It was close to Thanksgiving before Duncan went nuclear on us.

I’m not sure if he’d been trying to lull us into a false sense of security, or if it just took him that long to get organized, but by the time it happened, we had settled into a comfortable state of discomfort.

I, for one, had found a very unexpected peace with him. As profoundly as his revised personality had disappointed me, for the most part, it had also cured me of my epic crush. I almost thought of them as two different people now. Old Duncan, who I still pined for, and New Duncan, who I most definitely did not.

Old Duncan was still my irreplaceable gold standard for everything lovable.

New Duncan? Was just kind of a dickish boss.

And guys like that were a dime a dozen.

I couldn’t have been in love with him now. There was nothing likable there to love.

New Duncan was intensely private—never talking about himself, or his home life, or his past. We hadn’t even had one sighting of the wife—or the kids. He kept his home life and his work life completely separate in every way. I guess he really did not want us in his business. Fine with me. Better, in fact. He didn’t even have photos in his office—no personal things at all. Just books on pedagogy.

Dull as chalk and half as fun.

It was a relief. My heart was safe. Now if he would just stop meddling with my school, I kept telling myself, things could go back to normal. Ish.

Even though, of course, I knew they never could.

And then, one unremarkable Friday afternoon, we got a doozy of a memo—like no one at this school had ever seen before. “From: Duncan Carpenter. RE: MEMO—SAFETY AND SECURITY—Effective Immediately.”

It was nine single-spaced pages long, and I read every word.

We all did.

It may be the only nine-page, school-wide memo in the history of time that’s been read to completion by all of its recipients.

But not in a good way.

As my eyes took in sentence after sentence in horror, I felt a rising sense of panic.

All those things I was so relieved Duncan hadn’t done?

He was doing them now.

He’d organized his memo into two sections: On-Campus Security Improvements and Off-Campus Security Improvements.

For On-Campus Security, the following changes would be effective immediately: Our lovely, open archway at the school’s entrance would have an iron gate installed over it, and visitors would be buzzed in by a guard—one of three new ones we’d be hiring. Once inside, everyone would clear metal detectors and run their bags through airport-style X-ray machines: students, faculty, administrators, and visitors alike. Bags and backpacks would be hand-searched, as well.

Oh, and P.S.—Duncan had just fired our security guard, Raymond, for “lack of alertness.”

On to classroom safety: All rooms on the ground floor would be required to keep their shades drawn and their windows closed and locked at all times. At some point in the future, windows would be replaced with bulletproof glass and/or metal bars would be installed. All the hardwood, historic classroom doors would be replaced with metal ones—made by a company that also made armored tanks—as soon as possible. Transoms over the doors—which we still used on pretty days for breezes, would be boarded up.

To “reduce visual chaos” and “aid visibility” on campus, over the course of the year, the school would be repainting hallways and classrooms a color that Duncan described as a “calming gray.” He was also instituting a uniform for the children to wear—also gray—starting in January, and he respectfully asked that teachers try to dress in solid colors, preferably muted grays, browns, and tans. All of this in the service of “increased visibility.”

Before I could even react to any of that, my eyes had moved on to the section titled Off-Campus Security—which argued, in essence, that there was no such thing. Because it would be impossible to ensure students’ security off campus, we would no longer be taking field trips to the beach, or to the aquarium, or to the amusement park built out over the ocean.

Basically: no field trips at all. Ever. Effective immediately.

I scrolled back up to the top of the email, and I read it again.

Then I read it again.

Especially the “no field trips” part. Because we had a field trip planned for the very next week: our annual beach cleanup for the third-graders, where the class combed a section of beach to collect as much plastic trash as they could. They wore gloves, used rakes and shovels, filled trash bags, and generally felt like they were making a huge impact. You could see the difference on the stretch of beach—and over the years, we’d filled a whole hallway with before-and-after pictures.

It was Max’s view that you couldn’t teach kids about something deeply depressing—like the state of our oceans—without also giving them hope and a plan of action. This week, as scheduled, the kids had all been watching documentaries about a phenomenon known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—a floating collection of plastic, litter, trash, and debris that had been carried by currents from all over the world to collect in a giant, gloppy soup of nastiness that was twice as big as the state of Texas.

Texas is big, y’all.

It’s almost 700 miles wide and almost 800 miles long.

It takes fourteen to sixteen hours to drive across it.

So that is one big patch of floating garbage.

We were islanders in Galveston. We had the Gulf on one side and the bay on the other. This wasn’t theoretical for us. People here made their livings, one way or another, from the water. And so we’d built the fall curriculum around it. Whether the bumper sticker on your car said BOI (Born On the Island) or IBC (Islander By Choice), we were all on this island together. The ocean and everything it meant, symbolized, or impacted was woven through every minute of our days. This wasn’t theoretical for us.

This was personal.

Max always felt like learning had to matter. That we had to build our lessons around things kids cared about and make sure they knew the stakes. And so building the third-grade curriculum around the ocean gave a theme to the whole year.

I even had a whole display in the library, and I’d been reading a retelling of The Little Mermaid that was slightly more Ariel-positive than the animated version they all knew. We’d compare different versions, usually ending in a lively discussion about gender politics in the mermaid kingdom and how giving up your entire identity for love was generally a bad idea.

“Don’t ever give up your voice for anyone,” I told the kids every year.

“Or your tail!” the kindergartners usually shouted.

“Especially not your tail,” I agreed—and then I had them spend the rest of the period in the maker space, drawing me pictures of their merfolk tails.

In my favorite version of the story, the mermaid finds a magic shell that let her do both—have human legs or a mermaid tail, depending on her mood.

How realistic was that ending? I didn’t really care.

If mermaids couldn’t have it all, dammit—who could?

But I’m getting off topic.

That night, after we’d all received Duncan’s epic memo, as we gathered at Babette’s, the mood among the teachers was very … villagers with pitchforks.

I guess you could say that the faculty and staff were not happy.

You could also say that they thought Duncan was the devil.

By the time I arrived, the garden table was stacked high with pizza boxes and at least thirty teachers were stress-eating. And stress-drinking. And somebody had hit the grocery store and cleaned out the bakery—cinnamon rolls, donuts, éclairs. Even a birthday cake that said “Happy Birthday, Stanley” that was on super-special for $1.99 because no one had ever picked it up.

People weren’t even using plates with that birthday cake. Just digging in with their forks like desperate raccoons.

Mrs. Kline was trying to keep order, but being in charge wasn’t really her thing. She had a yellow legal pad and was taking notes as the crowd got louder, and drunker, and more sugared-up.

Let’s just say the canceling of all field trips, all color, all individuality, all creativity, and all fun did not go over too well. It might have been the definitive moment when Duncan fully lost them.

Lost all of us.

“He wants to paint the whole school gray,” Alice kept saying.

“He wants to put bars on everything,” Sadie Lee from the first grade added.

“He’s making the kids wear uniforms,” Carlos said.

“He’s making us wear uniforms!” Anton the science teacher called out

“Where’s he getting the money for all this?” Mrs. Kline added.

“How is this happening?” Donna demanded.

“How did he get approval?” the school nurse wanted to know.

As I watched the teachers panicking, I came to a conclusion. Who Duncan used to be didn’t—couldn’t—outweigh who he had become.

I could not—and absolutely would not—let him turn our school into a prison.

He had to go.