We had to find a way to get rid of him.

I took Mrs. Kline’s yellow pad and her pen. Then I stood up on the back steps and called everybody to order by shouting, “One! Two!”

“Eyes on you!” they all shouted back.

So easy with teachers.

In the quiet that followed, I said, “That memo today made it clear: Nobody is coming to save us. We’re going to have to save ourselves. And save the school.” I looked around at all the teachers. There were at least thirty of us there. Then I said, “We have to get rid of this guy.”

A wine-and-cake-fueled cheer went up.

Of course, nobody really knew how to do that—but that was what this gathering was going to turn into. A full-panic, no-idea-is-too-dumb brainstorming session.

First idea was to get a petition going.

Second idea was writing a group letter to the board signed by as many faculty as we could get—which would be everybody.

Third idea was to refute each of Duncan’s bad ideas, one by one, assigning each to a willing faculty member to do a write-up about why it wouldn’t work. I agreed to take the gray walls; Coach Gordo agreed to take the iron bars; Carlos took the security guards; and Alice took the canceling of field trips. Once all the major affronts had been assigned, we went through the smaller changes, from the changing keypad codes to the recent switch of all campus lightbulbs to blue fluorescents, which were cheaper, yes, but which gave off a morgue-like vibe that was bumming everybody out. Unanimously.

Was I sure it would work? No.

But it was a start.

We’d figure this out. We’d work together. I wasn’t sure how, and I wasn’t sure when, but I knew we’d manage it. We weren’t giving up. We weren’t chickening out. And we sure as hell weren’t canceling our field trip to the beach.

ten

That was another rule of Max’s: Never give anyone bad news without also giving them something to do about it.

We went to the beach to pick up trash every year without fail.

All to say, when Duncan sent out that email, the buses were already ordered, the teacher teams were already organized, the trash bags and rakes and cleanup supplies were already assembled, and the posters to record and celebrate how many pounds of trash we’d removed were already made.

All ready and waiting.

I’d say, in general, I was a pretty obedient person. I didn’t throw recyclables in the trash. I voted every Election Day—even in the tiny ones most people skipped. If a recipe called for a tablespoon of something, I didn’t just eyeball it, I measured it out.

But in response to the beach cleanup being canceled, I had a very nonobedient reaction. Some unknown, fiery part of me rose up from some unknown, fiery place in my soul and created this thought in my mind: I dare you.

I dare you to stop us.

Duncan Carpenter had no right to cancel that trip. It was a tradition much bigger than him. We did a beach cleanup every year. It had been happening since before Duncan Carpenter was even born. Or close enough. It had been Max’s idea long before I’d come here, and we weren’t going to just let it die now that he was gone.

Was this the hill I wanted to die on? Trash cleanup at the beach?

Yes. Apparently, it was.

Here’s what I’m saying: We wound up sneaking the entire third grade out of the building.

Just funneled ’em out the south gate and walked them the three blocks to the seawall. We held hands and we sang sea shanties. It was easy. The teachers had already blocked out the time. Carlos drove over with the shovels and the sifters in his pickup truck. It was fine. We’d be back by lunchtime.

I wore a wide-brimmed straw hat to work that day, and a seashell-printed sarong, and I brought my beach bag with extra sunscreen, in case anybody needed it.

The early part of the day was delightful.

I had the adorable Clay Buckley in my group, and he was full of trivia about everything sea related. He was one of those sweet, serious little boys who seemed somehow more like a thirty-five-year-old therapist than like a kid. Maybe it was the too-big glasses with blue camo frames. Maybe it was his gentle manner, or his impressive vocabulary, or the way he was practically an encyclopedia … but he mostly seemed like he was narrating a nature documentary.

Wise beyond his years.

The rule for the kids was that they weren’t allowed to touch the trash with their fingers. We made them wear gloves and dispensed cheap plastic beach toy shovels and plastic sifters for them to shovel up any trash they saw, sift the sand out, and then dump the remaining trash in the garbage bags. If a kid saw something sharp—a broken bottle, or worse—they had to call a teacher. The kids did pretty well with it—I think, in part, because by this point in the year, they knew so much about plastic in the ocean, they were eager to help.

Clay Buckley and I wound up side by side on our hands and knees that morning for more than an hour, shoveling and sifting bottle caps, balloons, six-pack rings, plastic bags, fishing line, and a million little brightly colored pieces we couldn’t identify—and by the end of it, I was officially in the Clay Buckley Fan Club.

Regardless of his mother. Or his dad.

Early on, Clay said to me, “It’s ironic that we’re cleaning plastic off the beach with plastic shovels.”

“It’s a little bit like cannibalism,” I joked.

But Clay thought about it. “It feels more to me like soldiers collecting their war dead.”

“I see that,” I said, and kept shoveling.

In that hour, from Clay, I learned more about the marine habitat of the Gulf of Mexico than I ever thought possible. Here’s a sample of what Clay had to say: “Everybody’s heard about the Kemp’s ridley sea turtles, but did you know the Gulf’s also got leatherback, loggerhead, and hawksbill?” (I did not.) “Did you know that the leatherback has existed in basically its same form since the time of the dinosaurs?” (Again, no.) “Can you imagine what it would be like for your favorite food to be jellyfish?” (Another nope.) “Spicy!” was all I could think of to say.

Then Clay said something that really shocked me: “Max and I used to go turtle hunting during nesting season.”

“Wait—you and Max hunted turtles?”

Clay looked up at me. “Not hunting, like bang-bang,” he said. “Hunting like click-click.” He clicked the imaginary shutter of a camera.

“Well, that’s a relief.” I gave him a wink.

I had seen more than a few photos of their outings, actually. You had to watch out, or Max would make you stand there while he flipped through every snapshot on his phone.

“There are whales out there, too,” Clay said, pausing to look out at the Gulf.

That didn’t seem right. My image of whales was out in the deep ocean, not the shallow Gulf. This time, I meant it: “Really?”

“Twenty-five different species, in fact. Humpbacks, blues, killers, and a bunch of others. One called a Bryde’s whale that just got listed as endangered. Oh, plus sperm whales.”

I frowned, like No way. “Sperm whales? Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“I have never seen a sperm whale around Galveston.”

“Well, of course not,” Clay said gently. “They’re underwater.”

“Fair enough.”

“Plus,” he added, “they’re far out, in the deep parts. But ships used to come to the whaling grounds from all over.” Then he turned to me and nodded. “And we’ve got the shipwrecks to prove it. Four thousand of them, to be exact.”

“There are four thousand shipwrecks out there?” I said, pausing to look out, like I might spot one.

“Yup.”

“How do you know all this?” I asked.

Clay looked down. “Max.”

Oh. Max.

“Plus,” Clay added then, “I want to be a maritime archaeologist when I grow up. And there’s a lot to learn. So I have to keep pretty busy.”

“I could totally see you as a maritime archaeologist,” I said. I wasn’t 100 percent sure what that was, but I could see Clay as anything he wanted to be.

“Thank you,” Clay said, giving a little bow. He went back to sifting. “Do you know about the shipwreck La Belle?”

I shook my head.

“It sank in the 1600s in Matagorda Bay—and archaeologists found it not that long ago and excavated it. They built a wall to hold back the water. They found a crest of a French admiral. They found the hilt of a sword. They found human bones.”

“Whoa,” I said.

“Max was going to take me overnight to the museum in Port Lavaca…” Clay stopped sifting for a second. “But now my dad’s going to take me instead.”

I tried to imagine Kent Buckley at a museum with his introverted, bookish, deep-thinking child. Clay would be reading every sign for every artifact twice, and Kent Buckley would be conducting some douchey meeting on his cell phone, talking too loud and hurrying Clay along.

It hit me then that, out of all of us, Clay might have been the person who’d needed Max the most.

“The museum sounds amazing,” I said, trying to say something true.