“Does that mean ... uh ... that we can do this again?” Jake asked carefully.
Laura smiled. “We’ll just have to see how we feel over the next few days and weeks,” she said. “There are no regrets right now, but that does not mean there won’t be any.”
“I suppose,” said Celia.
“But I have a good feeling about this,” Laura said. “A real good feeling.”
Chapter 17: The Best Vacation
San Luis Obispo County, California
July 3, 1997
Chastity Best, known pretty much universally as Chase unless she was in serious trouble (something which did happen with her on a fairly frequent basis), had just turned fifteen years old the week before and was now on the adventure of her young life. She was in the front seat of a sixty-five-thousand-dollar BMW 7 series car driven by her uncle Jake Kingsley, the world-famous (and infamous) rock and roll musician, on the way to the airport where he was going to fly her to Los Angeles in his private plane so she could meet her absolute idol, Celia Valdez, and then actually hang out with her for the next few days. She kept having to pinch herself to make sure this was all really happening and not just a dream.
She was getting better at convincing herself this was reality. She and the rest of her family—her mother, father, older sister Grace, older brother Brian and his wife Julie, and her nephew Everett—had flown first-class from Salt Lake City International Airport to Los Angeles International two days before for a two-week visit with her Aunt Laura and Uncle Jake. At LAX, a long stretch limousine (with a uniformed driver, a fully stocked bar, a television, and a VCR player inside) had picked everyone up and taken them to a smaller airport across the impossibly huge and crowded city. There, Jake had flown them all over some mountains and along the coast to San Luis Obispo, near where their house was. The flight in Jake’s plane had been rather crowded, with every seat taken up except the one in the small toilet (and Grace and Chase would have to alternate using that seat for takeoffs and landings on any flights where Aunt Laura was along for the ride as well—several such trips were planned during the vacation), but once they’d landed and all piled into three cars and made the twenty-minute drive to Jake and Laura’s radical house up on the cliff, the true adventure began.
She had her very own room in the house! It was a room that was twice the size of the room she and Gracie shared at home, with a bed that was also twice the size of hers, a walk-in closet, her very own bathroom (complete with a bathtub with little jets that shot water out), and a window that looked out over the ocean! The house had a pool table, a pinball machine, something called a shuffleboard table, refrigerators that were endlessly stocked with Pepsi, a bitchin’ stereo system with a huge collection of CDs, and a big screen TV with a huge collection of recorded movies. There was a radical housekeeper named Elsa, who talked with a British accent, called her “Miss Chastity”, did her laundry for her (as long as she emptied her pockets and put it in the hamper), fixed snacks for them throughout the day, made awesome breakfasts and dinners, and then cleaned everything up afterward herself (as long as they finished what was placed on their plates and as long as they put everything else in the places she had designated they be put). And there was a hot tub out on the edge of the cliff the house sat on; a hot tub that she was allowed to use as much as she wanted. And she used it quite frequently, sitting out there for hours at a time, staring out at that amazing expanse of blue water that was the Pacific Ocean until her skin became wrinkled like a prune.
Their first full day in Oceano they had spent mostly in the huge sand dunes along the beach, riding four-wheel ATVs with big flags sticking up from the rear. She and Gracie had been allowed to each have their own ATV to themselves! And after the day of riding, they had come back to the home, taken showers in their private bathrooms, and been served a meal of homemade chicken tacos, refried beans, and Spanish rice.
Uncle Jake and Aunt Laura had the friggin’ life! And all because he knew how to play his guitar and sing a little! Friggin’ amazing!
But none of that could even come close to comparing to what was going to happen today. Celia friggin’ Valdez! she thought with a near religious awe. I’m actually going to meet her in a about an hour! Oh my God! What will I say to her? What will she be like? Will she like me? Why would she like a kid like me? Will she even talk to me?
“Relax, Chase,” Uncle Jake said with a smile, obviously picking up on her thoughts to some degree. Uncle Jake was a very perceptive guy (and, she could not help but think, pretty friggin’ hot in a bad-boy sort of way—after all, he wasn’t a blood uncle, right?) “Celia is just an ordinary person like you and me. She likes spunk, and you’ve got a lot of that.”
“You think so?” she asked.
“I know so,” he assured her. He seemed about to say something else, but then his attention was suddenly distracted. “Ohh, here it is,” he said reaching for the volume button on the car’s radio screen.
“That song you were talking about?” Chase asked.
“That song I was talking about,” he said. “It’s debuting this morning. Let’s listen. Tell me what you think about it.”
“Okay,” she said, sensing that he was not just trying to shut her up so that he could listen, but was genuinely interested in what her opinion of the song might be. That made her feel very adult.
The DJ on the local alternative rock station was introducing the new tune to the listening audience—a large portion of which were college students from Cal Poly. “ ... from a band called V-tach, whatever that means,” he was saying. “Their debut album will be coming out in a few more weeks and is produced by none other than Jake Kingsley, our local cliff-dwelling, noisy-airplane-flying celebrity who used to front Intemperance. I’m told that the members of V-tach are all members of the band that backed Kingsley last year at the Tsunami Sound Festival in Indian Springs, Nevada, where all the reviewers report they stole the show from the headliner Matt Tisdale, former guitar player for Intemp. Bigg G, the piano playing rapper who was part of Kingsley’s band for the TSF is, alas, not one of the members of V-tach, but nevertheless, this is some good, solid alt-rock music. Give it a listen. It’s called When I’m Not Home.”
The song began to play. Chase instantly liked it. Unlike her parents, sister, and brother, who listened to nothing but country music (Uncle Jake was trying to arrange a visit from Obie II, who they all worshiped), Chase loved alternative rock, thought it was the best friggin’ music ever invented, and had a keen appreciation for the jangling guitars and emotionally tragic lyrics that often went with the genre. She had no musical training of any kind, had never picked up an instrument in her life, but she had a love for music that transcended the average fifteen-year-old (or even the average forty-year-old) by a light year or two. As she listened now, she was drawn to the changing tempo and alternating distortion levels of the guitars between the verses and the choruses, the rhythmic backbeat that alternated along with the tempo, the lyrics, which she had no trouble at all interpreting even though it was a first listen, but most of all, the smoky, sexy sound of the lead singer’s voice as he sang out those lyrics.
The song came to an end and Ironic, by Alanis Morrisette began to play. Chase made a sour face as she heard it and was grateful when Uncle Jake turned the radio down to nearly sub-audible level.