3. Remind Joe that he booked an interview, even though I explicitly told him I’ll be gone for the day. Check.
4. Either I or Joe’s manager will be there in time for the interview to field questions. However, since Joe refuses to let me hire a decent staff for the house, remind him that he is therefore in charge of making sure things are tidy before the reporter arrives.
5. Make sure Joe wears pants.
Oh boy. “I think you might want to clean up a bit.” I hitch my thumb at the row of framed platinum records, hanging at precarious angles above the couch. A pizza box had been made into a tepee on the end table, and there are so many half-empty glasses and bowls residing on various chairs and tables in the family room and bits of ground chips living in the white carpet, you’d think he’d thrown a party after we got back last night. Yet from what I could tell from my room in the east wing, it had just been Joe and his greatest hits on Guitar Hero in here.
“A reporter? Why does a reporter want to come here?” Joe sits up. His rings clack against the glass-top coffee table as he searches for his glasses.
“I don’t know. Why doesn’t a reporter want to come here?” According to Marta, Olympus Hills is where the rich and famous come to live when they get sick of LA. If a reporter is being allowed inside Joe “the God of Rock” Vince’s mansion, it is probably quite the scoop. “All I know is that Marta said to make sure you’re up before the reporter arrives.” I check my list. “Also, to make sure you’re wearing pants.” Thankfully, he is. Very tight leather ones, but pants they are. “Marta said you want to make some sort of announcement to the press.”
I can only hope that announcement doesn’t involve outing the secret of his long-lost backwater daughter to the world. Mom always said it was a miracle that the paparazzi had never found us in Ellis. It’s almost like we were invisible to the rest of the world there.
“Oh, right, that.” Joe finds his glasses: thick-framed, nerdy, hipster specs that clash with his leather pants, skull rings, and long, rocker hair.
Three things I know for sure about Joe so far. The longer portions of his hair are extensions, he never wears his glasses in public, and even though he tries to pull off an übercool, leather-clad, Top Forty rocker persona for the press, when I listen real closely, I can hear that he has more of this geeky, Indie singer-songwriter vibe. It’s always baffled me, the few times we’ve met.
He presses the thick frames onto his face and makes a strangled noise as he surveys the mess around him. He turns a wide, toothy grin on me. “Fancy helping a poor bloke clean up a bit?”
“Not on your life.”
“Come on, Daph, no love for your poor old dad?” He wiggles his eyebrows above the rims of his glasses, that cheeky smile on his face. “Quality daddy-daughter time,” he croons.
“You are not my dad.” He isn’t going to let me forget that I called him that back at Paradise Plants, is he? “And cleaning up after your drunken binge doesn’t make for quality lushy-louse–daughter time.”
My anger shows in my voice too much, but at the moment I don’t care. Joe didn’t say a word to me on the entire trip from Ellis to here, and he’d disappeared the second I arrived at my new house, and the only reason that he’s even paying attention to me now is because he doesn’t want to clean up his own mess. I have no idea why he wanted custody of me if he’s just going to ignore me as much here as he did when I lived a thousand miles away.
Joe places his hand against his chest and gives me an expression that almost looks genuinely crestfallen. But from the smell of stale whiskey and pizza that wafts off him, he is probably just trying to stifle a burp.
“I’m leaving to go find someplace to rehearse. My audition for the music program is today. That’s the whole reason you wanted to bring me here, isn’t it?” I pick up my guitar off the postmodern lounge chair, which clashes with the ancient Greece–inspired architecture of Joe’s mansion. I use my fingernail to press down the peeling edges of a sticker of the Parthenon on my guitar case. The whole thing is covered in stickers of places I plan to visit someday. The Colosseum, Taj Mahal, Eiffel Tower, the pyramids of Giza.
Joe’s eyes look huge and bloodshot as he blinks at me from behind his thick lenses. He doesn’t answer my question, just looks at his wrist again as if trying to read his missing watch. “What day is it?” he asks. “The twentieth?”
“It’s the twenty-first.”
“Already?” Joe jumps up from the couch, and then catches himself against the armrest, like he’s dizzy from standing up too fast. He’s probably trying not to puke.