23
NAME: FRANK KASIGI
The conference could not possibly have gone better. I was congratulated by so many people that it was almost embarrassing. Our district superintendent confided that the principalship of Claverage's senior high division would be opening up in a couple of years, and the job was mine for the asking.
I felt fantastic. Why wouldn't I? I returned to the school flushed with victory. I had no way of knowing that the key word in that sentence was going to be "flushed."
I'd expected a huge pile of mail, and a lot of phone messages and e-mails. But as I sifted through the papers and envelopes on my desk, the familiar logo of the Consolidated Savings Bank kept turning up.
I opened the one marked "Urgent" and unfolded the computer-generated page inside.
Dear Customer,
We are returning this check to you because your account is overdrawn, and the transaction cannot be honored. A service fee of $30.00 has been charged to your account.
Stapled to the page was a Claverage High School check with INSUFFICIENT FUNDS stamped across it in red. It was made out to the American Cancer Society in the amount of five hundred dollars. My own signature appeared on one of the lines. On the second was written Capricorn Anderson.
My office tilted, and I clung to the arms of my chair for fear of winding up on the carpet. This was one of the checks I'd given Anderson! Why was he donating five hundred dollars to the American Cancer Society? Not that it wasn't a worthy cause, but this money was supposed to pay for the junior high Halloween dance!
Hands shaking, I opened a few more envelopes. They were all the same—the March of Dimes, Habitat for Humanity, Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, all for hundreds.
An icy feeling spread northward from the base of my spine. If these checks were bouncing, it meant the money in the Student Activities Fund was gone! There had been four thousand dollars in that account!
I waded into the mountain of mail with both hands, tossing envelopes in all directions, until I came up with the bank statement. In it, the whole terrible story was laid out for me in detail.
There were the checks that I'd countersigned, the ones that had bounced, and the ones that hadn't. I saw the deposits for the food and music, and one or two other expenses that probably had to do with the dance. The rest were all made out to charities. One, to the March of Caring, was for a thousand dollars!
What was going on here?
I buzzed my secretary. "Get Capricorn Anderson down to my office. Immediately!"
"Capricorn Anderson is no longer a registered student here."
I nearly inhaled my tie. "Since when?"
"He left the school last Wednesday," came the reply. "His grandmother was released from the hospital."
"Get her on the fucking phone!" I yelled, losing all my self-control.
There was a brief pause, then, "It says here that they don't have a phone."
I did the only thing I could think of. I called Flora Donnelly. I left messages at her home, office, and cell number. I must have sounded pretty desperate, because she turned up within the hour.
By that time, I had already spoken to my bank manager and a very unfriendly assistant to the deejay, who accused me of "…hangin' rubber paper offa my man, yo," whatever that meant.
I turned beseeching eyes to the social worker. "This is your case, Flora. I know you have a special connection to this weirdo kid. Can you shine any light on this for me?"
She examined the evidence—the bank statements and the bounced checks. Her face was a sickly shade of gray. She looked like I felt.
Then she said something I didn't expect: "Frank, this is all your fault."
"My fucking fault?"
"What possessed you to give him signed checks?"
"I was going out of town!" I defended myself. "I didn't want him to be caught short. Besides, we always give the junior high kids some responsibility with the Student Activity Fund. They're adolescents. They're supposed to be able to handle it."
"I warned you that Cap Anderson is a boy who may as well have been raised on another planet."
"Okay," I admitted, "I noticed he wasn't exactly streetwise, but that didn't stop him from committing fraud."
"He's no more capable of fraud than of flying," she said flatly.
"It's right there in black and white!" I insisted. "This crafty son of a bitch found a way to take the school's money and make it look like he donated it to charity. I've got no choice but to call the police."
She was suddenly patient. "When you gave him those checks, did you explain to him what a check is and how it works?"
"Of course. I'm not a fool."
"No," she said. "I mean exactly how it works. That the amount of the check is deducted from the balance in the account? And that the money can run out?"
"Everybody knows you can't spend more fucking money than you have!"
"Frank, I never told you this. I lived on Garland Farm until I was twelve. When my family moved, I had never handled money. Not even a penny. Money was the key to everything that was wrong with the world, and the leaders of the community kept any kind of financial dealings completely hidden from us kids. I guarantee you that Cap had no idea that anyone had to pay for the checks he was writing. And the power to write them must have seemed almost magical. Once he realized that he could use that power to help people, there was no limit to how much he might try to give away."
I was thunderstruck. "Are you telling me that he really did take the entire Student Activity Fund and donate it to charity?"
She nodded. "He's got all the idealism of the sixties with none of the reality checks. He's not a criminal, he's the exact opposite—totally innocent in every sense of the word."
I held my head. "It would have been easier if the poor bastard robbed the school at gunpoint and took off for the Mexican border. That I could have explained to the board, and insurance would have covered it. What am I going to do? Call the March of Dimes and demand my money back?"
"You could try," she suggested reasonably. "This can't be the first time an unauthorized person misspent money."
"Yeah, to buy a fucking plasma TV, not to donate to charity."
Her face betrayed a ghost of a smile. "Don't worry. At Garland, there's nowhere to plug in a plasma TV."
"Here's a charge that doesn't look very charitable," I muttered, still studying the bank statement. "It's to a jewelry store on Main Street."
She looked over my shoulder. "I'm sure there's some explanation. Prizes, probably. Best dancer, best rap, most outrageous outfit—that kind of thing."
I nodded numbly. That was the moment when I realized there would be no dancing prizes, because there would be no dance.
It wouldn't be a popular decision, but I saw now that this was the only way. Sure, I could fight with the bank, or plead with the charities. But it would just make me look like a fool. Or I could drive out to this Garland place and demand that the grandmother replace the funds Cap frittered away. Still—who knew if they had any money at all? They were living an alternative lifestyle forty years after the rest of the world had given it up. The local papers would have a field day reporting that while I was running a junior high principals' conference in Las Vegas, my trusted eighth grade president was emptying my treasury.
The senior high principalship was not going to be offered to a court jester.
No, I had to cancel the dance, recoup what I could, and eat the rest.
Flora Donnelly was right. This was my fault, but not for her reasons. I had long suspected how the middle school kids went about picking their eighth-grade president.
And when I chose to look the other way, I was sort of putting a stamp of approval on it. But I always knew that one day it would blow up in their faces.
I just never thought it would blow up in mine.
