Schooled Read Online Free PDF Page B

set fire to the sidewalk. All from the girl who was so concerned about what the neighbors might think.
    He looked up at her and he smiled—instead of heaving a rock through her window, which is what I would have done. Oh, what a sight he was, with all that hair hanging limply around his shoulders. He looked like a weeping willow in soggy sandals.
    According to Sophie, the entire incident was my fault. By bringing Cap into our home, I had left her no choice but to take matters into her own hands.
    Since Sophie was never going to apologize to Cap, I did it myself.
    “I’m so sorry, dear,” I said, handing him a towel that wouldn’t have dried one tenth of his abundant hair. “You have to forgive Sophie, although I can’t think of a reason why.”
    He looked sad. “She doesn’t like me.”
    I smiled. “Sixteen-year-old girls don’t like anybody.”
    His answer brought me straight back to my Garland days. “When you’re unkind to others, it’s usually because you don’t believe that you, yourself, deserve kindness.”
    “Don’t be so nice,” I said. “She can be pretty mean. In her defense, she’s been through a lot in the last couple of weeks. Her father—my ex-husband—his heart’s in the right place, but he makes a lot of promises he can’t keep. And Sophie ends up caught in the middle. Just yesterday, she was waiting for him to pick her up for her first driving lesson. He never showed. That’s him—doesn’t come, doesn’t call, dead air. She won’t admit it, but she’s devastated.”
    He looked thoughtful. “I guess when you have a lot of people in your life, there’s more of a chance that someone will let you down.”
    I laughed. “You’re right. But it’s a risk most of us are prepared to take.”
    Cap looked dubious. He had grown up with exactly one person in his life—Rain. And regardless of what I thought of her, to him she had been as constant as the rising sun.
    How terrifying must it be to lose that?

 
    8
    NAME: CAPRICORN ANDERSON
    I really missed Rain.
    My whole life, whenever I got confused, there she’d be to explain it all to me. One time I remember, we were in Rutherford, laying in a supply of tofu. We grew our own fruits and vegetables at Garland, but everything else had to be brought in from outside. Then we stopped at the hardware store to stock up on duct tape, which was just about the most useful thing on earth for a farm commune. It repaired roofs, walls, pipes, cars, furniture, and boots. At least a quarter of Garland was held together with the stuff. It made an instant cast for a broken finger, and even pulled splinters out of your skin. Before I was born, when there were lots of young children growing up in the community, all those diapers used to be fastened by squares of duct tape.
    But when we got to the store, there was a group of people blocking the entrance. They were carrying signs and chanting. They seemed to be really angry about something.
    Rain explained that the employees were on strike, standing up for fair treatment. She thought it was an excellent idea. She refused to cross the picket line, so we drove twenty miles out of our way to buy our duct tape. We came back, though, and marched with the strikers for a couple of hours. Rain even let me unscrew the knobs to let the air out of the tires of the boss’s car.
    Rain said the trip was the purest form of education—learning by doing. I sure could have used that kind of wisdom now, with so much going on in my life and so many things I didn’t understand.
    Like bullfighting. I asked Mrs. Donnelly about it, but the subject really seemed to bother her. She advised me to ignore anyone who mentioned it again. So I looked it up in the encyclopedia, and I figured out why Mrs. Donnelly was so upset. Bullfighting is a cruel sport where innocent animals are tormented, tortured, killed, and have their ears cut off.
    I needed Rain more than ever to ask her why a school would have anything to do with that. But she