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