16
NAME: CAPRICORN ANDERSON
A few days later, Sophie and I got off the bus and started walking up to the house, as usual.
"Hey, isn't that your mom's car in the driveway?" I asked her, pointing to the parked Saturn. Usually, the driveway was empty when we returned home from school.
"Yeah, which means she's home early. Something's not right," she replied.
Sophie was right- her mom was in fact waiting for us in the kitchen.
"What happened, mother? Is everything alright?" Sophie asked her.
"Unfortunately not, dear."
Sophie looked even more worried than before. "Did something happen to dad?"
"Nothing that hasn't happened before," her mother sighed. "He took off without so much as a good-bye about an hour after you kids left for school."
Sophie shrieked and kicked over the kitchen chair.
"Oh, honey, don't feel bad. You know how he is."
"Anything I can do to help?" I cut in. An empty Dasani bottle missed my ear by inches. "Get the fuck out of here! Mind your own fucking business!"
"Sophie!" her mother exclaimed in horror. "You apologize to Cap!"
In answer, she raced for the stairs, pounded up to her bedroom and slammed the door.
I looked at Mrs. Donnelly. "I don't understand why Sophie's mad at me when I was only trying to make her feel better. Now that Mr. Donnelly's gone again, she's back to treating me as if I've crawled in from the septic tank."
"Please forgive Sophie," Mrs. Donnelly begged. "My ex-husband is not a terrible person, but he doesn't see things through. He rolls into town, gets everybody's hopes up, and then he's gone until the next time, when he does it all over again. I learned my lesson and got off the roller coaster, but my daughter hasn't figured it out yet."
I felt terrible for Sophie. She was really crushed. Mr. Donnelly left town so suddenly that she hadn't even gotten her bracelet back from the engraver. Who knew if she'd ever see it again? But, of course, it was a lot more than losing a silver bangle that upset her.
Life certainly gets complicated when you know more than one person. I could only imagine what it would be like when I knew eleven hundred, or even twenty-six hundred.
On Trigonometry and Tears, there was a character named Rishon, who really bothered me. He didn't cheat on his girlfriend like Nick, or spread computer viruses just for fun like Aurora, but his irresponsible behavior was almost impossible to bear.
Sophie definitely didn't agree. "What the fuck do you care? It's a TV show." Her mood had been in free fall since Mr. Donnelly's departure, although she had apologized to me over dinner that night for throwing the bottle.
"But if he doesn't retake the SAT to bring up his score, the University of Florida is going to withdraw his acceptance!" I exclaimed.
She looked at me pityingly. "So?"
"He hasn't even started studying! And he overslept and missed the practice test!"
"That's what they do on T & T," she explained. "They take perfectly normal people and turn their lives into fucking pond scum. That's why it's fun to watch. If everything was perfect, there'd be no story."
"But what's Rishon going to do next year?" I persisted.
"Probably find a part on a different show. He's an actor."
Because Sophie had been watching TV her whole life, and not just a few weeks like me, it was easier for her to watch Rishon throw his whole future away. For me, it was agony.
Rain always said that when we judge others, we're really judging ourselves. That was the real reason Rishon upset me. How could he think his SAT scores were going to go up by themselves? How could he ignore the fact that he was about to lose his spot in college?
It was all too familiar. As eighth grade president, I was in charge of the Halloween dance, and I was giving it the Rishon treatment. I was ignoring the whole thing, almost as if I thought it might go away.
Then, on T & T, it all worked out for Rishon. One of Aurora's viruses found its way into the admissions department computer at the University of Florida, wiping out half their records. All that was left indicated that Rishon was accepted. He ignored his problem—and the problem just sort of melted away.
With a growing sense of wonder, I realized that the same thing was happening with the dance. I was still doing nothing, yet somehow, the arrangements were being made. Students would come up to me in the halls; they would sing along when I played guitar in the music room; they would join in my morning tai chi routine—and then they would volunteer to help. So many people were working on the party that I was beginning to think we were actually going to have one.
No wonder T & T was such a popular show. It was practically an instruction manual for life.
Garland Farm followed simple logic: you plant tomato seeds; you get tomato plants. No seeds, no tomatoes. Cause and effect. But a real school was so messy and random that solutions sometimes fell into place by sheer luck. It was almost like getting tomatoes without first planting seeds.
I thought I'd never get used to the outside world, with its chaos and clutter. But with millions of puzzle pieces being tossed up into the air, it really did stand to reason that the occasional one would come down in the right place. That was why Rishon would go to college, and C Average would have its junior high Halloween dance.
Even Rain would have to admit that there was something kind of impressive about that.
"Anderson—come over here! I need a word with you." The words jolted me out of deep meditation. I looked up to see Mr. Kasigi glaring down at me.
"Why haven't you come to meet with me yet?"
I was floored. "I did—the day I registered."
"Don't play dumb with me, mister! I'm hearing talk of deejays and pizza ovens on wheels! How were you going to pay for all that?"
"I don't have any money."
He was getting red in the face. "Nobody expects you to pay for it! The school has money set aside for the junior high dance. But if you don't present your budget, I can't release one penny!"
"I don't have a budget," I explained honestly. "I just have people who help me do things."
"Like what? Fix your cuckoo clock?" He launched into a long speech about how he had volunteered to be on the program committee for some principals' conference, so he didn't have time to nursemaid me through Finance 101, whatever that was.
"But it's all taken care of," I tried to tell him. "The food, the music, the decorations—it all just worked out." I stopped myself before telling him about Rishon. I had a feeling Mr. Kasigi was not a T & T fan.
"And who's writing the checks?" he demanded.
"Checks?"
Rain had a checkbook, but I never saw her touch it. "Sometimes we use money to get along," she used to tell me, "But that doesn't mean we have to become its slave." To Rain, financial matters were a distasteful but necessary private function, like going to the bathroom.
Mr. Kasigi said I would have to write checks. Not only that, but he would have to cosign them, or they wouldn't count.
After school, he drove me to the bank. I'd never been in one before, but the instant I stepped inside, I knew this was a place that represented everything Rain and I were rejecting by living at Garland. Money was all that was important here. People were depositing it, withdrawing it, borrowing it, and paying it back. They were counting it in broad daylight. I honestly felt like running away.
But how could I? For one thing, there was a man in uniform guarding the door. I practically jumped out of my skin when I realized that he had a great big gun strapped to his hip.
Mr. Kasigi noticed my reaction. "Calm down, Anderson. He's a security man, not a bank robber."
Every time I thought I was fitting into my temporary life, something would remind me just how much of an outsider I still was. I wanted less than nothing of what this place had to offer, but to people outside Garland, money was so desirable that the bank had to hire armed guards to keep criminals from stealing it. When I finally got back home, I was going to drop to my knees and kiss the ground.
Mr. Kasigi and I met with an assistant manager. And when it was all over, I was holding a book of checks marked Claverage High School: Junior High Student Activity Fund. "You'll need these to pay for music and food," he explained, signing the first twelve checks on the spot. "And I'm sure there will be other expenses that come up. They always do."
I tried to tell him that I didn't know the deejay or the pizza company—that other students had made the arrangements. But he interrupted me with this long lecture about how this money belonged to everybody, not just me, and how I had to be responsible. And I would have been—if I had the slightest idea what he was talking about.
All I wanted was for him to leave so I could get out of this awful place. I wouldn't even let him drive me to the Donnellys'. I needed to walk there in the fresh air, just to get the smell of banking out of my nostrils.
A few blocks down the street, a sight met my eyes that stopped me in my tracks. There, in the display window of a small jewelry shop, gleamed a silver bangle with multicolored stones. It was exactly the same as Sophie's birthday gift from her father—the one he'd taken for engraving and never brought back.
I stepped into the store for a closer look. It was beautiful, but also kind of sad, because it reminded me of how upset Sophie had been lately.
The idea came immediately. If I bought this bracelet, had it engraved, and sent it to Sophie, she'd never know that it hadn't come from her father, and it would make her happy.
I didn't have any money. But I had something even better—checks, which automatically counted as exactly as much money as you wrote in that little box. It probably wasn't what Mr. Kasigi had in mind, but I remembered his exact words: Be responsible.
Rain always said that nothing was more responsible than doing what was in your power to make another human being happy.
"I'll take it," I told the woman behind the counter.
"It's a hundred and seventy-five dollars." She was wary.
"Do you accept checks?"
