Forcing Gravity (5 page)

Slipping into my wetsuit was foreign since back home I never wore one, but even in the middle of summer, the water temperature of the Pacific Ocean was frigid, and I wasn’t taking any chances. As the sun was just starting to rise, I paddled out, relishing in the calm and quiet of a new day. No matter how stressed or inside my head I got, surfing could always reel me back to sanity. Out there, I was far away from the people and things that drove me crazy. Out there, I was free.

I smiled to myself as the first wave of the day started to appear in the distance and got in line to catch it at just the right spot. Popping up on my board for the first time, I angled myself toward the shoreline and rode it all the way in.
And then I did it aga
in and again and again, until I exhausted myself.

Knowing my mother would be pissed if I went inside all salty and sandy, I
leaned my board against
our outdoor shower, rinsed off and peeled my wet suit down.
I contemplated going inside to see if Julio would make me an omelet when
I
saw movement on the back porch of the Lewis’
s
house.
Carol was up and reading the paper on the deck.

I slid my board
shorts on over my
bathing
suit and headed over to greet the woman I liked to call my second mom
but who I really wished was my real mom
.

“Logan!” she said, as soon as
my head cleared the steps. She
rose from her chair and reached out to hug me.

“I’m all wet,” I warned, but she just waved me off.

“Oh, I don’t care about that. Give me a hug.”

She squeezed me tight, like someone who hadn’t seen their daughter in a year, like I’d expected my mom to do, but she hadn’t.

“It is so good see you,” she said, pulling back to appraise me. “Oh, you are more gorgeous than ever. And apparently my
oldest
son took notice of that.” She was grinning conspiratorially at me.

My face fell.
I’d hoped Garrett, or at least Ethan, would have told her not to believe
what the tabloids had printed. I knew she, like my dad, secretly thought I’d end up with one of her boys, but it wasn’t happening.

“I’m kidding!” she said then. “Garrett told me the truth, but I have to say, for a little while, I was hopeful. You’d make a great addition to our family.”

“She’s already part of ou
r family,” a very rumpled looking Ethan said as he slumped into a chair at the table and leaned his head on his hand. He looked hung over.
He probably
was
hung over.

“I suppose you’re right,” Carol agreed. “Now come, sit. I made pancakes.”

I was always amazed that Carol cooked for her family. They were just as well-off as my mother, but Carol refused to hire a cook. She did have a maid though, since their house, although not as monstrous as ours, was still more than she could handle.

But Carol didn’t subscribe to the Hollywood way of life in almost every other way. She was a writer by trade and had made a good living from an early age writing contemporary romance novels. She’d met Ethan’s and Garrett’s father
, an entertainment lawyer,
while on a book tour and
had
moved to L.A. from O
hio to be with him. I liked the
fact that she never really let go of her Midw
estern roots and raised her kids
like she would have if they
were still living in her provincial
hometown.

“I can’t say no to pancakes,” I said.

I was ravenous after the low-carb meal my mother had served the night before. I looked over a
t Ethan who seemed a little green at the mention of food.

As soon as Carol disapp
eared I turned to him.
“Rough night, E?”

“Ugh,” he was all he could manage, so I reached for the carafe of coffee in the middle of the table and poured him a cup.

I shoved it under his nose, hoping
it would awaken him. He eyed it
gratefully after a few seconds but didn’t move to pick up the cup. Oh well, I’d met him halfway. He’d have to do the rest.

“How was Cla
i
re?” I asked.

He shrugged. “
We hooked up, but
I’m tired of the same old girls. I need to get to college so I can meet some new ones.”

“Maybe you’re just tired of the scene,” I suggested. “I mean, wouldn’t you like to have a girlfriend? Someone you can get serious with? Fall in love, maybe?”

Ethan’s eyebrows rose as he looked at me skeptically. “No, I don’t want a girlfriend.
Definitely not.
My buddy Chris started dating this girl last year, and he’s completely
whipped,
a shell of who he use
d to be. N
o thanks.”

I rolled my eyes at his dramatics and poured myself a glass of orange juice. “Getting a girlfriend doesn’t mean you lose your identity, you idiot. It means sharing your life with someone special.”

He finally took a sip of coffee and winced as he swallowed. “Lo, I’m just about to start college, where there will be thousands of girls at my disposal. Why would I want a girlfriend?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.
Whatever.
Forget I asked.”

I was not a girly-girl in so many ways, and I think Ethan sometimes forgot that I actually
was
a girl, but deep down I was a romantic at heart. I wanted a boyfriend and all the gooey crap that went with it. I wanted my life to be like a Taylor Swift song – a happy one, not the ones about break-ups
, since those didn’t sound enjoyable
. Of
course I’d never tell Ethan that
. He’d just razz me about it for the rest of our lives.

“
I don’t need a girlfriend
,” he said,
grinning
his trademark Ethan Lewis
smile
.
“I have you. You’re that special person I can share my life with.”

He said it mockingly, but I knew there was some truth to it.
He was just as important to me as I was to him.

“Screw you,” I said, just as Carol emerged with a plate of pancakes.

“Oh
Ethan, what did you do now?” she a
sked, and I made a face at her son
. He’d gotten in trouble our whole lives, no matter if he’d been at fault or not. And it looked like things hadn’t changed.

“He wants to be a playboy for the rest of his life,” I said, taking a few pancakes from the plate Carol had set in the middle of the table.

“That’s my baby boy,” she said
resignedly,
as she reached over and pinched Ethan’s cheek. “The girls love him, because he’s so cute.”

I almost spit orange juice out of my nose, as
Ethan pulled out of his
mother’s reach. “You’re both ridiculous,” he grumbled.

“But we love you, cute little Ethan,” I said in a baby voice, completely mocking him.

“Yeah, and you’re lucky I love you too.”

***

“Do
you ever feel like you’re invisible?” Et
han asked
me
later that afternoon.

After breakfast
I’
d gone home to shower, only to find that my mom was gone ye
t again,
and my sister was face-
timing with some friend of hers who needed lessons on how to appropriately wear eye shadow so she didn’t look like a ghoul.
Faced with n
ot much else to do, I’d changed
and gone back to the Lewis’
s
to hang out with Ethan.

I nod
ded
. “When I’m around my mother
,
I feel invisible
all the
time.”

He was sitting backwards in his desk chair while I perched on his bed
, fl
ipping through the latest issue of
Celebrity Weekly
and mouthing the w
ord of
a new song by The Killers that was
playing on his iPod, nodding my head in time with the music.

“Not so much when I’m at home
, though,” I clarified. “My dad is the best.”

“
Yeah, he is pretty cool,” Ethan agreed. “
Doesn’t it bother you?”

“What?”

“That your mom ignores you.”

“Nope,” I said, not bo
thering to look up.

I knew the look he was shooting me. It wasn’t the
first time he’d
l
ooked at me with pity after I’d
gotten a text from my
mother letting me know that I was
on m
y own for dinner because she had a date or
dinner with friends or
some
other
social
event
she just had
to attend.
It was what she
did, and I was used to it
.

But Ethan was bothered, especially because it was only my second night in town. Of course if you asked my mother, she’d tell you that we had dinner together the night before, and to her that was an acceptable
welcome. Julio would cook for my sister and me
tonight, so it wasn’t like we’d starve
. I was fine with it. I learned
a long time ago that my mother was
always
focused on one
person – herself. Skylar and I we
re usual
ly afterthoughts, if she thought
of us at all.

But I think Ethan sometimes forgot that my mother was nothing like his mother, so he couldn’t understand why I wasn’t more affected by her behavior. Since
he came from a nuclear family that wa
s still intact with two parents
,
who still kiss
ed each other hello when they ca
me home from work at night
,
and siblings who he adored, he had
a hard tim
e understanding that my family wa
s not like his.

My fam
ily wa
s, in the most rudimentary terms,
a hot mess
.
And quite honestly, I don’t think we ever had
the potential to be a nuclear family
, since that concept blew up soon after I was born
.

My dad loved my mom. That I know. He adored her and pampered her and catered to her every whim, and she loved it, but it wasn’t enough for her. She wanted fame and fortune and an exciting life.
But
she got pregnant by accident and was a mother before she was ready.
Over the years, I attributed her immaturity
and complete lack of maternal instincts
to the fact that she was so young when they got married and had me, so she neve
r really got to be a teenager.
My dad, who was always much more responsible,
and two years older,
took care of everything while she remained a child at heart.
It’s why he got me when they divorced.
And
why
she readily gave me up.

My parents met when
my dad
was a senio
r in high school and my mom
was a sophomore
. He was a football player, and she was a cheerleader. They fell madly in love – well, as madly in love as you can be when you’re
eighteen and
sixteen. After graduation from high school, my father
headed to USC, and he continued to date m
y mother
for the next two years. He fully expected her to follow him to USC, seeing as they’d been together so long, but my mother,
ever t
he party girl, had plans to
take a year off and backpack around Europe with her girlfriends. Unfortunately for her, she found out she was pregnant with me a week before she was supposed to leave. That fall, while her friends were visiting The Louv
r
e and Buckingham Palace, my mother was at home growing a child that I’m not sure she ever wanted.

To this day, I am almost one hundred percent confident that my father convinced her to have me. He was the responsible one, the sensible one and the one
who
was beaming down at me in pictures the day I was born.
There was no doubt in my mind that he loved me
from the moment he found out about me
, and I can almost guarantee that there was never a hesitation in his mind that I would be brought into the world. If I was a betting person, I would put money on the fact that if the decision had been solely up to my mother, I wouldn’t be here today.

I would also bet that my father promised my mothe
r he would take care of us
. My father’s family had money, so he could promise that. Even
as young as they were
, he knew they would never go without. He would provide for his family, and I would be willing to wager the significant amount of money he
’d
put away for
me in a college trust fund that this was a key point in my mother’s ultimate decision to
marry him and
have me. Although being a teen mom wasn’t ideal, she knew
she
wouldn’t have to deal with the hardship
s
that others in her situation would
have
.