“And the more time I spent with you, the more I started seeing the world through different eyes.”
“We were trying to wake you up. We called it Operation Duncan.”
“Well, it worked.”
“Not well enough.”
I thought of our school building. Its butterfly garden, its courtyard, and its cloisters, and the way it felt like another place and time. I thought of my library and its book staircase and our sunny cafeteria and our butterfly mural.
Then I said, “Is there anything you can do to stop him?”
Duncan didn’t answer right away. I looked over and saw a funny expression on his face.
“Oh, my God,” I said. “You don’t want to stop him.”
“I didn’t say—”
I started walking faster. “Oh, my God, here I was thinking we were friends.”
“We are friends.”
“You can’t be friends with a person who wants to put you in prison.”
“Come on. It’s not prison!”
We’d just come to a fishing pier that jutted out over the Gulf. I turned and started marching out along it, over the water. “It’s pretty damn close,” I said. “You can’t live your whole life in fear. You can’t insulate yourself from everything. Kids get hurt all the time—but we don’t make them wear bicycle helmets everywhere. You take reasonable precautions, and then you hope for the best. That’s all you can do.”
“This is bigger than a bump on the head,” Duncan said.
But I didn’t break stride. “And even if you make us all move to that tragic Death Star building—if you really make the kids give up natural light, nature, play, color, and joy, and hope to lock them away all day in some hermetically sealed, unearthly environment all their lives—even still … they could still step outside and get shot. They could go to the movies and get shot. They could go to the beach and get shot. They could go to a concert and get shot.”
“But it wouldn’t—” He stopped himself.
“It wouldn’t what?” I stopped walking to meet his eyes. We were out over the water now, waves beneath us. “It wouldn’t be on your watch?”
Duncan looked away.
“That’s all about you, friend. That is not about them.”
“It’s not just about me!” Duncan said, his voice loud. “It’s about you. It’s about all of you. It was hard for me to see you in danger when I first got here—but it’s even harder for me now! Because now I know you—and the kids, and the teachers—and now I’ve spent time with you, and now I care about you! Before, it was theoretical. Now it’s real.”
He had just told me that he cared about us—about me—but I couldn’t even hear it. “We are not in danger!” I shouted. “No more than anybody else is any other minute of the day. Life is full of danger. Terrible things happen all the time. That doesn’t mean you live your life in fear.”
Looking back, I want to grab that version of myself by the collar and yell at her to shut up. Who was she to lecture Duncan? Who was she to talk about fear? Who was she to dole out life advice?
Something shifted in Duncan’s eyes then. He stood up a little straighter, too. Then he said, “Ask me why I didn’t want to dance with you.”
“What?”
“The other night. At the party. I didn’t want to dance. I said I don’t do it anymore. Ask me why not.”
I hesitated, and I felt my righteous irritation drain away. I suddenly knew he was going to have a hell of an answer to this question. When I did it, my voice was much quieter. “Okay, Duncan,” I said. “Why don’t you dance anymore?”
He nodded, like Right. Here we go. “Because when I got shot, we were right in the middle of having a dance party in class.”
I put my hand over my mouth.
He took a deep breath to continue. Then, without letting himself pause, he told me. “We’d been reviewing for finals all week. It was Friday, which was always Hat Day—so the kids were all wearing top hats, and cowboy hats, and hats that looked like sharks, and traffic cones, and roasted chickens. We were burned out and just needed to laugh like crazy and jump around.
“We heard the gunshots down the hall over the music—so much louder than the music—and silliness shifted to soul-blazing terror in one second. I mean, that sound is unmistakable. Even if you’ve never heard it in real life—even if you’ve only seen it in movies. We all knew in an instant what was