Duncan just stared at me.

“I used to work at Andrews Prep in California. We”—I gestured between the two of us, feeling a flash of irritation that I had to explain this—“worked together for two years. I was quieter then, and a lot less … colorful. Maybe you didn’t notice me. But I noticed you. Everybody did. You were…” I shook my head. “You were everything I wanted to be. You were the best possible kind of teacher I could imagine. And when I heard that you were coming here to be the principal of Kempner, I thought you’d be the best thing that could happen to us in the wake of losing Max—and that’s saying a lot. But … what happened to you? Where are your flamingo pants? Where is your popcorn tie? The Duncan Carpenter I knew wouldn’t be canceling field trips! He’d be planning new ones.” Suddenly, the anger kind of melted away, and my voice got a little shaky. “I remember who you used to be. I was so excited to see that guy again. But it’s like he’s gone. I don’t know where he is. And I don’t have any idea at all who you are. But I’d give anything to see that guy again.”

Duncan kept himself still the whole time I was talking—not moving, his expression totally stoic.

I don’t know what I was hoping for. Some kind of explanation, maybe, like My boring wife told me it was time to grow up and stop goofing around. Or maybe, I thought principals had to be hard-asses. Are you saying this place would prefer a sweet-hearted goofball?

I guess in some fantasy version of this moment, I’d be able to show him the error of his ways. I’d be able to give him permission to be who he truly was. It’s that fantasy we all harbor when somebody else is completely wrong, and we hope that if we explain it to them, they’ll hear us, and go, “Oh, God. You’re right. I’m the worst. Thank you for helping me be a better person.”

Like that’s ever worked.

Anyway: it didn’t.

In response to all that—my confession that I knew him, my admission of how much I’d admired him, my accidental, utterly vulnerable, grand finale confession of how much I truly longed to see the former Duncan again—Duncan went with, “We’re getting off topic, here.”

But no. We were just—finally—getting on topic.

I didn’t back down. “I remember you,” I said, taking a step closer, peering into his face.

Duncan looked out at the Gulf.

“What happened?” I said. “What made you like this? Why did you change?” And then, thinking maybe I was asking the question that would hit the bull’s-eye and cause him to admit the truth at last, I said, quieter, in almost a whisper. “Was it your wife?”

Duncan frowned and looked at me. “My wife?”

“She doesn’t approve of goofing around, does she? She wants you to be serious all the time. She wants you to be like all the other adults.” I shook my head. “She never had a sense of humor. Why do guys always, always go for the pretty girls—no matter how boring they are?”

But Duncan was staring at me.

Oh, God. I’d insulted him. You can’t go around calling people’s wives boring! I tried to backtrack. “Not your wife, of course—I mean—she’s pretty and also … not … boring.” I was so blatantly lying.

But that’s when Duncan said, “Who?”

“Your wife. I’m sorry. I’m sure she has many, many great qualities.”

But he was frowning. “I don’t have a wife.”

I froze. “Of course you do.” And then, as if I were trying to remind him of something he should already know, I went on, “That lady from admissions? From Andrews?”

“Chelsey?”

“That’s it,” I said. “The one who asked you out in the parking lot.”

“Wow,” Duncan said. “Okay. We dated, but…”

That didn’t compute. “Didn’t you … marry her?”

“Marry her!” he burst out with the closest thing I’d seen to a laugh from him since he’d arrived.

“Didn’t you move in together? Wasn’t it really … serious?”

He shook his head slowly, like he couldn’t imagine why I was asking that. “No.”

“There was a rumor,” I said, now all accusatory, “that you were thinking about getting engaged.”

He looked at me like that was irrelevant. “Still, no.”

“A solid rumor,” I said. “A convincing rumor.”

But Duncan just shook his head.

And despite the fact that we were fighting over the field trip, despite the fact that he had just declared the end of all fun forever, and despite the fact I didn’t even like him anymore, my heart, very slowly, just started flapping its wings.

“So … you’re not … married?” I needed to reconfirm. Again.

“No!” he said, like he’d never heard anything so crazy.

“You don’t have, like, a whole gaggle of kids?”

Embarrassing, but true: I could not disguise the bizarre feeling of joy that had just appeared inside my body—like a million tiny, carbonated bubbles. I felt positively fizzy.

Duncan peered at me, reading my face.

I smiled. I couldn’t help it. Then I put my hand over my mouth.

He shook his head at me, like he couldn’t make sense of it all. “It was always casual. Sometimes I think we were really just dating because she wanted it so badly. It was easier to say yes than no. Anyway, I left Andrews the next year—got offered a job in Baltimore—and she didn’t want to leave California, and that was that.”

I didn’t know what else to do but start laughing. “Just to confirm one more time: not married?”

“Not even close.”

I shook my head. “I thought you went home every night to the wife and kids.”

“God, no. I go home every night with Chuck Norris—who has totally become the alpha, by the way—and then he bosses me into giving him half my dinner and then sleeps on my head.”

“Okay,” I said. “So—similar.”

“I’m not opposed to being married, though,” Duncan said. Then he added, “Kind of the way you feel about cats.”

Oh, my God.

Wait—what?

My mouth dropped open. “You … know that?”

“That you are neutral on cats? But more of a dog person?”

I felt like all the air had been sucked out of the sky. “Wait. You … remember me?”

“Of course. We worked together at Andrews.”

“But … have you always remembered me—or just since I started yelling at you?”

His voice sounded a little rough. “I have always remembered you.”

“But why didn’t you say anything?”

“What was there to say?”

“I don’t know. How about ‘Hello. Nice to see you again. How’ve you been?’”

Duncan’s eyes seemed softer, somehow. “Hello,” he said. “Nice to see you again. How’ve you been?”

Luckily, I remembered the third-graders nearby. I condensed my voice into a whisper-shout. “I’ve been shitty, thank you!” I said.

“Not entirely, though,” Duncan said back, and I was too mad to notice that he sounded almost human. “You love it here.” Then he added, “And it seems to love you.”

Were we going to talk about something real now? It was completely disarming. I felt dazed. “I did love it here. I loved this job, and this town, and this school. I’ve grown up, and—you know…” I wanted to say “blossomed” but that felt like a weird thing to say about myself.

“Blossomed,” Duncan supplied, when I faltered.

I blinked at him.

“But then,” I went on, “we lost Max. My hero—everybody’s hero—and the closest thing to a father, and a mentor, and frigging Santa Claus that I’ve ever known. He died right in front of me. Just as close as you are right now. And then, boom! You showed up—and I was so hopeful to see you again, and I thought maybe you could heal—” I almost said me, but then I switched to “—us all. But you were totally different. Nothing like the guy I knew. Nothing like Max, either. Nothing like this school or its values. And now I don’t know what to do because now everything that mattered to me is falling apart—and it’s not all because of you, but you are certainly not helping—and it’s so much worse now because I just used to be so totally—”

I stopped myself from saying in love with you.

I tried again. “You were just so—”

I stopped myself from saying lovable.

Finally, I said, “It’s worse than if you were just some random, ordinary, pencil-pushing, form-loving administrator. It’s worse than if you were just some run-of-the-mill douchebag. Because I know who you used to be. And he was so much better than the guy you’ve become.”

In the process of, you know, speaking my truth, I had stepped closer and closer to him, and by the time I finished, I was just inches away, and he was looking down at me.

The wind tugged at my straw hat, so I put a hand on top to hold it in place.

For a second there, I felt like I’d made a pretty good argument.

And then I realized I’d just called my boss a douchebag.

He realized it, too.