Schooled (13 page)
Wow.
What a lightning strike. Like crashing your own funeral.
Hugh fell off the flatbed. I didn’t blame him. I was seriously thinking about taking a dive myself. This didn’t make me look so great either.
The people close in realized who had just shown up. They went berserk, hugging Cap and shrieking with joy. Farther back, there was a buzz of confusion. Something was going on, but nobody could figure out what.
Finally, a couple of guys in the front row helped Cap onto the truck. The wind took his long blond hair and blew it into a halo around his face, backlit by a streetlamp.
The roar from eleven hundred throats combined shock, disbelief, happiness, and even love. I was used to crowd noise from playing football, but I never experienced anything like this. The ground shook. The echoes bounced off houses and buildings. It was unreal.
The hairball tried to say something. Forget it. There was no way anyone was going to hear him over the sounds of celebration that he was still among us. He had a couple of shiners and a cut on his nose where Darryl had decked him. Yet it was obvious to everybody that the eighth grade president was not hospitalized, not suffering from amnesia, not in a vegetative state, and was very, very much alive.
Naomi, her face glowing and streaked with tears, reached down for the fallen microphone and handed it to Cap. Still the thunderous ovation went on. I clocked six full minutes, but it might have been longer.
Finally, the tumult died away, and an expectant silence covered the crowd.
Cap shuffled uncomfortably and said, “This isn’t the Halloween dance…is it?”
A wave of laughter greeted this. I’ll bet I was the only one out of the eleven hundred who knew that he wasn’t joking—me and Winkleman.
“I can’t believe so many people were worried about me,” he went on. “I’m fine. I just had to go home because Rain got out of the hospital. My life isn’t here anymore. I live at Garland Farm.”
He seemed to spot someone at the edge of the crowd and gave a shy wave in that direction. I followed his line of vision and noticed an older lady who waved back with a cane. Even if she hadn’t made that gesture, I would have been able to pick her out. She was the only adult in hippie clothes—peasant blouse, long cotton skirt, Day-Glo headband with a yin/yang disk in the center of her forehead. Stunned disbelief was the only way to describe her reaction to the sight of Cap on the receiving end of all that love. Trust me, I could relate.
“Rain,” he said gravely, “I’m sorry I came here when you said not to. I only did it because I really wanted to see a dance. But there was another reason too. I left school before I had a chance to say good-bye to everybody. So I guess I should start that now.”
He turned to the right side of the front row. “Good-bye Jason…good-bye Trudy…good-bye Leo…good-bye Ariel…good-bye Trevor…good-bye Mike…”
There was a titter of amusement that died out quickly when people realized that he wasn’t stopping.
“…Good-bye Daniel…good-bye Raj…good-bye Heather…good-bye Naomi…good-bye Jordan…good-bye Lena…good-bye Hugh…”
This was getting weird. He went all the way across the first row, and then started along the second in the opposite direction. By this time, there was absolute silence in the parking lot.
“…Good-bye Daisy…good-bye Emily…good-bye Julius…good-bye Sam…”
He was halfway down the third row when I finally clued in. Cap wasn’t planning to say, “Good-bye, everybody.” He was saying good-bye—to
everybody
!
I had a flashback to the assembly two months ago, when Kasigi had first proclaimed him president. As a goof, I’d told the kid that he had to learn everyone’s name. And somehow, by some
miracle
, he’d actually done it!
“…Good-bye Severin…good-bye Jay…good-bye Kelly…good-bye Phil…”
No football player could fail to recognize what I was experiencing right then. It was the moment on the field when you realize that you’re completely, hopelessly outclassed. When I looked at the hairball on the payload, I didn’t see the eighth grade president; I saw the Super Bowl champions. There was no defeating a kid who could memorize an entire school.
“…Good-bye Natasha…good-bye Annabel…good-bye Patrick…good-bye Marco…”
It took almost an hour. Nobody moved. We barely uttered a sound. It was the kind of performance that came along once in a lifetime, and you didn’t want to miss one second. It was like being a part of history.
Eleven hundred students. Eleven hundred names. He never hesitated, and he never got one wrong.
We wouldn’t even have known he was finished except that he set the microphone down on the flatbed and started to climb off.
Nobody let him. Darryl rushed over, hoisted him onto his shoulders, and began to tote him through the cheering crowd. Naomi and Lena were at their side, screaming their heads off. I waded over to join them. After all, they were my friends, and it was time to bury the hatchet. Hippie-loving friends were better than no friends at all.
Cap called down to us, “Rain’s waiting,” so we headed for the older lady in the yin/yang headband.
It was slow going, because everybody in the place wanted to high-five the living legend. Navigating all those outstretched arms was like plowing through a field of bamboo.
When Darryl finally deposited Cap onto the tarmac beside Rain, she barely noticed him. She was being chewed out by a younger woman who I’d seen around the school a few times.
“…What he did with those checks—as an adult, he could go to jail for that!”
Rain’s face was ashen. “He tried to give the school’s money to charity?”
“Who taught him any different?” the woman ranted. “I remember your brand of education! None of us had the faintest idea how to survive in the real world! I was lucky—I had parents. Who’s Cap going to turn to? You won’t live forever, you know.…”
So that was what happened with the checks! It wasn’t Kasigi; it was pure Cap, taking the hippie thing too far, as usual. And instead of getting arrested for it—which would have happened to the rest of us—he was elevated to rock-star status.
Cap regarded his grandmother nervously. “There was supposed to be a dance. I’m not sure what happened. Are you mad at me?”
“Of course not,” she told him. Then she turned to the younger woman. “Good-bye, Floramundi.” It didn’t sound friendly.
“Bye, Cap!” piped up Darryl as grandmother and grandson got into a double-parked pickup truck.
“We love you!” Naomi yelled as the two sets of hippie hair disappeared down the street.
The woman called Floramundi hugged a really good-looking high school girl who was holding a rubber Minnie Mouse mask. I did a double take.
She
was Cap’s
date
? The Minnie to his Mickey?
Unbelievable! While he was busy turning C Average on its ear, Cap still had time to pick up a supermodel. Had the whole world gone crazy? I spun around like a victim of amnesia, desperately searching the parking lot for a glimpse of something—
anything
—that made sense.
And there, in the dispersing crowd, my eyes found Hugh Winkleman. He looked terrible—his clothes disheveled, his glasses bent and askew. He was such a dweeb, but he was almost
my
dweeb now—the only kid who’d stuck by me while the whole school flocked to the hairball.
I was kind of starting to appreciate that guy.
I was driving the pickup on the dirt lane alongside our orchard when I got arrested again.
I was surprised when the siren blurped and the lights started flashing. Rain had told me to stay off the county roads, but that I’d be okay so long as I stuck to Garland property.
When I said that to the officer, though, his answer shocked me: “This isn’t Garland anymore. The land belongs to Skyline Realty and Development. And you’re driving without a license.”
With that, he loaded me into the back of his squad car.
The county sheriff’s office was a lot smaller than the police station they’d taken me to after I drove Mr. Rodrigo to the hospital in the school bus. It had only one room, and there wasn’t even a lockup—just a metal ring they could handcuff people to.
They didn’t do that to me. They just sat me in a chair and told me to wait while they made phone calls.
I stared out the window, feeling pretty low. Rain was going to be mad when she found out about Skyline Realty and Development. Dealing with big companies was one of the things she’d formed Garland to get away from. Who knew what a hassle it was going to be to straighten out this mistake?
She’d been so busy lately—away a lot, and really quiet when she was home, listening to her favorite songs from the sixties on our record player. “The Times They Are A-Changin’” by Bob Dylan especially seemed to fascinate her. She let it repeat over and over again.
“Bob Dylan was right,” I’d said one night.
She looked sad. “I used to think change was a
choice.
That you could avoid it if you stuck with your convictions. Now—” She shook her head. “I just don’t know.”
I’d almost asked her if she’d heard that they hardly ever made vinyl records anymore—that it was all CDs and MP3s and DAT files. I decided not to. Even more change was probably the last thing she wanted to deal with.
It had been a tough couple of weeks since the Halloween dance that wasn’t a dance at all. I wondered if I’d ever be happy again. I knew I didn’t fit in at C Average, but Garland wasn’t exactly right for me either.
Knowing eleven hundred people can spoil you for being alone.
I didn’t regret my time in real school. I learned a lot—like when you have a checking account, your money is separate from all the other money in the bank. And when you write a check, the number you put in the little box gets subtracted from what you have.
I learned that you can’t fix a china figurine with duct tape because it doesn’t look right. And I learned a new vocabulary word: klutz.
I learned about lockers and reruns and Giga-Volumizer. I almost learned about dances, but I didn’t.
The most important thing I learned is how many things out there I still needed to learn about. I wanted to, but it didn’t seem like I was going to get the chance.
On the other side of the window, the sunlit world had never appeared so wide and tempting.
A very fancy car with a shiny new paint job screeched up to the curb. I recognized the hood ornament that looked sort of like a peace sign. I knew from
Trigonometry and Tears
that it was called a Mercedes, and it cost a lot of money. I was puzzled to notice a yellowed bumper sticker on the back—
War Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things.
The only place I’d ever seen one like it was on our old pickup truck.
A blond, stylishly dressed woman slipped from behind the wheel, talking on her cell phone. With her free hand, she reached back into the car and pulled out a cane.
Rain’s
cane!
I did a double take. The hair was different, the clothes were different, and I’d never seen the car. But this was Rain!
She came in and gave me a hug. I felt the familiar contours of her love beads through the fabric of her designer blouse.
She announced, “Not bad for an old grandma, right?”
“Rain, what happened? You’ve—
changed
!”
She took a deep breath. “Brace yourself, Capricorn. I’ve got a lot to tell you.”
“I’ve got a lot to tell
you
,” I interrupted. “I got arrested again. And the police say some development company owns Garland! What are we going to do?”
“Some development company
does
own Garland. I should know. I sold it to them.”
I was horrified. “
Sold?
You always said no one owns the earth, so no one can buy it or sell it!”
She was patient. “That wasn’t me, Cap. I was quoting the ancient Hopi Indians. Forty years ago, when Garland began, I purchased the land with money I borrowed from my parents. We lived as a true commune, sharing everything, and I was a partner—nothing more, nothing less. But the deed was always in my name, so it was always mine to sell.” She waved her hand to quell my protest. “Calm down. I wouldn’t let them build some gated fortress of McMansions for the masters of the universe. There’s going to be affordable housing for all income levels. And a park with a flower garden. I thought that was a nice touch.”
I was distraught. This went against everything I’d been taught to believe in. She was taking the entire Garland value system and junking it! I understood that she had the
legal
right to sell it; what I didn’t understand was—
“Why?”
I demanded. “You lived this way for forty years! You kept on long after all the other communities and communes shut down and disappeared! Why stop now?”
“Oh, Cap, I thought you knew. I did it for you.”
“Me?”
“My accident was a wake-up call. I’m not planning on dying anytime soon, but you’ll eventually outlive me. When I’m gone, you’ll have to get along in the real world. That just won’t happen if we stay at Garland. It would be criminal for me to let you face life with no more street smarts than a newborn baby. Although,” she added meaningfully, “nobody could say that your first try wasn’t a success. How many people get to attend their own memorial service—along with eleven hundred of their closest friends?”
It was as if my entire universe had been twisted inside out. Was this Rain, or some stranger who had taken control of her body? Yet, in a way, I was seeing my grandmother more clearly than ever before.
I
was the one who had been born and raised at Garland; Rain grew up in San Francisco. I may have been completely helpless in the outside world, but she wasn’t.
“Besides,” she went on, her eyes twinkling, “some incredible things have been happening in the real estate market since the sixties. I just sold Garland for seventeen million dollars.”
I stared at her for a long time. “That’s a lot, isn’t it?”
She nodded. “We’re rich. But don’t worry. We’re not turning our backs on what Garland represents. With this money, we can accomplish more than we could by living there for a thousand years. You had the right idea with those Student Activity Fund checks. I see a charitable foundation—the Garland Foundation, maybe. The sixties may be over, but the spirit is stronger than ever.”
I chewed on this. “So what happens now? Where are we going to live?”
“I bought us a condo,” she replied. “It won’t be ready for a few days, and I’ll be tied up with the details. So I’ve arranged for you to stay with a family near the new school you’ll be attending.”
I must have looked miserable, because she added, “You’ll like these people. Honestly.” She took the cell phone from her suit pocket, flipped it open, and handed it to me.
“Uh—hello?”
A voice said, “Hey, freakazoid, I hear you’re moving back in.”
The grin must have split my face. “So the new school is—”
Rain smiled too. “I can think of eleven hundred kids who are going to be really happy to have you back.”
And I already knew all their names.