Schooled Read Free Page A

on thick. “They don’t have regular time at school, you know. They have periods. All of a sudden an alarm goes off and you’re supposed to drop what you’re doing and rush off to a different room with a different teacher to do something completely different! How can anybody learn like that?”
    There was a knock at the door, and Mrs. Donnelly poked her head into the room. She lived at Garland for a while when she was a kid, so she understood how great it was and how much I wanted to get back there.
    “Hello, Rain. How are you feeling?”
    “It’s been a long time, Floramundi.” Rain looked her up and down. “It’s wonderful to see that you’ve done well since your family abandoned the lifestyle and value system they believed in.”
    They talked about her parents and a few other people. Some of the names were familiar, but I didn’t remember anybody. The days of Garland as a thriving commune were over long before I was born in 1994.
    It was a friendly conversation, but every time Rain called her Floramundi, Mrs. Donnelly got kind of tense. Maybe that was because her family left Garland, so she couldn’t live there anymore. I knew how that felt.
    Anyway, we were soon on our way home—her home, not mine, unfortunately.
    Her house was pretty nice, except it had too many stairs. There didn’t seem to be any more purpose for them than there had been for the fight at school earlier in the day. The living room was a few steps down; the bedrooms were a few steps up; and the kitchen was in the middle. Mrs. Donnelly called it a split-level. But what was the point of splitting a house when you could just make it flat and not have any stairs at all?
    Everything was more complicated in the world outside the community. The buildings at Garland were made of wood, period. Here there was wood in some places, but also brick, stone, and aluminum. Inside, there was carpet and tile, white walls and other colors, and hundreds of pictures, curtains, tassels, clocks, figurines, and a million different things that might have been useful, but might have been just for decoration too. Who could tell? It seemed like an awful lot of stuff for just one house.
    Mrs. Donnelly lived here with her daughter, Sophie. And, of course, me, now.
    Sophie was sixteen. She went to the high school. I didn’t much like it that I had to be here. Multiply that by fifty, and that’s how much Sophie didn’t like it that I had to be here.
    “Mother—are you on drugs? How could you bring that—that freakazoid into our house?”
    “Shhh—Sophie. He’ll hear you.”
    “I want him to hear me!” Sophie shrieked. “How else is he going to get the message to clear out?”
    “He has nowhere else to go,” Mrs. Donnelly pleaded.
    “And that’s my problem? Just because he comes from the same hippie-dippie flea circus where you grew up doesn’t mean we have to adopt him!”
    “Lower your voice,” her mother ordered sternly. “It’s only for six weeks—two months at the outside.”
    “Two months ? I have to live my life! Do you know how long it took me to get Josh Weintraub to ask me out?
What’s he going to think when he drives up and sees this tie-dyed streak of misery draped across the porch?”
    This whole conversation went on before either of us had spoken a single word to the other. I didn’t actually talk to Sophie until later that night when I accidentally blundered into her room. She was in her pajamas, speaking on the phone while smearing pale green cream all over her face.
    She threw down the handset. “You. Out. Now. ”
    I stood frozen, staring at her. “What—what’s on your face?”
    “Oh, right, you’ve never heard of moisturizer. You were just looking for an excuse to come busting into my room!”
    I was mystified. “What are you moisturizing?”
    She stamped a slippered foot. “My skin, genius! It’s a beauty product, okay? Scram!”
    I backed out into the hallway. She slammed the door with such force I’m amazed the wall