Free Schooled by Gordon Korman

teach me some of his kendo positions. I couldn’t wait to show them to Rain when we got back home.
    Another reason more people were speaking to me at school was this Halloween dance.
    Luckily, there was a dance on Trigonometry and Tears , so I sort of knew what to expect. It looked a lot like Rain’s description of riots back in the sixties—hundreds of people crammed belly to belly, waving their fists and shouting. I couldn’t figure out why anyone would want to do that for fun. But they did. It was all they talked about.
    “I don’t know what kind of food to get for the dance,” I said for at least the tenth time. “I didn’t even know people ate at a dance. I thought they danced.”
    “Yeah, but you need snacks and drinks and desserts,” said Holly van Arden (No. 130). “My neighbor goes to St. Andrews, and at their last prom, they had Create-Your-Own-Pizza. You design the pie, toss the dough, add the toppings, and it cooks while you’re dancing. People are still raving about it.”
    “Well, I think we should have that,” I decided. “Go ahead and set it up.”
    “It’s not cheap,” she warned. “They have to bring in these giant ovens on wheels.”
    I told her what Rain told me when I asked what would happen if we weren’t able to afford our monthly trips for supplies. “When you spend your life worrying about money, pretty soon money becomes your life.”
    “Cool!” she exclaimed. And she took on the job.
    In the identical way, people volunteered to handle drinks, desserts, posters, and decorations.
    The next morning when I arrived at school to do my tai chi, Holly van Arden asked if she could join me. Naomi was already waiting for us.

 
    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 the whole school 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 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 at the community.” Then he caught me off guard. “Do you want me to teach you?”
    Breakthrough.
    We reconvened the next morning in the 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