Page 16 of Free to Believe
9
Jake
“Jenna, will you turn down your music so I can talk with you?” I yell from the bottom of the stairs. I can almost guarantee there’s no way she heard me. “Jenna!”I yell at the top of my lungs.
Shit, if I have to listen to Lady Gaga one more time on repeat singing about taking someone home, I might hang myself by my guitar strap. I lower my head to the newel post. Whoever said raising a teenage daughter was easy was obviously taking large amounts of drugs to numb their senses. Raising Jenna is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. The second being the day Jenna’s mother decided she no longer wanted to be burdened with a husband or daughter.
I can’t blame Jenna for her bitterness; I’m filled with it myself. It’s why I decided to take my cousin and her fiancé up on their offer to borrow their home on Nantucket. I applied for a teaching position on the island, making us one of its approximate 10,000 permanent year-round residents.
Jenna couldn’t be more pissed.
I uprooted us right before her senior year of high school, but things were getting bad at home when I made that call. Right before the end of the school year, I had been contacted by the Loudoun County Sherriff’s Office because my little girl was at a party drunk and stoned off her ass. When I called her mother to discuss the situation, Michelle couldn’t be bothered. She was too busy trying to settle down with her new lover.
Now, I was dealing with a sixteen-year-old who felt betrayed by her mother, hated me because I uprooted the only life she knew, and had barely any support system. I had a little more than a year left with the little girl I cradled in my arms seconds after her mother pushed her out before she left to go to college—providing she could get her act together to get in.
Stomping up the stairs, my own frustration boils over. “I swear to God, Jenna, if that music isn’t turned down by the time I reach your room, I’m confiscating everything that plays music in this house and chucking it out the window.”
Suddenly the music volume turns to a reasonable level and the door to her suite flies open. “Does that mean your music shit too, Dad?” she asks hopefully.
But now I’ve forgotten about the music.
“What the hell did you do to your hair?” I bellow. My daughter’s perfectly golden locks are an array of color with magenta being the featured color.
She smirks. “Relax. It’s color chalk. It’ll come out as soon as I wash it.”
I get right in her face. “Then go wash it. You have to go to work soon.”
She rolls her eyes. “I spent hours doing this. There isn’t a chance I’m changing it.”
“Must you fight me on everything?”
“You’re the one who brought me to this hellhole.”
I snort. “Yeah because living in this house is such a hardship.”
“I’ll admit, Dani has good taste. Everything else about this island pretty much sucks.”
I scoff. “Except for your new hair?”
She grins, and for just a moment, I have my little girl back. I want to put her crazy-ass hair in pigtails and turn time back about ten years to an age when she thought I hung the moon in her sky. “Come on, you have to admit, it’s pretty damn cool.”
The fact she did all this without clearing it with me aside, she did an incredible job. “I refuse to admit a thing.” I give her a mock glare. “As long as it washes out,” I caution sternly.
You’d think I just handed her the world. “You mean it? I can keep it in?” Her excitement is palpable.
“As long as it truly is chalk, Jenna. You know how I feel about lying.”
“It is, Dad. Hold on.” She races back into her room. Coming back with the packaging, she shows me that it may take a few washes due to the lightness of her natural hair, but in fact the chalk is washable. I give up the small battle to win the war of finding my daughter’s heart after I crushed it a few months earlier.
“Just promise me you’ll ask next time? What if you had a college interview or something?”
Jenna laughs. The sound is the music that warms my soul. “Chill, Dad. My hair won’t be a problem where I want to go.”
I swallow hard. I can’t believe we’re actually having this conversation with some semblance of calm. “So, you’ve been thinking about it?”
Turning, she walks into her room and flops back on her queen-size bed. I cringe when I imagine washing the sheets with the hair chalk covering them. Jenna’s books and sketch pads cover practically every surface. “Thinking about it? It’s all I’ve thought of.”
Finding an open space, I sit on the edge of the bed. Laying my hand on hers, I ask, “So, where did you decide?” UMass wouldn’t be hard for her to get into. Wellesley might be a stretch, I muse. So would Brown. Lord knows, she’s as talented as I am at music, so maybe NYU or Juilliard?
