoyed a drink or two here or there— a bit of wine at dinners, and a bit of tequila and others at certain parties— but I was never able to stomach beer. Even the smell made me sick. No doubt Games proclivities were to blame. Whenever I was home, he expected me to provide his gambling funds. He called that our "little secret." Meaning, if I told my mom, he would punch my lights out. Again.
"Gabe, the girl just got home. And she makes the money herself. Shouldn't you give her a break?" Eddie, our on-the-older-side-and-mostly-better-than-the-rest-of-Gabe's-asshole-friends building manager said, doing his best to reel Gabe in, to no avail.
Gabe twisted his face into a frown, making his quadruple chins ripple. "Now why would I do that? She's Hollywood's bitch. She's loaded and I'm her step-father. If anything, I deserve the money she gives me considering I agreed to raise her freakshow self." He threw the money I'd given him to the middle of the table. "Give me my chips. Let's start another round."
I left as soon as the money started getting counted and replaced with chips. I was not in the mood to get screamed at for not giving him the full amount.
My suitcase had been thrown haphazardly into the hallway, kind of close to where my bedroom door was. I picked it up on my way and once I made it into my room, I tossed it onto my bed. Gabe wanted to use my room as his own personal 'man-cave' while I wasn't in school, but my mother always made sure my door was locked and he wasn't smart enough to break-in.
Home sweet home, I grumbled in my mind, pulling out the nearest perfume and spraying it generously. Gabe's smell was almost worse than the nightmares about Mrs. Dodds, or the sound of that old fruit lady's shears snipping the yarn.
But as soon as I thought about that, my legs felt weak. I remembered Grover's look of panic— how he'd made me promise I wouldn't go home without him. A sudden chill rolled through me. I felt like someone— something— was looking for me right now, maybe pounding its way up the stairs, growing long, horrible talons. Step by step, almost there—
Then, with one single word, my fears melted away.
"Allie?" My mom's voice called.
I felt my whole body immediately relax. My mother could make me feel good just by walking into the room. Her eyes sparkled and changed color in the light. Her smile, as warm as a quilt. She'd gotten a few gray streaks mixed in with her long brown hair, but I never thought of her as old. When she looked at me, it was like she was seeing all the good things about me, none of the bad. I've never heard her raise her voice or say an unkind word to anyone, not even me or Gabe.
"Oh, Allie!" She cried, almost tackling me onto my bed with a hug. "You look so grown up! I can't believe my princess graduated today!"
Her red-white-and-blue Sweet on America uniform smelled like the best things in the world: chocolate, licorice, and all the other stuff she sold at the candy shop in Grand Central. She'd brought me a huge bag of "free samples," the way she always did when I came home. My dietician hated it, but what he didn't know wouldn't hurt him.
We sat together on the edge of the bed. While I attacked the blueberry sour strings, she ran her hand over my double dutch braids and demanded to know everything I hadn't called or texted her about. She asked about all the new movies I'd starred in since the beginning of the year and talked a lot about college. She mentioned a few interviews I'd done, and my cover of Vogue that I'd told her about, but hadn't come out yet. All she wanted to talk about was me. Was her baby okay? Was she doing all right?
She'd been in the middle of saying something about Columbia when Gabe interrupted from the other room. "Hey, Sally! How 'bout you make us some bean dip?"
I saw her shoulders sag, just slightly, and I knew she saw my whole body tense. She knew I hated him and she knew how much I wanted to stab him in the eye with a spoon, but she always wanted us to get along. My mom is the nicest lady in the world. She should've been married to one of the hot actors who'd played as my dad in some of my movies, not this ass.
For her sake, I'd tried to sound super happy about my last year of high school, but in all honesty, it sucked. I suffered from a bad case of senioritis (even though I wasn't really a senior) and I got sexualized and catcalled almost daily. I didn't tell my mom about that, though. I also didn't tell her about Mrs. Dodds or the old ladies. With the usual horrible stuff she read about me on the internet, she didn't need anything to add to her worry.
"I have a surprise for you!" She said, and she snapped her fingers like she always did once she remembered something she'd forgotten. "We're going to the beach. I want to use the beach house you bought a lot now since, for this moment, you don't have shows or movies to worry about and you won't have to model again for a few more weeks."
I perked up immediately. Our summer beach house was virtually the only thing my mother let me buy with my own money. At least, the only thing that she'd use, too. Her parents used to rent it out until they died, which is where she'd hunkered down when her uncle died. She stayed there for a week to wallow in her misery before she had to rejoin society, lest she blow all her money to stay there. She'd met my dad there, on her last night. She never had the nerve to go back until I was around six, also around the time of her and Gabe's first year of being married. She tried to make it back every year, but it was a large and expensive beach house in the Hamptons, and cost a lot of money to rent out, even for a night.
By the time I was 12, I had a pretty good understanding of life and why the number in my bank account could actually be a great thing, even if it was accompanied by a countdown for how long it would be until I turned 18. I'd asked Danny to look into buying it out, and low and behold, the woman who owned the property was looking to sell, as she was close to having blown all of the money she'd inherited from her dead Oil-Tycoon husband and didn't feel the need to care for it anymore. She was all too happy to sell it to me.
But I'd done all of that behind my mother's back and she almost boycotted going that year entirely, before deciding this would be the only thing she'd relent on. She strong armed me into an agreement that I'd never spend so much money on something that had to do with her again, however, and not wanting to see the disappointed look on her face due to not being able to provide me the same luxuries I could provide myself, I relented. She knew how much it meant to me, being able to go to the house every year with her, and since I'd already bought it, there wasn't much else she could do.
"Uh, when?!" I asked, almost jumping up and down.
"Once I get packed, we will be ready to go. You already have your suitcase of clothes and things here, so all I need to do is get my stuff ready. I'll take your step-father's car and you can take your Harley."
Quick bit of information: I kinda have a car obsession. So I own many cars, however, they are all stationed at our beach house in East Hampton. I wasn't about to temp Asshole Gabe into wanting to drive my luxury cars. The only vehicle of my own that was always near, was my Harley, which I knew made my mom happy. I tended not to use any of the cars I bought around her, for the same disappointed look reasons.
Gabe appeared in the doorway and growled, "Bean dip, Sally? Didn't you hear me?"
I wanted to punch him, but I met my mom's eyes and I understood she was offering me a deal: be nice to Gabe for a little while. Just until she was ready to leave for East Hampton. Then we would get out of here.
"I was on my way, honey," she told Gabe. "We were just talking about the trip."
Gabe's eyes got small. "The trip? You mean you were serious about that?"
"Pig," I muttered. "He won't let us go, will he?"
"Of course he will. He doesn't have control over you anyways," my mother said evenly. I tried to ignore her emphasis on 'you.' "Your step-father is just worried about money. That's all. Besides," she added, "Gabriel won't have to settle for bean dip. I'll make him enough seven-layer dip for the whole weekend. Guacamole. Sour cream. The works."
"Money," I scoffed under my breath. "I bought the damn house. The only money we spend going is the gas money we use getting there and back."
Gabe softened a bit. "So this money for your trip... it comes out of your clothes budget, right?"
"Yes, honey," my mother said placatingly, settling her hand on my arm to keep me from pouncing.
"And you won't take my car anywhere but there and back?"
"We'll be very careful."
Gabe scratched his double chin. "Maybe if you hurry with that seven-layer dip... And maybe if the girl apologizes for interrupting my poker game."
Maybe if I cut off your dick with a butter knife, I thought. And make you sing soprano for a week.
But my mom's eyes warned me not to make him mad.
Why she put up with this guy was beyond me. I cleared my throat quietly, preparing for the intense acting energy I was about to exert. Red leather, yellow leather. Red leather, yellow leather.
"I'm so terribly sorry," I lied, "for interrupting your incredibly important poker game. Please go back to it right now."
Gabe's eyes narrowed and for a moment I doubted my acting and lying skills, but then he rolled his eyes. I guess his tiny brain couldn't detect the intense sarcasm in my voice.
"Yeah, okay. Whatever," he settled on. He went back to his game.
"Thank you, Allie. Let me go get ready. Get your helmet and keys and I'll be right back."
She left to go pack and make Gabe his seven-layer dip.
We were ready to leave an hour later. Gabe watched me roll mine and my mom's suitcases down to his car and kept watching as I got my bike ready.
He yelled down to me once I finished putting my mom's suitcase in the trunk. "There better not be a single scratch on that car once you bring it back or there'll be hell to pay. I'll have a beer bottle with your name on it waiting. I'm sure it'll love getting broken over your head and I'm sure you remember how that felt last time."
I wasn't going to be driving, but I doubt he cared. It'd be my fault because I was easy to push around and had a lot more money than my mother. He'd find something to blame on me and that beer bottle would connect with my skull at some point. As long as he could hold my mother over my head, he had the upper hand.
Watching him lumber back toward the apartment building, I got so mad I did something I can't explain. As Gabe reached the doorway, I made the hand gesture I'd seen Grover make on a few different occasions while we were in school. I thought it was a sort of warding-off-evil gesture, a clawed hand over my heart, then a shoving movement toward Gabe.
The screen door slammed shut so hard it whacked him in the ass and sent him flying up the stair-case as if he'd been shot from a cannon. Maybe it was just the wind or some freak accident with the hinges, but I didn't stay long enough to find out.
Once I saw my mom walking towards me I got on my bike, put my helmet on, and was ready to drive as soon as she'd opened her door.
Our beach house was very large and sat right on the beach. It was perched right at the end of the neighborhood and was easily the largest house in a couple-mile radius. There was a shitton of rooms, most of which weren't used often, so there would be a few cobwebs if it wasn't taken care of. The beach had white sand, the same shade as my hair and the seas were normally pretty cold.
So, of course, I loved the place.
It calmed me down in a way nothing else could. The water hitting my feet made me feel like I could do anything. Like the feeling you get when you walk out of a movie theater and you feel like you could conquer the world, except I don't feel like I'm in a daze. It's quite the opposite, actually. I feel wide awake.
As we got closer, my mom always seemed to grow younger, years of worry and work disappearing from her face. Her eyes turned the color of the sea. I didn't even have to be in the same car as her to know that.
We got there at sunset, opened all the windows (well, not all the windows. Mostly the ones in the living room and on the main floor), and went through our usual cleaning routine. We walked on the beach, fed blue corn chips to the seagulls, and munched on blue jelly beans, blue saltwater taffy, and all the other free samples my mom had brought from work.
Should I explain the blue food?
Gabe had once told my mom there was no such thing. They had this fight, which seemed like a really small thing at the time. But ever since, my mom went out of her way to eat blue. She baked blue birthday cakes. She mixed blueberry smoothies. She bought blue-corn tortilla chips and brought home blue candy from the shop. This— along with keeping her maiden name, Jackson, rather than calling herself Mrs. Ugliano— was proof that she wasn't totally suckered by Gabe. She did have a rebellious streak, which wasn't shown often, but did remind me that I did get a few things from her. My polite streak was proof of that.
When it got dark, we made a fire. We roasted hot dogs and marshmallows. Mom told me stories about when she was a kid, back before her parents died in the plane crash. She told me about the books she wanted to write someday when she had enough money to quit the candy shop.
I told her I'd get her a laptop and an editor and a publisher right then and there, but she would hear nothing of it. If she wanted to be an author, it wouldn't be because of her famous daughter. She'd probably use a fake last name so it wouldn't seem like she was leeching off of me. I asked her why she wanted to go the hard route and she smiled and shook her head at me; the 'you'll understand when you're older' went without saying.
Eventually, I finally got enough nerve to ask about my father, one of the few things that was always on my mind when we were here. My mom's eyes went misty and I almost took the comment back, but I stood my ground. She took two blue jelly beans from the bag. I figured she'd tell me the things she always did, but I never got tired of hearing them.
"He was kind, Allie," she said. "Tall, handsome, and powerful. But he was also gentle. You look exactly like him, it's almost uncanny. If you were to style your hair the same way he did his and had the same physique, you two would be impossible to tell apart. You have his white hair and those pretty green-blue eyes. And you definitely didn't get your height from me."
That was true. I'd passed my mother in height a while ago. She was very short and petite, and while I did get the petite from her, I was also tall and curvy.
"I... I wish he could see you now, Allie. He'd be so damn proud."
I was shocked. For one, I'd never heard my mother curse. Ever. And secondly, I couldn't quite decide what was so special about a 16-year-old girl who got sexualized on the internet, in public, and pretty much everywhere else. Sure I'd quickly become one of the highest paid actors and models in the world and just that previous September I released the most streamed album of the year, but what would that really mean in the long run? Hollywood is wishy-washy on the best of days, and fame is fickle. The countdown was nearing on a year and two months. It would only get worse the more I did. The more people who knew my name meant a lot more trouble for me. On dark days, I wondered if the trouble was worth it.
"Did he... stick around? After I was born, I mean," I asked, trying very hard to keep my voice from cracking. It was close, but I think I did it.
"He... he came to see you a few times. His work was very serious and he didn't have a lot of time. But he saw you."
I nodded slowly, taking it in. I guessed that was why I'd remembered something about him. I wasn't about to tell my mother that, though. She was already on the verge of crying as it was. I felt like that would set her over the edge.
"I was going to ask you... I got offered by Warner Brothers to do another movie. They wouldn't start filming for a while, but they wanted to go ahead and get the cast done. It's filming in Georgia, though. They said they might be able to pull a few strings and move it to New York, but Georgia would be ideal. Would you be okay with that?"
"I don't know, Allie. There's a lot I need to think about right now. I'd feel better if you didn't leave. You know how worried I get every time you board a plane."
"I know. It's just, this one's... different. I think it would... I really want—"
"You know," my mom said, standing up slowly, "I'm getting a little tired. I think I'm going to turn in for the night. Please don't stay up too late. We can talk in the morning."
I just nodded and my mother left me to my thoughts. The wind picked up a little, and my hair flew from my shoulder to my back. My head fell to my right hand as I tried to rub away the headache that was starting to form.
I only looked up when I felt someone watching me. I could've sworn it was coming from the ocean, but I didn't stay long enough to figure out if anything was there. I was not trying to be the stupid one in the horror movie. No thanks. I brushed my hair with my fingers as I walked into the house.
That night I had an awful dream, shocker shocker.
It started with a whole bunch of memories I'd tried to suppress of all the bad things that had happened to me throughout my life.
During third grade, a man in a black trench coat had stalked me on the playground. When the teachers threatened to call the police, he went away growling, but no one believed me when I told them that under his broad-brimmed hat, the man only had one eye, right in the middle of his head.
Before that— a really early memory. I was in preschool, and a teacher accidentally put me down for a nap in a cot that a snake had slithered into. My mom screamed when she came to pick me up and found me playing with a limp, scaly rope I'd somehow managed to strangle to death with my meaty toddler hands.
And there was one time when I was thirteen and I'd seen a huge lion prowling the edge of a forest we were filming near. I noticed every time the camera would move in its direction, it'd retreat back to the forest and then come back out once the camera moved. Finally, it just leaped away after hours of us filming and no one getting near it.
Then, the dream changed.
It was storming on the beach, and two beautiful animals, a white horse and a golden eagle, were trying to kill each other at the edge of the surf. The eagle swooped down and slashed the horse's muzzle with its huge talons. The horse reared up and kicked at the eagle's wings. As they fought, the ground rumbled, and a monstrous voice chuckled somewhere beneath the earth, goading the animals to fight harder.
I ran toward them, knowing I had to stop them from killing each other, but I was running in slow motion. I knew I would be too late. Both animals lunged at each other and before I could see what happened I woke with a start.
Outside, it really was storming, the kind of storm that cracks trees and blows down houses. There was no horse or eagle on the beach, just lightning making false daylight, and twenty-foot waves pounding the dunes like artillery.
With the next thunderclap, my mom woke. She ran into my room, eyes wide, and said, "Hurricane."
I knew that was crazy. Hurricanes were never seen around here this early in the summer. But the ocean seemed to have forgotten. Over the roar of the wind, I heard a distant bellow, an angry, tortured sound that made my hair stand on end.
Then a much closer noise, like mallets in the sand. A desperate voice— someone yelling, pounding on our front door.
My mother grabbed both of our suitcases and ran to the front door, a floor down from us. I followed her down to the foyer.
She threw my suitcase to me and slung open the door.
Grover stood there, out of breath and looking like he needed a seat. However, he looked different. What the fuck...?
"Searching all night," Grover gasped. "What were you thinking?"
My mother looked at me in terror— not scared of Grover, but of why he'd come
"Allie!" she said, shouting to be heard over the rain. "What happened at school? What didn't you tell me?"
I was frozen, looking at Grover. I couldn't understand what I was seeing.
"O Zeu kai alloi theoi!" he yelled. "It's right behind me! Didn't you tell her?"
I was too shocked to register that he'd just cursed in Ancient Greek, and I'd understood him perfectly. I was too shocked to wonder how Grover had gotten here, by himself, in the middle of the night.
My mom looked at me sternly and spoke in a tone she'd never used before: "Allie. Tell me now!"
I stammered something about the old ladies at the fruit stand and Mrs. Dodds, and my mom stared at me, her face deathly pale in the flashes of lightning.
She grabbed me by the hair and dragged me to Gabe's car, pushing past Grover on her way. She took my suitcase and threw me into the driver's seat. Grover got in the back, while my mom ran to the passenger's side and sat down with my suitcase in her lap.
She didn't even let me ask a question. She just put the keys in the ignition and said, "drive. Now. I'll tell you where to go. Take a left up here."
Now that we were in the car and I had more things to worry about, I finally processed many things. Grover's muscular disease finally made sense to me. Because he didn't have legs. Well, he did, but they weren't human legs. They were more like farm animal legs, all thrown together with fucking hooves.
* * *
something i noticed about the first go around of this story is that allie's fame is just kinda,,, there. like it really was there just for whenever it was necessary, but went fairly unused any other time, so i'd like to dig into that a little bit more for our little take two and this chapter was sort of the start of that. i added some more information and lines to sort of drive the point home and really set it up better, so i hope it didn't make this chapter too wordy
anyway, sorry it's been a bit since an update. school kicked my ass a bit, but i'm ahead once more in all my classes, so i'll make more of an effort to update more regularly. i still have to remember i'm posting again lol
i hope you all have a great rest of your day or night !
~xoxo, trin <3