I sighed. “I will go talk to him and try to figure this out. Let’s meet at Babette’s tonight and I’ll report back.”
One of the teachers offered to get the school’s bylaws to figure out just exactly how much hiring power Kent Buckley had. Could he just pick any crazy person he wanted? It seemed unlikely, but, on the other hand, when Max and Babette were in charge, none of this had mattered. It was possible, at least, that some weird rules had gone unnoticed.
As we considered that possibility, I pulled a little teacher move. “Eyes on me,” I said. “We’re not going to freak out. We’re going to choose to believe everything’s okay until we have evidence to the contrary.”
It was some of my favorite Babette advice. She gave it to me all the time.
“Um,” the nurse said. “I think we got our evidence to the contrary when he pulled out that fake gun.”
“Okay,” I said, like Fair enough. “But this was his first day. We can give him one do-over.”
We could, and we would. We had work to do, rooms to organize, a school year starting up next Monday, ready or not. There was no time to do anything else. This plan would have to do for now. People started gathering up their things.
They weren’t going to panic, and neither was I.
Not, at least, until I figured out what the hell was going on.
* * *
Walking over to Max’s office—now Duncan’s—I struggled to wrap my head around pretty much every single thing about seeing him again. There was so much to wrestle with—from the fake gun, to his utter tone-deafness with the group, to his rude comments about Max.
Not to mention that he hadn’t recognized me.
Now that the full-on crazy of the meeting was on pause for a minute, that was the part that came rushing back.
He had stared right into my face with zero recognition.
How was that possible? Was that even possible? Physiologically, I mean?
It wasn’t like it had been twenty years. I did the math as I walked along the cloister past the courtyard. I had left Andrews to come to Kempner four years ago in May, so it had been four years and three months since Duncan Carpenter had seen my face. Could you forget the face of someone you’d worked with for two solid years in that amount of time? Someone you’d sat across from in faculty meetings, passed in the hallways, eaten across from in the cafeteria?
I know I’d been trying to stay invisible back then, but come on.
Nobody’s that invisible.
Are they?
As I thought about it, I realized that I was always near him, but never right in front of him. I was always aware of him, but it didn’t follow that he was aware of me, too. If I was camouflaged in the background, maybe he didn’t remember me. Maybe I had just been a generic version of a girl he worked adjacent to—with never enough specific details to register. Some kind of navy blue, nonspecific female smudge in his memory.
There were plenty of people in the world that I didn’t remember.
Most of them, in fact.
Still, I was offended.
Of course, I was wildly different now. The trappings of me, at least. Maybe that was all he could see.
Or maybe he just wasn’t even really looking. Maybe he was so busy trying to adjust to his new job and step into Max’s shoes and scare the hell out of everybody that he wasn’t focused on his visual surroundings. Maybe he was tired from being up all night with a sick baby, or two. Or maybe he wasn’t wearing his glasses.
Did he even wear glasses?
Good. Something I didn’t know about him. One thing, at least.
Because I really knew too much in general. I knew his birthday, for example: May the fourth—and he’d always worn a Luke Skywalker costume to school that day with a button pinned on it that said MAY THE FOURTH BE WITH YOU. How lopsided was that? I knew his birthday, and how he liked to celebrate it, and exactly how good he’d looked in that Luke Skywalker costume. I carried a full visual of him brandishing a light saber stored in my memory at all times … and he didn’t even know who I was.
It wasn’t fair.
But he certainly wasn’t carrying a light saber now. What the hell had happened to him? Was it that he’d married that boring admissions girl? Had she told him he