"Schooled," Vocabulary from Chapters 7-12

It was hard enough for him to come out of total isolation at Garland without having to be dropped into the snake pit that was middle school.

My sole consolation lay in the fact that he would have to suffer this abuse only for a few weeks more.

Anyway, deep in my heart I believed that a genuine school, nasty and merciless as it could be, was still better than Garland Farm.

So I looked it up in the encyclopedia, and I figured out why Mrs. Donnelly was so upset. Bullfighting is a cruel sport where innocent animals are tormented, tortured, killed, and have their ears cut off.

Without Rain as my mentor and guide, I was lost.

Hugh looked dubious. “Well, you probably shouldn’t go by me. I’m not exactly Mr. Popularity around here.

Maybe in a place as complex as C Average Middle School, it was impossible to analyze every single thing that happened.

It was crowded, noisy, dirty, rowdy, and uncomfortable.

Still, never in my wildest nightmares could I have imagined myself living with a refugee from Bizarro World.

“Don’t be unkind,” she told me sharply. “The way those kids are teasing Cap is inhuman. Have a little compassion.”

That idiotic Zen-hippie style of his turned out to be just right for a driving instructor. No matter what mistakes I made, it didn’t seem to faze Cap—not even when I thought someone’s driveway was a side street and turned onto it.

“There’s no almost,” he lectured serenely. “Only ‘happened’ and ‘didn’t happen.’ This didn’t happen.”

“This is a philosophy Rain passed on to me when she taught me how to drive our truck.”

Not muscle strong or fighting strong—a kind of strength that gave him the self-control to meditate instead of falling apart, or to ignore what other people thought, and find meaning in a dead bird.

You could harass him; you just couldn’t upset him.

He had no way of knowing that the person he was using as a guide was an even bigger outcast than he was.

And every morning, he was out in the school yard, performing these slow-motion, dancelike martial arts moves. Zach called it hippie ballet, but I thought it was kind of graceful and athletic.

No longer did I feel the ridiculing eyes boring into me as I walked the halls of C Average.

The raucous clamor of the bus died as if someone had pulled the plug.

I would have enjoyed the sight of so many people who had terrorized me being terrorized themselves, except that I was twice as scared as they were.

It started off as a rumbling of discontent, bubbling over into a chorus of outrage on Cap’s behalf.

“I’m getting stronger every day. In no time at all, we’ll both be back to the sanity of Garland.”

“Extend your fingers,” I whispered. “The energy should begin in your core and flow out through your extremities.”

I assumed she was going to give me directions to the journalism lab. Instead she said, “Watch out for Zach and Lena. Watch out for all of us. We’re not as nice as we pretend to be.”

A community thrives when each member does what he or she is best at.