“It’s a historic building,” I said, as I caught up behind him. “Built as a convent in the 1870s, and the nuns lived here for a hundred years before their numbers dwindled so much, the church sold the property to the city. It sat empty for another twenty years before Max and Babette”—I always made sure to give her equal credit on feminist principle—“founded the Kempner School and renovated it. Fun fact: did you know that our school is named after Babette?”
Duncan looked at me like that didn’t make sense.
“Babette Kempner,” I said.
“But wasn’t Max’s name also Kempner?”
“Sure,” I said. “But he was thinking of Babette when he named it.”
We kept walking.
“The cafeteria used to be the chapel,” I went on.
“I read that in the manual.”
“We have a once-a-week assembly with the kids where we bring in speakers and programs from all different faiths and philosophies—plus performances. Singers, drummers, belly dancers, fire-eaters.”
“Fire-eaters?”
“It’s kind of an anything-goes situation.”
I could almost hear him mentally typing: MEMO—RE: FIRE-EATERS.
I pointed up at one of the second-story rooms. “That’s where the ghost lives.”
Duncan glanced sideways at me, though he never actually met my eyes. “The ghost?”
This was a good story. “One of the nuns fell in love with a sea captain whose boat went down in a storm in the Gulf. She couldn’t believe he was dead, though, and she locked herself in this room, watching the ocean, refusing to come out until he came back to her … but he never came back, and she died of heartbreak. They say she’s still here, waiting. Sometimes people see her, still waiting by the window, watching for him, never giving up hope.”
Duncan frowned again. “Do the kids know that story?”
“Of course.”
“Does it scare them?”
“Well, yeah. But in a good way.”
Duncan looked back up toward the room. For a second, I thought he was thinking about the ghost, but then he said, “Roof needs to be replaced. And that window paint is peeling like crazy.”
I’d known he was going to look at the place like that. But it still bothered me. I wanted him to be impressed. I wanted him to fall in love.
“This building survived the Great Storm of 1900,” I said then. “Do you know about that storm?”
“A little.”
“It’s the worst natural disaster in U.S. history,” I said, “to this day. Ten thousand people died in one night. Winds were more than a hundred and fifty miles an hour. People’s clothes were ripped right off their bodies, corsets and all—that’s how strong the winds were. But this building stood steady. All the nuns survived—as well as a hundred people who found their way here and sheltered overnight. There’s a whole museum about the storm. And a documentary.”
Duncan nodded. “Sidewalk needs to be fixed,” he said then, pointing at an uneven spot. “That’s a tripping hazard.”
The old Duncan would have taken my hand and dragged me upstairs to look for the ghost. The old Duncan would have walked right out of school to buy tickets for the documentary. The old Duncan would have fallen in love with this breathtaking, stately, remarkable stone building and everything it had survived.
But the new Duncan just said, “Insurance on this place must be a nightmare.”
Nightmares were a big thing for him, too, apparently.
As we continued the tour, I got limper and limper. I showed him our butterfly garden, but he said it had too many bees—a liability. I showed him Babette’s art room, but he said it was too overstuffed with supplies—a fire hazard. The brightly painted hallways were “visual chaos.” The hopscotch pattern we’d stenciled on the hallway floor was a “tripping problem.” The bulb lights in the faculty lounge were “a mess.”
Everything awesome about our school—everything that made it special and unique and joyful—was problematic to Duncan. It was like he refused to see anything good. He was hell-bent on only looking for trouble.
And his demeanor.
Good God, he was like a prison warden.
Which would have been alarming to witness in any new school principal, but given that this was the Duncan Carpenter, it was utterly destabilizing. There were no jokes. There was no laughter. I did not even count one smile.
If I’d had any indication—at all—that he even vaguely remembered me, I might have asked him about it. Part of me wondered if he would recognize me eventually, if something might trigger his memory. And part of me thought I should just go ahead and say something.
But I couldn’t bring myself to say it.
Frankly, it was insulting. If he’d forgotten me so thoroughly, it was pathetic for me to remember him. Pretending not to know him, either, became a way of saving face, even if only to myself. He didn’t remember me? Fine. I didn’t remember him, either.
It was worse than if I hadn’t known him at all.
I’ll tell you something: I’d known all along that Duncan coming here was going to break my heart. But this was worse than what I’d braced myself for. It wasn’t just the agony of wanting someone I couldn’t have. It was like the guy I’d loved so much for so long no longer existed—even though he was standing right next to me.
It was more like grief than heartbreak.
There was an upside, though. The old Duncan had been intimidatingly awesome.
That was not a problem anymore.
The tour took us two hours—hours when I should have been making dinner for Babette, or organizing library shelves, or putting together that dumb hanging sculpture I’d ordered.
Over and over, I tried to tell Duncan about the building’s history—how a famous bank robber had tried to hide here in the 1890s before being apprehended, and how it had been used as a military hospital during World War II, and that it had been a set for a movie with Elizabeth Taylor in the 1950s. And over and over, he countered those amazing stories with questions like, “Why don’t any of the classroom doors have locks on them?”
I give myself credit for doing an epic job of stalling, pausing to call his attention to big things and minutia alike—from our painted rock garden to our rain-collecting barrels. I showed him the back staircase where we’d painted a number on each step going up, and then added the English word for that number, the Spanish word for it, and the number in braille dots. I showed him how the rubber “floor” of the playground was patterned in Fibonacci spirals. I showed him the fifth-grade science room that had a periodic table painted on the ceiling. I took him past Alice’s room, where she had drawn a semicircle of angles on the floor under the spot where the classroom door opened.
I kept thinking, as the tour went on and on, that he’d finally tell me that he needed to get back to his office. But he didn’t. Finally, when there was nowhere left but the library, I made an attempt to just cruise by.
“Wait,” he said, pointing at the library doors.
“Ah,” I said, as if I’d forgotten the very place that I was in charge of. “Of course.”
Duncan opened the door for me, looking impatient.
When Max and Babette had renovated the building thirty years before, they’d been dead split over putting the library down on the lower level, near the entrance, so that kids had to walk right past it to get in and out of the building—or on the higher level, so it had views to the ocean and felt like a tree house. In the end, they compromised and did … both. The main entrance to the library was down low, off the courtyard, but they’d busted a hole in the ceiling and built a staircase to the room directly above it, making it two stories tall.
When I’d arrived, Babette had helped me paint the stair risers like a stack of giant books, and it was the first thing you saw when you walked in.
It was exactly what a library should be, in my view. Whimsical. Inviting. Infused with possibility. Not to mention sunny, comfortable, and homey. I wanted kids to come in and out all the time. I wanted the doors to be open from the moment the first kid arrived on campus in the morning until the very last kid left.
I kept a collection of crazy pens in a cup on my desk to entice the kids to come see me: pens with troll hair, and googly eyes, and pom-poms. One pen had an hourglass embedded in it, one looked like a syringe filled with blue liquid, and one was shaped like a very realistic bone. I had pens in the shapes of feather quills, and pens with bendy mermaid tails, and pens that told fortunes like a Magic 8 Ball. I had sloth pens, unicorn pens, and pens with pom-poms.
I had other toys on my desk, too—a fancy kaleidoscope, a Newton’s cradle, a set of magnetic sculpture balls, and a collection of spinning tops. I had a Rubik’s Cube, too, although it didn’t work as well as it used to since one of the first-graders had decided to solve it by peeling off and rearranging the stickers.
All to make the circulation desk feel like fun.
All to let the kids know they were safe with me.
I wanted to make sure that if kids felt an impulse at any moment to pop by the library, there’d be nothing to stop them. It was the best way I knew to turn them into readers: to catch those little sparks when they happened and turn them into flames.