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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.

 
    7
    NAME: MRS. DONNELLY
    As Cap’s caseworker, part of my job was to check in with the school from time to time to make sure he was doing well. That’s how I wound up having lunch with Frank Kasigi, assistant principal at Claverage Middle School.
    “Oh, don’t worry about Cap from an academic standpoint,” he assured me. “He’s right up there with our brightest and best. Commune or no, he’s been very well educated by someone.”
    I thought of Rain and shuddered, even after all these years. She had always been the teacher at Garland. For someone who rejected all forms of authority,