“It’s a deliberate kind of joy. It’s a conscious kind of joy. It’s joy on purpose.”
Duncan squinted like he really wasn’t sold. “In clown socks and a tutu.”
“I’m telling you. I know all about darkness. That’s why I am so hell-bent, every damn day, on looking for the light.”
twenty-one
That night changed everything.
Nothing like a near-death experience, a walk on Seawall Boulevard, and a little adrenaline-inspired oversharing to promote interoffice bonding.
When I got to work on Monday, Duncan was friendly.
Friendly.
He greeted me pleasantly, the way nice people greet each other, and then he walked with me toward the courtyard. And that’s when things got really crazy.
The courtyard …
Was full of children …
Blowing bubbles.
I froze. I frowned at Duncan. “What is going on here?”
Duncan just smiled.
I reached over and poked my finger into his shoulder, as if to check that he was not a hologram.
Confirmed: flesh and blood.
I had woken up that morning with a terrible oversharing hangover, aghast at the amount of talking we’d done, the things I’d confessed to. I didn’t go around chatting about my epilepsy. It wasn’t something I shared with people—especially not people who were … complicated.
I’d wondered what it would be like to see him again.
Duncan was truly impressive at compartmentalizing. No matter how much fun we had doing Babette-mandated activities outside of school, he remained totally wooden and impersonally professional at school. Sometimes, after we’d had an especially fun time, he’d be extra cold the next day, as if to get us back to neutral.
Fair enough. As long as he didn’t paint anything else gray, I wasn’t going to complain.
Getting dressed that morning, I went extra cheerful, as if to confirm visually that he couldn’t get me down: a pink-and-red sweater set and a blue-jean skirt—and red knee socks with little pom-poms on them.
I’d spent the whole morning holding my shoulders back and battening down my emotional hatches to prepare myself for whatever glacial, stoic, all-business expression I was about to encounter on Duncan’s face.
He wasn’t going to disappoint me, dammit. I was going to be un-disappointable.
But now here he was, smiling. And waiting for me to smile back.
Standing in a courtyard full of bubbles.
Every single kid had a colored bottle—red, blue, orange—and a little wand. Some were blowing, and some were running around, trying to harness the wind. The teachers were there, too.
And, of course, Chuck Norris was running around like a lunatic, trying to catch the bubbles in his mouth.
“What is going on here?” I asked.
Duncan shrugged, suppressing a smile, and said, “We’re blowing bubbles,” almost like What about bubbles don’t you understand?
“Am I still asleep?” I asked Duncan.
He smiled. “If you are, then I am, too.”
“Why is this happening?”
Duncan said, “The teachers asked if we could have a bubble party during homeroom.”
“And you said yes?”
“I said yes.”
“You never say yes.”
“This time, I did.”
“But … why?”
Duncan looked away and surveyed the kids. Then he gave a little shrug. “I don’t know. You convinced me.”
“What—the other day?” I asked. “How, exactly? All we did was almost die!”
He shrugged. “I guess you reminded me of something. Something important. And that was enough.”
“What did I remind you of?”
Duncan lifted a bubble wand toward his lips and blew a steady stream of bubbles in my direction. Then, when the wand was empty, he lowered it, shifted his gaze to my eyes, and said, “You reminded me what it felt like to be happy.”
And that, right there, was the tipping point.
The rest of the spring semester just floated by on a cloud of pleasantness.
Babette and I felt like maybe we had done it. Maybe we had fixed him. Or, more specifically, maybe we and six weeks of twice-a-week therapy had fixed him. Could it have been that easy? That fun? He really did seem a lot better.
He didn’t turn back into Old Duncan, exactly. He still wore his suit, still coiffed his hair, still stayed serious a lot of the time.
But there was warmth to him now. He let himself give in to play. He gave in to crazy socks. He accepted that Chuck Norris was never meant to be a security dog and started letting the kids pet him.
He let himself relax. A little.
There was no hope of resisting him after that, and I let him take my heart completely hostage. I settled into a comfortable-uncomfortable life of pining. I never found the nerve to ask him if the things he’d said on drugs had been true, and he, of course, never brought