He was serene. “I’ve been inside that bank, Hugh. They’ve got plenty of money for everything.” He tore off the check and handed it to Naomi.
She took one look at it and let out a shriek that raised the roof clean off the school.
Lena gawked over her shoulder. “A thousand dollars?”
“What?” I wheeled on Cap. “Are you nuts? You can’t give away that much!”
“Rain says there should be no limit on giving,” he lectured serenely. “Only taking.”
“She’s not the one Mr. Kasigi’s going to strangle—”
But my words were lost in the excited buzz as students flocked around to investigate the source of Naomi’s scream. Lena took the check from her and held it up for the crowd. There were oohs and aahs.
“You’re awesome, Cap!” Naomi cried emotionally. “Awesome!”
Darryl nodded fervently. “You’re the man!”
Suddenly, everybody was clapping and cheering. I was blown away. Not one of those idiots had the faintest idea that Cap’s donation came straight out of the budget for the Halloween dance.
I wanted to scream: Look at the check! The school’s name is printed right on it! This money is yours—mine—all of ours!
That was when I experienced a moment of stunning understanding. Popularity had nothing to do with the truth. If these kids took a minute to ask themselves where Cap got off writing thousand-dollar checks, they’d be rioting, not applauding. But what really mattered was image. The eighth grade president was a star now. Nobody questioned it when he did something wonderful, because that’s exactly what was expected of him.
All the adulation must have been overwhelming to someone like Cap, who was so accustomed to peace and quiet. He pushed his way through a barrage of high fives and ducked into the bathroom. I followed him, struggling with my own feelings about this. I wanted to be happy for the guy, but why? Because he did something stupid? His entire rise to fame seemed bizarre. Random. Dumb.
“Must be nice,” was all I could think to mutter.
“It is nice,” he agreed in wonder. “I couldn’t have imagined how good it feels when so many people like you.”
I recoiled as if he’d slapped me. Being liked was a feeling I didn’t know. That I might never know. And to have that rubbed in my face by my one kindred spirit, the only person around who was more of an outsider than I was—it was the ultimate insult.
I didn’t care if he grew up on Pluto, let alone some hippie commune. To say that to me—someone who’d never experienced a popular minute, much less a popular day—was beyond cruel. Nothing could have made me feel worse than I did at that instant.
The door was flung mightily open, and into the boys’ room burst Naomi, her face pink with daring. She threw her arms around Cap and pressed a long kiss right on his mouth.
Cap was so shocked that he crumpled against the stall door when she let go.
“To be continued,” she said meaningfully, and ran out of the bathroom.
I glowered at him through eyes that were barely slits. Hero status wasn’t good enough for him anymore. He had to be a heartthrob too.
I was finished with Capricorn Anderson.
19
NAME: ZACH POWERS
I saw a show last night with a bunch of scientists arguing over what the signs will be when the world is coming to an end. They talked about asteroids, volcanoes, and melting ice caps.
Small minds.
When Cap Anderson becomes the most popular, happening kid at C Average Middle School, that’s the end of the world. Especially when you consider that the guy he replaced was me.
It was all because of that stupid dance. How could a hippie who knew less than nothing about parties organize the middle school bash of everybody’s dreams?
“It’s your own fault,” Lena accused. “You recruited half the school to bug him, and he turned them into an army of volunteers.”
She had a point. With the exception of me and the Hairball-in-Chief, everyone was working on the Halloween dance—even the cool people. Darryl was hauling huge rolls of construction paper to the decorations people in the art room. Naomi was designing reflective mobiles to hang from the basketball hoops. Lena was on the committee to cover the bleachers with orange-and-black bunting. Even cheap paper chains were impressive when you had eleven hundred kids stringing them.
“This is going to be the greatest party we’ve ever had!” Naomi enthused. “I’ll bet we get a thousand kids.”
“And that’s just the planning committee,” I added sourly.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Ignore him,” Lena put in. “He’s in mourning because he thinks Cap stole his year.”
“Our year,” I corrected. “And he’s making it into 1967!”
“You shouldn’t be so hard on Cap,” Darryl told me. “Sure, he’s weird, but he’s the best eighth grade president we’ve ever had.”
“Eighth grade president isn’t a real job,” I seethed. “It’s a joke, remember?”
“Well, maybe it started that way,” Naomi said earnestly. “But Cap Anderson is the most amazing person I’ve ever known.”
I snorted. “Anybody can be amazing handing out thousand-dollar checks.”
Now that had caught me off guard. What was up with all this charity? He gave eight hundred to the food drive in the cafeteria. Five hundred to cancer research. The same to Alzheimer’s disease. They may have called it the March of Dimes, but that didn’t stop Cap from forking over six-fifty. He even stuck checks into the slots of those cans designed for people to drop their spare change.
Mr. Kasigi had to be behind it somehow. Cap wouldn’t be allowed to throw around big chunks of school money without permission from the office. Maybe the whole thing was a lesson about philanthropy. It bugged me. The eighth grade president wasn’t supposed to set a good example. His job was to make an idiot out of himself and have a nervous breakdown. But no, the assistant principal had to set Cap up for sainthood!
Whatever Kasigi was thinking—if he was thinking—I was the one paying the price. I was spending more and more of my time arguing with my friends, and all because of that hairball.
My year. Yeah, right. More like my minute.
How do you think I felt at lunch on Tuesday when I walked out of the food line with my tray and found Cap Anderson at my table, in my seat? Okay, it was a big cafeteria, but I’d been working my way up to that position since the very first day of sixth grade. It hadn’t taken me more than thirty seconds to look around the room and know that this was the place where the masters of the universe ate their tuna fish sandwiches. It was near the wall of windows, but not so close as to get too hot on sunny days. Yet, at the end of the period, a shaft of light always seemed to shine down like a spotlight on the person sitting in the end chair. My chair—at least until today.
Those filtered rays were shining now on the haystack of Sasquatch hair. I stared at Darryl. The gutless wonder wouldn’t even look me in the eye. He was concentrating on the exit sign over the door, which may or may not have been a message for me to get out. Naomi was focused on Cap, which meant nobody else in the building existed. Lena was the only one with the nerve to face me. Her look plainly announced that not only had I lost my spot, but I wasn’t welcome to pull up a chair and squeeze in either.
Fuming, I turned away.
Crash!
It was a tray-to-tray collision. My split pea soup sloshed onto his egg-salad sandwich; his Tater Tots flipped into my banana cream pie; his Snapple tipped over, raining down on my shoes.
I stared at the idiot as iced tea soaked into my socks. The last person I wanted to see just then.
Hugh Winkleman.
He stood frozen with fear, probably straining all those math brain cells to calculate how big a wedgie he’d just earned himself. Let me tell you, he should have been thinking huge. I had half a mind to stick a booster rocket under his waistband and launch it into orbit.
“You—”
A
nd then I took in the expression on his face, and it was like looking in a mirror. He was staring at his hippie friend, who now had no time for him. And I was staring at my friends—same story.
In a way, it was more depressing than anything that had happened so far. I, Zach Powers, had something in common with this loser. That had to be rock bottom.
Still, there was only one other person in the whole school who was as disgusted as I was by all this hippie-mania. And that person had just dropped his lunch on me.
“Uh—sorry,” he said nervously.
I felt an odd rush of emotion. It wasn’t affection, trust me. But Hugh represented an earlier time at this school—before the space capsule landed and barfed up Cap Anderson. A time when things made sense.
Hugh was the one who should have been eighth grade president all along. Heck, if I’d met Cap twenty-four hours later, it probably would have happened exactly that way. Then this would still be my year, and Cap would be nothing more than a walking bad-hair day nobody really knew.
“Don’t worry about it,” I told Hugh. “Listen—we’ve got to talk.”
He looked so suspicious that I felt a pang of remorse for the mean things I’d said and done to him since kindergarten. In all the years I’d known him, we’d never had a conversation that hadn’t been a sham to lure him through a door with a bucket of ice water balanced on top. Sure he was suspicious. Wouldn’t you be?
“About Cap Anderson,” I elaborated, “and everything that’s been going on.”
Hugh expanded his tunnel vision on Cap to include an inventory of the guy’s tablemates. He sneered at me. “Oh-ho-ho! Looks like somebody’s been replaced!”
I swallowed my pride. “You’ll notice Cap isn’t hanging with you anymore.”
“I was his friend when no one else would talk to him,” Hugh said resentfully. “When you and your cronies were trying to ruin his life.”
“Well, whatever we were plotting, it obviously didn’t happen. He’s practically the king of the school.”
Hugh nodded slowly. “I don’t like it either.”
“It doesn’t have to be this way,” I pressed on.
He rounded on me. “You are such a jerk! Whoever told you that the whole world performs according to your instructions? That’s what started this whole mess—you trying to make poor Cap dance to your tune!”
“I don’t remember you warning the guy off when we nominated him for eighth grade president,” I snarled.
“Because I was grateful the nominee didn’t turn out to be me.”
I pounced on this. “So you let Cap swallow the hook. Now who’s the manipulator? You’re just as guilty as I am.”
“Maybe so, but I’m not stupid,” he said hotly. “Making Cap your victim blew up in your face. Now you want him out so you can stick me in his place.”
“It’s not like that,” I pleaded. “Look, Cap’s president. We’re stuck with that. But there’s still time to puncture the tires of this bandwagon before the Halloween dance ratchets him up to icon status.”
“No way! Just because I’m mad at Cap doesn’t mean I’m going to help you stab him in the back!”
At my table, Naomi leaned over and dabbed delicately at a ketchup smear on the side of Cap’s mouth. I almost upchucked. “Will you look at that!”
Hugh had been watching too, his face twisted with distaste. He said, “To be continued.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing,” he muttered, not quite meeting my eyes. “What do you need me to do?”
I shrugged. “Simple. The whole school thinks he’s immortal. We just have to show them they’re wrong.”
20
NAME: CAPRICORN ANDERSON
I don’t remember exactly when I stopped keeping count of how many people’s names I knew. It was somewhere in the three hundreds, and the total had to be even higher now.
The yearbooks made the biggest difference. I’d look at those little black-and-white pictures, and suddenly an image of someone I’d seen around school would pop into my head. And poof, I’d know another student.
I was kind of lagging behind on the sixth graders because they weren’t in the C Average yearbook. But Mrs. Donnelly had the elementary books as well. And there they were—the graduating fifth-grade class.
Rain would be proud. I used the memory technique she had learned from a college professor who’d passed through Garland in the early seventies. You find a connection between the name and something about the person. For example, Monique rhymes with streak, and she had a blond streak in her dark hair. Darryl was built like a huge barrel. But sometimes I had to be a little more creative. Seventh-grade Ron had a birthmark shaped like a crab, which made me think of the Crab Nebula. AstRONomy. It sounds difficult. But once your brain is used to working that way, it happens almost automatically.
For someone who grew up knowing only one person, suddenly knowing hundreds of them was a little intimidating. But I had to admit it was kind of wonderful too.
In Sophie’s opinion, studying old yearbooks was just another reason why I had to “get a life.” Of all the things she said to me, this was maybe the most baffling. How could I get a life when I was obviously already alive?
We were seeing less and less of each other, despite the fact that we were in the same house. Sophie’s driving test was in a week, so she never passed up a chance to practice with her mother. And she wasn’t watching TV with me anymore because Trigonometry and Tears had gone into reruns, which meant they were showing old stories that we’d already seen.
I thought it was fantastic, because it gave you another chance to notice things you might have missed the first time around.
She rolled her eyes at me. “We just saw this episode two weeks ago. Lashonda flunks home ec and gets caught lending Troy’s letter jacket to that college guy she’s been dating on the side.”
I wished she hadn’t said that, because I wanted to be surprised again, even though I knew it was going to happen.
But she’d been fairly upbeat lately. She was excited about her road test, and so happy with her bracelet. I was thrilled that I’d been able to do that for her.
The best thing about being eighth grade president was definitely the checks Mr. Kasigi had given me. It was funny—a money-obsessed world was the main reason Rain had dropped out and formed Garland. Yet, in my experience, money was really excellent, and every time I spent it, someone ended up smiling.
I was planning to mention it the next time Rain and I spoke on the telephone. Money could help hospitals and disaster victims and starving orphans. What was so terrible about it? Thanks to Mr. Kasigi’s checks, I was in a position to lend a hand. It was everything she had taught me to believe in.
Mr. Kasigi would be back from his conference next week. I couldn’t wait to show him how good I’d become at using money. Also, I needed some more checks. The first batch was almost finished.
He was going to be impressed.
C Average Middle School had three lunch periods of forty minutes each. On Wednesday, classes were canceled during that two-hour block so everyone could go to the football field.
Hugh explained it to me. “It’s a pep rally.”
“Pep?” I repeated.
“You know, cheering, excitement, rah, rah, rah. The whole school gets together to watch the players bonk helmets and beat their chests.”
“And that takes two hours?” I queried. I was getting better at understanding school customs, but this one didn’t make much sense to me.
“Not really,” Hugh admitted. “Most of that time is getting everybody in and out again. But it’s pretty intense. We play Rhinecliff on Saturday, and they’re our biggest rivals.”
“Over what?”
“Football, of course. And as the eighth grade president, you have an important role.”
Rain and I weren’t sports fans, what with the obsession over winning and losing. But I couldn’t disappoint everybody after they’d made me feel so welcome.
I followed Hugh into the mass migration of students heading out of the building at eleven fifteen. We were a noisy procession, with horns and cowbells and excited voices chanting rhyming cheers.
It was hard not to be swept up in it, even though I wasn’t sure what it was about. So much of school was like that—more a feeling than anything of substance.
“What’s my part in all this?” I asked Hugh.
He led me away from the crowd thundering onto the metal bleachers and into a low hut marked LOCKER ROOMS. We slipped through a door that said VISITORS.
Hugh plucked a set of large pads off a wall hook and placed them on my shoulders. “You’re going to be out there with the team.”
I was alarmed. “I don’t know how to do football.”
“Don’t worry,” he soothed me. “It isn’t a game. You just have to show your support for the team.”
As if on cue, the PA system crackled to life. “Faculty and students, give it up for your very own Claverage Condors!”
Running feet clattered in the hall outside. The field exploded with cheers. Even more deafening was the metallic boom of thousands of feet on the bleachers. A band was playing, but it was barely audible over the crowd noise.
“Am I late?” I asked anxiously.
“No,” Hugh replied, “you’re going to be right on time.” He eased a yellow football jersey over my head and began tucking my hair under a matching helmet.
“Maybe I need a bigger hat,” I suggested.
“Maybe you need a haircut,” he countered, cramming the bulky headgear into place.
A faceguard lowered itself into my field of vision. I felt like I was peering out from behind a fence.
“Is that really necessary?” I asked.
“Definitely.”
For an instant, I thought he looked kind of sad. I was concerned. “Is everything okay?”
“When is everything ever okay with me?” he complained. “Now get out there and make the school proud.” He pointed me through the doorway, which led down a concrete tunnel and onto the field.
The crowd noise swelled to a deafening crescendo. But you know how cheers sound friendly? This was different—angrier. Mean, even. I scanned the bleachers and saw a sea of hostile faces staring straight at me.