Schooled (7 page)
Cap’s best friend.
I was surprised when I overheard someone calling me that. Not that I had a problem with it. When people discussed me, the sentence usually began with “The biggest dork in the whole school is…”
Friend
had to be a promotion from that.
And it was true. Well, true-ish. If anybody was his friend around here, I was. We spent a lot of time together, but only at school. For all I knew, he stepped off that bus every afternoon and was
whooshed
into Dimension X—which might have explained a thing or two about his personality.
I tried to take the friendship further a couple of times, but he didn’t want to join the chess club—he gave me a whole speech on the evils of competition. And when I invited him over to my house, he just said no. He wasn’t being rude; he was just being Cap. Obviously, I couldn’t invite myself to the place where he was staying, since that wasn’t really his home.
Okay, I figured, how about neutral territory? Maybe I could coax him into a trip to the mall.
“That’s a really cool shirt,” I told him. “Where did you buy it?”
Another dead end. “Rain and I do our own tie-dyeing at the community.” Then he caught me off guard. “Do you want me to teach you?”
Breakthrough.
We reconvened the next morning in the art room before classes. I brought a couple of plain white T-shirts, and Cap showed me how to scrunch, twist, and tie them up, securing them with rubber bands. Then he rummaged through the cabinets and took out enough chemicals to create a small nuclear bomb. Well, not really, but it was a lot of stuff—mostly paints and dyes, and solutions to make the colors permanent.
We were dipping the first shirt in a tub of purple when Miss Agnew came in to get ready for first period. Uh-oh, I thought, we’ll be finishing this job in detention.
“Hugh Winkleman, I hope you’ve got permission—” Her eyes fell on my partner in crime. “You’re Capricorn Anderson! I heard about what you did for Mr. Rodrigo. You’re a hero!” She peered into the sink. “Wow, tie-dyeing! I haven’t done that since college!”
When Miss Agnew’s first period class showed up at the bell, they found the three of us up to our elbows in color and wet fabric. She sent them back to their lockers for T-shirts and gym shorts—anything that would take paint.
“But I thought we were drawing the human figure in motion,” said one seventh grader.
“Tomorrow,” Miss Agnew promised absently. “Today we tie-dye.”
She even called down to the office and got Cap and me excused from period one so we wouldn’t get in trouble. But I guess the conversation didn’t stop there, because a few minutes later, an announcement came over the PA:
“Those students interested in tie-dyeing with eighth grade president Capricorn Anderson should report to the art room.”
Well, what self-respecting middle school kid would turn down a free pass to get out of work? We were mobbed in there. People were lined up with their towels, socks, underwear, and any canvas bag that was supple enough to be twisted and tied. Miss Agnew was in her glory. Never before had her art room seen such enthusiasm.
The star of the show was definitely Cap. He was demonstrating, helping, mixing colors, and hanging up finished work. This was more than just Tie-Dye Palooza. Kids were asking him about the bus-driving incident and the Halloween dance, and hanging on his every word. It hit me then—everybody had seen Cap at the assembly, and around the halls here and there, but no one really knew him. Today had started out as my attempt to get a couple of shirts tie-dyed and hang out with Cap in the process. Yet before my eyes, it had turned into the eighth grade president’s coming-out party. There must have been eighty students in that room, and I’ll bet ninety-five percent of them approached him at some point.
True to character, he asked all their names and wrote them in his notebook.
For the rest of the day, the halls were ablaze with color as the artists proudly wore their creations, most of them still wet. It was a carnival atmosphere, with lots of pointing and laughing and high fives.
Which might explain why I almost didn’t notice something else that was different about today: there wasn’t a single spitball lodged in Cap Anderson’s hair.
Not one.
I knew something was wrong the minute I got off the bus and walked to the Donnellys’. The Saturn was in the driveway, which meant that Mrs. Donnelly was home early. And the TV was off, even though
T & T
would be on in a few minutes.
Sophie and her mom were in the kitchen. I heard Mrs. Donnelly’s voice first:
“Oh, honey, don’t feel bad. You know how he is.”
I hurried into the room. “What happened? Is everything all right?”
An empty Dasani bottle missed my ear by inches. “Get out of here!” Sophie shrieked. “Mind your own business!”
“Sophie!” her mother exclaimed in horror. “You apologize to Cap!”
In answer, she leaped out of her chair and raced for the stairs. “Mother, don’t you dare tell the freakazoid anything about this!” She pounded up to her bedroom and slammed the door.
I looked at Mrs. Donnelly. “What did I do?” It was a silly question. What did I ever do? Nothing. And Sophie still treated me as if I’d crawled in from the septic tank.
“Please forgive Sophie,” Mrs. Donnelly begged. “She’s just had some bad news.”
I was worried. “Did something happen to Mr. Donnelly?”
“Nothing that hasn’t happened before,” she sighed. “He took off without so much as a good-bye.”
“But what about the driving test?” I protested. A license might have been just a piece of paper, but to Sophie it meant everything.
She shrugged. “We’ll just have to reschedule for when I can take her. My ex-husband is not a terrible person, but he doesn’t see things through. He rolls into town, gets everybody’s hopes up, and then he’s gone until the next time, when he does it all over again. I learned my lesson and got off the roller coaster. My daughter hasn’t figured it out yet.”
I felt terrible for Sophie. She was really crushed. Mr. Donnelly left town so suddenly that she hadn’t even gotten her bracelet back from the engraver. Who knew if she’d ever see it again? But, of course, it was a lot more than losing a silver bangle that upset her.
Life certainly gets complicated when you know more than one person. I could only imagine what it would be like when I knew eleven hundred.
On
Trigonometry and Tears
, there was a character named Rishon, who really bothered me. He didn’t cheat on his girlfriend like Nick, or spread computer viruses just for fun like Aurora. But his irresponsible behavior was almost impossible to bear.
Sophie definitely didn’t agree. “What do you care? It’s a TV show.” Her mood had been in free fall since Mr. Donnelly’s departure.
“But if he doesn’t retake the SAT to bring up his score, the University of Florida is going to withdraw his acceptance!” I exclaimed.
She looked at me pityingly. “So?”
“He hasn’t even started studying! And he overslept and missed the practice test!”
“That’s what they do on
T
&
T
,” she explained. “They take perfectly normal people and turn their lives into pond scum. That’s why it’s fun to watch. If everything was perfect, there’d be no story.”
“But what’s Rishon going to do next year?” I persisted.
“Probably find a part on a different show. He’s an actor.”
Because Sophie had been watching TV her whole life, and not just a few weeks like me, it was easier for her to watch Rishon throw his whole future away. For me it was agony.
Rain always said that when we judge others, we’re really judging ourselves. That was the real reason Rishon upset me. How could he think his SAT scores were going to go up by themselves? How could he ignore the fact that he was about to lose his spot in college?
It was all too familiar. As eighth grade president, I was in charge of the Halloween dance, and I was giving it the Rishon treatment. I was ignoring the whole thing, almost as if I thought it might go away.
Then, on
T & T
, it all worked out for Rishon. One of Aurora’s viruses found its way into the admissions department computer at the University of Florida, wiping out half their records. All that were left indicated that Rishon was accepted. He ignored his problem—and the problem just sort of melted away.
With a growing sense of wonder, I realized that the same thing was happening with the dance. I was still doing nothing, yet somehow, the arrangements were being made. Students would come up to me in the halls; they would sing along when I played guitar in the music room; they would join in my morning tai chi routine—and then they would volunteer to help. So many people were working on the party that I was beginning to think we were actually going to have one.
No wonder
T & T
was such a popular show. It was practically an instruction manual for life.
Garland Farm followed simple logic: you plant tomato seeds, you get tomato plants. No seeds, no tomatoes. Cause and effect. But a real school was so messy and random that solutions sometimes fell into place by sheer luck. It was almost like getting tomatoes without first planting seeds.
I thought I’d never get used to the outside world, with its chaos and clutter. But with millions of puzzle pieces being tossed up into the air, it really did stand to reason that the occasional one would come down in the right place. That was why Rishon would go to college, and C Average would have its Halloween dance.
Even Rain would have to admit that there was something kind of impressive about that.
“Anderson—come over here! I need a word with you.” The words jolted me out of deep meditation. I looked up to see Mr. Kasigi glaring down at me.
“Why haven’t you come to meet with me yet?”
I was floored. “I did—the day I registered.”
“Don’t play dumb with me, mister! I’m hearing talk of deejays and pizza ovens on wheels! How were you going to pay for all that?”
“I don’t have any money.”
He was getting red in the face. “Nobody expects
you
to pay for it! The school has money set aside for the dance. But if you don’t present your budget, I can’t release one penny!”
“I don’t have a budget,” I explained honestly. “I just have people who help me do things.”
“Like what? Fix your cuckoo clock?” He launched into a long speech about how he had volunteered to be on the program committee for some principals’ conference, so he didn’t have time to nursemaid me through Finance 101, whatever that was.
“But it’s all taken care of,” I tried to tell him. “The food, the music, the decorations—it all just worked out.” I stopped myself before telling him about Rishon. I had a feeling Mr. Kasigi was not a
T
&
T
fan.
“And who’s writing the checks?” he demanded.
“Checks?”
Rain had a checkbook, but I never saw her touch it. “Sometimes we use money to get along,” she used to tell me, “but that doesn’t mean we have to become its slave.” To Rain, financial matters were a distasteful but necessary private function, like going to the bathroom.
Mr. Kasigi said I would have to write checks. Not only that, but he would have to cosign them or they wouldn’t count.
After school, he drove me to the bank. I’d never been in one before. But the instant I stepped inside, I knew this was a place that represented everything Rain and I were rejecting by living at Garland. Money was all that was important here. People were depositing it, withdrawing it, borrowing it, and paying it back. They were counting it in broad daylight. I honestly felt like running away.
But how could I? For one thing, there was a man in uniform guarding the door. I practically jumped out of my skin when I realized that he had a great big gun strapped to his hip.
Mr. Kasigi noticed my reaction. “Calm down, Anderson. He’s a security man, not a bank robber.”
Every time I thought I was fitting into my temporary life, something would remind me just how much of an outsider I still was. I wanted less than nothing of what this place had to offer. But to people outside Garland, money was so desirable that the bank had to hire armed guards to keep criminals from stealing it. When I finally got back home, I was going to drop to my knees and kiss the ground.
Mr. Kasigi and I met with an assistant manager. And when it was all over, I was holding a book of checks marked Claverage Middle School: Student Activity Fund. “You’ll need these to pay for music and food,” he explained, signing the first twelve checks on the spot. “And I’m sure there will be other expenses that come up. They always do.”
I tried to tell him that I didn’t know the deejay
or
the pizza company—that other students had made the arrangements. But he interrupted me with this long lecture about how this money belonged to everybody, not just me, and how I had to be responsible. And I would have been—if I had the slightest idea what he was talking about.
All I wanted was for him to leave so I could get out of this awful place. I wouldn’t even let him drive me to the Donnellys’. I needed to walk there in the fresh air, just to get the smell of banking out of my nostrils.
A few blocks down the street, a sight met my eyes that stopped me in my tracks. There, in the display window of a small jewelry shop, gleamed a silver bangle with multicolor stones. It was exactly the same as Sophie’s birthday gift from her father—the one he’d taken for engraving and never brought back.
I stepped into the store for a closer look. It was beautiful, but also kind of sad, because it reminded me of how upset Sophie had been lately.
The idea came immediately. If I bought this bracelet, had it engraved, and sent it to Sophie, she’d never know that it hadn’t come from her father. And it would make her happy.
I didn’t have any money. But I had something even better—checks, which automatically counted as exactly as much money as you wrote in that little box. It probably wasn’t what Mr. Kasigi had in mind. But I remembered his exact words:
Be responsible.
Rain always said that nothing was more responsible than doing what was in your power to make another human being happy.
“I’ll take it,” I told the woman behind the counter.
“It’s a hundred and seventy-five dollars.” She was wary.
“Do you accept checks?”