The conventional wisdom would become that Kent Buckley had refused to even consider Babette. That her power and devotion from the community was threatening to him. That he’d used technicalities to keep her from her rightful place.

But a second theory would also take root: that she had turned him down. One look at her confirmed she wasn’t doing well. If she’d eaten anything since the funeral, I couldn’t tell you what. And her hands, I noticed every day, were still shaking. She was listless and deflated. Despite all her years of wisdom and strength, looking at her now, it was possible that losing Max was more than she could handle.

Anyway … fair or not, right or not, it was happening.

Under Kent Buckley’s leadership, we were suddenly about to bring a total stranger into our stunned, lost, grieving school family.

Except—not a total stranger to me.

I stared at the photo while Kent Buckley talked on and on, building up to a genuine rant about how the American school system had gone soft, and how we all needed to toughen up, and how if we weren’t careful, these kids were going to be a generation of hippies, nerds, and weaklings.

This to a group of teachers made up exclusively of hippies, nerds, and weaklings.

Yet another reason Kent Buckley was unlikable.

He had no idea how to read a room.

As he brought his rant to a close, and before anyone could respond, or even ask a question, Kent Buckley’s Bluetooth rang—and he decided to take the call. He turned his attention back to his ear, announced, “Meeting adjourned,” and walked on out of the room, berating whoever was on the other end of his earpiece with, “Dammit, that’s not what we told them to do.”

What was Kent Buckley’s job, again? Some kind of “business.” I thought maybe he did commercial real estate. I felt like he built mini-malls. How important could that call possibly have been?

But there it was. He was gone. And we were left with a new principal.

In the wake of that moment, nobody moved.

Everybody stayed put, looking around, as the room filled up with murmurs. What the hell had just happened? everybody wanted to know—and nobody more than me. I sat still, blinking at the floor, trying to let it all sink in.

Duncan Carpenter was coming here.

My Duncan Carpenter.

And it was, somehow—at the exact same time—both the best and the worst news I’d ever heard.

three

“Who the hell is Duncan Carpenter?” everybody demanded later that night—much later, when we’d gathered in Babette’s backyard for an emergency meeting under the bulb lights.

It was both our Friday-night gathering place and the default meeting spot for emergencies and nonemergencies alike—had been for years.

This was, of course, an emergency.

Usually, Babette didn’t mind. It was a BYO situation—and people let themselves in and out of the side gate. No trouble at all. It had become a standard gathering, and almost, if I’m honest, a kind of weekly group therapy. With alcohol. Even in the summer.

At this point, Babette couldn’t have stopped us if she’d wanted to.

Especially tonight.

I didn’t expect her to join us. She’d done almost nothing but sleep since the funeral.

I understood that this was part of the process. I’d lost my mom when I was ten. I wasn’t a stranger to grieving, to the way it drowned you but didn’t kill you—only kept you submerged for so long you forgot what air and sunshine even felt like. I knew that grief set its own timeline, and that the only way out was through.

I got it.

But she did join us, in the end, and I was so grateful to see her there. We’d all lost Max—but I’d lost them both, in a way.

Max and Babette and I had always been the last ones to leave the iron table in the backyard on Fridays … talking, overprocessing school politics, psychoanalyzing the kids and their parents, and spitballing ideas for solving everybody’s problems.

They really had been my dearest friends.

Slash mentors.

Slash surrogate parents.

The meeting centered, naturally, on Duncan Carpenter, and how nobody’d even heard of him, and what was the deal with that overly serious photo, and didn’t we get any say at all in the hiring process, and what was happening, and why the hell wasn’t it Babette taking over?

“Kent Buckley’s not wrong,” Babette said. “I’m hardly in a fit state to take over the school.”

But who was this new guy? And why hadn’t anyone been consulted? And what kind of psychotic break had I experienced in the meeting today?

So I told them everything I could confess to publicly. “We used to work together,” I explained, “in California, at Andrews Prep—my last school before I came here. He was a teacher then—fourth grade and gym—and he was … kind of a legend. Everybody loved him. I’m telling you, he was something really, really special. He was Max-like.”

I glanced over at Babette.

She gave a nod, like It’s okay. Go on.

“He just had a warmth about him. He was funny and goofy and crazy. He was playful. He was hilarious. Kids followed him around. Hell, adults followed him around.”

Emily Aguilo from the second-grade team said, “Why would Kent Buckley hire a guy like that? That’s not Kent Buckley’s thing. He just lectured us for an hour on how this school needs to toughen up.”

I shrugged. “Maybe he doesn’t realize?”

Carlos Trenton, our hipster science teacher with a beard long enough that he could braid it, said, “No way is Kent Buckley paying any attention to this guy’s teaching philosophy.”

We all agreed. Kent Buckley had no interest in pedagogical theory. He cared about one thing: status. If Duncan was a rising star, and he’d poached him from another school, then Kent Buckley was happy.

But that’s when Donna Raswell, who’d had Clay in the second grade last year, jumped in: “Kent Buckley pays attention to everything. I’ve never met a bigger control freak in my life. He counts the pencils in his kid’s pencil bag.”

I shook my head. “He may pay attention—but not to the right things.”

“But why would he hire another principal like Max?” a kindergarten teacher asked. “He’s been trying to undermine Max from the minute Clay started in kindergarten.”

Carlos actually snorted. “Unsuccessfully.”

True. Max had viewed Kent Buckley as an annoying, ankle-biting dog that he had to shake off his pants cuff from time to time.

But one he couldn’t get rid of entirely. Because of Tina. And Clay.

In truth, we all knew Kent Buckley would have no interest in our hippie school if his kid didn’t happen to be a student. And his kid never would have become a student if his wife hadn’t wanted their child to attend the school founded by her parents. And so now Kent Buckley was forced to watch his son attend a school that, in his opinion, was doing everything all wrong.

And it wasn’t Kent Buckley’s way to just let people disagree with him.

So while Max dying was a crushing loss for everybody else, for Kent Buckley it was—as he’d kind of confessed in the meeting today … an opportunity.

Right now, with everybody reeling, if Kent Buckley could stay focused and push through a new head of school more to his liking, he could impact how things were done around here for years to come.

And so he’d moved quickly, and quietly—and he’d brought in someone new before we could focus enough to protest.

But the joke was on Kent Buckley. He had just accidentally done the opposite of what he’d meant to: he’d hired a new principal almost exactly like the old one.

A part of me had to be happy about it. Given our sudden, unbelievable situation, Duncan Carpenter was a stroke of impossible luck. Bringing him here would be the best possible thing for the school.

Even though, given my history with him, it might well be the worst possible thing for me.

* * *

Later, after Babette had gone to bed, and most folks had gone home, as I rinsed cans and bottles for recycling at the kitchen sink, Alice leaned against the counter and said, “What’s going on, Sam?”

Her shirt today said, GRAPHING IS WHERE I DRAW THE LINE.

Even though Alice was a year younger than me—twenty-seven—she was also six inches taller than me, and so she had a big-sisterly vibe. She was engaged to her college sweetheart, Marco, who was in the navy and went on long deployments. They rented a little 1920s bungalow a few blocks down. When he was gone, I saw a lot of her—and when he was here, I saw almost nothing of her.

Fair enough.

He had shipped out a week before Max died, and though I wouldn’t want to say I was glad Alice was alone these days, let’s just say I was grateful to have a friend.

She knew me pretty well. Well enough to know something more was up than I’d confessed to the group.

“So,” she said, like she’d been waiting all night for all the other bozos to leave. “What did you leave out?”

I met her eyes, and I said, “Duncan Carpenter is the Guy.”

“What guy?”

I pursed my lips and leaned in to intensify my look. Then I said slowly, “The Guy.”

Alice frowned a second, then said, in recognition, “The Guy?”

I gave an unmistakable nod, like Bingo.

“The the Guy? The one who drove you out of California?”