Next, I heard the door shush closed behind him.

Then, it was quiet for a long time. I started to wonder if maybe she’d gone, too. If maybe they both had. I edged down a couple more steps, and from that angle, I could see my mom. She was pressed up against the door, totally still, almost like she wasn’t even breathing.

Mama, I mouthed—but without sound.

And then a deep, otherworldly sound started to fill the room, as she slowly sank to the floor, and I realized she was crying out—a kind of long, lowing, desperate sound of agony, like nothing I’d ever heard. When she reached the floor, she beat against it with her open palm until she started to cry for real—dark, ragged, body-racking sobs like I didn’t even know existed.

I hesitated for one second—unsure if I should go to her, if seeing me would make her feel better or worse. But then I couldn’t stand it. I skittered barefoot down the steps and across the Persian rug, and I threw myself down beside her.

She looked up, surprised.

“I’m sorry, Mama,” I said.

And she just knew in that instant, the way mothers always know, that I’d heard it all. She pulled me tightly to her chest and wrapped her arms around me. “It isn’t you, sweetheart,” she said, her voice still thick. “It isn’t you.”

But, of course … she was lying.

It was me.

She knew it, and now so did I.

I never thought about that night now. I hadn’t forgotten it, exactly, but I kept it somewhere at the distant edges of my memory. What was the point of replaying it? Nothing could change. Nothing could work out differently. My father would leave, and I wouldn’t see him again until my mother’s funeral, two years later—and even then he would look at me with bitterness.

He didn’t take me in after that. I’d go to live with my mother’s sister, and my father and I would spend the rest of our lives ignoring each other’s existence.

All because of this one thing that was wrong with me that would never be fixable.

Anyway, how could someone like Alice—cheerful, logical, tea-drinking Alice—ever understand something like that?

I couldn’t even understand it, myself.

She wanted to know why my falling in love with Duncan was bad—and for a second, I thought about trying to explain it to her.

But words failed me.

In Alice’s world, love was mathematical. Every problem had a solution.

But in my world, solutions had always been a hell of a lot less easy to come by.

sixteen

When Babette showed up in the kitchen, still in her robe, she took one look at the two of us and said, “What did I miss?”

“Sam kissed Duncan,” Alice said.

“Finally!” Babette said. “Maybe it’ll fix him.”

“One kiss can’t fix a person.”

“Maybe it’ll inspire him to try to fix himself.”

I meant to lay it all out for them very carefully, but instead, here’s what came out: “He was so doped up after the surgery it was like a truth serum, and he wound up confessing that he’d had a thing for me back in California, and then I had to take his clothes off for him and he fell on top of me, and then he stared into my eyes until we were kissing, and then he told me he was lonely and he asked me to stay with him, and now I’m afraid I have no choice but to fall back in love with him.”

Babette took that in.

“Wow,” Alice said.

I nodded. But I was tired of thinking about what it all meant for me. Now that Babette was here, I added: “And there’s one more thing. He was shot. In a school shooting.”

Babette and Alice both set down their coffee mugs, leaned in, and said, “What?”

Maybe I shouldn’t have told them. Maybe it was private information that he’d only disclosed under the influence of drugs. But I trusted them.

And I really, really needed advice.

I nodded to confirm. “He almost died. The scars are … massive. Shocking. I mean. Disfiguring.”

Babette sighed. “That explains a lot.”

“And so now I’m very conflicted,” I said.

“I can see why,” Alice said.

“Because I’d already given up on him. And we’ve hatched a plan to get him fired. And there’s no doubt that for the sake of the school, he needs to go. But…”

“You want him to stay,” Babette said, with a little smile.

“But, now, after seeing the scars … I can see why he’s acting like he is.”

“He’s afraid.” Babette nodded.

“Yes, and I don’t think he’s dealt with any of it—whatever that would even mean. I mean, how would a person even do that? How would you even start?”

“You feel like there’s hope for him?” Alice asked.

I nodded. “I’ve been trying all this time to figure out what changed. And now that I know, I feel like maybe instead of trying to fire him, we should try to help him.”

Babette and Alice thought about it.

I looked back and forth between them. “What do you think?”

And that’s when Babette gave me a big smile—the first real smile I’d seen from her in months. Then she said, “I think it’s the best idea I’ve heard in ages.”

* * *

Babette had never really been too jazzed about the idea of getting Duncan fired.

But the idea of helping him?

That really lit her fire.

Right then, we started brainstorming on one of Babette’s yellow pads. We titled the list The Duncan Project, and Alice made tea while we shouted out ideas and I wrote them all down. Our motto was “No idea too dumb,” which we decided we wanted on T-shirts, and we listed every single crazy thing we could think of that might help Duncan remember who he’d been before, reconnect to joy, and “deal with it,” whatever that meant.

We put down everything, from “throw oranges at him to see if he’ll accidentally start juggling them,” to “do a fake teacher raffle where he wins free sessions with a therapist,” to “bring in guest speakers about PTSD.”

“Is he in therapy?” Babette asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“He needs to be.”

“Good luck with that.”

In the end we wound up sorting the ideas into several categories:

Help him remember his old self

Help him make connections with humans

Remind him what it was like to be happy

Expose him to risks

Soften his tough-guy outer shell

Nurture him physically

Help him build a mental framework for thinking about resilience

Therapy

Under each category, we listed everything we could think of to help accomplish that thing. Under “Help him remember his old self” we listed things like: trick him into wearing a Hawaiian shirt; get him to dress up in costume; make him teach a yo-yo class; and dare him to walk on his hands. Under “Help him make connections with humans” we listed: game night at Babette’s; go fishing with the guys; kissing booth; and massage. And as far as helping him build a framework for resilience, we listed: keep a journal; see the documentary about the 1900 storm; talk about Buddhism; study post-traumatic growth; and get him talking.

A lot of spitballing going on.

We really didn’t know what we were doing.

But we made up for that with ideas. Pages’ and pages’ worth.

Babette asked me about how I’d coped when my epilepsy came back. “Were you depressed?” she asked.

“Very,” I said. “It felt like a prison sentence. Like I’d spend the rest of my life alone, never knowing when disaster would strike.”

“Kind of like Duncan.”

I thought about it. “Good point.”

“So how did you cope?”

I thought about it. “Max helped me,” I said. “He told me to pay attention to the things that made me feel better—and then to do more of those.”

“Sensible,” Alice said.

“It made me feel better to walk on the beach, so I walked on the beach. It made me feel better to drink cups of warm tea, so I drank them. Bubble baths made me feel better. Riding my bicycle. Flying kites. Listening to audiobooks. Reading. Baking. Candles. Wearing the flower hat.”

“And then I gave you that book on color theory,” Babette said.

“And I started filling up my world with color. Because Max promised me that joy was the cure for everything. And the more I learned about how it worked, the more I felt like joy was cumulative. That it wasn’t about finding one big thing—but about collecting as many tiny pieces as you could.”

Alice pointed at me. “See what I’m saying? Math.”

“It worked for you?” Babette wanted to confirm.

“Life is still life. But it has definitely helped stack the deck in my favor.”

Maybe that was why Duncan’s attack on the school felt so personal. It was more than just bad for the faculty and bad for the kids—it was specifically bad for me.

My epilepsy had gone away when I was twelve. It just … resolved itself. All through middle school, the seizures were less and less frequent, and then, six months had gone by, and then a year. And the relief I’d carried—for years after the seizures stopped—was profound. It was like I’d been broken my whole life, and now was fixed.