Schooled (3 page)
Adults are always trying to figure out what makes kids tick. They send professors into middle schools to do research and run tests; they publish thousand-page studies.
Know what? They don’t have a clue.
If you want to understand middle school students, there’s only one way to do it: follow the wedgies. Wedgie-givers and wedgie-receivers. Take it from someone who’s been down that road before.
Sad to say, I’m one of the receivers. Zach Powers, Lena Young, and their crowd ride roughshod over a lot of people. But if statistics were taken, I’d be victim number one.
Until Capricorn Anderson showed up.
Even
I
could pick on a guy like that. Not that I’d ever do such a thing. I’d never lower myself to the level of those nitwits. But what a kid.
He wasn’t nerdy in a typical way. He wasn’t a computer geek or captain of the chess club (that was me). He couldn’t speak Klingon; in fact, he’d never even heard of
Star Trek.
But just one peek at the guy and you knew that, dweebwise, there was a new sheriff in town.
A lot of eyes were on him as he sat down in the cafeteria. God, it felt good to have them staring at someone else for a change. I walked over to him. A guy like this was going to need all the friends he could get (one).
“Capricorn, right?” I set my tray down across from him. “I’m Hugh—from social studies class.” I stuck my hand out, but he just stared at it. It wasn’t a snub. Believe me, I could teach a college course on snubs. This was cluelessness. He honestly didn’t know what to do.
“I remember you,” he said finally. “There are so many people here. It’s hard to keep track.”
“I can help you with that.” I pointed to the table where Zach and Lena were holding court. “That crowd thinks they own the place. They think that because they do. Stay away from them. They’ll chop you up and press you into salami. Now, anyone you see hanging around their crew falls into one of two subgroups—the jocks and the wannabes. Stay away from both. And you definitely don’t want anything to do with goths, burnouts, skateboarders, hip-hop kids, environmentalists, or anybody who has a baseball cap on backward.” I took note of the blank expression on his face. “You know, standard survival skills. I’m sure it was similar at your old school.”
“I was homeschooled before this.”
“No kidding.” I’d heard of that, but I’d never met anybody who did it. “What’s it like?”
“Wonderful,” he said wanly.
“I’ll bet!” My enthusiasm was genuine. “It must be nice to wake up in the morning and not have to worry about walking into a hostile environment, with your next wedgie a matter of not
if
but
when.
”
“What’s a wedgie?”
Wow. Homeschooling must be heaven! I didn’t answer the question. He’d find out soon enough.
My eyes fell on Cap’s lunch, which consisted of salad, carrot sticks, and two slices of whole wheat bread. He must have noticed, because he was looking just as curiously at my hamburger.
“What part of the animal does that meat come from?”
“I don’t know.” I chewed thoughtfully. “The lips, probably. Want a bite?”
“I’m a vegetarian.”
At that moment, I heard an all-too-familiar
thpoot
coming from behind us. Maybe one kid in a thousand would have recognized the sound. But I’m that kid. It was an incoming spitball.
I tensed, waiting for impact. But it wasn’t aimed at me. Instead, I watched the tiny projectile land and lodge itself amid Cap’s cascading piles of long hair. He didn’t even feel it. Hermits could hole up in all that hair, and no two would ever meet.
At Zach’s table, a celebration was going on, with lots of backslapping and high fives. Darryl Pennyfield, Zach’s football buddy and co-Neanderthal, was horsing around. Deadeye, I called him, but never to his face. When his face was too close, mine was usually being stuffed into a locker. Then I caught sight of the straw in Naomi Erlanger’s hand. I guess Cap’s mop was an irresistible target for amateur spitballers, not just the professionals.
The PA system came to life with the voice of Mr. Kasigi. “Just a reminder—the election for eighth grade president will be held on Tuesday, September twenty-sixth. The position is open to all eighth graders. So far, only one name has been placed in nomination—Capricorn Anderson. Thank you.”
I was blown away. “You’re running for president? In your first week here?”
Cap scanned the ceiling. “Who
is
that? If he wants to talk to us, why doesn’t he just come into the room?”
“But why is he talking about
you
?” I persisted. “
Are
you running for president?”
“Of course not. I don’t believe in government. I come from an autonomous collective.”
“But Mr. Kasigi said—” And suddenly, I just knew.
The triumphant grins on the smug faces of Zach and company told the whole story. Cap hadn’t placed his name in nomination. Zach had done it for him. I’d heard something about this last year. The eighth graders had picked this computer genius, Luke Simard, and got him elected president just so they could make fun of him. By the end of the year, the poor kid was so crazy that he skipped graduation and applied to an alternative high school so he wouldn’t have to face four more years with the people who’d made his life so miserable.
Now we were the eighth graders, and it was our turn to do the same thing. Only, instead of picking the smartest guy in school, Zach had zeroed in on somebody who didn’t even seem to know what a PA system was.
I opened my mouth to issue the warning. The words were forming on my tongue:
Cap
—
get over to the office this minute and take yourself out of nomination! Do it now, before it’s too late
—
And then it hit me. If Cap Anderson had never been born, the name announced to the whole school would have been mine. My strange and hairy new friend was the only thing preventing me from being the next Luke Simard.
I shut my mouth and kept it shut, trying to keep my eyes off the spitball still lodged just above Cap’s left ear. I felt bad about it, but I felt something else too:
Better him than me.
The time was coming. I could almost smell it.
One day Zach Powers was going to be my boyfriend. Sure, he was sniffing around Lena—everybody knew that. But sooner or later he’d see that she lacked the depth and sincerity of yours truly, and that, besides, she had the hots for Darryl, or maybe Grant Tubman, if only he’d get rid of that ridiculous tongue stud that looked like a pimple. Enough said—especially about Lena, who was my best friend.
It was tough to compete with Lena, who was so naturally pretty and had a very strong personality. To be honest, she was kind of a bulldozer when it came to getting what she wanted, but I don’t say that in a mean way. People did what she told them to because they liked her—not just because she’d make their lives miserable if they didn’t. And since I was more shy than Lena, and not quite so willing to squeeze into size-zero jeans and apply makeup with a snow blower, I had to try a little harder to get Zach’s attention.
Who would have thought that the equalizer would turn out to be the biggest dweeb in school? No, not Hugh Winkleman. Capricorn Anderson.
The minute I shot that spitball in the cafeteria, I could feel Zach noticing me. He said, “Nice trajectory,” and he asked if he could finish my Tater Tots. I knew it was the turning point in our relationship. The road to Zach went straight through the new hippie kid.
Example: Zach wanted to make Cap eighth grade president. Sure, the rest of us had our hearts set on Winkleman, but I quickly volunteered to work on Cap’s election campaign. Not that anybody was running against him, but we still had to make it look real so Mr. Kasigi wouldn’t get suspicious.
We made posters. My favorite was:
CAPRICORN ANDERSON—THE PEOPLE’S CHOICE
, because while I was painting it, Zach said, “It doesn’t have to be perfect, Naomi. It’s not like anybody’s going to have to vote for him.” And while he was talking, his hand brushed my hand.
Lena was a little suspicious when I told her we didn’t need any help with the election. You definitely didn’t want to get on her bad side. But by the time Zach and I started going out, she’d probably be hot and heavy with Darryl (or Grant Tubman, minus the tongue stud). So I was safe.
Zach was so cool. It was almost like watching the plan beamed straight from his brain onto the screen of a blockbuster movie. We put up the posters, scared off two dummies who wanted to run for the job, and presto! Capricorn Anderson was elected eighth grade president, unopposed.
“The best part is the doofus has no idea what just happened to him,” Zach chortled.
“Who knows what’s going on under all that hair?” snorted Lena.
I personally got the impression that Cap thought all new students had to go through this. Like being president was part of registering and choosing electives. But I kept my mouth shut and laughed along with the others. Zach had a great smile.
When they made the announcement at the all-school assembly, Zach and Darryl hoisted the new president up on their shoulders and marched him onto the stage. He’d been around C Average for a couple of weeks, and people knew his name from our posters and had seen him in the halls. But this was the first time the entire student body made the connection. Eleven hundred kids took in the sight of a genuine middle school hippie—this tall, skinny, longhaired boy in tie-dye, toes poking out of those homemade sandals. He looked so silly, so goofy, so
weird
that he was almost cute. Not attractive, but adorable in the sense that you can’t help pitying him—like a wet puppy rolled in sand.
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 undertakers 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.