The school made me dizzy. I spent half my time wandering the halls, asking people directions to rooms they’d never heard of. Students were constantly peppering me with questions I didn’t have the answers to. And now a girl named Lorelei Lumley was writing me notes about how she’d love to run her fingers through my hair. Why would anybody want to do that?
The closest thing I had to Rain was Hugh Winkleman—hardly a replacement, but at least he was willing to help. We ate lunch together every day, and I found myself honestly looking forward to that regular meeting where Hugh could explain things to me.
“It’s obvious,” he said. “She’s in love with you.”
“I don’t even know who she is!” I hadn’t learned more than fifteen or twenty names at that point.
Hugh was disgusted. “Typical. I’ve spent my whole life in this dumb town, and I’ve never gotten a girl to give me a second look. And here you have someone named Lorelei throwing herself at you. You can’t let that slip through your fingers. Ask her to the Halloween dance.”
“What’s the Halloween dance?”
“Only the most important social event of the school year! Not that I’ve ever been to one.” His eyes narrowed. “If you’re eighth grade president, shouldn’t you know about it?”
“I hope not,” I said worriedly.
Hugh looked dubious. “Well, you probably shouldn’t go by me. I’m not exactly Mr. Popularity around here. But I think the president plans the whole shindig—refreshments, decorations, music—”
Something tingled directly beneath the peace sign I wore around my neck. I was developing a sixth sense for when trouble was coming my way. But what good was advance warning? Advance warning of what? I wasn’t going to understand it anyway.
Maybe that was my mistake—even trying to understand. Garland was so simple—seven acres of land containing exactly one house, one barn, a vegetable garden, fruit trees, a pickup truck, and only one other person. Maybe in a place as complex as C Average Middle School, it was impossible to analyze every single thing that happened.
Like what were those little white paper balls that I kept brushing out of my hair every night? Was there so much paper in a school that the molecules eventually clustered and fell like precipitation? And how did a pickled brain and all those other weird objects get into my locker? I thought the whole point of a lock was that no one could open it but me. I sure never put pink goo and a dead bird in there.
Rain always recommended meditation for stress and confusion. But if you meditate in front of your locker, someone might steal your sandals while your eyes are closed.
I had to go home barefoot on the school bus that afternoon. I know complaining is a negativity trip, but it was hard to stay positive about the floor of a school bus. It’s a collecting place for the filthy, smelly, sticky, and often sharp and jagged castoffs of a society run wild.
If I’d ever questioned why Rain and her friends gave up on city life in San Francisco and founded Garland back in 1967, five minutes on that bus explained it. The dark underbelly of the human animal was turned loose on that vehicle. It was crowded, noisy, dirty, rowdy, and uncomfortable. People fought, shrieked, threw things at one another, and tormented the hapless driver. It was an insane asylum on wheels.
By the time I made it to the Donnelly house, my bruised and bleeding feet were decorated with lollipop sticks, chewing gum, hairs, broken soda-can tabs, straws, buttons, and some things I couldn’t even identify.
To make matters worse, Sophie caught me in the backyard hosing off my feet at the outdoor tap.
“Nice,” she muttered. But the thing is, her expression said she didn’t think it was nice at all. Lately, every time I talked to Sophie, she looked like she had just eaten some turnips that had been harvested a week too late. Her face twisted into an unpleasant contortion that made it hard to see how beautiful she was. But I tried my best, because I knew about her disappointment over her father and the driving lessons. I realized my good fortune at being raised by Rain, who never broke a promise and never let me down in any way.
The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to do something nice for Sophie, to make her feel better. But how could that ever happen? Every time I went near her, she practically bit my head off.
9
NAME: SOPHIE DONNELLY
My mother is the most generous, caring, good-hearted, sympathetic person in the world. She even chose a career devoted to helping people. She’s a saint.
I always knew that lousy attitude was going to get us in trouble one day. Still, never in my wildest nightmares could I have imagined myself living with a refugee from Bizarro World.
The stuff he scraped off his feet alone would have been enough to get the house condemned by the board of health. God only knew what was living in his hair! And his clothes—I was amazed they didn’t get up and walk away on their own.
Mom insisted he was very clean. I told you about her—generous to a fault.
“He’s been wearing the same stuff for the past three weeks,” I accused.
“They just look the same because they’re all cotton tie-dyes,” she explained patiently. “He has plenty of clothes. I drove out to Garland myself to pick up his things.”
“I hope you brought extra shoes too,” I put in. “Somebody hung a pair of corn husk sandals on the high-voltage wires by the commuter line. I wonder who they belong to. I called Brad Pitt, but he’s wearing his.”
“Don’t be unkind,” she told me sharply. “The way those kids are teasing Cap is inhuman. Have a little compassion.”
“Have a little compassion for me,” I said sulkily. “Josh was just dropping me off while the freakazoid was scraping a third-world country off his feet. You know what he said? ‘Is that your brother, Sophie?’”
“What did you tell him?”
“What could I tell him? I said it was a homeless guy. A person can dream.”
My solemn vow: should Capricorn Anderson put the kibosh on my chances with Josh Weintraub, not even Mother’s social worker training could save him.
If Josh and I started dating—are you there, God? It’s me, Sophie—there’d be no way to keep that space alien off the radar screen. I could have sworn there were six of him. Wherever I wanted to be, that’s where he was—squeaking the porch swing, or hogging the kitchen table, eating those organic soy nuts Mom bought for him. He’d even started watching my favorite show, Trigonometry and Tears, the high-school soap opera. Because he had never seen TV before, he was a total addict who barked out warnings and advice to the characters on the screen.
“Will you shut up?” I yelled, not for the first time.
Even though he was embarrassed, he still defended himself. “Nick doesn’t know that Alison found out he’s been seeing Corinne on the side!”
“They’re actors! It’s a story! They can’t even hear you!”
And he understood. Sort of. But he didn’t stop talking to the TV. It was just too new to him. How would I ever explain that to Josh?
I needn’t have worried. That relationship was over before it started. I probably should have told Josh that Cap was my brother. Or maybe my husband. It would have saved me the most boring date of my life.
To think that I pulled strings and called in favors just to meet him! What a letdown. He talked about video games for three hours before telling me he was getting back together with his ex-girlfriend from Indiana. Rock on.
So I wasn’t in the best of moods when Josh took me home after the ordeal. There was only one thing that could have made this night any worse—face time with My Favorite Martian.
He was waiting for me on the porch. “Hi.”
“Where’s my mother?”
“Around the corner at the Peabodys’,” he told me. “Quick—we should have just about an hour.”
I was wary. “For what? To pick a few more staples out of your feet?”
He held up the car keys and jingled them in front of me. “Driving lessons.”
I stared at
him. “Driving lessons? From a little squirt like you?” Then I remembered what Mom had told me—that Cap had been arrested and released for driving without a license. At that lawless flower-child Camp Day-Glo, they probably let you drive when your foot could reach the pedal without breaking the moisture seal on your training pants.
“I know your other lessons got canceled,” he went on.
Oh, thanks, Mother. Someday I’ll repay you by telling your personal business to every passing hobo.
I felt betrayed, furious—and intrigued. My father was a total flake. He’d probably get around to giving me a lesson one day, but it would be pure random chance when and if it ever happened. And Mom’s killer schedule didn’t leave a lot of windows of opportunity.
I wanted to drive. I needed a teacher. Even if it had to be the freakazoid.
I did a lot of things I’d promised myself I’d never do. I got in the car with him. I listened to him and did what he told me to do. That idiotic Zen-hippie style of his turned out to be just right for a driving instructor. No matter what mistakes I made, it didn’t seem to faze Cap—not even when I thought someone’s driveway was a side street and turned onto it.
“Honest mistake,” said Cap, but, rattled, I stepped on the gas instead of the brake.
The Saturn burst forward. Suddenly, a white-painted garage door loomed out of the darkness, coming up fast.
I lost it. I didn’t even have the sense to take my foot off the gas. I was in mid-panic when Cap reached over and yanked on the steering wheel. We swung around, the tires of the Saturn churning soft earth as we plowed into a flower bed. The rough ride slowed us down long enough for him to reach over and shift into park. The car lurched to a halt.
“Abdominal breathing,” he ordered quietly. “In through the nose, out through the mouth.”
“But I almost—”
“There’s no almost,” he lectured serenely. “Only ‘happened’ and ‘didn’t happen.’ This didn’t happen.”
“Get us out of here!” I whimpered when my lungs refilled with air.
“You’ll do that. It’s a circular driveway. Just continue around.”
I was really panicking. Visions of an angry homeowner coming at us with a shotgun were whirling around my head. “I can’t! It’s too narrow, and there are trees on both sides! I’ll hit something!” At that point, I didn’t care if I never drove again. I just wanted to make it home alive in something that still resembled a Saturn.
He was endlessly patient. “This is a philosophy Rain passed on to me when she taught me how to drive our truck.”
I very nearly hit him. “This is no time for your hippie-dippy wisdom!”
But there was no stopping Cap when the subject was the immortal Rain. “She said, ‘If the front gets through, the rest will drag.’”
I stared at him. “That’s philosophy?”
“Rain used to drive a taxi in San Francisco before she formed Garland.”
I let out a nervous giggle, and it relaxed me. I put the car back in gear and aimed the hood between the two trees. May Mother never find out that I was piloting her precious Saturn on instructions from Rain, the face of so many of her childhood nightmares.
When we reached the road, I was panting with pure relief. The freakazoid made me pull over while he went back and replanted all the flowers I’d spun up. I was so grateful, I didn’t even kill him.
Surviving my first brush with disaster must have boosted my confidence, because I was a better driver after that. In short order, I was tooling around the neighborhood with something approaching skill. Pretty soon I even forgot that my learner’s permit probably wasn’t valid when I was in the car with someone even less qualified behind the wheel than I was.
I was so wrapped up in the experience that it took me a few seconds to recognize the female pedestrian we’d just passed.
“My mother!” I rasped. “Oh, man, we are so busted!”
He didn’t seem to understand. “Why?”
“Think, for once in your life! What does neither of us have? A driver’s license, maybe?” This was more serious than a few uprooted chrysanthemums. We were doing something highly illegal. “If she catches us, I’ll be grounded till I’m forty, and you’ll be sleeping in the street!”
For the first time, he seemed to realize that we weren’t playing by hippie rules. Obviously, Mom hadn’t noticed her car, because she wasn’t sprinting after us, yelling. Hands trembling, I turned off the block, and we switched drivers. I may have been bugging out, but I have to say Cap was totally cool under pressure. We had to go out of our way to avoid passing Mom again. But he whipped that car around corners, through darkened streets, and up into our driveway. We sprinted in the back door, and were on the couch in front of Trigonometry and Tears when she came in.
She regarded me suspiciously. “What?”
I immediately grasped the weak spot in our cover. Mother had left two teenagers at war, only to return home to a peace treaty.
So I turned to Cap and snarled, “Keep your split ends off my side of the couch!”
That seemed to mollify her. It was exactly the kind of thing I’d been saying to Cap ever since he’d arrived at our house three weeks before.
But my heart wasn’t in it that night.
10
NAME: NAOMI ERLANGER
The bad news: Lena said she didn’t have the hots for Darryl or for Grant Tubman—at least not until the infection in his tongue stud cleared up.
The good news: she didn’t come out and say she was interested in Zach. But how could she not be? He was by far the coolest guy at C Average, totally adorable, and the mastermind behind making Cap Anderson eighth grade president. Although, I have to admit I thought stealing his shoes went a little too far.
Zach didn’t agree. “Come on, what kind of person sits in front of his locker, with his eyes shut, barefoot, and mumbling in some foreign language? He was practically begging for it.”
I consoled myself with the fact that they weren’t even shoes. They were made out of some kind of dried leaves. Technically, we did Cap a favor, because the next day he showed up in real sneakers.
“We’re bringing him into the twenty-first century,” Zach insisted.
His eyes looked so sincere and so blue that I just had to go along with it. I couldn’t help myself. I kept on writing love notes from Lorelei Lumley to slip into Cap’s locker.
Dear Capricorn,
I waited all day and was heartbroken when you didn’t come. You must have thought I meant storeroom B-376 of the middle school. Silly me, I was in storeroom B-376 of the high school. There is no storeroom B-376 at the middle school. But I guess you already know that. Please, please, please give me another chance. Meet me at—
The rest was a giant tomato soup stain. I don’t know about Cap, but it would have driven me crazy.
Another note contained directions to a small courtyard off the library. There was only one door, and it locked as soon as it closed behind you. Poor Cap spent two hours in there, until a custodian found him and set him free. I felt pretty awful about it, but my hands were tied. I was with Zach. We watched from a spot on the roof, expecting him to go berserk. He never did. He called for help a few times, but mostly he spent the day in the lotus position, with his new sneakers off, meditating.
I could sense Zach was a little frustrated that Cap wasn’t putting on more of a show. “Why isn’t he yelling? Or crying? Or at least banging on the windows, begging for rescue?”
To be honest, I couldn’t explain it either. Cap was weird, but there was more to it than that. There was something inside him that nobody else understood, something mysterious and strong. Not muscle strong or fighting strong—a kind of strength that gave him the self-control to meditate instead of falling apart, or to ignore what other people thought, and find meaning in a dead bird.
I couldn’t say that to Zach, of course, so I tried to be supportive. “Look on the bright side,” I offered from our vantage point on the roof. “He didn’t g
o nuts, but he was down there a really long time.”
Zach was not consoled. “Yeah, and we were up here a really long time! What’s the point of pranking someone if the prank’s on you as much as on him?”
He had a point. Cap Anderson was the ultimate eighth grade president. He fell for every gag, hook, line, and sinker, more than a Luke Simard or a Hugh Winkleman ever would. There was only one problem: he wasn’t reacting. You could harass him; you just couldn’t upset him.
Even when Zach told him that he was expected to plan the entire Halloween dance, he was mellow about it. Last year, that was what had put Luke over the edge.
Cap just said, “I’ve never been to a dance.”
He didn’t even refuse to do it. But we knew he wasn’t going to.
That made Zach mad. “We should have hung him off the wires, not just his sandals.”
I only had one class with Cap—Math. He never opened his mouth, yet whenever the teacher called on him, he always came up with the answer. Zach claimed Cap was the dumbest kid in school, but he was really smart.
He had no friends, except maybe Hugh Winkleman, who had to be worse than nobody. Or maybe not—those two ate lunch together every single day. It looked like Hugh did most of the talking, but that made sense. Cap was new, and surely he had questions about everything that was happening to him. He had no way of knowing that the person he was using as a guide was an even bigger outcast than he was.
“So he’s friends with Winkleman, big surprise,” Zach sneered. “Nobody normal would ever hang out with him. The stuff he does—what kid in a million years would ever want to do it with him?”
He had a point. Meditation wasn’t big in middle school. When Cap wasn’t in the lotus position in front of his locker, he was usually in the music room, strumming a guitar and singing to himself. It was always sixties music too—I recognized the Beatles and some of the folksier stuff you hear on the classic rock stations. And every morning, he was out in the school yard, performing these slow-motion, dancelike martial arts moves. Zach called it hippie ballet, but I thought it was kind of graceful and athletic.