Page 43 of What You Wish For

“It was a disaster.”

“I disagree.”

“Do you have any idea what this school is dealing with right now? We’ve just lost our principal. Our beloved principal—and founder. Not last year or even last spring.This summer. Everybody in that room was grieving and raw and lost and scared—including, I’ll add, his wife, who was sitting in the back row like a statue.”

“None of that has to do with me,” Duncan said. “I didn’t cause any of that. And I can’t fix it, either.”

“Maybe you can’t fix it. But you can try like hell not to make it worse.”

“People die,” Duncan said then. “It happens all the time. The best we can do is move on.That’swhat I’m here for.”

“Nobody is ready to move on.”

“I’m not sure that matters. School starts on Monday.”

“Yes. Exactly. And we need a plan for facing that. What we don’t need is a dude walking in here with a water gun.”

“I did what I needed to do.”

“But you didn’t do what anybody else needed you to do. You didn’t meet anyone, you didn’t talk to anyone, you didn’t interact at all or bond.”

“I’m not here to bond.”

“You most certainly are. Do you think you can run this school as a stranger?”

“Do you think you can walk in here and tell me what to do?”

He knew better than this. “Look,” I said. “I’m trying to help you.”

“I don’t need your help.”

“You didn’t know Max. So let me just tell you that he never ran this place as a dictatorship. That’s not how things work here. It’s always been consensus and discussion. This is a highly engaged, very passionate group of people—and part of what makes this school so legendary is everybody working together. Whatever it was you just did in that meeting is not going to fly—not here.”

“What Principal Kempner did or didn’t do isn’t really relevant anymore,” Duncan said then.

“I’m trying to tell you how things work.”

“Things work the way I say they work.”

“If you keep acting like this, you’re going to lose them.”

“What are you saying? That they’ll quit?”

“These are amazing teachers—the best of the best. They could be teaching anywhere.”

“That sounds weirdly like a threat.”

“I’m not threatening you. I’m telling you how it is. They came here to be part of a very special school culture. One that’s all about creativity and encouragement and making learning joyful.”

Duncan was unfazed. “Well, it’s a new culture now.”

He wasn’t taking me seriously. “You have no idea how much you just freaked the entire faculty out.”

“I think I have some idea.”

“And don’t even get me started on the gun.”

“Here it comes.”

---