Imagining Rivergate

This is the opening scene of Krazy Over You, the novel I’ve been quietly building for years. Consider this a sneak peek — the doorway into Jack Taylor’s story, the moment where everything begins.

***

As Jack sat on stage surrounded by political dignitaries, waiting for his turn at the podium to address the graduates and their families, a vision rose up out of nowhere.

This was one of the last graduations for Bayview Central — a hundred-year-old architectural relic in East Bayfield. From the archways framing the entrance, to the crenellated parapet trimmed in Gothic stone, to the ebony iron stair rails and the gentle curves of the terrazzo floors leading upward to the tower’s fourth floor, everything felt like a museum quietly begging to remain alive.

That tower held the school’s history: old uniforms, letterman jackets, scuffed footballs, trophies, photos, and ten decades of Harbourlight yearbooks.

In a few short years, these halls — once filled with the who’s who of Bayfield, and even Jack’s mother — would be silent and purposeless. There had once been a proposal to move the Rivergate kids, the special-needs high school a few blocks away, into a single hallway of Bayview to keep both schools afloat. But people never seemed to see what he and a handful of others saw the moment they first walked through Rivergate’s doors.

He looked around again at the portraits of past principals, hand-painted or photographed with the pride of eras long gone. The pointed doorway arches, the delicate balcony lines, the craftsmanship in every detail — this place had shaped more than academics. It had shaped lives.

And then it happened.

He didn’t imagine himself as the trustee about to address a school on the brink of closure. Jack imagined he was standing at the podium as the head of a new Rivergate Secondary — this was their school now. These were his students, his families.

This wasn’t a graduation.
It was an opening ceremony.

The first day of an institution built on the understanding that inclusion is personal, and that choice in education is not a luxury, but a necessity. The room was filled with educators and families who believed it too, here to see what school could look like when the world stopped forcing square pegs into round holes.

Then his name was called.

“Please welcome Jack Taylor, Trustee for District 3.”

He rose from his chair, walked toward the podium, and for a moment—brief but powerful—Jack’s dream came alive.

***

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