The Faculty Lounge

Set at Baldwin High School, a large public high school, the novel follows the faculty and staff through a chaotic 2022-23 school year that begins when an eighty-two-year-old substitute teacher, Mr. Bob Lehrer, dies on a couch in the third-floor faculty lounge. Ms. Sanderson, a twenty-two-year-old first-year geography teacher, discovers his body and alerts the school nurse, Nurse Honeycutt. Teachers gather around the sheet-covered body, including English teachers Ms. Fletcher, Ms. Brennan, and Mr. Williams, veteran math teacher Mr. Fitzsimmons, U.S. history teacher Ms. Jimenez, and Mr. Rayfield, a biology teacher who entered the profession after failing the medical school entrance exam due to substance use.

A flashback reveals Fletcher's formative first year at Baldwin in 1996-97. Then a struggling twenty-two-year-old named Amanda Fletcher, she was mentored by Mr. Lehrer, who at fifty-six was planning to retire. At a happy hour marking his retirement, a visibly intoxicated Mr. Lehrer kissed Amanda in the parking lot without her consent. She told her long-distance boyfriend, Dave Saunders, who fixated on the details rather than offering support. Mr. Lehrer left a formal apology note in her mailbox, calling her "too gifted to leave us." In the present, Fletcher reflects on her twenty-six-year career: marrying and amicably divorcing Dave, raising two sons, and becoming the gifted teacher Mr. Lehrer predicted she would be, even as she struggles with the bureaucratic demands of modern education. During the #MeToo era, she chose not to characterize his kiss as a defining trauma, instead feeling sorry for his loneliness. After the medical examiner removes the body, Fletcher comforts the upset Sanderson, offering the veteran teacher's standard advice: Some days all you can do is make it to the last bell.

Mr. Lehrer's will requests that his ashes be spread in Baldwin's front courtyard. Principal Kendricks, an affable leader recently turned fifty, honors the wish without seeking district permission. At the small ceremony, Fletcher praises Mr. Lehrer as a master teacher, Fitzsimmons honors his willingness to stand against bureaucratic mandates, and Nurse Honeycutt leads a prayer. As Kendricks awkwardly shakes out the ashes, Jessica Patterson, president of the parent-teacher organization, and two other parents enter the courtyard for a scheduled safety walk. A gust of wind blows the remaining ashes directly into Patterson's face.

The incident plunges Baldwin into crisis. Patterson publicly attacks Kendricks for scattering ashes without authorization and for failing to notify parents about a dead body on campus. The district initiates a formal investigation, and there is talk of heavier oversight from Central Office, the district's administrative body.

During an unannounced lockdown, Rayfield and Sanderson find themselves trapped in the English department book room. Rayfield confides that he is deeply unhappy as a teacher and fears becoming someone who never found his calling. Sanderson shares a traumatic memory of being locked out of her classroom during a high school lockdown drill. Rayfield reveals the most humiliating night of his life: During a fraternity hazing ritual, he was forced to consume grain alcohol and strip naked, and his involuntary physical reaction prompted ridicule that sent him into years of substance use. Sanderson validates his experience as abuse. They learn each other's first names, Jake and Hannah, and kiss.

The district mandates a counseling session for staff affected by the incident, run by Ms. Harper, a young Central Office official. Ms. Jackson, the head guidance counselor and one of the first Black educators hired at Baldwin, watches with frustration as Harper employs an infantilizing approach. When Harper tries to connect the session to standardized test scores, Principal Kendricks intervenes, affably guiding her out and earning the teachers' gratitude.

A parent named Vanessa Hollins emails Mr. Williams objecting to The Autobiography of Malcolm X in his advanced junior English class, calling it Critical Race Theory. In a disastrous mistake, Williams accidentally replies to Hollins with a message intended for Brennan, calling her demands "bullshit." Hollins copies district officials and a school board member, forcing administrators to pull the book from the curriculum and place a reprimand in Williams's file.

Assistant Principal Denise Baker's storyline reveals a woman spiraling into grief and alcohol addiction following the death of her wife, Kathy, from colon cancer three years earlier. The most senior of Baldwin's assistant principals, Baker secretly drinks throughout the workday. One night she drunkenly completes Fitzsimmons's state-mandated teacher evaluation, giving him a disastrously low rating. The next morning, Fitzsimmons storms into her office and discovers her drinking at her desk. After school, Baker dumps her remaining wine, only to find Fitzsimmons waiting by her car with his twenty-year Alcoholics Anonymous sobriety chip. Baker confesses the full scope of her drinking for the first time, and Fitzsimmons invites her for coffee.

Principal Kendricks's backstory reveals a former punk rock front man who entered teaching through an alternative certification program after his band dissolved. His connection with Assistant Principal Kitty Garcia begins when she references a punk club from their youth, sparking a flirtation. After a school play, Mark recognizes the opportunity to act on their attraction but instead wishes Kitty a professional good evening and drives home to his wife, Lisa. The narrative calls his choice to remain faithful "the most punk rock moment of his life."

Luz Guevara, a custodian working under false papers through an outsourced janitorial company, is revealed to be a former mathematics teacher from El Salvador. She and Mr. Lehrer practiced each other's languages in daily exchanges that became her only real friendship at Baldwin. He called her Profesora Guevara after learning her story, and she felt truly seen. When Luz observes a substitute behaving inappropriately with a female student, she reports it to Mr. Lehrer, who acts while protecting her anonymity, and the substitute is removed.

In early March, Kendricks is placed on temporary reassignment while the district investigates. Nurse Honeycutt's backstory reveals that as a teenager in 1970, she became pregnant and was sent to a home for unwed mothers, where her baby was taken away. In the present, after the Supreme Court overturns abortion rights, she secretly orders abortion pills from overseas. When a senior named Isabella tests positive for pregnancy and does not want to carry it, the nurse places the pills in Isabella's locker. Weeks later, Jessica Patterson, Isabella's mother, visits the clinic to thank Nurse Honeycutt, acknowledging what she did "at enormous risk to yourself."

In mid-May, Kendricks returns and gathers the "courtyard crew," the staff who attended the ash-scattering ceremony, to announce his reinstatement, which came partly because Patterson was appointed to a parent advisory council and partly because a scandal at a rival school diverted Central Office's attention. Jake Rayfield announces he is leaving to become a lab technician. Ms. Jackson, who has quietly decided to retire after more than forty years, does not share her plans, struggling with what will define her once she is no longer Ms. Jackson of Baldwin High.

In a final chapter, Brennan's student and neighbor Emilio, a shy seventeen-year-old house-sitting for her, discovers her vibrator in her nightstand. Meanwhile, Lydia Brennan discovers that Sean, the man she has been dating, is seeing other women and kicks him out. Back home, she finds sunflowers and a note from Emilio telling her she is "a special person." Moved, she blocks Sean's calls and reflects that the summer ahead offers countless chances to discover who she might still want to be.

The novel closes with two codas. Kendricks forwards a letter from Mr. Lehrer's son, Matthew, thanking Baldwin for honoring his father's wishes and describing how the school defined his father's life. An epilogue returns to August 1962, when twenty-two-year-old Bob Lehrer first enters Baldwin High as a brand-new English teacher. He practices saying "Good morning" to rows of empty desks and stands in the front courtyard, the same courtyard where sixty years later his ashes will be scattered. Filled with purpose, he resolves that here he will do good work.