bloomed into a smile.
Later, she might go home and miss Max even more, reminded of all she’d lost. But I suspected that Babette knew better than to let a little pain hold her back. She knew that joy and sorrow walked side by side. She knew that being alive meant risking one for the other. And she also knew, as I was starting to understand in a whole new way, that it was always better to dance than to refuse.
twenty-two
That night of dancing in the cafeteria was without question the best, most delightful, most joyful night of my entire school year. And it was followed, just a few days later, by an afternoon in that exact same space that very quickly became the worst.
Because, at the final faculty meeting of the year, Kent Buckley had an announcement for us.
He arrived at the meeting twenty minutes late. Talking on that douchey Bluetooth.
Duncan showed up late, too—just behind him.
“Okay, people! Listen up!” Kent Buckley said as he strode in, alienating everyone in the room.
We watched him as he took the stage and turned on the microphone at the podium.
“Great end-of-year news,” he said, as the mic gave a scream of reverb.
Kent Buckley tried again, more carefully.
“Duncan Carpenter—where are ya, buddy?”
Duncan hesitated, but then when it started to look like Kent Buckley might literally wait all day for him, he went ahead and mounted the stage.
At last, Kent Buckley went on. “My good friend Principal Carpenter and I have been hard at work on a super-secret project all year that it’s my pleasure to reveal to you today. We’ve got all the pieces in place to start moving forward at the start of summer. It’s been a difficult year for the school, but, as you know, I never see difficulties. I only see opportunities.”
By this point, we were all looking around at each other, like What?
Duncan had been working on a super-secret project with Kent Buckley?
Kent Buckley flipped the switch on the projector screen, and it slid down behind him. I present to you … Kempner School 2.0!”
Up popped an image of a sleek, black, glass-and-chrome building.
Everybody stared at it.
Everybody, that is, except Duncan, who stared only at the ground.
When Kent Buckley didn’t get the response he wanted, he launched into salesman mode. “Meet your new school! Gone is the sad old building with the peeling paint and rusty windows. Gone are the sagging steps and drooping shutters and missing roof shingles and cracking walls. We’re upgrading! Welcome to the newest, fanciest, most state-of-the-art educational facility in America. We’re going to make history with this building, folks. Remote video surveillance, automatic locking doors and panic buttons, bulletproof doors and windows. Hi-tech everything.”
At this point, people were starting to look around. What the hell was Kent Buckley talking about?
“This is … what?” Alice asked.
“The new school building,” Kent Buckley said, like Try to keep up!
“Whose new school building?” Carlos asked.
“Kempner’s,” Kent Buckley said, already impatient.
This couldn’t be real—but it couldn’t be a joke, either. Kent Buckley didn’t know how to joke.
Plus, one look at Duncan’s stricken face made it clear: this was real.
“We’re remodeling the school?” Mrs. Kline asked.
“No,” Kent Buckley said. “We’re building a new one.”
Murmurs all around—and not happy ones—as people tried to figure out what the hell was going on. Kent Buckley, never the most perceptive guy, went on talking like we were all gearing up to throw him a parade.
“Genius, right? I’ve gotta give a lot of credit to this guy”—he gestured at Duncan with his thumbs—“because when I was grilling him last fall on upping our security game, he did a pretty thorough assessment and finally came back and said, ‘You’d be better off building a brand-new school.’ So I said, ‘Hold my beer,’ and the next thing we knew, we had a potential buyer for this broken-down old place and a very promising pad site in an office park down on West Beach.”
When Kent Buckley stopped talking, it was dead quiet.
“You want to sell this place,” Carlos said then, “and build … the Death Star?”
Kent Buckley laughed and said, “You know, it’s funny—that’s exactly what we’ve been calling it.”
“It doesn’t have any windows,” Emily called out. “Just little slits.”
“It doesn’t have any plants,” Anton said.
“It’s in an industrial park,” Carlos said.
“Very observant,” Kent Buckley said, flashing a thumbs-up. “That’s all for visibility.”
“There’s no outdoor space,” Coach Gordo said.
“True,” Kent Buckley said. “Not a problem if you’ve got a wimpy kid like I do. But I’m working on arranging