30

NAME: ZACH POWERS

Wow.

What a lightning strike. Like crashing your own funeral.

Hugh fell off the flatbed. I didn't blame him. I was seriously thinking about taking a dive myself. This didn't make me look so great either.

The people close in realized who had just shown up. They went berserk, hugging Cap and shrieking with joy. Farther back, there was a buzz of confusion. Something was going on, but nobody could figure out what.

Finally, a couple of 12th grade men in the front row- Jason and his friends- helped Cap onto the truck. The wind took his long blond hair and blew it into a halo around his face, backlit by a streetlamp.

The roar from twenty-six hundred throats combined shock, disbelief, happiness, and even love. I was used to crowd noise from playing football, but I never experienced anything like this. The whole ground shook. The sound was so deafening that loud echoes bounced off houses and buildings. It was unreal.

The hairball tried to say something. Forget it. There was no way anyone was going to hear him over the sounds of celebration that he was still among us. He had a couple of shiners and a cut on his nose where Darryl had decked him. Yet it was obvious to everybody that the eighth-grade president was not hospitalized, not suffering from amnesia, not in a vegetative state, and was very, very much alive.

Naomi, her face glowing and streaked with tears, reached down for the fallen microphone and handed it to Cap. Still the thunderous ovation went on. I clocked six full minutes, but it might have been longer.

Finally, the tumult died away, and an expectant silence covered the crowd.

Cap shuffled uncomfortably and said, "This isn't the Halloween dance, right?"

A wave of laughter greeted this. I'll bet I was the only one out of the twenty-six hundred who knew that he wasn't joking—me and Winkleman.

"I can't believe so many people were worried about me," he went on. "I'm fine. I just had to go home because Rain got out of the hospital. My life isn't here anymore. I live at Garland Farm."

He seemed to spot someone at the edge of the crowd and gave a shy wave in that direction. I followed his line of vision and noticed an old lady who waved back with a cane. Even if she hadn't made that gesture, I would have been able to pick her out. She was the only mature adult in hippie clothes—a peasant blouse, long cotton skirt, Day-Glo headband with a yin/yang disk in the center of her forehead. Stunned disbelief was the only way to describe her reaction to the sight of Cap on the receiving end of all that love. Trust me, I could relate.

"Rain," he said gravely, "I'm sorry I came here when you said not to. I only did it because I really wanted to see a dance. But there was another reason too. I left school before I had a chance to say good-bye to everybody. So, I guess I should start that now."

He turned to the right side of the front row. "Good-bye Jason…good-bye Trudy…good-bye Leo…good-bye Ariel…good-bye Trevor…good-bye Mike…"

There was a titter of amusement that died out quickly when people realized that he wasn't stopping.

"…Good-bye Daniel…good-bye Raj…good-bye Heather…good-bye Naomi…good-bye Jordan…good-bye Lena…good-bye Hugh…"

This was getting weird. He went all the way across the first row, and then started along the second in the opposite direction. By this time, there was absolute silence in the parking lot.

"…Good-bye Daisy…good-bye Emily…good-bye Julius…good-bye Sam…"

He was halfway down the third row when I finally clued in. Cap wasn't planning to say, "Good-bye, everybody." He was saying good-bye—to everybody!

I had a flashback to the junior high assembly two months ago, when Kasigi had first proclaimed him president. As a goof, I'd told the kid that he had to learn everyone's name. And somehow, by some miracle, he'd actually done it! Not just the names of all the junior high kids, but also all the senior high kids.

"…Good-bye Severin…good-bye Jay…good-bye Kelly…good-bye Phil…"

No football player could fail to recognize what I was experiencing right then. It was the moment on the field when you realize that you're completely, hopelessly outclassed. When I looked at the hairball on the payload, I didn't see the eighth-grade president; I saw the Super Bowl champions. There was no defeating a kid who could memorize the names of not only a division but an entire high school.

"…Good-bye Natasha…good-bye Annabel…good-bye Patrick…good-bye Marco…"

It took almost two and a half hours, but nobody moved. We barely uttered a sound. It was the kind of performance that came along once in a lifetime, and you didn't want to miss one second. It was like being a part of history.

Twenty-six hundred students. Twenty-six hundred names. He never hesitated, and he never got one wrong.

We wouldn't even have known he was finished except that he set the microphone down on the flatbed and started to climb off.

Nobody let him. Darryl rushed over, hoisted him onto his shoulders, and began to tote him through the cheering crowd. Naomi and Lena were at their side, screaming their heads off. I waded over to join them. After all, they were my friends, and it was time to bury the hatchet. Hippie-loving friends were better than no friends at all.

Cap called down to us, "Rain's waiting," so we headed for the older lady in the yin/yang headband.

It was slow going, because everybody in the place wanted to high-five the living legend. Navigating all those outstretched arms was like plowing through a field of bamboo.

When Darryl finally deposited Cap onto the tarmac beside Rain, she barely noticed him. She was being chewed out by a younger woman who I'd seen around the school a few times. Standing next to this woman was a man who I guess was her husband.

"…What he did with those checks—as a mature adult, he could go to jail for that!"

Rain's face was ashen. "He tried to give the school's money to charity?"

"Who taught him any different?" the woman ranted. "I remember your brand of education! None of us had the faintest idea how to survive in the real world! I was lucky—I had parents. Who's Cap going to turn to? You won't live forever, you know.…"

So that was what happened with the checks! It wasn't Kasigi; it was pure Cap, taking the hippie thing too far, as usual. And instead of getting arrested for it—which would have happened to the rest of us—he was elevated to rock-star status.

Cap regarded his grandmother nervously. "Are you mad at me?"

"Of course not," she told him. Then she turned to the younger woman. "Good-bye, Floramundi." It didn't sound friendly.

"Bye, Cap!" piped up Darryl as grandmother and grandson got into a double-parked pickup truck.

"We love you!" Naomi yelled as the two sets of hippie hair disappeared down the street.

The woman called Floramundi and her husband hugged Sophie, who I realized must be their daughter. Sophie was holding a rubber Minnie Mouse mask. I did a double take. Sophie was Cap's date? The Minnie to his Mickey?

Unbelievable! While he was busy turning C Average on its ear, Cap still had time to pick up a supermodel. Had the whole world gone crazy? I spun around like a victim of amnesia, desperately searching the parking lot for a glimpse of something—anything—that made sense.

And there, in the dispersing crowd, my eyes found Hugh Winkleman. He looked terrible—his clothes disheveled, his glasses bent and askew. He was such a dweeb, but he was almost my dweeb now—the only kid who'd stuck by me while the whole school flocked to the hairball.

I was kind of starting to appreciate that man.