her equal credit on feminist principle—“founded the Kempner School and renovated it. Fun fact: did you know that our school is named after Babette?”
Duncan looked at me like that didn’t make sense.
“Babette Kempner,” I said.
“But wasn’t Max’s name also Kempner?”
“Sure,” I said. “But he was thinking of Babette when he named it.”
We kept walking.
“The cafeteria used to be the chapel,” I went on.
“I read that in the manual.”
“We have a once-a-week assembly with the kids where we bring in speakers and programs from all different faiths and philosophies—plus performances. Singers, drummers, belly dancers, fire-eaters.”
“Fire-eaters?”
“It’s kind of an anything-goes situation.”
I could almost hear him mentally typing: MEMO—RE: FIRE-EATERS.
I pointed up at one of the second-story rooms. “That’s where the ghost lives.”
Duncan glanced sideways at me, though he never actually met my eyes. “The ghost?”
This was a good story. “One of the nuns fell in love with a sea captain whose boat went down in a storm in the Gulf. She couldn’t believe he was dead, though, and she locked herself in this room, watching the ocean, refusing to come out until he came back to her … but he never came back, and she died of heartbreak. They say she’s still here, waiting. Sometimes people see her, still waiting by the window, watching for him, never giving up hope.”
Duncan frowned again. “Do the kids know that story?”
“Of course.”
“Does it scare them?”
“Well, yeah. But in a good way.”
Duncan looked back up toward the room. For a second, I thought he was thinking about the ghost, but then he said, “Roof needs to be replaced. And that window paint is peeling like crazy.”
I’d known he was going to look at the place like that. But it still bothered me. I wanted him to be impressed. I wanted him to fall in love.
“This building survived the Great Storm of 1900,” I said then. “Do you know about that storm?”
“A little.”
“It’s the worst natural disaster in U.S. history,” I said, “to this day. Ten thousand people died in one night. Winds were more than a hundred and fifty miles an hour. People’s clothes were ripped right off their bodies, corsets and all—that’s how strong the winds were. But this building stood steady. All the nuns survived—as well as a hundred people who found their way here and sheltered overnight. There’s a whole museum about the storm. And a documentary.”
Duncan nodded. “Sidewalk needs to be fixed,” he said then, pointing at an uneven spot. “That’s a tripping hazard.”
The old Duncan would have taken my hand and dragged me upstairs to look for the ghost. The old Duncan would have walked right out of school to buy tickets for the documentary. The old Duncan would have fallen in love with this breathtaking, stately, remarkable stone building and everything it had survived.
But the new Duncan just said, “Insurance on this place must be a nightmare.”
Nightmares were a big thing for him, too, apparently.
As we continued the tour, I got limper and limper. I showed him our butterfly garden, but he said it had too many bees—a liability. I showed him Babette’s art room, but he said it was too overstuffed with supplies—a fire hazard. The brightly painted hallways were “visual chaos.” The hopscotch pattern we’d stenciled on the hallway floor was a “tripping problem.” The bulb lights in the faculty lounge were “a mess.”
Everything awesome about our school—everything that made it special and unique and joyful—was problematic to Duncan. It was like he refused to see anything good. He was hell-bent on only looking for trouble.
And his demeanor.
Good God, he was like a prison warden.
Which would have been alarming to witness in any new school principal, but given that this was the Duncan Carpenter, it was utterly destabilizing. There were no jokes. There was no laughter. I did not even count one smile.
If I’d had any indication—at all—that he even vaguely remembered me, I might have asked him about it. Part of me wondered if he would recognize me eventually, if something might trigger his memory. And part of me thought I should just go ahead and say something.
But I couldn’t bring myself to say it.
Frankly, it was insulting. If he’d forgotten me so thoroughly, it was pathetic for me to remember him. Pretending not to know him, either, became a way of saving face, even if only to myself. He didn’t remember me? Fine. I didn’t remember him, either.