Author's Note: I'm not even going to try and justify this long hiatus. I'll just say thanks to the following people: iworshippiperpaigephoebe01 (anon), anniehmaggieh, koolg1rl, Squirrelflightlover, S24 (anon), cookie monster (anon), me (anon), ParamoreWorshipper (anon), Sonny days, teakietower, have-a-cookie, FearIsTheHeartOfLove, Konnichiwa Minna, kaylinwriter14, MillyFleur14 (anon), Bloomerica, Maiqu, zanessarobsten4ever (anon), leoshunny1985, highfivingjesus, RitaMarie, Cause in the daylight-x, ashkat101 (anon), caseybug14, ReadingAllAlong (anon), duchessduchie, TeddyLuver, FanFicSam, lolz3 (anon), Gabbie Wabbie, WillowHeidi Erickson, and animeaddict2323232. Thanks for reviewing, and I hope people are still going to read this.
Chapter Eleven
Jackie
I let myself into the apartment late that afternoon, after Haylie and I had left the juice bar, went to the nearest pizzeria, and gorged ourselves on the thin crusted pepperoni pizza the place was famous for. Over dinner, we talked about everything: my father, my mother, my plans for the future. I had enjoyed the pizza while it lasted but now it felt sticky and thick inside my stomach like I just downed a whole bottle of maple syrup.
"Are you okay?" Haylie asked, putting a hand on my shoulder. "You look sick."
"I'm fine," I said.
Pull yourself together.
"You don't seem fine," Haylie said. "Listen, why don't I stay here tonight? I'm sure that my mother wouldn't mind and neither will yours. I just... don't want to leave you alone."
I couldn't help smiling at Haylie. What had I ever done to deserve a friend as wonderful as she was? Even through all of my crap—and her own crap with the divorce and everything—she stood by me. I wasn't sure what I would do without her. Right now, I didn't feel like finding out.
"Okay," I said. "You are the best friend a girl can ask for."
Haylie grinned. "I know, no need to thank me."
"And you're so modest too," I teased. I dropped my bag on the bench right beside the door and stepped further into the apartment. "Let me just ask my mom if you can stay over." I raised my voice: "Mom, can Haylie stay over tonight?"
There was no answer.
That was explainable since the apartment was absolutely huge. If she was on the other side of the apartment, she'd never hear me calling her, and her bedroom was way over there, so... I didn't panic. I simply barreled up the stairs leading up to the second story of our apartment, running through the halls toward my mother's room. At any moment, I expected her to burst through a door, murmuring about "that herd of elephants I raised."
"Mom!" I called.
No response.
I neared her room. Maybe she was listening to music while she cleaned and that's why she didn't hear me. I stopped right outside her apartment.
"Mom," I said, knocking on the door. "Mom."
Silence.
Still. Maybe she was sleeping.
I turned the handle of the door and looked into my mother's room. Immediately things started to jump out at me: the open drawer, the closet door ajar, the mess of clothes on the floor. It looked nothing like my mom's normally neat and tidy bedroom. More than anything, it looked like she had left in a hurry, didn't even bother putting anything away, just grabbed what she needed and left.
"Jackie?" Haylie asked from behind her.
"What?" I turned around to face her and knew something was wrong, very wrong, just by the expression on her face. "Haylie, what's wrong?"
"I found this." She held up a piece of paper. "On the coffee table. Your mom wrote it."
The tightness in my chest was almost too much to handle. My hand started to shake as I reached out for the paper. I unfolded it once I had it in my grip. My mother's handwriting was different from the handwriting I saw in the diary: somehow smaller, cramped, tilted to the left. It somehow looked neater but at the same time, it seemed like her hand was shaking as she wrote it.
My dear daughter, I read.
I'm sorry that I have to leave like this with no warning, but Isobel Montez, my agent, told me about this audition in Hollywood. It's for a role in a movie that she thinks will be perfect for me, so I couldn't just refuse her. Normally I know I would wait for you to get home from school in order to say goodbye, but Isobel wanted to run me through the role a few times before the audition on Monday, considering I hadn't heard of the role before she told me about it. So I have to leave as soon as possible.
I'm so sorry, honey. I should be home in a couple days if I don't get the role. If I do get the role, I'm going straight off to filming, so I won't be around for a few weeks. I'll try to make it back for your birthday.
Love you, hon.
Mom.
The words made no sense. I read the letter over again, reading between the lines, and everything clicked into place.
"My mom is a coward," I breathed.
"Why?" Haylie asked, putting her arm around my shoulders. "What did the letter say? Where is your mother?"
"She's gone," I said. The paper crumpled in my hand as my fist closed around it. "She left." I met Haylie's eyes. "Apparently she had some sort of audition in Hollywood that she just had to go to. But honestly, how dumb does she think I am?"
"I'm confused," Haylie said. "What are you on about?"
"My mother!" I almost yelled and shook Haylie's arm away from my shoulders. "It's just so convenient, isn't it, that my mother leaves just as soon as Chad Dylan Cooper, my father, arrives. She hasn't had an audition for a movie in six months and now, suddenly, Isobel Montez must have her for a role she's never even heard of? It's pretty damn coincidental, if you ask me." I threw the letter across the hallway. "She's running away."
"But why?"
The question rang through my head even before Haylie said it out loud. Why was my mother running away? What the hell had Chad Dylan Cooper done in the past that was so terrible that she had to run away from him? Why did their relationship seem so screwed up?
None of those questions had answers.
I sighed. "I don't know, Haylie," I said. "I honestly don't know."
"Do you want to call her?" Haylie asked. "Ask her why she left?"
The thought was tempting. I felt like digging my cell phone out of my bag, still thrown on the bench downstairs, and calling my mother up, yelling at her, telling her to come back here, damn it, and tell her what the hell was going on, but—at the same time, I knew it wouldn't do any good. It would just force me to tell the truth about what I knew—the diary, Chad Dylan Cooper—and then I'd get nowhere.
No, it was better to just let her go.
"I can't," I said. "She's gone now and nothing I say will change her mind."
"Are you sure?" Haylie asked. "You could get your mother to come back and talk to John, get him to arrange a meeting with you and Chad. You could fix everything, get your mother and father back. We could trick them somehow, get them in the same place—"
"This isn't one of your romance novels, Haylie!" I burst out, unable to stop myself. Anxiety stretched my body taut. I couldn't help but glare at her, even though something deep in the back of my brain told me that you're overreacting, stop it. "Real life is messy and complicated and unfair. Things aren't solved just by tricks or getting them in the same damn place!"
"I know that—"
"No, you don't know that," I said. "You're naïve. My parents didn't just get a divorce, they tore away from each other so completely that they can't even be in the same city—even a city as big as New York. Either Chad screwed up or my mother screwed up. Either way, everything's so messed up that I have no clue how anything will ever be right again."
Haylie remained silent.
I sighed. "My mom's gone. She's in Hollywood and I won't see her until Chad's gone. I know it."
"Then what are you going to do?"
I ran a hand through my hair, sighed again—louder than before. "I'm not sure."
"If you're not going to bite my head off again, I have a suggestion," Haylie said.
"Yeah?"
"I think that we should talk to John Alto." Before I could protest—what has she been smoking? I'm not going to John for anything—she continued. "I know he's an absolute jerk and we shouldn't encourage him, but he knows about your father. He probably has contact with him." She tried to smile. "He's the only one who could possibly get us in touch with him."
That was a good point.
Marlon could tell me where my father was and get me a meeting, but he would tell his wife. In turn, Brigette, John's mother, wouldn't be able to resist: she'd call up my mother and tell her that I was going to meet him, and then my mother would be back in seconds. I'd never be able to meet him after that and he'd never even know a single thing about me.
But at the same time...
"What makes you think that John would set up a meeting between me and Chad?"
"Because he might not be as big of a jerk as you make him out to be," Haylie said.
"You consider him to be as much of a jerk as I do," I retorted, "and, besides, John has never done anything when something wasn't in it for him."
"But at the same time, you know that we can't go to his parents for help," she responded. "You know that his father never keeps anything from his wife, and his wife never keeps anything from your mother. So the only way to talk to your father is to go directly to someone who might help us and at the same time wouldn't tell a soul. The only person that fits the bill is John."
The idea of going to John Alto for help didn't appeal to me. In fact, I'd almost rather jump off a bridge than ask him for help.
But Haylie had a point.
I needed to meet my father. With each passing day, the need grew inside my chest, expanding it, making it impossible to deny, but I never thought I would have a chance to ever see him. As soon as I heard the news that he was in New York City, I knew that I had to hear his part of the story. The need rose up inside, smothering, and I could feel the resolve wavering.
"Fine."
Haylie smiled. "I know it'll be difficult for you," she said, "but it will be worth it."
"Sure." I sighed. "Can we at least relocate this discussion to the living room? I think I'm going to need to sit down for this."
John
"Excuse me."
I looked up from the book I was perusing—yes, I know, I actually do read—to find Chad Dylan Cooper standing in the threshold of the library. He didn't look hesitant, but he didn't enter the room either. I dog-eared the page and set The Catcher in the Rye aside.
"Yes?" I said. "What do you need?"
"Nothing," Chad responded. "I was just talking to your father about our business arrangement and he sent me here to get a book."
"Let me guess," I said. "Business Deals for Dummies?"
Chad let out a laugh. "Not quite."
He made his way into the shelves, searching for the book, and I watched him. He was in the wrong section, but I didn't bother correcting him. I remembered the way I met him for the first time and the way he reacted when he heard what school I attended. A smile spread across my face.
"So, how are you liking New York so far?" I asked.
"It hasn't changed much," Chad responded, shifting through the romance section of the library. "Still as polluted and cramped as usual."
"You've been here before?"
"Several times," Chad said. "When I was a teenager, I came here every summer. It was my favorite place to relax."
"Did you hear about Pendell's back then?" I asked, noticing how Chad stiffened behind the shelves at the mention of the school. "Obviously you didn't go there, but it must have caught your attention, right? You seemed to know about it the other day."
"I... heard about it, yes," Chad said.
"Sixteen years ago?"
"No," Chad said.
"Then where?"
Chad didn't respond. He continued looking through the shelves in silence. It stretched on for a few seconds. Suddenly I alighted on something from a couple days ago that I had heard: that girl with the inane National Inquirer obsession who said—
"Do you know Sonny Munroe?" I blurted out.
There was a thump. The book Chad had taken off the shelf had fallen to the ground.
"I did," Chad said. I could hear the tension in his voice, I knew that he didn't want to talk about this, but damn it, he was going to talk. I would get to the bottom of whatever the hell he was hiding.
"Really," I said. "Did you know that she has a daughter? Her name is Jaclyn Munroe and, let me tell you, there is not a finer piece of—"
"Don't talk about her like that."
Chad's voice was thick with tension, more than before.
It seemed like I had hit a nerve.
"Why not?" I asked. "I would think you'd think badly of her yourself, considering Sonny was supposedly with you at the time she got pregnant by another guy—"
"Leave her out of this," Chad said.
"Is that how you know about Pendell's?" I pressed on. "Because Jackie goes there." A thought suddenly occurred to me and I grinned. "That is probably why you're defensive about her, because she's your daughter, but Sonny Munroe kicked you out. Or—" and this was juicy stuff, positively riveting information; this was what I lived for—"she left you in London. It was fifteen years ago that Sonny returned from London, wasn't it?"
A muscle in Chad's jaw twitched. His voice shook as he spoke.
"Where's the business section in this library?"
That was all the answer I needed. I grinned, leaning back in my chair.
"Four aisles down, middle shelf."
Neither of us said anything else to each other. Chad went to the business section, got the book he needed, and left the library, leaving me alone with my thoughts.
His reaction shocked me, to be honest. I didn't expect that Chad would get so defensive when it came to Sonny and Jackie Munroe. Though I knew what my father and Brigette had said in that meeting, it wasn't much. I took a shot in the dark when it came to Sonny and Jackie, but it seemed to hit a nerve somewhere. As soon as I mentioned Sonny, he lost his cool and, judging from what I knew of Chad from that meeting, Chad rarely lost his calm facade.
Maybe I was right.
Chad and Sonny did have a relationship sixteen years ago and that resulted in Jackie, apparently. And then Sonny left Chad alone in London, coming back to New York with Jackie. It was a sore spot for Chad because he had been left behind and, let's face it, no one liked being left behind.
Huh. Sometimes I even impressed myself.
My phone ringing inserted itself into my thoughts and I sighed in frustration. I glanced at the Caller ID.
JACKIE MUNROE Calling.
"Changed your mind about me, Jackie?" I drawled into the phone.
"Don't push it," she said. "I'm only calling because Haylie is practically forcing me to."
"Remind me to give her flowers tomorrow," I responded. I rested my feet on the coffee table in front of me. "So what do I owe to the pleasure of this phone call?"
"Well, I... um."
"Yes?"
"I, um, sort of need—"
"Go on, just say it," I said. "I won't judge, I promise."
"Ow!" Jackie shrieked. "Cut it out, Haylie!" She sighed, turning the line into static. "All right, all right." Another sigh. "John, I need a favor."
"What sort of favor?"
"Not like that," Jackie said, clearly hearing the innuendo in my tone. "I just... need you to introduce me to someone."
Considering the conversation I just had with Chad Dylan Cooper just a few minutes ago, my curiosity was immediately piqued. The coincidences were too much: Chad arriving, Haylie's erratic behavior that day when I was bragging (that suddenly made sense too, I realized), Chad's reaction to Jackie and Sonny, and now, Jackie's call.
How interesting. Everything was now converging on me.
"And who is this person?"
"I'd prefer it if we didn't discuss it over the phone," Jackie said, oddly professional. "Can we meet somewhere private?"
"The back of my limo is private."
"Please stop yourself from being disgusting for just one moment," Jackie said. "This is serious and it means a lot to me. We'll discuss whatever torturous thing you want me to do for you in exchange for this favor later, but for now, let's meet at the coffee shop just around the corner from Pendell's after school tomorrow."
"I suppose I could go for that," I said.
"Good," Jackie said. "See you then."
She didn't even wait for me to say anything else before there was a click and the line went dead.
Author's Note: Okay, so I know this chapter might not very long (or very good), but it's been so long since I updated that I didn't want to keep it any longer. I am so sorry it's taken me so long to update. One thing just led to another and I just lost my inspiration and it took me ages to get it back. Since it's summer, I hope to be able to update more often. I might even try to wrap up this story before school starts, but don't quote me on this, 'cause there's so much left to read and discover.
Anyway, please review?