I COULDN’T BELIEVE my eyes as I scanned the email in front of me for the third time. My lips parted, but no sound came out. My fingers dragged the cursor over the email address it was sent from, worried one of my so-called friends was trying to ruse me. But it was all there. The email was completely legit.
“Holy shit.”
“Are you talking to yourself?” Ebony walked into my bedroom, startling me. She tossed her long, straight, glossy black hair over her shoulder and pointed a freshly varnished fingernail in my direction.
I dropped my head to the side and studied her over my laptop. My friend’s hair held a similar resemblance to mine up until two days ago. Her dirty blonde was now pitch black, and I was still getting used to her dramatic change of appearance. “Who let you up?”
She scoffed and threw her Louis Vuitton bag onto my bed, spilling its contents over my quilt. “Your new maid.”
“Right, number twelve. I forgot about her.” My eyes rolled. I’d lost count of the number of maids my father had been through. They rarely lasted longer than a few months. Learning their names used to be easy, but recently it felt more like trying to complete a Rubik’s cube. There was Patricia. Tricia. Sarah, and Sia. Who the hell cared? Eventually, their names all merged into one I could remember. Maid.
“How long do you think this one will last?” Ebony asked, walking around my four-poster bed to the window. She used her fingers to open the white shutters covering them, peeping through the gap she created. I half expected her to turn to dust, but my father said I always did have an overactive imagination.
“Your dad didn’t bat an eye as I swanned up your driveway. He’s shirtless. He’s got bimbos naked in the pool like he’s Hugh Hefner or something. It’s not even midday.”
“He dates them,” I said casually.
Me and Ebony had been friends for years, but up until today, it had been easy enough to swerve the rumours of my father’s bachelor lifestyle. Now it seemed it was no longer possible when there was evidence to back it up right outside my window. It looked like last night’s naked parade continued through the night.
My eyes were still on my laptop screen, re-reading the email for the fourth time just to be sure I’d understood it right.
“Dates them?” she queried. “Plural? As in, he’s dating multiple women at a time, and they don’t care? All those media tales are true, then? How have we not discussed this before now?”
“I don’t care. Which means I don’t care if they care.”
She groaned, flicking the shutters closed as she moved her hand away. “But your dad is so old, and they are so–”
“Young.” I finished for her. “I know. Don’t remind me.”
She settled on my bed amongst the contents of her bag, eyes still on the closed shutters. “Are they as young as us?”
“Ebony,” I groaned, dropping my laptop from my lap and onto the yellow velvet ottoman beside me.
I glanced over at her. She looked so out of place in my room. All dark and edgy, while my room looked like a rainbow had thrown up inside it. A leap from how I felt on the inside, but I had a habit of purchasing colourful things. Call it a guise.
“What? You can’t blame me for being curious. I’ve never seen your dad shirtless, let alone all over naked girls that look to be in the same age bracket as us. You know I’d never judge you for who your father is or what he is.”
“What are you insinuating, Eb? Because gross. I can assure you my father isn’t a predator. They’re in their twenties, at least.”
“Not too far from our seventeen, then.” She stuck a finger in her throat and feigned sickness, though it lacked her usual carefree enthusiasm. “Your dad has to be thirty, maybe forty years older than them. Who likes wrinkly dick?”
“Are you asking me that question because you want to know, or trying to convince yourself you don’t?”
Everyone had heard the rumour she’d slept with our school principal a few years back, but she was always the first to deny it. He was a married man with kids only a little older than us. If it were true, he’d lose everything and likely end up behind bars. He had a duty of care, and in the state of Florida, Ebony was a minor.
I didn’t care who it was. I did not want to think, let alone talk about another older man’s genitals or private life.
Ebony rolled her eyes, and a shiver ran through my body at the image of being one of those girls, hanging off a man old enough to be my father. Even so, I dropped my head to my shoulder, feeling the need to defend him and his actions.
“My father throws money about like confetti. At them. With them. Without them. Some girls… like that sort of thing. It’s his coping mechanism, I guess. He closed off the compartment of his heart that loves like a regular person. You’ve just never stayed over long enough to witness what goes on here.”
“Not through lack of trying,” she said, raising a perfectly shaded black eyebrow at me. “He has you locked up like Rapunzel.” Her eyes dipped to my laptop and then back to my face. “What’s got you ‘holy shitting’ anyway?”
I wrapped my arms around myself and stared into her dark brown eyes. “I got in.”
“You got in?” she questioned. Seconds passed between us that felt more like minutes, but I knew the moment realisation dawned on her because her eyes widened as she shot off the bed and hurried towards me. “Holy shit. To Duke?”
An awkward splutter of laughter bubbled up my throat, but before it had left my mouth, Ebony grabbed me by the hands and pulled me to my feet. Her arms went around me, squeezing so tight I had to swallow everything back down before it somehow choked me to death.
“Holy shit, Blue!”
My eyes filled with tears as I clutched her back. “You know what this means, right?”
Her grip loosened momentarily before growing tighter. “Uh, I think it means you’re moving to London and finally getting out of this place you call a prison.”
“It’s not that simple, is it?” I pulled back and tugged on a strand of her black hair that had fallen into her face. “This is the easy part.”
She regained her composure, her eyes becoming as wet as my own, though neither of us would spill our tears. That’s not something we did together, knowing if we started, neither of us could stop.
And what good would crying do?
It wouldn’t solve anything.
Tears wouldn’t force a miracle.
We made some space between us, our hands gripping one another’s inner elbows. “I take it you haven’t told your dad yet?”
I shook my head. “How am I supposed to persuade him to let me go? He wants me to live the life he set out for me. That doesn’t involve anything but my trust fund and these four walls. Sometimes I think he’s right, you know. That I wasn’t made for more than this–a hot girl summer three hundred and sixty-five days of the year.”
“Shut. Up. You were made for so much more than this. Besides, you’re eighteen soon. He can’t keep you locked up in his cotton candied globe forever. He has to let you go someday.”
She studied my facial expression, looking for something I wasn’t sure I was capable of giving, but I smiled for her anyway.
“Yeah,” I sighed. No way anyone could understand why my father was the way he was without growing up with him. The persona he wore for the people around him was often much different to the persona he reserved for me. Overprotective daddy and sugar daddy were two entirely different roles to play after all. I’d always been the princess in his less than ivory tower, and he still treated me as such. It didn’t matter that I was verging on adulthood–he endeavoured his best to stop me from growing up like he could hold on to the essence of my mother through me.
He couldn’t.
I didn’t even know my mother.
I didn’t want to remember my mother.
And other than my looks, how was it possible to be anything remotely like her?
She was a ghost–often haunting my life.
Ebony’s phone began buzzing from my bed. The sound of some heavy metal playing through its speakers. I raised a questionable brow. This phase she was going through was so bizarre. But that was Ebony, always trying to draw attention to herself. She’d make herself out to be something she wasn’t to impress someone she desired to be.
She grinned and spun on her heels. “I’m late.”
“You’re leaving?” I asked. “Already? You’ve been here less than ten minutes.”
She picked up her phone, staring at it while it rang out. “I wasn’t expecting to waltz in here so easily and be able to stay. Your dad detests me.”
“He doesn’t detest you. He just doesn’t believe you’re genuine.”
Some days, I questioned what he saw that I didn’t. But maybe that was me, always seeing the good in people even if those people weren’t good people.
“Whatever. He’s grotesque. And hardly daddy of the year. Besides, I made plans to finally Skype with banks262.”
I frowned.
“What?” She shrugged, mimicking my expression.
“Finally Skype with banks262? You’re telling me you’ve been speaking for weeks and haven’t skyped yet? Have you ever seen his picture? Do you even know his real name?”
She pursed her lips and began shoving her things back into her bag that had previously spilt onto my bed, pausing briefly to shoot me a death glare before becoming serious. “Sorry, but are you a relationship guru now?” Her phone began ringing again as she finished packing everything into her bag. “I really gotta go.”
I stood there in a daze, wrapping my arms around my shoulders while she sauntered backwards towards my door, blowing kisses. “Good luck with your dad. Text me later, ’kay? I want all the details. Every single one.”
“You got it,” I said, throwing my palm in the air to catch her kisses. “Doubt there’ll be much to tell. There’s no way he’ll allow me to move across the state, let alone to another country.”
“What’s the worst that could happen?” she asked, leaving my room with a sympathetic smile.
I fell backwards onto my ottoman, her question hitting me with force. I didn’t want to think about the worst because the worst would mean staying exactly where I was–with a bleak future with no prospects.
My eyes darted to my darkened laptop screen beside me as I held on to what little hope I had left. I promised myself I’d get out of this place. Duke was out of reach, but my lips still twitched with a smile at the probability of change.
IT WASN’T until after I graduated and until the end of summer that I decided to speak with my father about my future.
It was late in the evening when I cornered him in his office. He sat at his expensive pedestal desk, a stream of paperwork spread out under his palms. Strands of his recently coloured brown hair fell over his forehead, and I couldn’t tell whether he was trying to convince him or his hook-ups that he wasn’t nearing sixty. Not that a box of dye could hide it. A quick Wikipedia search was all you needed to learn the A to Z of James Sterling. Everything but an insight into me or my mother, anyway. I thanked my lucky stars for that.
His brows pinched when I sat down in the leather chair opposite him. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“What makes you think something’s wrong?”
He placed his elbows on the wood and steepled his hands under his chin. The antique signet rings on his fingers openly showcasing every bit of our wealth. “The only time you ever come to see me in my office is if something is wrong. Is it Anna? Has she done something to upset you?”
“Who’s Anna? Another one of your throwaways?” I winced at my own judgement. But ‘throwaways’ did appear much kinder than fuck friends or sugar babies, and I’d never dared to curse in front of my father purely out of respect, though I felt he held little for me.
He gave me a stern look before he frowned. “The new maid. Anna.”
“Oh. Well then, no. Anna is fine. I hope she’s not put off by your indecencies and decides to stick around.”
“Blue,” he scolded, rubbing a finger over my mother’s initials tattooed onto his finger, where he no longer wore his wedding ring. “What I do in my time is up to me. It’s not harming anyone, and it’s unquestionably not harming the bank account of any maid I hire.”
Gnawing the inside of my cheek, I chose not to reply to his statement. The chances of him accepting my proposal were already slim. The chances of him accepting my proposal when he was angry and defensive would be zero.
“So…” He raised an eyebrow, allowing a moment of silence to linger between us. “What’s the issue, princess? What brings you to my office at this hour?” He looked over my shoulder at the grandfather clock in his office’s corner. I knew it was close to chiming on the tenth hour. My curfew–where I was assigned to my bedroom until the next morning–was almost up. All so he could invite yet another woman around without having to bear the guilt of me witnessing his obvious use for the female anatomy. I didn’t always stick to it, of course. But it beat listening to the slapping of body parts and moans travelling down the corridors and through the walls. Sometimes I imagined a neon arrow stuck at the end of our expansive driveway, with the words “ORGY THIS WAY!” just to make it feel more like a joke than the reality. I wasn’t sure what was worse–my actual reality of not having a mother or him treating women like whores.
I took a breath, wrapped the fringe of my denim shorts around my finger, and watched as he dropped his elbows from his desk.
“I applied for college.”
An awkward smile framed his lips as he shuffled the papers in front of him into a pile. “Why?” he asked, not meeting my eyes. He probably wouldn’t have liked what he saw, anyway. “You won’t ever need to work a day in your life.”
Sighing, I looked down at my finger wrapped around the fraying cotton of my shorts and pulled it tighter. “I qualified for a place at the University of Duke.”
A rumble vibrated from his throat as he sat back in his chair, crossing his arms over the chest of his shirt. “The University of Duke… Well, that’s in London.”
I looked up at him from under my eyelashes and nodded.
“No.” One simple word held a tone full of certainty.
“Dad,” I said calmly, even though I was beyond agitated.
“London is halfway across the world. Where would you stay?”
“They have shared accommodation available on campus. It’s already been arranged.”
“No daughter of mine is living in halls. Do you know how many young girls end up sexually assaulted at university? More than half.” He scoffed. “And the amount of knife crime? London recently reported its worst-ever death toll from teenage homicides.”
The fringe of my shorts snapped off when I pulled on it too tightly. With the cotton between my fingers, I looked up at my father’s solemn expression. “How do you know all of this?”
“A lot of The Lagoon’s fighters come from the streets. It’s my job to stay in the know when it comes to these things.”
“Come on, dad, please? There’s nothing for me here. Almost all my friends are off to Ivy League schools. I hardly leave our house without an escort. Let me do this. I can’t stay cooped up in this house any longer, and you can’t keep treating me like a child.”
He ground his molars and ran a hand back through his hair. “But why? I don’t like it. The thoughts of you in a city you barely know, with no one to look after you. No one to protect you. Halfway across the world.” He shook his head. “No. It’s insanity.”
“Nobody said you had to like it.” I hiked my shoulders and etched forward in my seat. “Please, dad. I’m a Sterling. Why on earth would I need protection? I can take care of myself. I won’t be the first person to attend college in a foreign country. I’m hardly the type to get mixed up in any gang wars or find myself alone in a rough part of the city. I’m not as fragile as you think I am.”
He observed my face, and I knew what he would say before he said it. He always brought her up in times like these, which was next to never. “You have the same blue glint in your eyes your mother used to get when she was excited about something. It lessens the green.”
My shoulders slumped. “I don’t want to talk about her.”
He rubbed his knuckles over his heart, then moved them to his jaw, brushing over the short stubble on his cheeks with a roughness that often came with the mention of my mother. “It would make you feel better if we did.”
“It makes me feel better when we don’t speak about her at all.”
“You’re lucky, Blue,” he said. “You’re lucky you survived the accident.”
“Lucky?” I scrunched up my nose. “I’m not lucky.”
“I have to disagree. You’re incredibly lucky a stranger pulled you from the car when they did.”
“I have nightmares,” I stated, swallowing roughly. “I hear her screams. I remember the warmth of the flames. Do you honestly believe that by telling me I’m lucky, you’ll somehow convince me? That if we talk about it, over and over, one day I’ll wake up and just be normal?”
Exasperated, he let out a heavy breath. “Princess, I am not trying to convince you of anything. All I’m doing is trying to explain. A three-year-old shouldn’t have to relive such a horrific event. I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to move across the world when even now, years later, you’re still so… so…”
“Dad–”
“Fragile.”
He placed a fist onto the papers he’d piled on his desk and pinned me with a glare, ending our conversation.
“But, dad–”
“No,” he said. “Now go to bed.”
“But–”
The grandfather clock in the corner of the room chimed, signalling the start of my curfew. I stood from my chair and pushed it back with force. My mouth opened to say something else but closed again when I thought better of it. As much as I wanted to protest, was there any point in fighting a losing battle? I’d have to find another way to escape the horror of a life he created around me. Even if it meant waiting until the day I turned eighteen and not a day later.
He lifted his chin upon seeing the wheels turning in my head that told him exactly what I was thinking. How I was beginning to resent him for the way he treated me. As if I was always one step away from a mental breakdown.
That’s right, dad, you can’t force me to stay.
“You really want this?”
I didn’t hesitate. “More than anything.”
His eyes searched my own, but the thin line of his mouth stayed sealed. He held his arm out without another word, directing me towards the door. The second my foot was over the threshold, I heard his sigh sound through the room, and then I listened to his office phone being removed from its hook. Resisting the urge to listen to his conversation like I’d done countless times before, I decided not to stick around.
If he was revoking my place from Duke, I didn’t want to hear it.
