Rock Angel (Rock Angel Series Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

from the corner of his mouth.
    Then he said, “Your mother is dead.”
    It was like hearing it for the first time. Shan’s face broke and she was crying again.
    “She was sick for a long time,” he said. “Longer than you knew. Longer than I knew. She hid it from me. You know why?” He took a couple of steps toward her. “Because of your fucking music school. She didn’t go to the doctor because there wasn’t enough money to pay him and still get you your goddamned piano lessons.” Now he was standing right over her bed, staring down at her. “It’s your fault,” he said tonelessly. “You killed your mother, Shan.”
    Shan remembered when she’d first started her classes at LeBarron, how her mother had said she would do anything, just anything to get her into that school. She began to cry harder.
    “You’d better shut up,” he said, “before I give you something more to fucking cry about.”
    With a tiny, mewling sound Shan lowered her face, trying to control her sobs.
    Suddenly, blinding pain against her leg. She screamed, jerked her head up—
    And saw the bright ember of her father’s cigarette coming toward her again.
     
    Shan sat up in the tub, wide awake. She flexed her legs, her knees emerging from the tepid bathwater to expose the round, white blemish that was a permanent inscription from that night. It was the first of many scars she would receive at the hands of her father.
    He never got over his wife’s death and he never stopped blaming his daughter for it, either. For weeks he’d barely speak to her then, out of the blue, he’d fly into a rage over some small infraction. Once he threw her into a wall for setting the beer she’d fetched on top of his newspaper.
    Shan’s life developed a routine. She tried to stay out of her father’s way, which wasn’t hard, since he was rarely at home. After school she hung out with a few other kids like herself, losers whose parents didn’t care what they did. Sometimes one of them had pot or beer purloined from a parent or older sibling, so they’d hole up at somebody’s house, get buzzed, and listen to music until it was time to go home for dinner.
    At home, keeping the house clean and doing the laundry had become Shan’s responsibility. She did the chores, fixed herself a can of soup or Chef Boyardee for supper, then played guitar and sang, working on her music until it was time to go to bed.
    And so she got by, for a long time. For more than two years, in fact.
    Then one afternoon she came home and fell asleep on the couch instead of doing the laundry. Her father was working the night shift then and when he got dressed, he found he had no clean socks and hit her so hard he knocked out two of her teeth. Shan waited until he went to work and within half an hour she was gone, taking only a backpack and her mother’s guitars. She could only carry two, so she took Joanie and the twelve-string. She’d long since graduated to steel strings so she never played the classical anymore, but to leave it behind still wrenched.
    Shan lived on the streets for over a year, eventually hitchhiking to New York, where she met Jorge. He was only one of many street people she encountered there, but he offered his couch one night when the temperature dipped below freezing. She took to coming by on subzero nights. He never seemed to mind and there were always people there, since he was a dealer.
    It was only natural to partake of whatever drug was being passed around. Shan sampled them all, enjoyed the different highs, but she was especially captivated by the brown rock Jorge referred to as the big H. She loved the way it made her feel, how all the sorrow and tension she carried inside her simply dissolved, just floated off. She hadn’t even realized how sad she was, how scared and confused and lonely, until the H took the feelings away.
    She couldn’t wait to do it again, but she was vaguely uneasy. “Doesn’t this make us junkies?” she asked Jorge.
    “Hell