In fact, Ms. Chaucer was selling them prescription drugs—Adderall, Ritalin, Moda, you name it. If that wasn’t batshit crazy enough, there were even a couple Ryans sharing an eight ball of cocaine! Although Ms. Chaucer swore to god, she didn’t sell them that.

Whatever the case, Ms. Chaucer was arrested. As for all the Sharpays and Ryans, they were pulled out of school and sent promptly to rehab.

It was all very low-key. No one actually saw it happen. However, when eighteen superhuman theater monsters suddenly fail to show up to school the next day—to say nothing of their supreme musical overlord—teenagers talk. And when necessary, they can even read the news.

Imogen didn’t know about it because she was a decent human being who rejected the idea of gossip. I, on the other hand, knew everything because Holden told me. And he knew about it because he liked to sneak onto his mom’s laptop and read her private school emails.

It later came out that Cicily Chaucer was kicked out of the Cats revival for attempting to sell cocaine to her costars. So, that didn’t bode well for the impending coke charge. As for that generous budget Principal Durden had been pouring into the theater department, Ms. Chaucer had apparently been embezzling funds for her prescription (and maybe not-so-prescription) drug-dealing campaign.

This put a heavy and uncomfortable spotlight on Principal Durden. If she was ever going to live this down, she needed to fix this. And the first thing that needed fixing was a nationally renowned theater class that was currently—and very literally—nonexistent. It didn’t need to be extraordinary. It only needed to exist. And hopefully be functioning to some degree. (And not as an upper-middle-class high school drug ring.)

Understandably, none of the existing faculty wanted to touch that position with a ten-foot stage prop.

There was, however, a young, aspiring staff member who had just barely earned his Bachelor of Arts at Southern Illinois University—a theater degree, if you can believe it—after nearly a decade of going to school part-time. Also, before his job at Piles Fork, he had a history of working in rehabs and said he could spot a teenager using from twenty yards away. He claimed he could tell what they were on just by looking at their pupils.

Principal Durden hired him on the spot as an adjunct teacher.

When she asked him his thoughts on filling the class two-thirds of the way through the school year, he said, “Do kids get detention around here?”

They did, obviously.

“Send those kids my way,” he said.