Are you wondering how it’s possible that Kent Buckley was the chairman of the board even though absolutely nobody liked him? Because, seriously: nobody liked him. Nobody liked his scheming, or his striving, or his ill-informed opinions on “what you people need.”
But when I say nobody, I really mean the faculty and the staff.
Let’s just say, we weren’t charmed by his BMW.
He campaigned hard to get voted chairman, and while Max was alive, it wasn’t that much of a job. Max made all the decisions, anyway—and this school was as much a cult of personality as anything else.
Max had known that Kent Buckley’s values were not in line with the school’s. But he just wasn’t too worried about it. “Just let him be the chairman. He wants it so bad.”
So they let him be the chairman. And then, less than a year later, Max died on us. And now Kent Buckley, of all people—a guy who had never liked Max, or the school, and who only sent his kid here because it was the one thing his wife had ever insisted on in their entire marriage—was suddenly in charge.
What. The. Hell.
And his first decision was to hire Duncan Carpenter as our new principal.
Which was … unexpected.
I would have expected Kent Buckley to hire somebody weaselly and petty, like himself. But he’d hired Duncan Carpenter. Duncan Carpenter. Probably the most Max-like person I’d ever met … besides Max himself.
It had to have been a mistake somehow.
* * *
In the wake of his announcement, Kent Buckley got some IT guys to project a photo of Duncan Carpenter up on a screen for us all to see. At first, I felt a buzz of relief.
For a half-second, I thought: Never mind.
The Duncan Carpenter I’d known had a lopsided smile, and perpetually mussed-up, shaggy hair—and he did something crazy in his official school portrait every year: deely boppers, or a fake punk-rock mohawk, or a giant stick-on mustache. The Duncan Carpenter I’d known had never taken a serious photo in his life. He had an irrepressible streak of joyful, anti-authoritarian naughtiness that he brought to every photo.
Not this guy.
No way was this guy Duncan Carpenter.
This guy had perfectly trimmed hair, styled up in front in a neat, businessman’s coif. And a gray suit with a navy tie. And he was just … sitting there. He wasn’t even smiling.
The guy in this photo was a stiff.
But once my eyes adjusted, once I accounted for the missing mop of hair, and the missing Hawaiian-print tie, and the missing mischievous smile, I had to admit … the face was essentially a lot like Duncan Carpenter’s face. Different, somehow—but the same.
His nose. His eyes. And definitely his mouth.
I felt an electric buzz—part agony, part thrill—at the moment of recognition.
It was him, after all. It was Duncan.
I’d thought I’d never see him again, ever. I’d planned to never see him again.
But now there he was.
Sort of. Though he looked so wrong. So unlike himself. He looked like he was in costume. And that was the most likely explanation, actually: that he might really be in costume—that he’d taken a parody photo of a hard-ass administrator, and Kent Buckley, in all his humorlessness, had thought it was real.
Because it couldn’t be real.
“Meet your new principal,” Kent Buckley said then to the room. “He knows a thing or two, that’s for sure. He starts next week, so you’ll have to be ready to hit the ground running when he arrives.”
What was this guy even talking about? We didn’t take orders from him.
Alice raised her hand. “We all thought Babette was going to take over.”
Kent Buckley’s eyes flicked over in Babette’s direction.
Babette was our art teacher at the school. She was the lady responsible for all the painted tiles in the courtyard. And the mosaic stepping-stones. And the painted lanterns. And the friendship quilt that hung in the office. And pretty much every inch of color or whimsy in the place.
But she wasn’t just the art teacher. Max and Babette had been a team of wise and kindly co-parents since the beginning.
“Babette,” Kent Buckley declared, “is grieving. She’s in no state to run a school.”
We all looked over at Babette.
She didn’t argue … but she didn’t agree, either.
For months following that moment, there would be a raging debate among the faculty over why Babette hadn’t been given the job. Most people got the sense that Kent Buckley had snubbed her and withheld her rightful position.