The school was shut down, but the board members stayed on to clean up the mess. We weren’t around to see it, but it must have been a really big job. They had to contact everybody—the students, faculty, staff, and parents—and tell them all, one painful phone call at a time, what had been going on at Allbright.
Once the kids had gone home and the school was empty, the board began tracking down the graduates. According to Martha Evergood (who drove out to our house to personally apologize to our parents for bringing us to Allbright in the first place, and to thank us profusely for helping to nail the scumbags), Toby had been right. Beyond the astonishing degree of their success, the Allbright graduates appeared to be perfectly normal. The most encouraging discovery, Dr. Evergood said, was the great variety of their political and philosophical opinions. Each one had, in Toby’s words, evolved. And ironically, they really were serving their country, each in his or her own unique way.
Their amazing success had so astonished the board members that once the smoke had cleared—the trial over, the former director and headmistress of Allbright in prison (Dr. Planck was judged incompetent to stand trial, but his great reputation was ruined forever), the campus and all its luxurious furnishings sold to settle the lawsuits—they voted unanimously to do the unthinkable: start another school. This one would be a day school in the D.C. area, incorporating all the positive things that had made Allbright so wonderful. And Martha Evergood would be its director.
I wish them well.
Prescott went back to his ritzy private school in Baltimore. But that summer he took an internship at a lab in the Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, where he lived in one of the dorms. This seemed like an odd choice to me, since Hopkins had plenty of fabulous labs close to where he lived. Then Zoë shed light on the mystery.
“He wants to be near Cal,” she said.
“Ah!” I said. “Of course!”
Prescott, as my dad would say, was “sweet on” Cal. Actually, I think she kind of liked him, too. Say what you will about Allbright and its personal development counselors—yeah, they went way too far with it, but in Prescott’s case it had helped him a lot. He had grown almost likeable. Who would have thought it?
Cal was now living and going to school in the Virginia suburbs of D.C. Her dad had finally come to his senses. Actually, he had been in the process of resigning his position in Goristovia in favor of a stateside desk job, when bad news from Allbright started popping up in his e-mail.
Two months after he came back to make a proper home for his daughter, Mr. Fiorello married his old college friend, Ms. Lollyheart. Talk about your happy endings!
Brooklyn is now wearing his hair in a giant Afro. He says he’s in his “historical period.” He promised to go back to the dreadlocks eventually, because they really do suit him, but felt he needed to “explore the sixties” for a while.
When his book of poems was officially published in the spring, we gave a party for him. Now he’s working on a volume of haiku. He asked if he could use the one about the tempura trees, and I said sure. He’s calling it “Franny’s Snow,” so if this book gets published, I’ll have my own little moment of fame.
As for Reuben, Martha Evergood hired him as her new driver, at three times his Allbright salary.
Zoë and J. D. and I are just glad to be home again. Mom and Dad still hover too much, but they’ll get over it in time. Meanwhile, we’re trying to sort out the positive things we learned at Allbright from the negative; like Toby, we’re evolving. Also like Toby, we’re fine.
The day after the momentous board meeting, Beamer came over to our house with his camera.
I made myself comfortable on the couch, with a fat cushion behind my head and the chenille throw wrapped cozily around me. Beamer didn’t want to use natural light this time; he liked the warm glow of the pole lamp beside the couch.
Zoë and J. D. were in the den too, listening—Zoë curled up in Dad’s leather chair and J. D. on the rug with his legs draped over the couch. Beamer was watching me through his camera.
“‘Chapter One,’” I read. “‘I Am Born. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.’”
And suddenly, like little David Copperfield, I began to cry. Not a big, loud baby’s wail like David’s, just a trickle of tears down my cheeks and a shaking voice as I continued to read.
How nicely he put things, I thought, old Mr. Dickens. For at that moment I knew that all of us had become the heroes of our own lives. And though I would never be a genius like Brooklyn or Prescott, I no longer thought of myself as ordinary. I had built a robot from scratch, all by myself, and together with my friends, had taken something very wrong and made it right.
I turned the page and went on reading. Beamer had stopped filming now. He sat on the floor near J. D., his arms around his legs and his chin on his knees, listening.
Outside, it began gently to rain.