Anyway, that was how I’d ended up in Texas, of all places—though that was how almost everybody wound up in Texas: love or money.

I’d come to this island by chance, but I’d found a real home here, way down at the bottom of the country in this wind-battered, historic town. I loved the painted Victorian houses with their carpenter Gothic porches. I loved the brick cobblestone streets and the tourist T-shirt shops. I loved the muddy, soft sand and the easy waves of the Gulf lapping the shore. I loved how the town was both humble and proud, both battered and resilient, both exhausted and bursting with energy, both historic and endlessly reinventing itself.

Most of all, I loved our school. My job. The life I’d built.

A post-Duncan Carpenter life that—really—the Guy himself had no place in.

* * *

“What are the odds?” I said to Alice, turning on the kettle for tea. “That of all the people in the world Kent Buckley could have hired … he picked him?”

“Do you really want me to calculate the odds?” Alice asked.

“Maybe not,” I said.

But Alice was off and running. “Challenge accepted! There are a multitude of variables to consider here. You’ve gotta take the square root of the independent schools in the Southeast and then factor in the ones with administrators looking to make a sudden move right before the start of the school year, and then solve for the X-Y axis.”

For half a second I thought she was being serious.

She went on, with a slight smile peeking through her deadpan expression. “It’s basically the same equation you use for escape velocity for the gravitational field. Minus alpha and omega, of course. Times pi.”

“I feel like I’m being teased.”

“I’ve seen that photo of him,” she concluded, now openly grinning. “Once you factor in the slope of that jawline, the coefficient there just skews the whole curve.”

I flared my nostrils at her. “Thanks so much for your help.”

“He does have a good jawline.”

I sighed. “Doesn’t he?”

The thing was, it seemed like such a shallow thing to fret about—especially in light of what Babette was going through. So an old crush was coming back to haunt me. Big deal.

“I guess the odds don’t really matter now,” I said next. “It happened.”

“Atta girl,” she said.

“You see my point, though,” I said. “It puts me in a very strange situation.”

Alice studied my face. “I can’t tell if you’re devastated or thrilled.”

“I am ninety-nine percent devastated and one percent thrilled,” I said. “But it feels like the other way around.” You’d think those two feelings might cancel each other out, but they just seemed to amplify each other.

Alice nodded. “So … you are devastated because…?”

“Because! Because I have a history with this person, even if he doesn’t know it. A history that I’d done a pretty competent job of dealing with and moving on from, only to find it boomeranging back at me with no warning. He was the entire reason I left my old school—it was one hundred percent to get away from him—and now he’s coming here. Here. I can already see how this story ends. He’ll drive me away from here, too. And then I’ll have to get a new job someplace far away and I’ll have to start all over—again—but I know no new school could be as awesome as this one, so that means I’m doomed to spend the rest of my life in exile, pining for—this place, my friends, everything.”

“I guess that’s one possible scenario,” Alice said.

I leaned down and banged my forehead against the table. “I don’t want him to take my home away from me.”

Alice frowned. “You think he’s going to fire you because you had a crush on him a million years ago?”

“I don’t think he’s going to fire me,” I said. “I just think he’ll make me so miserable I have to quit.”

“You think he’s going to be mean to you?”

“No,” I said, feeling my body sink in defeat. “I think he’s going to be nice to me.”

Alice tilted her head, like Huh?

“I think he’s going to be really nice,” I explained. “Too nice. Totally irresistibly nice.”

She lifted her head, like Got it. “You think the crush is going to wash back over you.”

“Like a tsunami.”

“So you think it’s going to be the same situation as before.”

“But worse. Because now they’ll be married and have like forty kids and the life I wanted so badly but was too chicken to try for will parade itself around endlessly until it breaks me.”

Very gently, Alice said, “Maybe it’ll shake down some other way.”

But I’d accepted my despair. “No. That’s it. That’s what’ll happen.”

But Alice wasn’t giving up. “So what if he’s married now? So what if he’s got a whole litter of kids? That could work in your favor! You’ll hardly see him. He’ll be exhausted. He won’t be drinking beers out in Babette’s backyard, that’s for sure.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, shrugging. “I’ll see him enough. A little goes a long way.”

An image appeared in my head of Duncan in the courtyard of our school, wearing a pair of his crazy pants—maybe the red ones with lobsters—surrounded by a crowd of cheering kids while he juggled beach balls.

“You look sick,” Alice said, watching me.

“I feel sick,” I said. And that’s when I noticed it was true. Of all the equilibrium-shaking things that had happened lately, this one was throwing me off the most.

“Maybe it won’t be as bad as you think,” she said. “Maybe he’ll show up here and you won’t feel anything. Crushes fade all the time. It’s been years. Maybe he’ll seem middle-aged and unappealing. Maybe he’ll have sprouted a bunch of hair on his ears. Or maybe, like, one of his teeth turned weirdly brown. Or”—she brightened, like this was her best idea yet—“maybe he has really bad breath now!”

“Maybe,” I said, but really just to be polite.

“I’m just saying,” Alice said, “that photo in the meeting was not exactly irresistible.”

I couldn’t explain the photo. “Yeah,” I said. “But it didn’t capture him.”

“Let’s hope not,” Alice said.

“You’re going to love him,” I promised, “despite yourself. We all are. You can’t not love him. On hot days, he used to bring squirt guns to car pool. He invented Hat Day. He started a pancake-eating contest. He talked the kids into doing a terrible flash mob on the playground. One time, he rented a cotton-candy machine without telling anyone and put it in the cafeteria. On the last day of the school year every year, he’d wear a purple velvet tuxedo to class, and then he’d take off for the summer in a limousine.”

“Okay,” Alice conceded. “Fine. He’s got joie de vivre.”

“He’s got it,” I said, “and he shares it. You can’t be around him without catching some.”

“So that’ll be … good for the school.”

“Not just good—great,” I said. “It’ll be great. For the school.”

Alice nodded and finished my thought. “And it’ll be kind of awful for you.”

“The irony is,” I said, “after I moved away, I regretted it. I missed him so much after I was gone. I used to fantasize all kinds of reasons to see him again. I used to long for a reason to be around him.”

“Exactly,” Alice said, like she really got it. “Be careful what you wish for.”

I nodded. Then the kitchen fell quiet, and we stared at our half-drunk tea mugs.

And in that little pause, I realized some other worst-possible-bad news for me. I did feel sick. Physically sick. Sitting in Babette’s kitchen talking about Duncan Carpenter was making me nauseated.

But not just any kind of nauseated. A very particular kind. The kind of nauseated that can mean something’s going on neurologically. The kind of nauseated that I sometimes got … when I was on the verge of having a seizure.

Which happened from time to time.

Occasionally. Once or twice a year.

Fine. I’ll just say it. I have epilepsy.

Mild epilepsy.

A touch of epilepsy.

Just enough to know for sure, as I sat there and felt all the sensations inside my body, that I was having an aura.

Which is actually a type of seizure in itself—it just doesn’t feel like one.

I felt the nausea gather in my stomach like storm clouds. I sat up a little straighter and I pushed back my chair from the table an inch or two.

Alice noticed. “You okay?”

“I just feel a little … off,” I said.

“Are you having an aura?”

Alice was one of the very few people who knew.

I made an O with my lips and blew out a controlled, frustrated sigh, and said, “Probably.” Like Of course. Of course this is happening.

Stress was a risk factor. Ironically.

I’d had it bad as a kid—really bad. Bad enough that my third-grade best friend had disinvited me from her birthday party after witnessing a particularly bad one in the cafeteria. Then it had gone away in middle school—and stayed gone for so long, I thought I was cured.

But then, not long after I moved here, it came back.