It had been Max’s baby. He was the one who’d had the idea—and convinced the board to use some of the endowment to buy it. When the sale had gone through, Max encouraged everyone to submit ideas for how to bring it to life. Then, over the summer—a summer that now felt like a thousand years ago—Max, Babette, and I had gone through the plans and ideas, culling through the articles and concepts, consulting with designers, finalizing the budget, and getting things rolling in earnest.
This was what we usually did with our summers, anyway—starting with the summer we’d painted the butterfly mural all over the big wall in the cafeteria. The next year, we’d yarn-bombed the playground in the courtyard with brightly colored crochet spirals and webs and flowers. Last year, we’d gone crazy with paint: adding bright yellow, orange, and baby blue stripes all around the lockers and hallways, roller-disco-style, and clouds and flowers and rainbows in all sorts of unexpected places.
It hadn’t even occurred to me that Duncan might not want to keep the project going.
Duncan, after all, had hung a disco ball in the cafeteria of Andrews Prep. He’d kept a class hedgehog. He’d once tried to build a zip line off the gym roof.
How could Duncan kill plans for a playground? He was a playground.
The Adventure Garden had been a massive, school-wide project that we were unanimously excited about, and now we needed it more than ever. I started pulling off rubber bands and pulling out file folders, frantically looking for the best parts so I could show him what I meant. “But the Adventure Garden is for the good of the school! Let me just show you the plans. It’s epic. It’s magical. You won’t even believe—”
“I don’t need to see the plans,” Duncan said.
“It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen,” I promised. “It’s going to have a tree house, and a lily pond, and a ropes course—”
He opened the door then, and held it open, waiting for me to leave.
But I hesitated. Then I had to ask. “Are you here to destroy the school?”
Then, in a slightly softer tone that seemed to acknowledge that he at least registered all the crushing, life-altering anxiety hiding behind that question for me, he said, “I’m not here to destroy the school.”
I let out a deep sigh.
Then he added, “I’m here to fix it.”
* * *
One thing was clear after that: I was more trapped here than ever.
When I’d first found out Duncan was coming, I’d thought he was going to make me miserable by being so likable I’d have no choice but to fall in love with him again—but now it looked like the opposite would be true: he’d make me miserable by ruining my school, and, by extension, my life.
I wasn’t sure which one was worse—but, either way, I was miserable.
My emotions were moving around like numbers on a slide puzzle, but I wasn’t getting any closer to a solution.
That was my takeaway: somehow, for some reason, Duncan Carpenter had become completely deranged, and I couldn’t leave until I understood why. Leaving to save myself was one thing. But leaving a whole school behind in the hands of a madman was quite another.
It left me wondering if Duncan had an evil twin or something. Because, truly, weren’t people’s identities fairly consistent over time? People didn’t just wake up one morning with completely different personalities. Something had happened to him—but what? Traumatic brain injury? Amnesia? Witch’s spell?
It had to be something epic.
Seriously. He was a monster now.
And that’s exactly what I told everybody that night at Babette’s.
I was kind of hoping that the shock of the morning meeting might wake Babette up and stoke her into action. Not that there was anything wrong with grieving. She was allowed to grieve, of course. But I wasn’t really a leader, per se, and so I wouldn’t have minded at all if Babette had suddenly lifted her head, realized what was happening, and stepped into her rightful shoes as the commander of the resistance.
But not tonight.
She’d gone to bed with a headache and wouldn’t come down.
Instead, I wound up reminding myself not to overthink it. “Leading” was really just talking, planning, and making people pay attention.
Three things I was perfectly good at.
I told the group about everything Duncan had said in his office, and everything I’d learned: That the morning meeting had not, in fact, been a fluke. That this legendary warmhearted goofball had somehow mutated into