Tracy Flick Can't Win (Tracy Flick #2) (2)

It gnawed at me that summer, the possibility that I’d misjudged my own past, that maybe I’d been a little more ordinary than I would have liked to believe. But even if that were true, there wasn’t anything I could do about it. There was no injustice to expose, no serial abuser living it up in a tropical paradise.

Mr. Dexter didn’t just lose his job because of me; he lost his wife and a lot of his friends and his self-respect, and he never really got back on track. After he stopped teaching, he managed his family’s hardware store until it went out of business, and then he became a home inspector. He got married a second time in his forties, but that hadn’t worked out, either. I knew this because he wrote me a letter in 2014. He was in the hospital at the time, being treated for an aggressive form of prostate cancer, and wanted to apologize to me before it was too late. He said he still thought about me sometimes, and wished we’d met under different circumstances.

I’m not a bad person, he said. I just made some horrible decisions.

He was fifty-five when he died. As far as I was concerned, he could rest in peace.



* * *



Sophia was attending soccer camp that week at Green Meadow High School, where I served as Assistant Principal. I pulled up in the horseshoe driveway by the practice field, idling just long enough to watch her sign in with a clipboard-wielding counselor, and then trot onto the grass, where she was greeted with a fanfare of happy shrieks and joyful shimmies from the other girls, as if they hadn’t seen her for years. I felt a familiar pang of separation, the melancholy awareness that my daughter’s real life—at least her favorite parts—took place in my absence.

I’d never been like that as a child, a valued member of the pack, showered with affection, protected by the safety of numbers. I’d always been a party of one, set apart from the other kids by the conviction—I possessed it from a very early age—that I was destined for something bigger than they were, a future that mattered. I didn’t believe that anymore—how could I, my life being what it was—but I remembered the feeling, almost like I’d been anointed by some higher authority, and I missed it sometimes. It had been an adventure, growing up like that, knowing in my blood that something amazing was waiting for me in the distance, and that I just needed to keep moving forward in order to claim it.

The only thing waiting for me that morning was my cramped office in the empty high school, the unceasing demands of a job I’d outgrown. It was an important position, don’t get me wrong—I had a lot on my shoulders—but it was hard to stomach being the number two again, after savoring an all-too-fleeting taste of real authority.

Three years earlier, I’d taken over as Acting Principal after my boss, Jack Weede, had suffered a near-fatal heart attack. He was sixty-five at the time, and everyone assumed he would pack it in, and that my promotion would become permanent. But Jack surprised us all by coming back; he couldn’t let go of the reins. It was his call and I didn’t hold it against him—retirement had never struck me as much of a prize, either—but the ordeal had taken a toll on him, and a lot of his workload ended up landing on good old Tracy’s desk.

Even on a slow day in early August, there was more than enough to keep me busy. I started by combing through the analytics from our most recent round of assessment tests, trying to spot gaps in our curriculum, and offer some low-impact, last-minute suggestions for addressing them. We’d been slipping a bit in the statewide rankings—not badly, but just enough to cause some alarm—and we needed to take some concrete measures to turn that around before it became a serious problem.

After that, I scoured a stack of old résumés in search of a long-term substitute for Jeannie Kim, our popular (if slightly overrated) AP Physics teacher, who was taking maternity leave in January. An incompetent sub isn’t a huge problem if they’re only in contact with the students for a day or two, but Jeannie was going to be out for an entire semester.

If I’d left it up to Jack, he would’ve waited until the last minute, hired the first warm body he could get his hands on, and then shrugged it off if something went wrong. It’s hard to find a good sub, Tracy. There’s a reason those people don’t have real jobs. But I wasn’t about to let that happen, not if I could help it. Our students deserved better. It was easy to forget, when you were a grown-up and high school was safely in the past, how it felt to be a captive audience, the way time could stand still in a classroom, and one bad teacher could poison your entire life.





- 2 -


Vito Falcone was ready to make amends. With the help of his sponsor—a sullen Uber driver/piano teacher named Wesley—he’d drawn up a list of the people he’d wronged in a significant way. There were nineteen names on it, and that was just his adult life. He’d been a dick in middle school, and an even bigger dick in high school, but Wesley advised him to set that aside for the time being.

“You got your hands full as it is,” he said.

It was a humbling experience for anyone—dredging up the past like that—but it was even worse for Vito, because… well, because he was Vito, an important person, well-known and widely respected, at least in some quarters. He’d played in the NFL for three seasons—not a superstar, but he’d shown a lot of promise until a knee injury ended his career—and he’d stuck with the game after his retirement, becoming one of the most successful high school coaches in central Florida. He was an alpha dog, the guy who gave the orders and let you know when you fucked up. The world was like this: you apologized to Vito; Vito didn’t apologize to you. Nobody else in the church basement had any idea what that felt like, or how hard it was to surrender that kind of authority.