“It means I can rearrange the budget in whatever way I deem necessary for the good of the school.”

What the hell was happening? We’d spent a year planning this place. We’d had committees, done research, read articles and watched TED Talks.

It had been Max’s baby. He was the one who’d had the idea—and convinced the board to use some of the endowment to buy it. When the sale had gone through, Max encouraged everyone to submit ideas for how to bring it to life. Then, over the summer—a summer that now felt like a thousand years ago—Max, Babette, and I had gone through the plans and ideas, culling through the articles and concepts, consulting with designers, finalizing the budget, and getting things rolling in earnest.

This was what we usually did with our summers, anyway—starting with the summer we’d painted the butterfly mural all over the big wall in the cafeteria. The next year, we’d yarn-bombed the playground in the courtyard with brightly colored crochet spirals and webs and flowers. Last year, we’d gone crazy with paint: adding bright yellow, orange, and baby blue stripes all around the lockers and hallways, roller-disco-style, and clouds and flowers and rainbows in all sorts of unexpected places.

It hadn’t even occurred to me that Duncan might not want to keep the project going.

Duncan, after all, had hung a disco ball in the cafeteria of Andrews Prep. He’d kept a class hedgehog. He’d once tried to build a zip line off the gym roof.

How could Duncan kill plans for a playground? He was a playground.

The Adventure Garden had been a massive, school-wide project that we were unanimously excited about, and now we needed it more than ever. I started pulling off rubber bands and pulling out file folders, frantically looking for the best parts so I could show him what I meant. “But the Adventure Garden is for the good of the school! Let me just show you the plans. It’s epic. It’s magical. You won’t even believe—”

“I don’t need to see the plans,” Duncan said.

“It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen,” I promised. “It’s going to have a tree house, and a lily pond, and a ropes course—”

He opened the door then, and held it open, waiting for me to leave.

But I hesitated. Then I had to ask. “Are you here to destroy the school?”

Then, in a slightly softer tone that seemed to acknowledge that he at least registered all the crushing, life-altering anxiety hiding behind that question for me, he said, “I’m not here to destroy the school.”

I let out a deep sigh.

Then he added, “I’m here to fix it.”

* * *

One thing was clear after that: I was more trapped here than ever.

When I’d first found out Duncan was coming, I’d thought he was going to make me miserable by being so likable I’d have no choice but to fall in love with him again—but now it looked like the opposite would be true: he’d make me miserable by ruining my school, and, by extension, my life.

I wasn’t sure which one was worse—but, either way, I was miserable.

My emotions were moving around like numbers on a slide puzzle, but I wasn’t getting any closer to a solution.

That was my takeaway: somehow, for some reason, Duncan Carpenter had become completely deranged, and I couldn’t leave until I understood why. Leaving to save myself was one thing. But leaving a whole school behind in the hands of a madman was quite another.

It left me wondering if Duncan had an evil twin or something. Because, truly, weren’t people’s identities fairly consistent over time? People didn’t just wake up one morning with completely different personalities. Something had happened to him—but what? Traumatic brain injury? Amnesia? Witch’s spell?

It had to be something epic.

Seriously. He was a monster now.

And that’s exactly what I told everybody that night at Babette’s.

I was kind of hoping that the shock of the morning meeting might wake Babette up and stoke her into action. Not that there was anything wrong with grieving. She was allowed to grieve, of course. But I wasn’t really a leader, per se, and so I wouldn’t have minded at all if Babette had suddenly lifted her head, realized what was happening, and stepped into her rightful shoes as the commander of the resistance.

But not tonight.

She’d gone to bed with a headache and wouldn’t come down.

Instead, I wound up reminding myself not to overthink it. “Leading” was really just talking, planning, and making people pay attention.

Three things I was perfectly good at.

I told the group about everything Duncan had said in his office, and everything I’d learned: That the morning meeting had not, in fact, been a fluke. That this legendary warmhearted goofball had somehow mutated into a militaristic dictator. That he didn’t care if the faculty all quit. And that he was canceling the Adventure Garden.

Each piece of news elicited progressively louder groans of outrage, but the news about the Adventure Garden was the clincher.

“That was Max’s project!” Anton shouted.

“What about the tree house?” Carlos demanded.

“What about the vegetable patch?” Emily and Alice asked.

Everybody wanted to know what we were going to do.

I told them I didn’t know. We’d just have to figure it out as we went along. Then I looked around. “Mrs. Kline?”

She raised a hand. “Present.”

“Can you please find a copy of his contract? And the school-board charter, while you’re at it? Let’s figure out exactly how stuck with this guy we are. Also…” I looked around. “Does anybody know our school policy on dogs?”

“On dogs?” Rosie Kim asked.

“He’s got a security dog,” I told them.

This touched off a whole new wave of outrage. What kind of dog? Was it big? Was it scary? Was it trained? What was it doing at school? What about kids who are afraid of dogs? Who was going to keep an eye on it? What kind of person brought a dog to a campus full of little kids? What about dander? What about allergies? Were dogs even allowed? Could somebody find out?

I did not tell them that the dog’s name was Chuck Norris. Nor did I tell them that Duncan had declared it was “scary.”

Finally, when the worrying reached a crescendo, I stood up.

I might not know how to be a leader, but I did know one thing: we were going to protect our school. We weren’t all this awesome for nothing.

And that’s when I made my voice loud and gave us all the pep talk that everybody needed to hear—including me.

“I don’t know exactly what we’re going to do,” I said. “I’ve never been faced with anything even vaguely like this. But I know what we’re not going to do. We’re not going to panic. We’re not going to let fear make us lose sight of who we are. We’re here for a reason—right? To look after all these little souls we’ve been entrusted with. We’re not going to forget that. We’re here for them—and for each other. Kids first—and we’ll worry about this Duncan Carpenter situation later. I don’t want anybody doing anything stupid—Anton, I am looking at you. No graffiti, no threatening notes, no angry posts on social media. The most important job we have for the next few weeks is helping the kids. Right? We need to help them understand that death is a part of life, that Max is gone but not forgotten, that we can keep him with us by carrying his warmth and his kindness forward. They need all the stability we can give them for now. So let’s hunker down, do our jobs, help the kids through this transition, remember who we’re here for … and do everything we can to make things better, not worse.”

eight

Chuck Norris, the security labradoodle, did not turn out to be scary.

He did, however, turn out to be a massive pain in the ass.

Soon, impossible as it was, school started again.

The building flooded with kids and backpacks and lunch boxes. Every single kid, it seemed, wanted to know where Max was. Even kids who’d been at the party.

I felt pretty much the same way.

Where was Max?

For my part, I just put my head down and tried to focus on what was right in front of me: kids and books and paperwork and planning.

Sometimes, in quiet little moments, when I looked up from my desk in the library and saw the place filled with kids reading on the sofa, and in the beanbag chairs, and in our reading fort, I could almost pretend that everything was the same as always.

But the new security dog wasn’t really having that.

In fact, he turned out to be a book eater.

Not once, but twice on the first day of school, he found his way into the library and chewed up books. First, a Mo Willems boxed set. Then, after lunch, The Secret Garden.

Both times, I walked him back down to Duncan. “Seriously?” I demanded, holding out the mutilated Secret Garden—now missing a full third of its binding.

“I think he might be teething. I found a tooth in the carpet earlier.”

“Not okay. Get him a chew toy.”

Duncan nodded, like that was actually a good idea. “I will.”

“And don’t let him just roam around school.”

“It’s looking like he can open my office door.”

“And the library doors,” I added.