Schooled Read online

  Zach started shouting, “Speech! Speech!” and some other people took up the cry.

  Mr. Kasigi handed over the microphone, and we all quieted down to listen to what Cap had to say.

  He stared at us for a long time, until I was almost wondering if Zach had chosen someone who was so nerdy he was too perfect for the job.

  Then he announced, “I shouldn’t be president.”

  “Why not?” Darryl heckled.

  Cap struggled with that one. But when he finally spoke, his answer was as bizarre as his appearance: “I—I don’t know anybody’s name.”

  Like the president had to be able to rattle off the names of all eleven hundred of his constituents or else he wasn’t qualified. Peals of laughter rolled through the gym. Even the sixth graders could see how dopey that was.

  I felt proud and exhilarated. I felt like the woman that’s behind every great man—the one behind Zach, I mean. “That was fantastic!” I congratulated him when the assembly was over.

  He grabbed me by the arm and began towing me to the front. “We’re not done yet.”

  “Where are we going?”

  His oh-so-blue eyes gleamed. “If the hairball thinks it’s his duty to learn eleven hundred names, who are we to burst his bubble by telling him he doesn’t have to?”

  “You mean—?”

  I didn’t get a chance to finish the thought, because he was already flagging down a very dazed eighth grade president. Poor Cap! I honestly felt sorry for him. Freshly inaugurated to an office he never ran for—well, what would you be thinking? He just wanted to get out of there and be left alone.

  “Remember me, Cap? I’m Zach and this is Naomi,” Zach greeted him. “Now you know us. It’s only a matter of time before you get the chance to meet everyone else in the school.”

  Cap’s haunted eyes took in the sight of the entire student body, more than a thousand strong, streaming through the gym exits. If it hadn’t been so funny—if Zach’s eyes hadn’t been almost turquoise—I would have confessed that the whole thing was a gag.

  “I’m not good at remembering names,” he told us. “I don’t know a lot of people.”

  “We’re sure you can do it,” I assured him.

  “One,” he persisted.

  “One what?”

  “One person. I see other people—when we’re in town for supplies. But Rain does all the talking.”

  “Rain?” I queried.

  “My grandmother. She’s the person I know.”

  That was the thing about Cap that I would never dare say to Zach. I could never escape the suspicion that he was putting us on even more than we were putting him on. But if that was the case, he had to be the greatest actor on the face of the earth. Because he didn’t crack a smile. Not for a millisecond.

  Zach pressed on with his plan, and I pressed on with mine. We put a suggestion box in the guidance office, for students to bring their concerns to the president’s attention. Cap never suspected that the entries were all fake, and that we were writing them in the equipment room after Zach was done with football practice.

  We spent too much time laughing for any serious romance to develop, but it was fun. We were convulsed with hysterics at the thought of our hippie asking Mr. Kasigi to convert the water fountains to Gatorade, and to erect a bullfighting stadium in the parking lot.

  Surprisingly, Mr. Kasigi seemed to be kind of going along with the gag. It was one thing for him to keep out of student matters, like he did last year with that Simard kid. But when someone asks you for a bullfighting ring in an American public school, you have to know you’re being pranked. Mind you, when you’ve just heard that same kid express the belief that a president has to know every student’s name, you can never be one hundred percent sure.

  Whatever the reason, our assistant principal never took Cap aside and explained to him that someone was yanking his chain.

  And we really yanked. Zach told him that he had to hold weekly press briefings for reporters from the school newspaper. The reporters? Us. We didn’t work for the paper, but how was Cap going to know that?

  “What about the real newspaper staff?” I asked uncertainly.

  “They’re not invited,” Zach said decisively. “Those dweebs should be happy we didn’t make any of them president.”

  The first of these conferences was held in a room that didn’t exist. Cap wandered the halls like a lost soul in search of the fictional geography lab. Zach planted students out there to give him bogus directions: “Make a left at the music room, down the stairs, through the double doors, then two rights and a hard left at the furnace….”

  We rescheduled for Friday, after telling him how disappointed we were that he’d stood us up. He apologized and promised to do better.

  This briefing was held in room 226, which did exist but was locked. While he wrestled with the doorknob, Zach sent the football cheerleaders to form their human pyramid right beside him. They chanted: “Cap, Cap, he’s our man! If he can’t open it, nobody can!”

  To tell the truth, I wasn’t super-high on this idea, since Lena was not only a cheerleader but also the apex of the pyramid. It was impossible to compete with anyone in a cheerleading outfit, especially at our school. Over the summer, the basement got flooded and the uniforms all shrank.

  I felt better when the real press briefings began. Lena traded her pom-pomps for a reporter’s notebook, and we all spoke up for the people’s right to know.

  “Cap, what are you going to do about the terrible state of cafeteria food?”

  “Cap, the boys’ locker room is a cesspool! What are your plans to improve it?”

  “Cap, have you thought about air-conditioning the school buses in light of global warming?”

  “I don’t have the answers to any of those things,” was his grave reply. “Maybe you picked the wrong person to be president.”

  Which only proved that we’d picked exactly the right person to be president.

  Now that Lena was back in the plan, I had to come up with something good, in order to stand out in Zach’s eyes. I invented a secret admirer for Cap named Lorelei Lumley, a seventh grade student-government groupie, who slipped perfumed love notes through the vents of his locker.

  “These are perfect,” Zach enthused. I could tell that he hadn’t overlooked the bright-red lip imprint that I had kissed onto every piece of stationery.

  Zach had Cap’s combination, so we made it our mission to see that he never opened the door without finding something bizarre and/or gross. It became my favorite part of every day—pressed against Zach in the drinking fountain alcove, waiting to see what Cap would pull out of there next—a rotten banana with a greasy black peel, a goat’s brain from the science lab, a Ziploc Baggie of Pepto-Bismol, a dead bird.

  Cap didn’t react very much to any of these things, except the bird. We watched, amazed, as he wrapped the small body in a paper towel and marched it straight out the door. He got as far as the flower bed. There he knelt and began scrabbling with one hand in the soft dirt.

  Zach peered through the floor-to-ceiling window. “What’s he doing? Digging worms?”

  “That’s not it,” I said in a tremulous voice. “He’s burying the bird.”

  Zach was mystified. “Why?”

  Cap placed the shrouded little corpse into the hole and covered it tenderly with earth. Then he plucked a couple of daisies and placed them across the tiny grave. He stood up, removed his psychedelic headband from that haystack of hair, and bowed solemnly.

  The smart move definitely would have been to hang back with Zach and make fun of the performance. But something came over me—I still can’t explain it. I walked out and stood beside Cap. I wasn’t a bird lover. I didn’t know a canary from a condor. But the look of sympathy on the hippie’s face was so honest, so pure, that it planted the emotions inside my heart. Suddenly, I had to pay my respects to this innocent creature, cut down in the prime of life.

  It wasn’t much of a funeral. We stood there like junior u
ndertakers while the wind turned Cap’s unbound hair into a reasonable facsimile of a rain forest.

  “Death is a part of life,” he said simply. “This is just another part of your journey. Fly well.”

  I noticed that quite a few kids were looking on—trying to figure out if we’d gone crazy, probably. One seventh grader took off his baseball hat in reverence. I caught a disapproving look from Zach on the other side of the window, and silently cursed myself for making a mistake Lena never would have made. Yet it seemed so right, and I couldn’t be sorry for that.

  When Zach became my boyfriend, I hoped I could make him as sensitive as Capricorn Anderson.

  Afterward, some of the spectators went up to Cap to say a few quiet words. He asked all of them their names.

  7

  NAME: MRS. DONNELLY

  As Cap’s caseworker, part of my job was to check in with the school from time to time to make sure he was doing well. That’s how I wound up having lunch with Frank Kasigi, assistant principal at Claverage Middle School.

  “Oh, don’t worry about Cap from an academic standpoint,” he assured me. “He’s right up there with our brightest and best. Commune or no, he’s been very well educated by someone.”

  I thought of Rain and shuddered, even after all these years. She had always been the teacher at Garland. For someone who rejected all forms of authority, she was a major tyrant in the classroom. If she hadn’t adopted the hippie lifestyle, she would have made a terrific Marine drill sergeant.

  Then Mr. Kasigi let the other shoe drop. “Yet socially—in my entire teaching career, I’ve never met a student who knows so little about ordinary everyday living. Have you worked with any other students from this Garland Farm?”

  “Only one,” I replied faintly. “She had a very difficult adjustment.” I didn’t bother to mention that “she” was me.

  “Adjustment is one thing. But Cap is like a space traveler who just landed on Earth and left his guidebook on the home world! Is it possible that he honestly believes bullfighting is a sport we play in middle school?”

  “Bullfighting?” I repeated. “How did that subject come up?”

  His reply posed far more questions than it answered: apparently, Cap had asked about it as part of his duties as eighth grade president.

  Eighth grade president? How could a brand-new student, who didn’t know a soul in the place, get himself elected president?

  It made no sense to me. But later on, my sixteen-year-old daughter acted like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

  “Duh—eighth grade president isn’t an honor, Mother. It’s like being elected village idiot. Every year they pick the biggest wing nut in the building. It must have seemed like the freakazoid dropped straight from heaven to fill the post.”

  I was horrified. “Sophie—that’s awful!”

  She shrugged. “What’s really awful is that you’re a social worker—with power over kids’ lives—and you have no clue about what’s common knowledge at that school.”

  “Did this happen when you were in eighth grade?”

  “Remember Caitlin Tortolo? She didn’t really win a semester in Europe. She left school early to have a nervous breakdown.”

  “And you participated in it?”

  “Everybody did,” she retorted. “At least, we did nothing to stop it. If you don’t go along with the gag, you’re next.” I must have looked disapproving, because she added, “Grow up, Mother. The world’s a big, tough, scary place—like you don’t know that.”

  Actually, I did know that. I didn’t realize she knew it.

  I felt terrible for poor Cap. It was hard enough for him to come out of total isolation at Garland without having to be dropped into the snake pit that was middle school. Worse, I couldn’t even warn him about it—not without poisoning his one-and-only experience of the real world.

  My sole consolation lay in the fact that he would have to suffer this abuse only for a few weeks more. His grandmother was recovering well. I’m sure he would have liked to visit her more often. But the facility was an hour away, more with traffic, and there just wasn’t time to take him during the week.

  Anyway, deep in my heart I believed that a genuine school, nasty and merciless as it could be, was still better than Garland Farm.

  Besides, nastiness was relative. After school, Cap had to come home to my house, where Sophie was there to demonstrate the true meaning of nasty. She hated Cap Anderson with a passion that I wouldn’t have believed her capable of—and I was her mother.

  Even when he did things that had nothing to do with Sophie, she took them personally. His healthy vegetarian diet she considered a slap in the face to her own eating habits. His neatness was a deliberate ploy to make her appear messy. She couldn’t bear that Cap woke up early to practice tai chi on our front lawn.

  “But, Sophie,” I tried to reason, “why would it matter to you? You’re barely awake at that hour.”

  “It’s humiliating!” she raged. “We might as well put a sign on the roof that says ‘Warning: Mutant on Premises!’”

  The next morning, when Cap was performing the dancelike martial arts moves by the dogwood bushes, my darling daughter emptied an entire wastebasket full of water down on his head. This she followed with a string of language that would have set fire to the sidewalk. All from the girl who was so concerned about what the neighbors might think.

  He looked up at her and he smiled—instead of heaving a rock through her window, which is what I would have done. Oh, what a sight he was, with all that hair hanging limply around his shoulders. He looked like a weeping willow in soggy sandals.

  According to Sophie, the entire incident was my fault. By bringing Cap into our home, I had left her no choice but to take matters into her own hands.

  Since Sophie was never going to apologize to Cap, I did it myself.

  “I’m so sorry, dear,” I said, handing him a towel that wouldn’t have dried one tenth of his abundant hair. “You have to forgive Sophie, although I can’t think of a reason why.”

  He looked sad. “She doesn’t like me.”

  I smiled. “Sixteen-year-old girls don’t like anybody.”

  His answer brought me straight back to my Garland days. “When you’re unkind to others, it’s usually because you don’t believe that you, yourself, deserve kindness.”

  “Don’t be so nice,” I said. “She can be pretty mean. In her defense, she’s been through a lot in the last couple of weeks. Her father—my ex-husband—his heart’s in the right place, but he makes a lot of promises he can’t keep. And Sophie ends up caught in the middle. Just yesterday, she was waiting for him to pick her up for her first driving lesson. He never showed. That’s him—doesn’t come, doesn’t call, dead air. She won’t admit it, but she’s devastated.”

  He looked thoughtful. “I guess when you have a lot of people in your life, there’s more of a chance that someone will let you down.”

  I laughed. “You’re right. But it’s a risk most of us are prepared to take.”

  Cap looked dubious. He had grown up with exactly one person in his life—Rain. And regardless of what I thought of her, to him she had been as constant as the rising sun.

  How terrifying must it be to lose that?

  8

  NAME: CAPRICORN ANDERSON

  I really missed Rain.

  My whole life, whenever I got confused, there she’d be to explain it all to me. One time I remember, we were in Rutherford, laying in a supply of tofu. We grew our own fruits and vegetables at Garland, but everything else had to be brought in from outside. Then we stopped at the hardware store to stock up on duct tape, which was just about the most useful thing on earth for a farm commune. It repaired roofs, walls, pipes, cars, furniture, and boots. At least a quarter of Garland was held together with the stuff. It made an instant cast for a broken finger, and even pulled splinters out of your skin. Before I was born, when there were lots of young children growing up in the community, all those diapers used to be f
astened by squares of duct tape.

  But when we got to the store, there was a group of people blocking the entrance. They were carrying signs and chanting. They seemed to be really angry about something.

  Rain explained that the employees were on strike, standing up for fair treatment. She thought it was an excellent idea. She refused to cross the picket line, so we drove twenty miles out of our way to buy our duct tape. We came back, though, and marched with the strikers for a couple of hours. Rain even let me unscrew the knobs to let the air out of the tires of the boss’s car.

  Rain said the trip was the purest form of education—learning by doing. I sure could have used that kind of wisdom now, with so much going on in my life and so many things I didn’t understand.

  Like bullfighting. I asked Mrs. Donnelly about it, but the subject really seemed to bother her. She advised me to ignore anyone who mentioned it again. So I looked it up in the encyclopedia, and I figured out why Mrs. Donnelly was so upset. Bullfighting is a cruel sport where innocent animals are tormented, tortured, killed, and have their ears cut off.

  I needed Rain more than ever to ask her why a school would have anything to do with that. But she was out of the picture. This was a decision I would have to make on my own.

  And I did. The next time I saw Zach Powers, I put my foot down. “I’m not going to ask Mr. Kasigi about bullfighting anymore. I object to it on moral grounds.”

  He said, “I respect your honesty,” and shook my hand. As he walked away, I noticed his shoulders shaking. Overcome with emotion, I guess.

  I was beginning to see that growing up knowing only one other person had some serious disadvantages. Without Rain as my mentor and guide, I was lost.