Disconnected (Luke Hemmings AU)

Chapter 1

I don't remember much about the first three weeks of the summer my mom died. I suppose those weeks passed in the same way most previous summers did before the year I was fifteen; my mom picked me up at L.A.X in her Benz, I totally pigged out on the food I wasn't allowed to have during the school year at Weatherwell Preparatory Academy, lounged around my the pool with my best friend Katy, and endlessly hoped for the a few moments alone with her older brother Todd, who I wanted to fall in love with me. My mom would have been around, I'm sure, occasionally asking me to help her with her suntan lotion or walk over to Larchmont Village to get her coffee smoothie. For the most part my mlm was somewhat of a shadow in my summer days even before the accident.  Katy, who I've known since kindergarten, used to say my mom was a periphery character. 

              She was always in the background, usually nursing a hangover. There were a few summers where she was recovering from plastic surgery, padding around the house in her robe with her swollen face bandaged. On weekend nights she would appear in my bedroom doorway wearing an obscenely short dress and ask me how she looked.  "Embarrassing" was never the answer I gave her.

      She was not the kind of mom who baked cookies. Or gave out motherly advice (unless you'd call consider advising your daughter to pad her bra to be typical parental guidance.) She never seemed concerned about where I was going and who with-maybe because I rarely did anything with anyone other than Katy. I think my insistence on attending boarding school and genuine interest in schoolwork floored her; my mom was a bit of a livewire when she was my age and I don't think she ever imagined she would give birth to a violin-playing bookworm. But however atypical our mother-daughter relationship was, it worked. By the end of the summer she usually seemed sad to see me pack my suitcases and head back to Massachusetts, and usually around Halloween I would feel a little homesick and miss her walking around the kitchen in her satin sleep mask propped up on her head.

It was just me and Mom, the two of us, the only family I had ever known. We lived in a small but pretty bungalow in West Hollywood and Mom worked from time to time doing guest roles on soap operas or singing back-up on a commercial jingle. Having a mother who has one foot in the entertainment industry and spends the majority of her time miliing around the house ordering stuff on QVC isn't that rare for Los Angeles. But I wouldn't consider my life normal because of my dad.

My biological father is a rock star.

Possibly the most famous American rock star there is, or at least he was in the early nineties when his band, Pound, first broke the charts. Luckily my mother had the sense to not give me his last name; I've always gone by Allison Beauforte, which is my mother's last name. It's bad enough that everyone at school knows that my dad is Cameron Atwood. It would be pure torture having complete strangers guess my genetic lineage if my last name were to give them a clue.

Not like I had anything to do with Cameron Atwood, anyway. Up until that summer I had only met him twice. Yep. That's right. Twice in fifteen-and-a-half years. Once when I was seven, Pound played a huge amphitheater in Orange County and my mother took me backstage. My father had long hair then, with blonde streaks, and in the Polaroid that my mother snapped of us together he was wearing a white leather coat with fringe on the sleeves. And, I suspect with horrible eyeliner. Total fashion tragedy.

Then, when I was twelve, I had a very incomfortable lunch with him at a trendy burger joint near the airport, where our waitress kept winking at him and refilling his water glass needlessly while he and I tried to "connect." This awkward second meeting was entirly my mothers idea. At the tme I thought she was innocently trying to help us establish some kind of father-daughter relationship but later I pieced together that it was a calculated step in her hitting him up for payments. At the time, he was already covering my clothes, doctor appointments, violin lessons and ballet clases, the latter of which had been my mom's idea.