a militaristic dictator. That he didn’t care if the faculty all quit. And that he was canceling the Adventure Garden.
Each piece of news elicited progressively louder groans of outrage, but the news about the Adventure Garden was the clincher.
“That was Max’s project!” Anton shouted.
“What about the tree house?” Carlos demanded.
“What about the vegetable patch?” Emily and Alice asked.
Everybody wanted to know what we were going to do.
I told them I didn’t know. We’d just have to figure it out as we went along. Then I looked around. “Mrs. Kline?”
She raised a hand. “Present.”
“Can you please find a copy of his contract? And the school-board charter, while you’re at it? Let’s figure out exactly how stuck with this guy we are. Also…” I looked around. “Does anybody know our school policy on dogs?”
“On dogs?” Rosie Kim asked.
“He’s got a security dog,” I told them.
This touched off a whole new wave of outrage. What kind of dog? Was it big? Was it scary? Was it trained? What was it doing at school? What about kids who are afraid of dogs? Who was going to keep an eye on it? What kind of person brought a dog to a campus full of little kids? What about dander? What about allergies? Were dogs even allowed? Could somebody find out?
I did not tell them that the dog’s name was Chuck Norris. Nor did I tell them that Duncan had declared it was “scary.”
Finally, when the worrying reached a crescendo, I stood up.
I might not know how to be a leader, but I did know one thing: we were going to protect our school. We weren’t all this awesome for nothing.
And that’s when I made my voice loud and gave us all the pep talk that everybody needed to hear—including me.
“I don’t know exactly what we’re going to do,” I said. “I’ve never been faced with anything even vaguely like this. But I know what we’re not going to do. We’re not going to panic. We’re not going to let fear make us lose sight of who we are. We’re here for a reason—right? To look after all these little souls we’ve been entrusted with. We’re not going to forget that. We’re here for them—and for each other. Kids first—and we’ll worry about this Duncan Carpenter situation later. I don’t want anybody doing anything stupid—Anton, I am looking at you. No graffiti, no threatening notes, no angry posts on social media. The most important job we have for the next few weeks is helping the kids. Right? We need to help them understand that death is a part of life, that Max is gone but not forgotten, that we can keep him with us by carrying his warmth and his kindness forward. They need all the stability we can give them for now. So let’s hunker down, do our jobs, help the kids through this transition, remember who we’re here for … and do everything we can to make things better, not worse.”
eight
Chuck Norris, the security labradoodle, did not turn out to be scary.
He did, however, turn out to be a massive pain in the ass.
Soon, impossible as it was, school started again.
The building flooded with kids and backpacks and lunch boxes. Every single kid, it seemed, wanted to know where Max was. Even kids who’d been at the party.
I felt pretty much the same way.
Where was Max?
For my part, I just put my head down and tried to focus on what was right in front of me: kids and books and paperwork and planning.
Sometimes, in quiet little moments, when I looked up from my desk in the library and saw the place filled with kids reading on the sofa, and in the beanbag chairs, and in our reading fort, I could almost pretend that everything was the same as always.
But the new security dog wasn’t really having that.
In fact, he turned out to be a book eater.
Not once, but twice on the first day of school, he found his way into the library and chewed up books. First, a Mo Willems boxed set. Then, after lunch, The Secret Garden.
Both times, I walked him back down to Duncan. “Seriously?” I demanded, holding out the mutilated Secret Garden—now missing a full third of its binding.
“I think he might be teething. I found a tooth in the carpet earlier.”
“Not okay. Get him a chew toy.”
Duncan nodded, like that was actually a good idea. “I will.”