15

NAME: HUGH WINKLEMAN

Cap's best friend.

I was surprised when I overheard someone calling me that. Not that I had a problem with it. When people discussed me, the sentence usually began with "The biggest dork in junior high is…" Friend had to be a promotion from that.

And it was true. Well, true-ish. If anybody was his friend around here, I was. We spent a lot of time together, but only at school. For all I knew, he stepped off that bus with the hot senior high girl every afternoon and was whooshed into Dimension X—which might have explained a thing or two about his personality.

I tried to take the friendship further a couple of times, but he didn't want to join the chess club—he gave me a whole speech on the evils of competition. And when I invited him over to my house, he just said no. He wasn't being rude; he was just being Cap. Obviously, I couldn't invite myself to the place where he was staying, since that wasn't really his home.

Okay, I figured, how about neutral territory? Maybe I could coax him into a trip to the mall.

"That's a really cool shirt," I told him. "Where did you buy it?"

Another dead end. "Rain and I do our own tie-dyeing in the community." Then he caught me off guard. "Do you want me to teach you?"

Breakthrough.

We reconvened the next morning in the shared art room before classes. I brought a couple of plain white T-shirts, and Cap showed me how to scrunch, twist, and tie them up, securing them with rubber bands. Then he rummaged through the cabinets and took out enough chemicals to create a small nuclear bomb. Well, not really, but it was a lot of stuff—mostly paints and dyes, and solutions to make the colors permanent.

We were dipping the first shirt in a tub of purple when Miss Agnew came in to get ready for first period. Uh-oh, I thought, we'll be finishing this job in detention.

"Hugh Winkleman, I hope you've got permission—" Her eyes fell on my partner in crime. "You're Capricorn Anderson! I heard about what you did for Mr. Rodrigo. You're a hero!" She peered into the sink. "Wow, tie-dyeing! I haven't done that since college!"

When Miss Agnew's first period class showed up at the bell, they found the three of us up to our elbows in color and wet fabric. She sent them back to their lockers for T-shirts and gym shorts—anything that would take paint.

"But I thought we were drawing the human figure in motion," said one seventh grader.

"Tomorrow," Miss Agnew promised absently. "Today, we tie-dye."

She even called down to the office and got Cap and me excused from period one so we wouldn't get in trouble, but I guess the conversation didn't stop there, because a few minutes later, an announcement came over the PA:

"Those students interested in tie-dyeing with eighth grade president Capricorn Anderson should report to the art room."

Well, what self-respecting middle or high school kid would turn down a free pass to get out of work? We were mobbed in there. People were lined up with their towels, socks, underwear, and any canvas bag that was supple enough to be twisted and tied. Miss Agnew was in her glory. Never before had her art room seen such enthusiasm.

The star of the show was definitely Cap. He was demonstrating, helping, mixing colors, and hanging up finished work. This was more than just Tie-Dye Palooza. Junior high kids were asking him about the Halloween dance, and kids from both divisions were asking him about the bus-driving incident and hanging on his every word.

"Hugh, I'd like you to meet Sophie, my senior high housemate," Cap called, walking up to me alongside the beautiful girl who'd come to his aid on the bus and then left with the arresting officer.

"Hugh was my very first friend here," Cap explained to Sophie, noticing that I was at a loss for words.

"It's an honor to meet you, Sophie," I blurted out as I shook her extended hand. "It was great to see you helping and defending Cap on the bus that day."

Sophie shrugged and muttered, "Think nothing of it, Hugh, it was just the right thing to do." I stared at her, still dumbstruck that I had just been introduced to one of the most popular girls in the whole school and that she had actually greeted me by name.

Looking around the room, it hit me then—everybody in junior high had seen Cap at the assembly, and most of the senior high students had seen him around the halls here and there, but no one really knew him. Today had started out as my attempt to get a couple of shirts tie-dyed and hang out with Cap in the process. Yet before my eyes, it had turned into the eighth-grade president's coming-out party. There must have been at least 180 students in that huge room, and I'll bet ninety-five percent of them approached him at some point.

True to character, he asked all the new people their names and wrote them in his notebook.

For the rest of the day, the halls were ablaze with color as the artists proudly wore their creations, most of them still wet. It was a carnival atmosphere, with lots of pointing and laughing and high fives.

Which might explain why I almost didn't notice something else that was different about today: there wasn't a single spitball lodged in Cap Anderson's hair.

Not one.