Schooled (2 page)
The instant I saw him standing there with all that hair and all those beads, I just knew.
Garland Farm. It had to be. Nobody else looked like that. Nobody
had
looked like that since 1970. Except at Garland.
He seemed terrified, and with good reason. No one knew what lay ahead for him better than I did. I held out my hand. “I’m Mrs. Donnelly.” He made no move to take it. “Capricorn.” Capricorn. Wasn’t that just classic? My own name, Flora, was short for Floramundi—a world of flowers. I’d been out of that place more than thirty years, but one sight of this kid, and it all came roaring back in a tsunami of Day-Glo ponchos and organic lentils.
I was five when my family joined the community—too young to remember any life before that. For six long years, that place was my universe. I ran around barefoot, wearing peasant dresses, shared my parents with the other kids, protested the Vietnam War, did farm chores, and listened to a whole lot of sitar music.
So help me, I didn’t know how weird it all was until my parents decided they were too old to be hippies anymore, and we rejoined the real world. That part I remember like it was yesterday—this little flower child, who barely knew how a doorknob worked, suddenly dropped in the middle of a society several centuries ahead of the one she’d just left.
I looked at Capricorn Anderson, and that’s what I saw—not a case, but a time traveler, about to step into a world that had forgotten the sixties except for J.F.K. and the Beatles.
In my right hand was a piece of paper with the address of the foster home the Department of Child Services had assigned for this boy. I crumpled it up and tossed it into the nearest trash can.
“Well, Capricorn, it looks like you’re going to be staying at my house for a few weeks.”
“Absolutely not!” he exclaimed. “I have to get back to the community. The plums aren’t in yet. And after that the apples. Everything has to be ready for when Rain comes home.”
I remembered Rain. She was one of the founders of Garland, the queen bee of the place when I lived there. I was always afraid of her. I thought she was a witch.
“Wait a minute—” I put two and two together. “Rachel Esther Rosenblatt is
Rain
? Your grandmother?”
He brightened. “You know her?”
That’s when I figured out the key to Capricorn’s heart, so I could do what needed to be done for his own good.
“I used to. Way back before you were born, my family lived at Garland. Rain would want you to be with someone who understands.”
I had a reluctant houseguest.
I high-fived my way off the school bus, slapping hands on both sides of the aisle.
“Hey, Zach!”
“How’s it going, man?”
I jumped down to the tarmac of the school’s driveway.
It was a beautiful September day. This was my time—eighth grade, captain of the football and soccer teams, Big Man on Campus. After two years of looking up to other people, I’d finally made it to the point where there was nobody to look up to but me.
Everything was perfect.
I frowned. Well, not quite perfect. I noticed that the sign on the front lawn read:
WELCOME TO CLAVERAGE MIDDLE SCHOOL
They’d fixed it again. Unacceptable.
I did a quick scan to confirm there were no teachers looking on. Mr. Sorenson’s eyes were on the buses, so his back was turned. I reached up and snatched off a letter. The sign now read:
WELCOME TO CLAVERAGE MIDDLE SCHOOL
Much better. I stuffed the
L
behind the bushes and walked on, enjoying the admiration of some seventh grade girls. It was a dangerous job, but somebody had to do it. At C Average Middle School, the buck stopped with me.
Not that I was nobody last year. I was still probably the most happening seventh grader in the place. But it isn’t really your school until you’re a senior. I wasn’t going to drop the ball on any of it.
For example, the election for eighth grade president was coming up. Not that I was running myself. God forbid. The tradition at C Average was to nominate the biggest loser in the building. No one runs against him, of course, and he wins automatically. Then, for the rest of the year, you get the pleasure of watching President Bonehead giving speeches, running assemblies, and making a complete idiot out of himself.
It’s top-notch entertainment—
if
you nail exactly the right guy.
I was pretty sure I had the front-runner all picked out. Ever since kindergarten, the primo nerd, bar none, had been Hugh Winkleman. Over the years, the doofus had been on the receiving end of so many wedgies that he had elastic waistband material fused to the top of his head—pardon the exaggeration.
In a million years, there could not have been anyone more perfect for this job than Hugh. Or so I thought.
I was on my way to homeroom when Mr. Kasigi, the assistant principal, flagged me down. Standing beside him was the strangest-looking kid I’d ever seen. He was tall and skinny as a rake. I swear he’d never been anywhere near a barbershop in his life. His long blond flyaway hair stretched all the way down to the middle of his back. His clothes looked like pajamas—
homemade
pajamas. And his shoes were something out of a social studies project on the pioneer days. They were sandals woven out of corn husks, and rustled when he moved.
Kasigi introduced us. “Zachary Powers, meet Capricorn Anderson. Cap just transferred here.”
Yeah, from the planet Krypton.
“Show him to locker 743 and make sure he gets to homeroom.” He rushed off in the direction of the office.
The weirdest thing about Capricorn Anderson was this:
he
was looking at
me
like
I
was the freak. Like he’d never seen another kid before!
“Come on, Cap. Follow me.”
We walked down the hall, picking up more than our fair share of attention.
“New kid,” I said aloud, just in case anybody thought he was actually
with
me. “Kasigi asked me to show him around.”
Locker 743. “Here it is,” I told him. “You’ve got the combo, right?”
He just stared at me blankly.
“The combination,” I prompted. “There—printed on top of your orientation form.”
“But what does it mean?”
I would have sworn he was putting me on, except he looked so bewildered.
“Here—I’ll show you. Seventeen…thirty-three…five.” There was a click, and the door swung wide.
He peered in as if he expected to find a mountain lion lying in wait. “It’s empty.”
He was beginning to rile me. “Of course it’s empty. It’s
your
locker. It’s empty until you put something in it.”
“What do
I
have to put in there?” he demanded.
“How should I know? It’s
your
stuff.”
“When we lock things away,” he said with conviction, “we’re really imprisoning ourselves.”
Now, that was definitely something you didn’t hear every day. “What school did you go to before this?”
“I’m homeschooled,” he informed me. “I’m only here because Rain broke her hip, and they won’t let me live alone at the community.”
Hugh Winkleman, you’re a lucky man. With the arrival of this new kid, all the losers in school were bumped down one space. Never before had anyone screamed for the job of eighth grade president like Capricorn Anderson.
This was my year!
“What are you looking at, jerkface?”
“What are
you
looking at, buttwipe?”
The first boy swung his book bag around and slammed it into the side of the other’s head.
He
responded by punching the first boy in the nose, and soon the two were rolling on the grass, grunting and raining blows on one another.
I was horrified. I’d read about physical violence, but this was the first time I’d witnessed it in real life. It was sudden and lightning fast. Wild, vicious, ugly.
In seconds, a ring of spectators formed around the brawlers. Their gleeful chant echoed all around the schoolyard.
“Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!…”
“Break it up!”
A teacher burst into the circle, a brawny man with a whistle around his neck. He squeezed himself between the combatants and pushed them apart. “All right, who started it?”
“He did!” the two chorused, each pointing at his opponent.
The teacher gazed around at the spectators. “Any witnesses?” Nobody said a word. “Come on, who saw what happened?”
“I did,” I volunteered.
“Well?”
“Buttwipe wanted to know what jerkface was looking at, and jerkface wanted to know what buttwipe was looking at.” I turned earnest eyes on the bloody and dirt-smeared brawlers. “You were barely three inches apart. Couldn’t you see you were both looking at each other?”
The teacher reddened. “Who do you think you are, Jerry Seinfeld?”
“You must have me confused with another student,” I told him. “My name is Capricorn Anderson.”
“Are you talking back to me?”
I hesitated. The whistle-teacher had asked me a question, and I’d answered by talking. “Yes?” I ventured uncertainly.
By the time he was finished yelling, both fighters had boarded their buses and gone home.
I
was the one who got sent to Mr. Kasigi’s office.
I was waiting on the bench when Mrs. Donnelly appeared.
I leaped up. “Is Rain going to be okay?”
“That’s why I’m here. Let’s take a ride over there and find out.” Her brow furrowed. “What are you doing in the hot seat?”
“I have a smart mouth,” I replied honestly. “It’s against the rules.”
She began leading me down the hall. “Come on, we’ve got a long drive. I’ll straighten everything out with Mr. Kasigi.”
It took more than an hour to get to the hospital, but it was worth it. Good news—Rain’s operation was a success.
“So we can go back home?” I asked anxiously.
Rain smiled sadly. “The doctor was right. This is going to be a long recovery. And because it’s only the two of us at Garland, they’re not going to release me early.” She held my hand. “I know you’re upset, but we’re just going to have to be strong.”
“I don’t like it out there,” I complained. “It’s too crowded. People dress funny; they talk too fast; and all they’re interested in is
things
! Cell phones and iPods and Game Boys and Starbucks. What’s a starbuck?”
She looked upset, and older than I’d ever seen her before. “I want you to listen to me, Cap, and try not to blame me.”
“Blame you?”
“I believe in the community,” she began, “and I believe in the life we’ve built together. But I was fooling myself to think that you were still so young that you wouldn’t have to learn about the world outside ours. It’s not a nice place, and I didn’t want you tossed into it without a little more preparation.”
I’d read about depression, but this was the first time I’d actually felt it. It was like a stone pressing down on my chest. I couldn’t lift it off because I didn’t have the strength.
“I’m kind of scared, Rain.”
“Well, don’t be,” she said firmly. “All you have to do is focus on who you are and what your values mean to you. You’ve passed every state test—always in the top five percent. You’re as smart and capable as anybody—more than most.”
“What I saw in school today wasn’t on any test,” I observed grimly.
She gave me a sympathetic smile. “True, information isn’t the same as experience. You know what television is, but you’ve never watched it. You know what pizza is, but you’ve never tasted any. You know about friendships, but you’ve never had a friend.”
“
You’re
my friend.”
“Of course I am,” she agreed. “But I’m not exactly a teenager.”
“I’m already finished with other teenagers. I’ve been in real school for one day, and that’s plenty. People are constantly screaming at each other. Two boys actually resorted to physical violence! I thought violence only happened in crimes and wars, but this was over—” I shrugged helplessly. “I can’t even explain it.”
“You have to feel sorry for them,” Rain said with a sigh. “Nonviolence isn’t something everyone understands.”
“They’ve got these things called lockers,” I raved on. “The halls are lined with them. And you won’t believe what they’re for! They’re for locking stuff away—so other people won’t steal it! Why can’t everybody just share?”
Rain must have agreed with me, because she looked really worried.
I poured it on thick. “They don’t have regular time at school, you know. They have
periods.
All of a sudden an alarm goes off and you’re supposed to drop what you’re doing and rush off to a different room with a different teacher to do something completely different! How can anybody learn like that?”
There was a knock at the door, and Mrs. Donnelly poked her head into the room. She lived at Garland for a while when she was a kid, so she understood how great it was and how much I wanted to get back there.
“Hello, Rain. How are you feeling?”
“It’s been a long time, Floramundi.” Rain looked her up and down. “It’s wonderful to see that you’ve done well since your family abandoned the lifestyle and value system they believed in.”
They talked about her parents and a few other people. Some of the names were familiar, but I didn’t remember anybody. The days of Garland as a thriving commune were over long before I was born in 1994.
It was a friendly conversation, but every time Rain called her Floramundi, Mrs. Donnelly got kind of tense. Maybe that was because her family left Garland, so she couldn’t live there anymore. I knew how that felt.
Anyway, we were soon on our way home—her home, not mine, unfortunately.
Her house was pretty nice, except it had too many stairs. There didn’t seem to be any more purpose for them than there had been for the fight at school earlier in the day. The living room was a few steps down; the bedrooms were a few steps up; and the kitchen was in the middle. Mrs. Donnelly called it a split-level. But what was the point of splitting a house when you could just make it flat and not have any stairs at all?
Everything was more complicated in the world outside the community. The buildings at Garland were made of wood, period. Here there was wood in some places, but also brick, stone, and aluminum. Inside, there was carpet and tile, white walls and other colors, and hundreds of pictures, curtains, tassels, clocks, figurines, and a million different things that might have been useful, but might have been just for decoration too. Who could tell? It seemed like an awful lot of stuff for just one house.
Mrs. Donnelly lived here with her daughter, Sophie. And, of course, me, now.
Sophie was sixteen. She went to the high school.
I
didn’t much like it that I had to be here. Multiply that by fifty, and that’s how much Sophie didn’t like it that I had to be here.
“Mother—are you on drugs? How could you bring that—that
freakazoid
into our house?”
“Shhh—Sophie. He’ll hear you.”
“I want him to hear me!” Sophie shrieked. “How else is he going to get the message to clear out?”
“He has nowhere else to go,” Mrs. Donnelly pleaded.
“And that’s
my
problem? Just because he comes from the same hippie-dippie flea circus where you grew up doesn’t mean we have to adopt him!”
“Lower your voice,” her mother ordered sternly. “It’s only for six weeks—two months at the outside.”
“Two
months
? I have to live my life! Do you know how long it took me to get Josh Weintraub to ask me out?
What’s he going to think when he drives up and sees this tie-dyed streak of misery draped across the porch?”
This whole conversation went on before either of us had spoken a single word to the other. I didn’t actually talk to Sophie until later that night when I accidentally blundered into her room. She was in her pajamas, speaking on the phone while smearing pale green cream all over her face.
She threw down the handset. “You. Out.
Now.
”
I stood frozen, staring at her. “What—what’s on your face?”
“Oh, right, you’ve never heard of moisturizer. You were just looking for an excuse to come busting into my room!”
I was mystified. “What are you moisturizing?”
She stamped a slippered foot. “My skin, genius! It’s a beauty product, okay? Scram!”
I backed out into the hallway. She slammed the door with such force I’m amazed the wall didn’t crumble. The one at Garland probably would have.
There I stood, still facing her door, paralyzed with discovery. Beauty. That was precisely the word that had been haunting me. Sophie Donnelly was beautiful. I had seen beautiful girls on book jackets, and even noticed some from a distance when Rain and I had gone into town for supplies. But this was the first time I’d ever really met one. I never could have imagined how strong the effect would be. Just standing near her—even when she was yelling at me—made me feel…nice.
It sure was a strange and complex world outside Garland.
