Sweet Sixteen, Chapter 2 ~ Hollace MacKenzie, part 2

Hollie felt as if she’d known her cousin all her life, but they’d actually only first laid eyes on each other when she was two years, five months old and he had just turned three.

Adrian’s parents had an on-again-off-again relationship that started in junior high and continued on in the same pattern for the next twelve years.  Sometimes Uncle Jake was with Katherine Boone (he called her Kiki and as a result everyone else did too, even though she said it was kind of a silly old high school nickname) and sometimes he was with someone else and she was far away.

It didn’t matter much to Hollie who her father’s younger brother had in the way of girlfriends, but she preferred him with Kiki since where Kiki was her son went also.  Truth be told, in the six years since she’d first met Adrian (a meeting she had no memory of, but liked to imagine she did) she had not really seen him that often.

Kiki was fifteen and Jake seventeen the June Adrian was born, when Hollie had barely been rounding her mother’s abdomen, just three months along.  They’d had some sort of fight; Elly told Hollie that Kiki’s parents decided to move away from where Jake lived at the time.  They’d never really liked him, even less so when he got their daughter pregnant, and they were hoping there’d be a break up.  There was, but only because Jake was upset with her for letting her parents take her — and his son — away.  He’d been even madder when Kiki went and gave Adrian her surname, not his, not even a hyphenated Boone-Markson.  Just Boone.

His own father had been absentee for a long time, and his mother wasn’t very tough, so he couldn’t really imagine parents who gave orders and left you no choice.  That’s how Elly told it.  She said it had been their own father who calmed Jake down enough so that he pursued keeping in touch with Kiki over the phone, through the internet, and even driving long distance at least once a month to visit.  After all, he had every right to visit his baby boy, right?  Russ even drove his brother there sometimes, to provide moral support in the hostile environment.

When Kiki was eighteen in three years, she did return to be with Jake.  That was right around the time when Russ and Jake’s band, Ixion, took off with them signing their first contract and starting work on an album.  They’d been playing clubs around where they lived for the past three years, but this would mean national exposure, money, travel . . . fans.  Elly said it had all been very exciting, and Hollie liked to think she remembered something of the feeling in the air then, even though she had been so young.  She could imagine she actually remembered things when Elly told her about them.

Jake and Kiki lasted a couple years after she came back.  Elly said that in the three years they’d been long distancing it, Jake had had a few “short term girlfriends” and Kiki knew about them and pretended not to care because they had broken up and were just staying in touch for Adrian’s sake . . . right?  Right.  And then when they got back together, they were back together, so it didn’t matter what either had done when they were apart . . . right?  Wrong, said Elly.

With the burgeoning fame and glamour that being in an up and coming rock band created, came more opportunity for mistrust.  Jake had started drinking in high school and he kept drinking more the older he got.  And being in a band took up a lot of time.  And there were, of course, always women around at concerts.  Elly said “women” as if that one word should explain everything, and when Hollie, at a younger age, had wondered why, Elly had just smiled and said that there were lots of women who hung around rock bands trying to be short term girlfriends.  Really short term.

At any rate, it took only two years for Kiki to move back in with her parents, taking Adrian with her.  Hollie felt as if she could almost remember that herself — she had been five by then.  And maybe she did remember some things, helped on by Elly jogging her memory, but the first really clear memory she had of seeing Adrian was when they met again the next time Jake and Kiki got back together.

That was when she was seven years old — Adrian already eight.  Jake somehow managed to charm himself back into Kiki’s good graces; Kiki was easy to charm, that Hollie learned herself in the subsequent years, not needing Elly to tell her.  She didn’t know why it had taken Uncle Jake two years to do it — but probably it was because he hadn’t been trying.  He’d been having short term girlfriends.  Elly said it was Russ again who convinced him to give up the groupies to pursue regaining Kiki.

Hollie figured that Kiki’s parents must hate, loathe, and despise her father.  It made her smile a little — for better or worse it was him who played a big part in thwarting their efforts to keep their daughter away from Jake Markson.  She liked to think that her father could thwart anyone’s efforts if he wanted to.  She’d like to be able to do that, someday.

Now, thwarting Kiki’s parents was one thing, thwarting Jake’s efforts at self destruction was undoubtedly harder.  In the two years since she could remember meeting Adrian again on her own, Hollie had witnessed a lot about that slipshod family of her cousin’s.

Jake and Kiki had had a few miniature break ups, when Kiki went back to live with her parents for weeks or months, or took long vacations to other countries that involved Jake’s money and their son, but not him.  Hollie could remember every instance when Jake’s behavior had driven his girlfriend and her cousin away, and at times she wasn’t sure who she wanted to bonk over the head more, Uncle Jake or Katherine Boone.

Kiki was usually so easygoing that you didn’t think she was the type to walk out, but that was, really, her one weapon.  Hollie never saw her yell or throw things or anything like what her own mother did when she was upset, but Kiki could grab her bags and walk out the door at a moment’s notice.  Sometimes Hollie didn’t think that Jake really deserved it, and sometimes Kiki just wanted to get her way about something or other.  Other times, of course, Jake did deserve it.  But did Hollie deserve it?  Why did Kiki always have to take Adrian with her wherever she went?

It wasn’t really that long ago that they had met first when old enough to remember each other, but still Hollie felt now as if she’d been close to her cousin their whole lives.  He was the quieter of the two, the gentler, the weaker, that was for sure.  Hollie thought he needed a lot of toughening up, he was much too much like his mother who could only wield the weapon of absence.  He could banter back and forth with his cousin, tell her succinctly that he thought her birthday gift to her mother was a stupid gift, but you never, never ever saw him that way with other people.  Not other kids, not grown ups, no one.  Most people probably thought he was mute, or something.  Bullies picked on him because he was so incredibly pretty, and odd, and he didn’t fight back.  Artistic was the nice word for it, but Hollie really thought him odd.

She worried about him when they weren’t together.

Adrian was staying with his aunt and cousins because Kiki had accompanied Jake and the band on their last tour.  Elly said it was to keep an eye on him.  Hollie, ever practical, wondered to Elly who “kept an eye” on Uncle Jake when Kiki didn’t travel with him on tour.  Elly said, “Dad, of course.  But I don’t think Kiki thinks he does a very good job.  Don’t you remember the paternal suit last month?”

“The what?” Hollie asked.  She was very bright and understood a lot of terms other kids her age didn’t, but “paternal suit” made no sense.  And she hadn’t paid much attention to what was going on with the adults last month, she’d been happy enough that Adrian was around.

“Never mind,” Elly brushed it off.

Hollie had insisted on an explanation, though, because she could tell Uncle Jake had done something wrong and usually when he did something wrong Adrian was in danger of being taken away.

Elly hadn’t needed much prodding.  “A paternal suit is when a woman takes a man to court to prove that he’s the father of her child and demands that he pay child support.  They do DNA tests.”

Hollie, quick minded, remembered Elly’s explanations of where babies came from and the kind of women who hung around rock bands wanting to be short term girlfriends, and it all came clear.  “Do we have another cousin?”

“No.  Honestly, Hollie, don’t you ever listen in on what Mom and Dad are talking about?  The DNA results were negative.  That means Uncle Jake wasn’t the father.  But Kiki was angry about the whole thing, anyway.”

Elly never had any qualms about telling her younger sister just how life worked.  Hollie appreciated that, because you could never get such straight answers from adults, and kids her own age were usually confused and befuddled about such things.  Elly was sixteen, she knew all that adult stuff and could be counted on to explain it.  She was almost as good as a book for information, but you didn’t have to hide in a corner of the library to get that information.

“So Kiki’s going to go everywhere with him from now on?”  Hollie was wide eyed at the idea.  For one, Kiki usually left Uncle Jake when she was upset with him.  It was almost too good to be true that instead of disappearing and taking Adrian with her, she was sending Adrian to live with them while she traveled with Jake.  Could she really be understanding Elly right?

“I don’t know about everywhere, but she’s going with him to Europe this summer.”  Elly had sighed, loudly then, and said, “God, I wish I could go on tour with them.  I’m 16 now, I’m not a little kid.  But Mom has to be so paranoid about it.”

Hollie hadn’t really listened to Elly as she went on complaining about not being able to go.  She’d heard it many times before.  Their mother never allowed them to be around the band on tour, she said that rock ‘n’ roll tours were not places for children.  It aggravated Elly, who desperately wanted to travel the world with her father, but Dad would just shrug and agree with Mom, adding that she’d find it boring after a few days anyway.  Of course they’d gone to Ixion concerts when they took place near home, and they’d gone backstage.  But traveling with the band on the road was what Elly really wanted to do and it was what she was not allowed to do.

All Hollie had really cared about was that Adrian was going to be spending the entire summer with her.

Summer was over, now.  Officially over.  School had been back in session for about a month, but while Adrian was still living in the same house it seemed like summer vacation.  But now the tour was over and Dad was coming back from Europe.  Dad coming home was a wonderful thing, but that meant Kiki and Jake were coming back, too.  Coming back to reclaim their son . . . or maybe just Kiki would claim Adrian and take him away somewhere.  The best thing she could hope for was that they were still together and they’d all three stay home, so she could still see Adrian often.  They went to the same school and were in the same grade and shared the same classes, even though they were seven months apart.  Jake’s house was close enough to his brother’s that their children could visit each other easily.  But that was only if Kiki didn’t take Adrian away when she got home.

Hollie hoped and prayed that Kiki and Jake would still be together.  Adrian was her best friend, even if he was a boy, and a strange one at that.  She would miss him so.