Forcing Gravity Read online

  “Well,” I said, figuring I would talk since my mother was looking at me expectantly, “I’ve just been working at the rec center, teaching volleyball camps, and surfing and hanging out with my friends this summer. My life hasn’t been super-exciting.”

  It was true. It had been a slow summer. I hadn’t even dated anyone since Spring Break.

  “Until you were on the cover of Celebrity Weekly, that is,” my mother said, clapping her hands together with glee as her eyes lit up, and I finally realized what she was doing. She wanted the dirt on Garrett and me and our faux relationship.

  “Oh, yeah, right. That,” I said, trying to play it off. I did not want to get into that with her.

  “Yes,” she said, her eyes gleaming. “Truthfully, I always thought you would get together with Ethan Lewis, but Garrett Lewis is famous, so I guess that’s even better.”

  I sighed. My mother was all about status, and prior to eighteen months ago, she’d never have glanced twice at studious, serious Garrett, but now that he was an uber-celebrity, she was all about him.

  “Ethan is way hotter,” my sister chimed in.

  “He’s also too old for you,” my mother said, showing that she did in fact understand what it meant to be a mother.

  Skylar just pouted at this news, as if it came as a shock to her. Like Ethan would even look twice at her in that way. He thought of her as a little sister, but of course she was hitting puberty and noticing boys, and Ethan was quite noticeable, so I couldn’t exactly fault her. I’d had a crush on Zac Efron when I was her age, and he was several years older than me. I figured it was harmless.

  “So what happened, baby?” my mother asked then, a full pout gracing her plump, injected lips. “I saw how he broke your heart. I always thought he was such a nice boy.”

  She shook her head dejectedly, and I recognized the gesture as one I’d seen her do before when she had to act upset in a movie.

  “Mom, we weren’t dating,” I said pointedly.

  “Sure you weren’t, honey.”

  I swear, my mother was the only Hollywood celebrity who actually believed the stories the tabloids printed, even though she herself had been a victim of an embellished rumor a time or two. Of course, she just chalked those times up to publicity and waved the negativity away, assuming the magazine had just made a mistake in what they printed. ‘Any publicity is good publicity’ she’d said more than once, but I tended to disagree.

  “No, really, we weren’t,” I insisted. “We were just hanging out. He was in town shooting some scenes for a movie, and we hadn’t seen each other in a while, so we spent some time together.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I understand if you don’t want to talk about it, but just know that I’m here when you do.”

  I fought the urge to either laugh out loud or respond with some snarky comment, knowing it was just better to let it go. Instead I clenched my fists and smiled.

  “Thanks Mom. I appreciate that.”

  There was no way in hell I’d ever go to her with my boy problems. I’d go to Skylar first, and she’d never even been on a date with a boy. That was how much I didn’t value my mother’s advice.

  “Okay then,” my mother said, smiling widely. “Let’s go eat dinner.”

  That was it? That was all I got? We hadn’t talked since she’d called me to congratulate me on graduating in the top ten percent of my class, and all she wanted to know about my life was what had happened with Garrett? That blew. I wanted to kick myself for even thinking for one second that she might be interested in one real facet of my life. I knew better than that.

  I wondered how much longer I’d have to hang out before I could acceptably slip away to Ethan’s house.

  -3-

  I woke up early the next morning to go surfing and thought about inviting Ethan, but he’d said he’d be out late when we’d talked the night before. He’d been headed to the party of someone he’d gone to high school with and had invited me, but this was after he’d told me all about Claire Sunderland and how he hoped to score with her that night. The last thing I wanted on my first night in L.A. was to go to a party with Ethan and have him ditch me for the girl he was crushing on. No thanks. I opted to stay in and told him we could hang out the next day.

  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 again 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 boardshorts 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 our 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 Ohio to be with him. I liked the fact that she never really let go of her Midwestern 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 at Ethan who seemed a little green at the mention of food.

  As soon as Carol disappeared 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 Claire?” 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 used to be. No 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 asked, 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?” Ethan asked me later that afternoon.

  After breakfast I’d gone home to shower, only to find that my mom was gone yet 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 not much else to do, I’d changed and gone back to the Lewis’s to hang out with Ethan.

  I nodded. “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, flipping through the latest issue of Celebrity Weekly and mouthing the word 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 bothering to look up.

  I knew the look he was shooting me. It wasn’t the first time he’d looked at me with pity after I’d gotten a text from my mother letting me know that I was on my 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 were usually 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 was still intact with two parents, who still kissed each other hello when they came home from work at night, and siblings who he adored, he had a hard time understanding that my family was not like his.

  My family was, 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 never 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 senior 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 my 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 the 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 Louvre 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 mother 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 hardships that others in her situation would have.

  My mother did end up starting college at USC, and she and my father moved into a small house on the beach in Santa Monica. Over Christmas break, they got married, and three months later, I was born. We lived in that little house for the first few years of my life, but I don’t remember any more than what I’ve seen in pictures. From what I can tell, though, we were a happy family.

  Then, when I was about six months old, my mother was discovered while shopping in Santa Monica. She has told the story again and again in countless interviews, relishing in the day she was pushing her daughter in her stroller when a casting director approached her. The way she tells it, he offered her a small role in a movie on the spot. She took the job, a
nd from there things snowballed. I was two when she landed her first leading role, and she’s been landing them ever since. To the outside world, Alana Davis, is one of the top actresses in Hollywood, but to me, she’s the mother who chose her career over her family.

  Luckily for me, I have my dad, who never stopped loving me and putting me first. I honestly think he would have stayed with my mother, he loved her that much, but she wasn’t faithful to him. Only a handful of people know that in order to score that first lead role, she slept with both the director and the casting director. Then she actually had the nerve to tell my dad that it was a necessary part of being an actress, and he needed to be okay with it. When he wasn’t okay with it, she begged him for forgiveness and promised never to do it again. That lasted exactly a year, and then she slept with her co-star. My dad divorced her soon after he found out and moved us to Florida, where his parents were then living.

  I returned to L.A. each summer to stay with my mom. My dad would fly with me, then turn around and fly right back, and three months later, he’d fly out to get me, and we’d return home together. We did this until I was old enough to fly on my own. It was almost as if my mother expected that of him and never once volunteered to hop on an airplane either way.

  My mother was never the most attentive or involved of parents, and I spent most of each summer with the nannies that she’d hire to take care of me so she didn’t have to do it. At least they were fun. We’d go on adventures and hang out at the beach and go to Disneyland.

  Then, the summer I was seven, Ethan Lewis moved in next door with his perfect family, who was more than content to adopt me as their own. Ethan was a shy boy when he was seven years old. And being the independent little girl I was, I marched right up to him as he hit a volleyball against his garage door over and over again the day after they’d moved in. I told him my name was Logan Kessler and that he was going to be my friend. He’d let the ball roll into the street as he looked up at me – I was taller than him back then – and nodded his head, his eyes wide.