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 gets put in handcuffs by a police officer for driving without a license. After a few minutes of questioning—in which Capricorn explains to the police officer that 1) he’s been driving since he was 8 years old, and 2) not only has he never heard of police emergency number 911, they do not have a telephone on Garland Farm—the officer lets him go.

The reason that Rain had been scaling the tree, instead of Capricorn, is that 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 has built is good enough to enter into the county science fair. Rain, however, thinks that competition is unhealthy:“all that emphasis on trophies and medals, the shiny symbols of an empty soul” (6).