Chapter 6
One minute he was minding his own business, sprawled facedown across his bed, and the next minute his old man was in his face, yelling like the house was on fire.
“Get up, goddammit,” Spencer Parkhurst said, yanking the sheets back. KJ looked up, bleary-eyed, and tried to cover his naked form.
“Huh? Whuut’s wrong?”
His father wasn’t a large man, but when he was mad, like he was now, his rage made him seem ten feet tall.
“Wrong? You tell me, son. Tell me why your mother has to find out from Christine Foyle that you’ve flunked out of school? Tell me why you’ve been lying through your teeth since the day you got home a week ago?”
“Shit.” KJ pulled the sheet over his face, and his father quickly snatched it back.
“Get up,” he repeated. “I’ll see you in my office in ten minutes. In the meantime, take a shower and get yourself sobered up. Your mother doesn’t need to see you like this.”
Kevin John Parkhurst was always the man with the plan. Take every Advanced Placement test available at Westminster Academy, the elite Atlanta prep school he’d been enrolled in since the age of six. Go out for the tennis and lacrosse teams, win a place on the most competitive travel team in the southeast. Date the hottest girl at Westminster. Get accepted for early admission at Duke, Vanderbilt, Wake Forest, and his old man’s alma mater, Penn, even though he had no intention of going to school there. Earn a lacrosse scholarship. Rush the best fraternities, get bids from all the top houses, and eventually, inevitably pledge the hardest-partying house on the Wake Forest campus.
And it had worked. Mostly. Until it hadn’t.
KJ couldn’t figure out when it had all gone to hell. His first- semester grades had been crappy, averaging barely C?, which came as a shock, because he’d always aced his high school classes. But college was different. The lacrosse practices came at a brutal pace, and the frat’s social schedule was killer.
He’d gone home over Christmas break and lied to his parents about his grades. They’d happily accepted his story because why not? Hadn’t KJ Parkhurst always been awesome at everything?
His coach had warned him—pick up the grades, or leave the team—and he’d been newly motivated. Until he wasn’t. Until organic chemistry kicked his ass and he hadn’t been able to get his term paper on beat poets written because he didn’t get beat poetry and anyway, the library was closed by the time he got done with practice… and it was just as easy to borrow an old term paper from one of his fraternity brothers, except his prof recognized it and reported him to the university honor court for plagiarism, and he’d been put on academic probation.
Then, as if his life hadn’t already gone completely to shit, in February, he’d blown out his left knee, and had to come limping home at the end of the semester, a total washout. In more ways than one.
When he was out of the shower, he scraped a razor across his chin and combed his wet hair. Better. He picked up the pill bottle, shook two tablets into the palm of his hand, and paused. He had six left, and NO FURTHER REFILLS was stamped in bold letters across the bottom of the label.
“Fuck it,” he mumbled, and swallowed both. He could easily get more, and anyway, he’d need something to take the edge off the coming shitstorm brewing right down the hall in the old man’s office.
KJ’s mother turned sorrowful eyes on him from the armchair opposite the desk. It was a textbook Betsy Parkhurst move. The passive- aggressive “we’re not mad, just disappointed” expression she’d used to great effect his whole life.
It was Tuesday, so she was still dressed for tennis, in her cute little pleated skirt and Piedmont Driving Club logo top. Her Tretorns were spotless, her peppy silvery hair and understated makeup unmussed. KJ had never seen his mother looking less than perfect.
Spencer was seated behind the desk, the sleeves of his starched blue dress shirt rolled up, waiting to pounce, so KJ sized up the situation and made a pre-emptive strike.
“Look,” he said, with a long exhalation of penitence. “Mom, Dad. I’m sorry. I should have come clean with you guys right away. I know I screwed up. Big time. I just… didn’t know how to tell you what was going on with me this past year.”
The old man rolled his eyes and snorted.
“KJ, what happened?” his mother asked softly. “All of this? It’s so unlike you. If you’d come to us, and told us you were struggling in school, we would have tried to help. I thought you understood that. Your dad and I are always one hundred percent behind you.”
“I know,” KJ said, pushing back a shock of blond hair that was brushing his eyebrow.
“This is all just bullshit,” Spencer barked. “Enough. Bad enough you flunked out of school. But the rest is just as bad. Honor code probation for cheating?”
How the hell?KJ thought.
“I talked to your coach as soon as your mother came home to tell me what Christine Foyle told her this morning at their tennis match.”
“The most humiliating moment of my life,” Betsy put in. “I wanted to die. Christine sat down beside me between sets and patted my hand, like I’d just lost a kitten or something. ‘Jenny told me about KJ’s having to leave school, and that must be so upsetting for you.’”
“That bitch,” KJ muttered.
“Never mind her,” Spencer said. “You couldn’t have told your parents you got kicked off the team?”
“What?” Betsy yelped. “When did this happen?”
“My knee,” KJ said, clutching it for effect.
“Which it turns out you also lied about,” Spencer said. “According to your coach, you didn’t actually hurt it playing lacrosse. He tells me it was a car wreck? Off-campus? Jesus Christ, son! When did you turn into a pathological liar?”
KJ was waiting for the meds to kick in, but these days, it seemed the more he took, the less they worked. His bad knee was throbbing, his eyeballs itched, and he kept shifting from one foot to the other, unable to stand still.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He clasped and unclasped his hands behind his back.
“Do I want to know what actually happened?” Spencer asked.
“Definitely not,” KJ mumbled as a wave of shame pinked his cheeks.
“What’s the plan, then?” the old man demanded. But before KJ could get in a word edgewise, his father plowed ahead.
“I’ll tell you my plan. You’re not gonna lie around feeling sorry for yourself all summer. I put in a call a little while ago, to Ric Eddings. He says he can put you to work at the Saint.”
“The Saint?” KJ leaned down and rubbed his knee, wishing again he’d listened to the surgeon who’d tried to set him up with a physical therapy regimen. “Like, down on the coast?”
His family had spent just about every summer of his life at the Saint. Every May, as soon as school let out, they’d pack up his mother’s van and drive the five hours south, staying in Betsy’s family’s cottage—if you could call a five-bedroom house with its own pool a cottage—with his grandparents and a rotating cast of aunts and uncles and cousins. His dad would come down for long weekends, and in between, his mom played tennis and golf and bridge with her friends, who were mostly the same friends she palled around with back in Buckhead.
“Yes, that Saint,” his father said. “Do you know any other place called that?”
“Ohhhh-kayyy,” KJ said. “So, what? I’d work at the Saint, and stay at the cottage?”
“You’ll stay with the other summer help in a dorm they’re building.”
“A dorm?” KJ blinked. “Like, sharing a room with strangers?”
“Exactly. You’ll stay in a room with strangers, and you’ll suck it up and work hard and let all your rich, entitled friends treat you like the minimum-wage jerk you’re gonna be.”
“Spencer!” Betsy piped up. “That hardly seems reasonable…”
“I don’t give a damn about reasonable,” the old man snapped. “Maybe if your son sees what life is like for the other half he’ll make more of an effort to stay in school and use his brain so he doesn’t have to spend the rest of his life waiting tables or caddying. At the very least, it’ll make a man of him.”
KJ raised his eyes to meet the old man’s. “Say, Dad, did you ever do that kind of work? I mean, didn’t you tell me you and Aunt Wendy spent every summer swimming and sailing all day every day up on the Cape?”
His father’s face purpled. He came around the desk and smacked KJ’s face with such force it sent him reeling backward. He stumbled, and nearly fell to the floor, then righted himself.
Something warm trickled down his chin. He touched his mouth and saw the blood.
“Spencer, for God’s sake!” Betsy cried. She rushed to her son’s side, but KJ shook her off.
“It’s okay, Mom.”
“Get out of my sight,” the old man said through clenched teeth.