The ultimate overachiever returns, now middle-aged and unmoored, in ‘Tracy Flick Can't Win.’
There was another front-page story in the paper. For months it had been an almost daily occurrence, one powerful man after another toppled from his pedestal, exposed as a sexual predator: Harvey Weinstein in his bathrobe, Bill Cosby with his quaaludes, Matt Lauer and his secret button; the list went on and on.
As a grown-up—as a parent and an educator—I had no doubt that what he did was wrong, and that his punishment was just. In the privacy of my own heart, though, I couldn’t manage to hate him for it, or even judge him that harshly. There was a mitigating factor at work, an extenuating circumstance. It didn’t exonerate him, exactly, but it made him less culpable in my eyes, more worthy of sympathy or compassion, whatever you want to call it.
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.
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.