The Orphans (Orphans Trilogy Book 1)

  THE ORPHANS

  by

  Matthew Sullivan

  WET BANDIT

  Copyright © 2015 by Matthew Sullivan

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Wet Bandit, Inc., Virginia.

  Visit us on the web at wetbanditbooks.com

  Cover illustration by Kristie Minke

  Editing by Lauren Leibowitz

  ISBN 978-0-9963020-0-5 (intl. trd. pbk.)

  ISBN 978-0-9963020-1-2 (ebook)

  First Edition

  For my family and friends.

  Thank you for all of your support.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Charlie Kim never planned on becoming an orphan. He planned on being the valedictorian of his high school class; making the varsity soccer, basketball, and baseball teams; and attending Stanford University, just like his parents did. He planned on majoring in Finance with a minor in Computer Science, landing an analyst job at a top private equity firm, and earning his first million before his twenty-fifth birthday. He planned when he would start his own investment fund, the number of corporate boards he would sit on, and when he would retire, which would mostly be a formality since he had already decided that he would never completely retire. He even planned when he would marry, how many kids he would have, the schools they would attend, and so on.

  For all intents and purposes, Charlie Kim had planned his entire life, the details of which were laid out in perfect cursive and chronological order on the pages of a pocket-size Moleskine notebook that Charlie carried with him everywhere he went. Absent from those pages was any mention of becoming an orphan.

  Five prolonged and painful days after the policeman had shown up at the Kim residence and relayed the crushing news that his parents had been killed, Charlie stood before two sealed mahogany caskets, both suspended side-by-side over their burial plots. He subconsciously bent the corner of his pocketed Moleskine with his thumb and let the pages snap back like a flipbook animation. He repeated this motion—a nervous tic that he had picked up a year earlier, during his first week of high school—over and over.

  A small sea of people had gathered behind Charlie. Most of their faces would have been unfamiliar to him if he had even noted their presence. He had not. Charlie was too wrapped up in his own thoughts to be mindful of anything existing around him. Whether it was the birds chirping in the distance or the sweet natural perfume of freshly trimmed grass, the rest of the world slipped past his senses unnoticed.

  Charlie’s lack of awareness was not limited to his surroundings. He was even oblivious to the signals his own body was sending, including the aching in his chest, a side effect of the many hours he had spent spastically clenching and heaving, and how his bloodshot eyes, unable to lubricate themselves after pouring a bathtub’s worth of tears and pushing Charlie to the brink of dehydration, were as sticky as newly paved asphalt. His eyelids struggled to blink, making it halfway before giving up, as he continued to stare at the caskets.

  The caskets had remained closed throughout the wake and the funeral mass. During the wake, Charlie had attempted to open his mother’s casket. At no point since he was told of their passing had Charlie actually seen his parents’ bodies, and part of him held out hope that when he opened the casket it would be empty.

  Charlie got as far as unfastening the first of the many casket locks, and was about to go for the second, when the funeral director stopped him. He let Charlie know that it wasn’t a wise idea. Charlie relayed his doubts, but the funeral director assured him that his parents were, in fact, inside each of the caskets. The somber look on the funeral director’s face let Charlie know that he was telling the truth. What the funeral director didn’t tell Charlie, with either words or expression, was that if Charlie had managed to open the caskets, he would not have even recognized his parents.

  A car accident had claimed the lives of Alan and Mary Kim. Partners in life and business, they had been driving down the 101 freeway, on their way back to their Atherton home from a meeting in San Francisco. They were less than a mile from their Woodside Road exit when they crashed.

  Nothing about the accident made any sense to Charlie. It happened on a stretch of highway that his parents had traveled multiple times daily over the past twenty-plus years. Charlie had even made sure to check the traffic on his cell phone before his parents had left, and if anything, there was less congestion than usual. There were no work crews with orange cones and caution signs to disrupt the traffic flow. On top of that, it had been a beautiful, cloudless day, just like the day of their funeral. There hadn’t been even a single drop of rain or anything that could cause Alan to lose control of his car and crash into the overpass support pillar. And yet, crash into the support pillar is exactly what they did.

  Their car was crushed like a recycled can of Coke. Alan and Mary died instantly. The policeman who broke the news to Charlie had made sure to let him know just how quick and painless their deaths had been. It was a misguided attempt—by someone who had clearly never endured a similar grief—to make Charlie feel marginally better. That and much more replayed in Charlie’s mind as his eyes stayed locked on the caskets and his thumb continued to cycle through the notebook pages.

  It wasn’t until a hand clamped down on his shoulder that Charlie finally snapped from his trance. He whipped his gaze toward the hand’s owner.

  Charlie’s grandfather, Kyung-soo Kim, looked back at him and nodded sternly. Grandpa Kim was Charlie’s last surviving family member, but to say that they were actually “family” would invoke the loosest application of the word.

  Charlie had first sensed the rift between his grandfather and the rest of his family at a very early age. But up until that night six months prior, when he overheard his parents discussing whether or not they should encourage the newly widowed Grandpa Kim to move in with the family, Charlie had not been aware of the exact history. Only then did he learn how Grandpa Kim had disowned his father when he chose to leave Korea for college, and reaffirmed his position when Charlie’s father married his Irish-American mother.

  Charlie returned the favor by disowning his grandfather on the spot. He wanted nothing to do with the man who wanted nothing to do with them. Charlie had crossed his fingers that his parents would decide to withhold their invitation. But his parents—frequent travelers of the high road that they were—elected otherwise, and opened their arms and household to the man who had pushed them away.

  Grandpa Kim reluctantly accepted their offer, but he did nothing to endear himself to his gracious hosts, skipping family meals and spending nearly all of his time alone in his room. Charlie met his grandfather’s cold shoulder with a frigid one of his own, leading Mary to conclude that Charlie and Grandpa Kim must have shared some sort of genetic stubbornness. But if it was, in fact, something that they shared, it was now something that they would have to share between just the two of them.

  Charlie went to yank himself free from his grandfather’s grasp, but stopped when he discerned a tear forming in the corner of the old man’s crow’s-footed eye. It caught Charlie completely off-guard. It was the first breach that he had ever detected in Grandpa Kim’s hardened exterior—a lifetime’s worth of fatherly regret condensed into one tiny drop.

  Grandpa Kim withdrew his hand from Charlie’s shoulder on his own accord. He cleared the drop with his index finger and nodded o
nce more; this time, in the direction of the priest, who was waiting to give the final blessing.

  Charlie nodded back. He let out a long sigh, and then he and Grandpa Kim stepped forward and laid their hands on the caskets.

  “Eternal rest grant unto Alan and Mary Kim, O Lord,” the priest said, “and let perpetual light shine upon them. May their souls, and the souls of all of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.” The priest gave one last splash of holy water, and then two portly cemetery workers lowered the caskets into the ground.

  Once the caskets had reached their final resting spot, the workers offered shovels to Charlie and Grandpa Kim, who accepted the tools. Charlie and Grandpa Kim took turns collecting piles of loose soil and scattering them across Alan’s grave. They did the same for Mary’s, and then handed the shovels back to the cemetery workers.

  Charlie took a couple steps back, returned his hands to his pockets—and his notebook pages—and drifted off into his own thoughts. As he watched the cemetery workers continue to fill in the soil, he wondered what would happen next. Would his life ever be the same? Could it ever be the same? The questions were complex, but the answers were simple: no way, no how.

  As far as Charlie was concerned, his parents weren’t the only ones in a hole; he might as well have been right in there with them. With each shovelful of soil, Charlie came up with a new way in which his life was doomed now that he was, and forever would be, an orphan.

  One by one, the attendees began to casually make their way from the gravesite. Only Charlie stayed behind. His feet remained planted, his eyes didn’t waver, and his thumb just kept flipping the pages of his notebook.

  After a few more flicks, Charlie’s thumb abruptly halted. For the first time, he actually felt the pages with his fingers. A thought flashed across his mind. His cheek muscles tugged at the corner of his mouth, some tiny fraction of a smile: Charlie had discovered the only way out of his deep, dark hole.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Charlie was beside himself with disbelief. How had he not come up with his solution sooner? It was so obvious. It was literally right in the palm of his hand. His path to happiness and success was the same as it had always been. All he had to do was stick to his plan.

  Charlie clutched the notebook in his pocket, careful not to squeeze too tight and damage the prized pages. For the first time in five days, he felt a sense of normalcy. A sense of confidence. He knew that losing his parents was a massive bump in his road—as massive as bumps get—but he also knew that it didn’t have to sidetrack him from all that he intended on accomplishing. Not if he didn’t let it. After all, he had seen his mother lose both of her parents and his father lose his mother, and both of them had been able to move on. He would do the same. Sure, a little faster than they had, but only because he didn’t have the luxury of time—not if he was going to make good on his goals.

  Charlie took off, his disbelief having turned to determination. He cut through the dispersing congregation, weaving in and out of narrow and rapidly disappearing lanes like an nfl running back with a nose for the end zone. He needed to get home as soon as possible, to the stacks of assignments—the accumulation of close to a week’s worth of absences, during which he made no effort to keep up—that demanded completing.

  Charlie mashed his teeth, angry with himself for letting himself fall behind like he had, especially with midterms right around the corner. Now he would have to cram harder than ever before to catch up and make sure his grades didn’t slip. Charlie knew there was little margin for error: Just one A- on his transcript could be enough to prevent him from making valedictorian and getting accepted to Stanford. One A- could throw off his whole plan. Charlie tried—in vain—to block out any thoughts of failure as he surged toward the cemetery exit.

  Most of the other attendees weren’t in as much of a rush as Charlie. It wasn’t heavy hearts that slowed them down, but instead, the rarity of having so many of Silicon Valley’s finest in the same spot at once. Funeral or not, if there were networking or business opportunities to be had, they would be had. And so, start-ups were pitched, power lunches were scheduled, and deals were negotiated.

  Even worse than the opportunists were those who thought it fit to share their own take on the rumors that were already swirling around town. Charlie wasn’t alone in questioning the circumstances of his parents’ crash; just about everyone with knowledge of the accident had. However, unlike Charlie, they didn’t just have questions—they had answers.

  “Trust me, it wasn’t an accident,” insisted one confident attendee to his group of gossipers. “I saw him last week. Something was definitely off. He didn’t seem like his usual self at all.”

  “I heard their prototype stopped running,” a member of the group added. “After how everyone was hyping it up as the biggest breakthrough since the airplane, that’s gotta be a crushing blow. It had to have taken its toll. I mean, I don’t know what I would’ve done.”

  “Maybe the same thing he did?”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  The “thing” they agreed Alan had done was intentionally ramming his Jeep into the highway overpass. In their defense, they had more than just hearsay to support their conclusion. The medical examiner had found no trace of alcohol or drugs in Alan’s body. The police detective confirmed that their car had no mechanical flaws. And, as the local news reporter pointed out, the lack of skid marks on the highway showed that no attempt had been made to stop the car from crashing.

  That left just two possibilities: Either Alan had fallen asleep at the wheel, at eight o’clock in the evening; or, as the funeral attendee noted, it wasn’t an accident. Those who had worked with Alan knew he could pull an all-nighter without so much as a yawn, which meant there was really just one possibility.

  The gossipy group slammed the brakes on their questionable conversation as Charlie darted in between them. Uneasy looks bounced around the group like pinballs. Thankfully for all parties involved, Charlie hadn’t heard one word of their discussion. The group let out sighs in succession as Charlie continued on his way, undeterred.

  Charlie had moved on from chiding himself and was focused on determining the order in which he would tackle his heap of homework, a task much easier said than done. While he knew that he had many hours’ worth of reading and problems for ap Biology and Precalculus, he also had to factor in the four-page paper that was due in his sophomore Language Arts class and could presumably take even longer as writing was by far his weak suit.

  Charlie was heavily debating the merits of each of his strategic options when a voice outside of his own head managed to sneak its way into his consciousness. It was both the familiarity of the voice and the combination of the words it spoke—including his father’s name—that allowed it to tiptoe past Charlie’s eardrum blockade, override all of his thoughts of homework, and stop him in his tracks.

  “It’s a huge loss,” continued the booming voice. “He could have been the next Tesla.”

  Charlie turned to the source, a hulking man with thick, dark hair, a chiseled jaw, and deep-set eyes so penetrating they could double for lie detectors. Two bodyguards in black suits and aviators flanked the man. The older of the bodyguards was nearly as big as the man he was charged with protecting and had a faint scar on his weathered cheek that resembled an N. The younger bodyguard was at least a half-foot shorter than his companion, slight of build, and while he was clearly in his mid-30s, his slicked, gray hair attempted to indicate otherwise. But Charlie’s eyes never even registered the bodyguards; they were locked on—as if pulled by tractor beams—the other man.

  “Terry Heins,” he said as he offered his hand for a shake.

  But there was no need for the introduction. Charlie not only knew who Terry Heins was, he knew everything about him. Charlie had watched every interview and read every newspaper clipping and magazine article he could find on the man the media had dub
bed “The Millionaire Maker of Silicon Valley.” Charlie knew that Terry had gotten his start in currency speculation before transitioning to private equity, where his company, Abbadon Capital, had been early investors in hundreds of start-ups, including every major social media site. Charlie also knew that depending on the day and the stock market, Terry was either the wealthiest or second-wealthiest person in all of California.

  While Charlie had always admired his parents’ integrity and passion, it was Terry’s business acumen that he intended to emulate with his own career. Terry was a force to be reckoned with. He not only knew how to play the game, he knew how to dominate it. Terry also had a plan of his own. It was only after reading about how Terry had meticulously mapped out his own life that Charlie had decided to do the same, borrowing from the successes of both his parents and Terry.

  Charlie considered telling Terry how influential he had been and how much he had learned from him before deciding it was probably more prudent to just play it cool. Charlie straightened his spine and his suit coat. “Charlie Kim,” he said matter-of-factly as he completed the handshake. “And just so you know”—Charlie tightened his grip as best he could, an act made nearly impossible given the fact that his tiny hands were dwarfed by Terry’s baseball mitts—“my dad’s engine was way better than the Tesla engine.”

  Terry smirked, amused by the show while also impressed by the young Kim’s poise. “You’re preaching to the choir, kid. Why do you think I invested a hundred million in your parents’ company?”

  “Uh, what?” Charlie stuttered. His shoulders slunk, his eyes lost focus, and his grip loosened to the point of letting go, as his mind was too busy racing—trying to figure out why his parents had never told him about Terry’s investment—to remind his body to keep up all of the nonverbal cues that he had learned to project confidence.