Schooled Read online

  “I guess this is it, then,” said Sophie.

  I paused at the TV, the only one I might ever get to watch Trigonometry and Tears on. “I can’t believe I’m never going to find out how Rishon does in college.”

  “Oh, he never makes it to college,” she informed me. “He gets run over by a cement truck on the way to freshman orientation.”

  I was shattered. “No!”

  She laughed. “I’m just pulling your chain. I’m sure he lives on to be a total basket case just like everybody else on T & T. He doesn’t exist, remember? I’d say ‘get a clue,’ but where you’re going, you’re probably better off without one.”

  We exchanged a very awkward good-bye. I wished her luck with the driving test, and she told me to have a nice life. It gave me a special glow to note that she was wearing the bracelet she thought was a gift from her father.

  “It was real, it was fun, but it wasn’t real fun,” she called as I headed down the front walk.

  It seemed fitting that the last thing she said to me was something I didn’t understand.

  I got back into the ambulance and we drove off. I knew I’d never forget Sophie Donnelly.

  “Next stop, Garland,” Rain told me.

  I couldn’t keep myself from grinning, which made my nose hurt.

  It was about an hour’s drive. It would have taken even longer, but the driver used his siren to open up some snarled traffic.

  I could tell the instant we turned onto the dirt road that led to the community. I had memorized every pothole and rut in that driveway, and they were all precious to me. The fact of returning hadn’t become real until that moment.

  The ambulance stopped, and the attendants helped us out and up onto our own porch. The first thing I noticed was that the duct tape had come off my Foucault pendulum. The bowling-ball weight had fallen, cracking the floorboards.

  I took in the sights and smells of the only home I’d ever known up until several weeks ago. It looked smaller than I remembered it, and more—used. The colors and textures seemed very bland compared to the warm and bright bricks and stuccos of the houses around C Average.

  I felt a pang of guilt for my disloyal thought. This was the greatest, most beloved spot on earth! If it looked a little run-down, it was from all the weeks standing empty.

  Rain could always read my mind. “The place is lonely. It missed us.”

  Not half as much as I missed it.

  23

  NAME: MR. KASIGI

  The conference could not possibly have gone better. I was congratulated by so many people that it was almost embarrassing. Our own district superintendent confided that the principalship of North High would be opening up in a couple of years, and the job was mine for the asking.

  I felt fantastic. Why wouldn’t I? I returned to Claverage flushed with victory. I had no way of knowing that the key word in that sentence was going to be “flushed.”

  I’d expected a huge pile of mail, and a lot of phone messages and e-mails. But as I sifted through the papers and envelopes on my desk, the familiar logo of the Consolidated Savings Bank kept turning up.

  I opened the one marked “Urgent” and unfolded the computer-generated page inside.

  Dear Customer,

  We are returning this check to you because your account is overdrawn and the transaction cannot be honored. A service fee of $30.00 has been charged to your account.

  Stapled to the page was a Claverage Middle School check with INSUFFICIENT FUNDS stamped across it in red. It was made out to the American Cancer Society in the amount of five hundred dollars. My own signature appeared on one of the lines. On the second was written Capricorn Anderson.

  My office tilted, and I clung to the arms of my chair for fear of winding up on the carpet. This was one of the checks I’d given Anderson! Why was he donating five hundred dollars to the American Cancer Society? Not that it wasn’t a worthy cause. But this money was supposed to pay for the Halloween dance!

  Hands shaking, I opened a few more envelopes. They were all the same—the March of Dimes, Habitat for Humanity, Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, all for hundreds.

  An icy feeling spread northward from the base of my spine. If these checks were bouncing, it meant the money in the Student Activities Fund was gone! There had been four thousand dollars in that account!

  I waded into the mountain of mail with both hands, tossing envelopes in all directions, until I came up with the bank statement. On it, the whole terrible story was laid out for me in detail.

  There were the checks that I’d countersigned, the ones that had bounced, and the ones that hadn’t. I saw the deposits for the food and music, and one or two other expenses that probably had to do with the dance. The rest were all made out to charities. One, to the March of Caring, was for a thousand dollars!

  What was going on here?

  I buzzed my secretary. “Get Capricorn Anderson down to my office. Immediately!”

  “Capricorn Anderson is no longer a registered student here.”

  I nearly inhaled my tie. “Since when?”

  “He left the school last Wednesday,” came the reply. “His grandmother was released from the hospital.”

  “Get her on the phone!”

  There was a brief pause, then, “It says here they don’t have a phone.”

  I did the only thing I could think of. I called Flora Donnelly. I left messages at her home, office, and cell number. I must have sounded pretty desperate, because she turned up within the hour.

  By that time, I had already spoken to my bank manager and a very unfriendly assistant to the deejay, who accused me of “…hangin’ rubber paper offa my man, yo,” whatever that meant.

  I turned beseeching eyes to the social worker. “This is your case, Flora. I know you have a special connection to the kid. Can you shine any light on this for me?”

  She examined the evidence—the bank statements and the bounced checks. Her face was a sickly shade of gray. She looked like I felt.

  Then she said something I didn’t expect: “Frank, this is all your fault.”

  “My fault?”

  “What possessed you to give him signed checks?”

  “I was going out of town!” I defended myself. “I didn’t want him to be caught short. Besides, we always give the kids some responsibility with the Student Activity Fund. They’re teenagers. They’re supposed to be able to handle it.”

  “I warned you that Cap Anderson is a boy who may as well have been raised on another planet.”

  “Okay,” I admitted, “I noticed he wasn’t exactly streetwise. But that didn’t stop him from committing fraud.”

  “He’s no more capable of fraud than of flying,” she said flatly.

  “It’s right there in black and white!” I insisted. “He found a way to take the school’s money and make it look like he donated it to charity. I’ve got no choice but to call the police.”

  She was suddenly patient. “When you gave him those checks, did you explain to him what a check is and how it works?”

  “Of course. I’m not a fool.”

  “No,” she said. “I mean exactly how it works. That the amount of the check is deducted from the balance in the account? And that the money can run out?”

  “Everybody knows you can’t spend more than you have!”

  “Frank, I never told you this. I lived on Garland Farm until I was twelve. When my family moved, I had never handled money. Not even a penny. Money was the key to everything that was wrong with the world, and the leaders of the community kept any kind of financial dealings completely hidden from us kids. I guarantee you that Cap had no idea that anyone had to pay for the checks he was writing. And the power to write them must have seemed almost magical. Once he realized that he could use that power to help people, there was no limit to how much he might try to give away.”

  I was thunderstruck. “Are you telling me that he really did take the entire Student Activity Fund and donate it to charity?”

  She no
dded. “He’s got all the idealism of the sixties with none of the reality checks. He’s not a criminal, he’s the exact opposite—totally innocent in every sense of the word.”

  I held my head. “It would have been easier if he’d robbed the school at gunpoint and taken off for the Mexican border. That I could have explained to the board, and insurance would have covered it. What am I going to do? Call the March of Dimes and demand my money back?”

  “You could try,” she suggested reasonably. “This can’t be the first time an unauthorized person misspent money.”

  “Yeah, to buy a plasma TV, not to donate to charity.”

  Her face betrayed a ghost of a smile. “Don’t worry. At Garland there’s nowhere to plug in a plasma TV.”

  “Here’s a charge that doesn’t look very charitable,” I muttered, still studying the bank statement. “It’s to a jewelry store on Main Street.”

  She looked over my shoulder. “I’m sure there’s some explanation. Prizes, probably. Best dancer, best rap, most outrageous outfit—that kind of thing.”

  I nodded numbly. That was the moment when I realized there would be no dancing prizes, because there would be no dance.

  It wouldn’t be a popular decision, but I saw now that this was the only way. Sure, I could fight with the bank, or plead with the charities. But it would just make me look like a fool. Or I could drive out to this Garland place and demand that the grandmother replace the funds Cap frittered away. Still—who knew if they had any money at all? They were living an alternative lifestyle forty years after the rest of the world had given it up. The local papers would have a field day reporting that while I was running a principals’ conference in Las Vegas, my trusted eighth grade president was emptying my treasury.

  The job at North High was not going to be offered to a court jester.

  No, I had to cancel the dance, recoup what I could, and eat the rest.

  Flora Donnelly was right. This was my fault. But not for her reasons. I had long suspected how the kids went about picking their eighth grade president. And when I chose to look the other way, I was sort of putting a stamp of approval on it. But I always knew that one day it would blow up in their faces.

  I just never thought it would blow up in mine.

  24

  NAME: NAOMI ERLANGER

  What were we supposed to think?

  First Cap gets crushed by the entire football team, and the coaches practically have to carry him to the nurse. Three hours later, he gets decked by Darryl Pennyfield—I’m never speaking to him again. Next thing you know, he’s being taken away by ambulance.

  I hadn’t seen him since.

  Okay, for the first couple of days, nobody was surprised Cap was absent from school. He was hurting. Who wouldn’t be? Then the weekend—the Condors game on Saturday. Well, who could blame him for blowing off that event after what the team did to him? Lena only went because she’s a cheerleader, and she said it was the lousiest turnout she’d ever seen for a Condors-Raiders matchup. (C Average and Rhinecliff battled to a 3–3 tie, in case you’re one of the few who cares.)

  Serves those jerks right.

  Anyway, I figured I’d catch Cap on Monday. Wrong. And by Tuesday, I was getting worried. It was almost a full week since anybody had laid eyes on the eighth grade president.

  Okay, I was extra upset because Cap was extra special to me. But everyone was talking about it. You’d see a bunch of kids in a huddle in the hall, and you didn’t have to eavesdrop to figure out the topic of conversation. Where was Cap? Why hadn’t he come back yet? Could he be really hurt? The custodians were still trying to scrub his blood off the terrazzo in the corridor where the big punch had been thrown.

  He must have been in bad shape. What else would keep him away from what was brewing between the two of us? “To be continued”—I meant that. This wasn’t another shallow middle school crush like the one I’d had on Zach. This was a relationship. And besides, the Halloween dance was on Saturday night. Cap had to realize we could never pull it off without him.

  When I asked Mrs. Vogel, my homeroom teacher, she replied, “I don’t think Cap Anderson is a student here anymore.”

  “What?” She might as well have told me that the school was slated for demolition with all of us inside it. “Of course he’s a student! He’s the eighth grade president!”

  She looked uncomfortable. “I don’t want to argue with you, Naomi. I’ve told you what I know.”

  “I’m going to ask Mr. Kasigi!” I stormed.

  “Who do you think told me?” she said, not unkindly. “Mr. Kasigi held an emergency staff meeting to bring all the teachers up to speed. I don’t recommend that you mention Cap’s name to him. He gets very emotional on the subject.”

  “But the dance is Saturday night! Who’s going to run it if Cap isn’t here?”

  She wouldn’t look me in the eye. “The announcement is going to be made at lunch. The dance has been canceled.”

  I felt like I’d been hit in the stomach with a two-by-four. “You can’t be serious!”

  She was serious enough to kick me out of the room. By the time I staggered into the hall, the first of the notices was being posted:

  DUE TO UNFORTUNATE CIRCUMSTANCES, THE HALLOWEEN DANCE HAS BEEN CALLED OFF.

  As you can imagine, the chaos was rising. There was only one middle school in Claverage. Our neighbors had all gone here; our older brothers and sisters. A lot of our parents had attended C Average. There had always been a Halloween dance.

  “They can’t cancel the dance!” wailed Tiffany Peterson. “It’s a tradition!”

  “They can and they did,” Lena said darkly. “Kasigi’s such a jerk. He spends the week partying at some fancy convention, and then comes home to pull the plug on anybody else having fun.”

  “But it’s our trademark!” Tiffany persisted. “The elementaries have holiday pageants; the high school has Homecoming. Halloween is our thing! How can Mr. Kasigi do this to us?”

  Zach put his two cents in. “Kasigi isn’t the problem. Since when do the teachers have much to say about what goes on in this place? You’re ignoring the obvious: the dance got canceled because Cap screwed up somehow.”

  “How do you figure that?” asked Lena. “The details are all set, and Cap isn’t even here.”

  “Exactly,” Zach agreed. “It’s his party. Where is he?”

  I jumped on that so fast, the wind should have knocked him over. “Where is he? It was your precious football team that tried to put him through the crust of the earth. And don’t forget the punch that leveled him was meant for you.”

  He shrugged. “It’s not my fault Pennyfield’s gone over the edge.”

  “Nothing’s ever your fault,” I snarled at him. “When you couldn’t use Cap as your clown, you tried to use him as your crash-test dummy. I’ve had it up to here with you, Zach Powers! You and I are through!”

  As rattled as I was, I took some satisfaction in the expression of total shock on his face. I laid it on even thicker. “Did it ever occur to you that ‘unfortunate circumstances’ might not be just a lame excuse? What if it means—what if it means—”

  Well, what could it mean? No one had the guts to say it, but it was in everybody’s thoughts. Stone-faced Mr. Kasigi couldn’t hear Cap’s name because it made him too emotional. What unfortunate circumstances could cause that? Add in the fact that Cap had dropped off the face of the earth.…

  “Let’s get to the bottom of this,” Lena decided.

  Good old Lena. She was a tough nut, but she could be so sensible sometimes. Plus, she had tons of connections, and everybody seemed to owe her a favor. Phil Ruiz helped out around the office, so Lena made it his job to get into student records and pull Cap’s file.

  He snuck the folder out in the kangaroo pocket of his hooded sweatshirt and showed it to us in the stairwell by the gym.

  This is what it contained: nothing. No papers, no grades, no test scores, not so much as an index card.

  “How is it poss
ible to have an empty file?” Lena demanded.

  “It isn’t,” Phil told her. “It should have transcripts, transfer forms from his old school, and emergency contact information.”

  “That’s what we need!” I exploded. “We have to contact him. This is an emergency!”

  “Don’t worry,” Lena said darkly. “Somebody must have his address.”

  I rode the same bus as Cap, but my stop was before his, so I had no idea where he got off. We couldn’t find anyone who knew which house was his.

  Then, at last, a breakthrough. Olivia Weintraub had a brother who had once dated a girl named Sophie Donnelly. He had talked about a longhaired sixties-type staying with the Donnellys. It could only have been Cap.

  Lena and I took Cap’s bus after school and found the right house, a well-kept split level on a quiet side street. Just the thought that he lived and slept here made me feel warm inside. I was positive we had the right place.

  “This is it,” Lena confirmed. “191 Rockcrest.”

  As we marched up the walk to the front door, the window of a car parked in the driveway whispered open. A very pretty high school girl leaned out and called, “Something I can do for you?”

  “Does Cap Anderson live here?” I asked anxiously.

  “No.” She started to roll the window up again.

  The passenger door opened and an older lady got out. “You girls are too late. Cap is—no longer at this address.”

  You could hear she was choosing her words carefully.

  “Well,” Lena persisted, “can you tell us where he is now?”

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

  “But why?” I wailed. “We really need to talk to him!”

  The daughter lowered her window again. “My driving test is the day after tomorrow. We’re busy.”

  “Sorry, girls,” the mother added. “I’m sure you’re just friends, with the best of intentions. But a lot of things have happened that I’m not at liberty to talk about.” She got back inside and shut the door.

  “Can’t you just give us his phone number?” I begged.