Now they are more cool. Because now they have my stamp of approval.”
“Yes, but you are a person wearing clown socks. So you’re not qualified to judge.”
And before I knew it, I’d spent twenty minutes trying to tear myself away.
I can’t explain it, but talking to him—about anything—just felt good. The way singing feels good. Or laughing. Or getting a massage.
I’ve never been addicted to anything, but I suspect it might feel a little bit like this: You know you shouldn’t but you just want to so bad. That was conversation with Duncan: illicit, indefensible, and wrong, wrong, wrong—but also blissfully, hopelessly impossible to resist.
And so I thought we were going to have one of those moments on the last day of school before winter break as I reported for lunch duty. Like, I walked along the cloister and saw him holding the door for people, and my heart did a little illegal shimmy in my chest. I almost felt nervous as I got closer—a feeling in myself I did not endorse—and then when it was my turn to go through the door, I looked up at him from under my eyelashes to say thank you, and just as I did, Chuck Norris came bounding toward us from behind me and knocked me right into Duncan’s arms.
Totally legitimate.
I smacked against Duncan’s chest with an oof, and the next thing I knew, he’d caught me.
It was the first time we’d touched in any way since I’d grabbed his arm on the beach—and now here I was, in his arms. The moment seemed to shift into slow motion and all my senses seemed to ramp up: I heard the swish of fabric, felt the rumble of his voice, the tension in his muscles as his arms clamped down to catch me.
He lifted me back to my feet, and it wasn’t until I was standing on my own that time caught up. I looked around and saw the room staring at us.
“Chuck Norris!” I said, all scoldy, to prove to everyone that I would never have voluntarily crashed into Duncan’s chest like that. But Chuck Norris had wandered off to try to drink from one of the sprinkler heads in the courtyard.
So I just kept moving, stepping on into the cafeteria, my whole body giving off invisible sparks from the impact.
It was a moment that made me feel dizzy and girly and stupid, and who knows what kind of giggling I might have done afterward if circumstances had been different. But as it was, as I arrived in the cafeteria, I looked up to see something that wiped the memory of Duncan’s chest clear from my mind.
The butterfly mural on the cafeteria wall—the floor-to-ceiling, full-sized, gorgeous, epic, legendary mural that Babette and I had spent an entire summer painting—was gone.
In its place was a gray wall.
I gaped.
Then I turned to look around the room like maybe it had … moved, somehow?
But all the walls were gray.
Everything was gray.
Even the floor, which hadn’t changed and was still a yellow-and-white checkerboard of slick industrial squares, looked gray. Like all the gray around it had soaked into it. The room—always so sunny and bright—suddenly looked dingy, and dirty, and sad. Just like a prison. Just like I’d warned him.
I looked around for Duncan.
He’d walked in after me.
He always prowled the perimeter of the cafeteria during lunch duty, standing at military attention and watching all entrances and exits. He never actually ate during lunch. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen him eat anything at all. Did he eat? Maybe he just plugged himself in at night like a Tesla.
I spotted him, standing stiff as a soldier, on guard.
I don’t even remember closing the space between the two of us. I just remember showing up.
“Where’s the—” I started to ask, but then I couldn’t say it. I started over and forced out the words. “Duncan … what happened to the mural?”
Maybe I haven’t properly described to you how awesome this mural was. Babette had designed it so the butterflies were the same size as the kids. So that when you walked in and saw it, you felt like you were among the butterflies. The plants were supersized, and the butterflies were hyperrealistic. All native plants, too, and native butterflies, and we’d labeled them—in pretty cursive script—so that the kids would come to know them—so that when they saw them out in the real world, around town, or fluttering over the dunes, they’d be able to say, “Look! A