3. Dallas
DALLAS
Lucy’s phone pinged to announce that today was graduation at the Rockwell School.
But Jack would not be graduating, and none of the Holt family festivities surrounding the event were happening.
Lucy would not tap her foot along to “Pomp and Circumstance” as the students marched in procession.
There would not be a big lunch at Mesero, nor would they gather in the evening at her house for a celebration with Jack’s friends and their families, even though Big D Party Rental had already dropped off linens and set up six round tables and fifty folding chairs in the backyard.
It was impossible to believe that it was all canceled, including MIT in the fall.
Jack had been so close, and now everything was grievously and hideously bungled. Lucy punched a fist into the mattress.
She hadn’t slept. The scene in the principal’s office had replayed over and over in her head while she tried to think of a way out of this mess.
She had a house full of guests in town for graduation—Mason’s divorced parents, along with his brother, Henry—and sometime around midnight, she was sure she’d heard something, raised voices and a thumping on the front door.
When she’d gotten up to look out the window, there was no one there.
Her heart was pounding even now as she stared at the ceiling of her bedroom, watching the blades of the overhead fan spin, feeling crushed.
The evening before, Jack—all chin stubble and leg hair, taller than she by six inches—had cried on her shoulder for the first time since he was a little kid.
And all she could do was pat his back and tell him that somehow—although she had no peg on which to hang this promise—things were going to work out.
At least his friends would rally around him.
They were superstars. A band of misfits, sure, unpopular by whatever metric high schoolers use to calculate popularity.
But they were a nice group. Smart, generous; they had one another’s back.
Rosie was an aspiring environmentalist. Drew, who had arrived at Rockwell in second grade, was shy, painfully so.
He and Jack volunteered every Wednesday afternoon, socializing animals at a local shelter, which is how the Holts had ended up with a pit bull, a something-doodle, a guinea pig named Piglet, and three still-unnamed tabby cats, one of whom was downright aggressive, though no one could tell them apart.
Sam was the last to join Rockwell and was the most outgoing of their group, recently wowing them all as Howie the milkman in the spring production of Our Town .
And then there was Jack: fan of bad puns and Torchy’s Tacos, member of a climbing gym, highly sensitive, and seriously into math.
All nice kids. None of them perfect. Only one of them expelled.
Lucy climbed out of her side of the bed, and the dogs, Bunny and Tank, followed her out of the room as she went to wake the twins.
Instead of decorating graduation cupcakes for their big brother that morning, the girls were going to Saturday swim practice.
They were groggier than usual as they ate their cereal.
But then came the usual morning chaos, conducted in hushed tones rather than at normal volume.
The girls ran around in pajamas, searching for goggles and dry pool towels, and then went to brush their teeth.
“Is my hair green in the back?” Zoe said, twisting to see for herself in the bathroom mirror.
“Yes,” said Alice.
“No,” said Lucy, sniffing the chlorine that emanated from her daughter’s head. “Your hair’s fine. But let’s put it in a ponytail.”
“A green ponytail,” said Alice snidely.
Lucy hustled them into the hallway, just as Uncle Henry came out of the guest room in a bathrobe, his hair standing up on end the same way Mason’s did. He put out a hand and high-fived the girls on their way downstairs.
“You’re up early,” Lucy said quietly. The last thing she wanted was to wake Jack or Mason’s parents, given how late they’d all been up. “Did you sleep okay?”
“Until the sunlight nearly blinded me,” he said, pointing a thumb over his shoulder.
“Adding that huge east-facing window was a bad move.” Henry had designed the house, and people either loved the architecture or despised it, as her mother did.
“I had a nightmare that the doors were all the wrong sizes and were falling out of their frames. It was like that dream where your teeth fall out.”
“It wasn’t a dream,” Lucy said, patting Tank, who was leaning heavily against her leg. “The dogs heard it too and went completely bonkers.”
“Or we’re all experiencing a collective anxiety,” Henry said, shaking his head. “Poor Jack.”
“Ellen took the news pretty well,” Lucy said.
“As you know, my mother is a pathological optimist. But she’ll be sad if it turns out that Jack isn’t moving to Cambridge.”
For Lucy, the very words “Jack isn’t moving to Cambridge” were like a punch to the gut.
“I called home last night,” Henry said, “and tried to tell the gang what happened, but I got confused about the math part.”
Of course Henry would tell his wife and kids, but Lucy hated to know the story was spreading and probably mutating, all while Mason knew nothing about what had happened.
She dropped her voice to a whisper. “Jack wrote a complicated formula to calculate how much the most popular girls in his class would have to be paid to invite him to their graduation parties. Someone found the list and claimed he was putting prices on them.”
“Too smart for his own good,” Henry said, putting a hand on her shoulder, “like father, like son. I’m sorry Mason isn’t here.”
Lucy was too. Very sorry.
“My brother picked a hell of a time to go to New Mexico.”
“Mason is on Mars,” she said.
Henry shrugged. “Whatever you say.”
He returned to his room, and Lucy went downstairs, where she found the girls in the kitchen with her father.
He’d let himself in the back door and was crouched over, patting Bunny on the rump.
When he straightened up, he stepped on a plush dog toy that let out an absurd squeak under his sneakers.
Alice was getting Go-Gurts from the fridge to take along in the car.
Even the twins were trying to act as though everything were perfectly normal when absolutely nothing was.
When she saw that the girls still hadn’t put on their bathing suits, Lucy sent them back upstairs to change, hoping Alice could keep Zoe on task.
“How’s he doing?” Rex said, putting a hand on the counter next to the plastic-wrapped tablecloths and napkins she’d rented for the party.
“Oh, Dad,” said Lucy. She sat down on a barstool, feeling the fatigue in her legs. “I’m freaking out. Drew’s mom heard the Burtons might try to press charges. There’s talk about a restraining order—”
“The Burtons, our neighbors ?” her dad said, his face flushed. “They’re demonizing a boy over a piece of paper. Why can’t they let him explain the math and apologize?”
“It was easier to kick him out,” Lucy said, “than to make sense of datasets.”
“You want me to go over to the Burtons’,” Rex said, “and give them a talking-to?”
Lucy was also tempted to try to talk to Janice, mother to mother, but she’d been instructed by the principal not to make contact. “No, you can’t,” Lucy said firmly, “and neither can I without making things worse.”
“I don’t see how things can get any worse,” Rex said.
He had a point. “Thank you for taking the girls this morning,” she said. “Who knows what the swim team parents have heard.” She got up to make a pot of coffee.
“I meant to congratulate you,” her dad said.
She turned back to him and coughed out a laugh. “What for?”
“Your mom said you got that client, for the Danish design you pitched.”
Lucy had forgotten all about Laurel Hotels. The lunch at Haywire seemed like ten years ago. “Right,” she said. “It isn’t so much Danish as Scandinavian in a more general way.”
“Whatever you want to call it,” her dad said. “It wasn’t easy to go against your bosses and their brothel theme—”
“Boudoir—”
“—but your good taste prevailed.”
All the more reason Lucy felt tremendous pressure to deliver. She wanted not only her bosses but the whole team to believe in her vision.
She was washing out the coffeepot when Alice ran in, dressed in her swimsuit and jelly sandals.
She grabbed on to Rex’s leg and yelled “safe” so Zoe couldn’t tag her.
But Zoe paid no attention; she was playing a different game altogether.
She came spinning into the room wearing Jack’s cap and gown, her stuffed rabbit, Fred, under her arm.
Behind her one of the cats was chasing the black fabric as it dragged across the kitchen floor, his claws tearing the hem into ribbons.
After they left, Lucy hid the cap and gown on a shelf in her closet.
She checked the time; the ceremony would be starting in three hours.
She was still—for no good reason—holding out hope that the principal would call and tell her he’d changed his mind, that Jack was off the hook. She kept her ringer on, just in case.
Alone in her bedroom, she sat cross-legged on her bed and called NASA. Sandra picked up right away. “Good morning, Lucy. I guess congratulations are in order.”
“Unfortunately not,” Lucy said. “We’ve had a crisis here.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that,” Sandra said, as sweet as could be.
“I need to talk to Mason.”
There was a long pause. “Well, bless your heart,” Sandra said, with an uncomfortable laugh. “You know that’s not going to happen.”
“No, seriously,” Lucy said, shifting to make room for the dogs, who joined her on the bed. “There’s a problem with Jack, as in ‘Houston, we have a problem.’ I need Mason to call me,” she said.
Sandra cleared her throat. “He can’t call you. Mason is on Mars.”
“Mason is in New Mexico,” Lucy said.