Read an Excerpt
1. Dallas The students involved in the scandal that spring may have been Rockwell’s best and brightest, but most kids at the school didn’t even know who they were. Lucy found out who was involved when her son texted: D + R + S + me = big trouble.
She was having lunch at Haywire on McKinney, sitting between Bryn and Harper, the impressive young CEOs who had hired her only six months before. She found them intimidating. Lucy worked remotely, and twice this powerhouse duo had flown her to their chic headquarters in LA for an in-person meeting. But today they had come all the way to Dallas just to see her. Lucy had no idea why.
She read Jack’s message under the table and texted back a question mark and a smiley face, thinking that if he and his friends were in some kind of trouble, it couldn’t be all that bad. Lost keys maybe. Or a crashed computer.
Lucy looked up to see Harper twisting a lock of her highlighted hair around one finger. “Should we have drinks?” she said, sounding not rebellious, but rather as if she’d just learned of a new custom, one she might dare to try herself.
“Like a cocktail?” said Bryn, intrigued. “Like... champagne?”
The waiter arrived. Lucy closed her notebook and sat up straight in the tufted U-shaped booth, smoothing her napkin over her lap.
“Did I hear champagne?” the waiter said as he placed their salads in front of them.
“Sure,” said Lucy with a shrug. “Heck, yeah.” This was, after all, the start of a momentous family weekend.
The waiter nodded and turned to her bosses. “Are we doing three glasses or a bottle?”
Harper was tapping her lips with her finger. “On second thought,” she said, “I think I’ll stick with mineral water.”
“Same,” said Bryn, adjusting her sleeveless top, which emphasized razor-sharp collarbones. “Day drinking wrecks me. But I love this for you, Lucy. You should celebrate.”
“A glass then,” said the waiter.
Lucy immediately regretted the order.
She assumed the celebration Bryn was referring to was Jack’s high school graduation. But the women exchanged a glance then, as Harper leaned forward and said, “We came to tell you in person, the Laurel team love-loved your pitch.”
Lucy started, knocking her bare knee into the table leg. “Really?” she said. “As in...?”
“As in,” said Bryn, “we got the contract for their six West Coast hotels. It was your concept that sold them, that whole Scandinavian, clean look you presented.”
“I worried it was giving hospital vibes,” Harper said. “Bland, sterile even. But they absolutely adored it.”
“Great,” said Lucy, unable to contain her smile. She loved her job with this boutique firm, so much more than the low-budget hotel chain where she’d worked before. It was awkward, though; she’d fought for this aesthetic against her own bosses, who were gunning for their signature, edgy boudoir theme that always included an obscene amount of red velvet. “I’m on it.”
“Good,” Harper said, “because they want to launch as soon as possible.”
“Onboarding starts Monday,” Bryn said.
“I’ll be ready,” said Lucy.
“Are you sure?” Bryn said, pouting slightly. “Because we know you’ve got, like, a whole thing this weekend.”
“It’s fine.” Lucy opened her notebook again and clicked the top of her ballpoint. In addition to the graduation, her visiting in-laws, and a backyard party for fifty, she would find time to prepare a kick-ass presentation. “It’s no problem.”
“They’re our biggest client,” Harper said with a bit of surprise, as though she could not believe Lucy had delivered this win. “So we need to earn their confidence right off the bat.”
The waiter came back and set the lone champagne coupe on the table, just as Lucy’s phone started to vibrate on the seat beside her. She glanced down, seeing the dreaded word “School” on her screen.
“I’m so sorry,” Lucy said. “I wouldn’t normally take this, but Zoe wasn’t feeling well this morning and—”
“Who?” said Harper.
“Her daughter,” said Bryn, sliding out of the booth to let Lucy out.
“Just... a sec,” Lucy said, holding up a finger and stepping away from the table. She heard a voice saying, “Hello? You there?”
Lucy recognized the drawl of the principal’s secretary. “Donna,” she said. “Yeah, I’m here.”
“Phew,” Donna said, sounding breathless. “We need you to come in to discuss the accusations.”
“Sorry?” Lucy put a palm over her free ear to block out the background noise from the bar. “What accusations?”
“It’s about Jack,” she said. “He participated in a... sexist activity.”
Lucy’s first reaction was to laugh. Jack was many things, most of them nerdy and some of them astonishing, but sexist he was not. He was a teenage boy, so he did things from time to time without thinking them all the way through. He was late for everything. His posture was bad and his feet smelled. He was a terrible driver; these were all accusations Lucy herself would level. But sexist? No.
“Principal Neal wants to know how fast you can get here.”
“What happened?” Lucy said.
“I can’t say anything more,” she whispered, “but Jack is in serious trouble.”
“Shit,” Lucy said, glancing over at Bryn, who was poking at her salad suspiciously, and Harper, who was looking around the restaurant, taking in its southern decor with bemusement. “I’ll be right there.”
Lucy walked back to the table and apologized profusely to her bosses. They stared at her blankly when she explained that she absolutely had to leave.
“Now?” Bryn said.
“I’m so sorry,” Lucy said. “There’s some kind of emergency—”
“Rotten timing,” Harper said, putting her fork down. “We have so much to go over.”
“Could we meet later today?” Lucy said, stuffing her notebook in her tote bag. “Like in an hour or so? I could come to your hotel?”
“We’re flying back this afternoon,” Harper said.
“But do what you have to,” said Bryn. “Family comes first.”
Lucy thanked them, but she was pretty sure neither one of them really believed that.
She picked up her minivan from the valet and broke the speed limit as she took the tollway from downtown to her kids’ school. On the way there, she called her mother, who picked up on the first ring.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in a meeting?”
“I had to leave,” said Lucy. “I’m heading to the school.”
“Uh-oh,” Irene said. “Who got sick?”
“No one. Jack’s in some kind of trouble.” She remembered what Donna said. “Serious trouble.”
“What did he do?”
“I don’t know yet. Probably nothing,” Lucy said. She could hear her mom’s manicured nails tapping on her keyboard. And then the clicking stopped.
“Jack’s a smart kid,” she said, “but his frontal lobe has a ways to go.”
“Donna said he did something... sexist.”
“Sexist? Jack? I don’t think so.”
“Yeah,” Lucy said, “me neither.”
“But you should probably call Mason anyway.”
Lucy swerved to dodge a busted tire in the middle of her lane and then swerved back to avoid a pickup truck on her left; the driver honked and shot her the finger.
“Hello?”
“I’m not going to bother him,” Lucy said. “Mason is on Mars.”
“Mason is in New Mexico.”
“Potato, po-tah-to,” Lucy said.
“It’s a theater set. Get someone to holler over the chain-link fence.”
“It’s not theater; it’s a simulation.”
“Potato, po-tah-to,” her mother said.
“Please don’t belittle NASA,” Lucy said, “or the biosphere or Mason. I’ll call you when I know something. I’m almost there.”
“Jack’s a good boy,” her mom said. “He probably pulled a senior prank. Something dumb but harmless.”
“Yeah,” Lucy said. “I bet you’re right.”
“Wait,” Irene said, “how did it go with Happy and Brie?”
“Harper and Bryn. I got the client,” said Lucy.
“Good for you, I knew you would. And what about your in-laws? Is their flight on time?”
“They land at six, and Henry gets in from Chicago at six fifteen.”
“Thank God he’s not bringing the crew. His children are hellions.”
“The reservation’s at seven thirty.”
“We’ll meet you there,” her mom said, “unless you want Zoe and Alice to ride with us.”
“Yes, definitely.”
What Lucy didn’t know as she was driving to the school that afternoon was that nothing was definite. The story of what Jack had done—or what people thought he’d done—was already sloshing out into the world, a toxic glob taking on a life of its own, sprouting hairy legs and developing bad breath, growing monstrous. No matter how fast Lucy drove or what she did or didn’t do when she arrived at the school, there was no motherly act that could contain the fallout, and everything she knew to be set in stone was already falling to pieces.
She got off the tollway and drove by the Preston Royal shopping center, turning into the campus. She passed impossibly green athletic fields and the state-of-the-art glass and steel science pavilion, parking as close to the columned entrance as she could get. It was ninety-seven degrees that afternoon, and yet she grabbed her cardigan from the back seat, anticipating the frigid air-conditioning in the school.
A cluster of seniors in their blue and white plaid uniforms eyed her as she passed them.
“Hi, Madison, Becca, Allie,” Lucy said. “Congratulations.”
None of them answered. Not a single “Thank you” as she walked by. She’d known these girls since they were in elementary school, not that they were friends with Jack exactly, not that they’d ever come over. But the class was, on some level, tight-knit. Lucy could not imagine what had happened to account for such rudeness.
Through the atrium—filled with balloons and a giant banner that said Hooray, Graduates!—Lucy arrived at the glassed-in, navy-carpeted administrative suite. Donna, the normally cheerful school secretary, nodded at her curtly, coral lips in a tight, straight line, and pointed her sharpened number-two pencil at the corner.
There was Jack, looking ashen, hunched over his closed laptop, the top of which was covered in stickers: Github Rules. Dogs believe they are human—Cats believe they are God. Let’s Go Solar. And Lefties are the besties. Jack was right-handed, so that last one had to be a nod to his twin sisters. Or a sticker ambush committed by one of them.
“What is going on?” Lucy said, sitting down in the chair beside him.
“It’s not what it sounds like,” he said. He was jiggling his foot at top speed.
“What does it sound like?” she asked. “And where are the others?”
“They were sent home,” he said, his eyes on the floor. “They might get suspended.”
Lucy could feel her heartbeat quicken. “Are you getting suspended?”
“Probably.”
“But why?” she said. “And how can anyone be suspended? Y’all’re graduating tomorrow.”
“It was a stupid... thing,” Jack said. “I thought the others would have cleared it up by now.”
“Look at me, Jack,” Lucy said, her exasperation and panic growing. “How stupid? What did you do?”
“Really stupid,” he said, glancing over at her, looking more like a scared ten-year-old boy than a young man heading to college. “But I can explain.”
She hoped so. She hoped he could fix whatever this was the way he could remove a bug from glitchy code or stop a fight between his sisters. She put on her sweater, a bit of armor for what was coming, and said, “Tell me everything I need to know.”
Before he could answer, the door to the principal’s office opened, and Janice Burton, queen of the senior class moms and Lucy’s neighbor from two streets over, walked out with her daughter, Cynthia. Lucy was relieved to see an ally; the Burtons had known Jack since he was a toddler. But on spotting Lucy and Jack in the corner of the room, Janice wrapped her arm around Cynthia as if to shelter her from some encroaching danger, hurricane winds or a pack of coyotes. “Shame on you,” Janice hissed as they walked by.
“Excuse me?” Lucy said. “Shame on...? Don’t we get to explain?”
But what, Lucy wondered, were they explaining? Janice and Cynthia were already out the door, marching down the school corridor, when the principal—former Texas Tech running back Kevin Neal—hulked out of the office. Kevin’s hairline was damp with sweat. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to reveal muscular forearms and a heavy watch that looked like it was rated for deep-sea exploration, even though they were three hundred miles from the Gulf of Mexico. Lucy put a hand on Jack’s shoulder, hoping that whatever he had to say in the next few minutes would fix what was going off the rails here and that Kevin would calm himself down before he had a heart attack, which would not be his first. Jack might be disorganized and socially clumsy, but the fact remained, he was a dream student, especially in the eyes of a principal. He was a Rockwell lifer, he was not a troublemaker, and he had an MIT acceptance for the fall, a win that the school administration had not only celebrated but happily touted as their own in a recent newsletter.
Kevin exchanged a grim look with Donna before turning to them. Lucy stood, and as Jack got up, he stepped back to let her go in first, whether out of gallantry or fear, she could not say. She looked at the open door and then at her good-natured, earnest son, and she felt an impulse to grab on to anything fixed around her, anything known. Here we go, she thought.
She reached out and took hold of Jack’s arm.
.
