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she was a major tyrant in the classroom. If she hadn’t adopted the hippie lifestyle, she would have made a terrific Marine drill sergeant.
    Then Mr. Kasigi let the other shoe drop. “Yet socially—in my entire teaching career, I’ve never met a student who knows so little about ordinary everyday living. Have you worked with any other students from this Garland Farm?”
    “Only one,” I replied faintly. “She had a very difficult adjustment.” I didn’t bother to mention that “she” was me.
    “Adjustment is one thing. But Cap is like a space traveler who just landed on Earth and left his guidebook on the home world! Is it possible that he honestly believes bullfighting is a sport we play in middle school?”
    “Bullfighting?” I repeated. “How did that subject come up?”
    His reply posed far more questions than it answered: apparently, Cap had asked about it as part of his duties as eighth grade president.
    Eighth grade president? How could a brand-new student, who didn’t know a soul in the place, get himself elected president?
    It made no sense to me. But later on, my sixteen-year-old daughter acted like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
    “Duh—eighth grade president isn’t an honor, Mother. It’s like being elected village idiot. Every year they pick the biggest wing nut in the building. It must have seemed like the freakazoid dropped straight from heaven to fill the post.”
    I was horrified. “Sophie—that’s awful!”
    She shrugged. “What’s really awful is that you’re a social worker—with power over kids’ lives—and you have no clue about what’s common knowledge at that school.”
    “Did this happen when you were in eighth grade?”
    “Remember Caitlin Tortolo? She didn’t really win a semester in Europe. She left school early to have a nervous breakdown.”
    “And you participated in it?”
    “Everybody did,” she retorted. “At least, we did nothing to stop it. If you don’t go along with the gag, you’re next.” I must have looked disapproving, because she added, “Grow up, Mother. The world’s a big, tough, scary place—like you don’t know that.”
    Actually, I did know that. I didn’t realize she knew it.
    I felt terrible for poor Cap. It was hard enough for him to come out of total isolation at Garland without having to be dropped into the snake pit that was middle school. Worse, I couldn’t even warn him about it—not without poisoning his one-and-only experience of the real world.
    My sole consolation lay in the fact that he would have to suffer this abuse only for a few weeks more. His grandmother was recovering well. I’m sure he would have liked to visit her more often. But the facility was an hour away, more with traffic, and there just wasn’t time to take him during the week.
    Anyway, deep in my heart I believed that a genuine school, nasty and merciless as it could be, was still better than Garland Farm.
    Besides, nastiness was relative. After school, Cap had to come home to my house, where Sophie was there to demonstrate the true meaning of nasty. She hated Cap Anderson with a passion that I wouldn’t have believed her capable of—and I was her mother.
    Even when he did things that had nothing to do with Sophie, she took them personally. His healthy vegetarian diet she considered a slap in the face to her own eating habits. His neatness was a deliberate ploy to make her appear messy. She couldn’t bear that Cap woke up early to practice tai chi on our front lawn.
    “But, Sophie,” I tried to reason, “why would it matter to you? You’re barely awake at that hour.”
    “It’s humiliating!” she raged. “We might as well put a sign on the roof that says ‘Warning: Mutant on Premises!’”
    The next morning, when Cap was performing the dancelike martial arts moves by the dogwood bushes, my darling daughter emptied an entire wastebasket full of water down on his head. This she followed with a string of language that would have