Schooled

Capricorn, who at 13 has never seen a police officer up close before, gets arrested. His grandmother, Rain, has fallen out of a tree while picking plums on their commune, breaking her hip. Capricorn drives her to the hospital, but on arrival, he is handcuffed by a police officer for driving without a license. After a few minutes of questioning—in which Capricorn explains that he’s been driving since he was eight years old and that he has never heard of 911, but Garland Farm lacks a telephone anyway—the officer lets him go.

Rain scaled the tree instead of Capricorn because Capricorn is homeschooled. Rain is his only teacher, and at the time of the accident, Capricorn was working on eighth grade vocabulary. Rain’s curriculum seems more rigorous than that of the local middle school, and the tester from the education department tells them that the Foucault pendulum that Capricorn built is good enough to enter the county science fair. Rain, however, thinks competition is unhealthy: “all that emphasis on trophies and medals, the shiny symbols of an empty soul” (6). She fears the tester is trying to trick her into sending Capricorn to a regular school.