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