Along with Babette, I wanted to add.
“But I’ll tell you something right now,” he went on. “If he wasn’t looking out for your physical safety, then he was no better than a fool.”
I felt the entire room catch its breath.
No. He. Did. Not.
Quick reminder: the man he was talking about had died right in front of us.
Babette went white, but she didn’t move.
“I want you to know,” Duncan went on, “that I’m excited to be here. Principal Kempner’s criminal neglect of your safety has given us the chance to make some epic improvements. Now it’s time to lead the nation in our next phase. The phase that will ensure the safety and security of every member of this school community and show all of America how it’s done.”
We stared at him.
He stared at us back.
Finally, he gave a little nod and said, “Thank you very much.”
And he was finished.
At least, I guess he was finished.
He hadn’t met anyone in the room, or asked us anything about this new place he was supposed to be in charge of, or interacted, or bonded, or, you know, done even one thing that he should have … but, no matter, he was picking up his broken laptop and walking off the stage.
Maybe three people clapped out of politeness.
Then the clapping stopped, and we all listened to the tapping of his shoe heels as he finished crossing the room, and walked, at last, out the door.
seven
As soon as the door clicked closed, everybody freaked out.
“What the hell was that?” Carlos demanded, just as Donna and Emily both said, in unison, “That guy is crazy!”
A coach named Gordo stood up then and gestured at the empty podium. “Did that guy just stand up in the auditorium of an elementary school with a gun?”
“A squirt gun,” I felt compelled to point out, almost like I had to do a little PR for Duncan … for old times’ sake, if nothing else.
“Looked pretty damn real to me,” Anton, the recently divorced science teacher, said.
“Until it squirted water,” I said.
Why was I defending Duncan? I was as horrified as anyone else.
“More importantly,” Carlos demanded, “did he just insult Max?”
The room descended into murmurs of abject bewilderment tinged with outrage—with phrases like “What the hell?” and “Who does that?” breaking the surface over and over.
“Maybe he just wanted to get our attention,” I said.
“With a gun?” Anton demanded.
I sighed. The whole morning was unfathomable. I couldn’t explain it, and I sure as hell couldn’t defend it.
Duncan—or whoever that had been—was on his own.
But I couldn’t disavow myself so easily.
I had stood up for him just now, but I had also been vouching for him all along, promising that Kent Buckley had accidentally hired us the best principal we could have hoped for. I’d sworn up and down that Duncan was going to blow their minds.
Unfortunate phrasing, in hindsight.
Either way, I’d established myself as the resident authority on Duncan, and now the room wanted answers. The panic turned accusatory. “You said he was amazing,” Emily said, turning to me.
“He was amazing,” I insisted. “I swear he was.”
“That was not amazing. That was psychotic,” Emily said.
“He painted a squirt gun to look real! Who does that?” Carlos added.
The outrage built to a din.
“Maybe it’s his evil twin,” the school nurse said, shaking her head.
I blinked and shook my head. “Maybe he was having an off day?”
“An off day!” They were indignant.
“I don’t know!” I said. “I’m as baffled as everybody else. Whatever that was—it’s nothing like the guy I used to work with. The guy I knew dislocated his shoulder testing out a Jell-O Slip ’n’ Slide for the school carnival—twice! He wasn’t obsessed with safety. He didn’t care about safety at all.”
Babette just sat in her chair, watching us. Normally, she’d be the person fielding everybody’s worries. But nothing about life was normal anymore.
Finally, I stepped up. “Okay,” I said. “That was not the meet-the-new-principal moment anybody was expecting.”
“That’s an understatement,” Coach Gordo called out.
“But,” I said, trying to instill that one word with an optimism I didn’t quite feel, “it was just one meeting. Maybe he was nervous. Maybe he was given some bad advice. Maybe he wasn’t feeling well. We don’t know. All we can do right now is go back to our classrooms and finish getting ready for the start of school.”
“That’s not all we can do,” Anton said.
I sighed. “I will go talk to him and try to figure this out. Let’s meet at Babette’s tonight and I’ll report back.”
One of the teachers offered to get the school’s bylaws to figure out just exactly how much hiring power Kent Buckley had. Could he just pick any crazy person he wanted? It seemed unlikely, but, on the other hand, when Max and Babette were in charge, none of this had mattered. It was possible, at least, that some weird rules had gone unnoticed.
As we considered that possibility, I pulled a little teacher move. “Eyes on me,” I said. “We’re not going to freak out. We’re going to choose to believe everything’s okay until we have evidence to the contrary.”
It was some of my favorite Babette advice. She gave it to me all the time.
“Um,” the nurse said. “I think we got our evidence to the contrary when he pulled out that fake gun.”
“Okay,” I said, like Fair enough. “But this was his first day. We can give him one do-over.”
We could, and we would. We had work to do, rooms to organize, a school year starting up next Monday, ready or not. There was no time to do anything else. This plan would have to do for now. People started gathering up their things.
They weren’t going to panic, and neither was I.
Not, at least, until I figured out what the hell was going on.
* * *
Walking over to Max’s office—now Duncan’s—I struggled to wrap my head around pretty much every single thing about seeing him again. There was so much to wrestle with—from the fake gun, to his utter tone-deafness with the group, to his rude comments about Max.
Not to mention that he hadn’t recognized me.
Now that the full-on crazy of the meeting was on pause for a minute, that was the part that came rushing back.
He had stared right into my face with zero recognition.
How was that possible? Was that even possible? Physiologically, I mean?
It wasn’t like it had been twenty years. I did the math as I walked along the cloister past the courtyard. I had left Andrews to come to Kempner four years ago in May, so it had been four years and three months since Duncan Carpenter had seen my face. Could you forget the face of someone you’d worked with for two solid years in that amount of time? Someone you’d sat across from in faculty meetings, passed in the hallways, eaten across from in the cafeteria?
I know I’d been trying to stay invisible back then, but come on.
Nobody’s that invisible.
Are they?
As I thought about it, I realized that I was always near him, but never right in front of him. I was always aware of him, but it didn’t follow that he was aware of me, too. If I was camouflaged in the background, maybe he didn’t remember me. Maybe I had just been a generic version of a girl he worked adjacent to—with never enough specific details to register. Some kind of navy blue, nonspecific female smudge in his memory.
There were plenty of people in the world that I didn’t remember.
Most of them, in fact.
Still, I was offended.
Of course, I was wildly different now. The trappings of me, at least. Maybe that was all he could see.
Or maybe he just wasn’t even really looking. Maybe he was so busy trying to adjust to his new job and step into Max’s shoes and scare the hell out of everybody that he wasn’t focused on his visual surroundings. Maybe he was tired from being up all night with a sick baby, or two. Or maybe he wasn’t wearing his glasses.
Did he even wear glasses?
Good. Something I didn’t know about him. One thing, at least.
Because I really knew too much in general. I knew his birthday, for example: May the fourth—and he’d always worn a Luke Skywalker costume to school that day with a button pinned on it that said MAY THE FOURTH BE WITH YOU. How lopsided was that? I knew his birthday, and how he liked to celebrate it, and exactly how good he’d looked in that Luke Skywalker costume. I carried a full visual of him brandishing a light saber stored in my memory at all times … and he didn’t even know who I was.
It wasn’t fair.
But he certainly wasn’t carrying a light saber now. What the hell had happened to him? Was it that he’d married that boring admissions girl? Had she told him he needed to grow up and stop being fun? Or maybe it was becoming a parent. Or maybe some mentor had given him the very bad—and very wrong—advice that he had to change his entire personality to be successful.
Or maybe he was just having an off day. It was possible.
But an off day that was that off?
I couldn’t fathom it. And I didn’t want to.
* * *