"Ready," Mom said, though it was obvious she wasn't. While Bill headed for the garage, she went to rinse out her coffee cup in the sink. She told me, "I put your glasses in your backpack."
I knew she was talking to me because, of course, the wicked stepsister has perfect eyesight.
On the other hand, I was currently wearing my glasses.
I said, "Was this before or after I put them on this morning?"
My mother gave me The Look.
Anyone with a mother knows The Look.
She sighed. "Your sunglasses."
For a second I was lost, then I remembered. I'd had no inclination to keep the mirrored sunglasses I'd found, or ever to wear them again—they'd been strictly to get me indoors. Though my pupils were still slightly dilated this morning, my eyeballs no longer looked deformed and I figured that, despite still being a little sensitive to light, I could survive.
"Thanks," I said, anyway.
My mother added, "I disinfected them." Of course she had. I was lucky she hadn't disinfected me.
"Thanks," I repeated.
She seemed abnormally reluctant to leave.
"Anything wrong?" the wicked stepsister asked.
"No." Finally Mom said what was on her mind: "I'm planning on visiting my mother after work today. Anybody want to meet me there?"
"There" was the nursing home, which we could get to if we took a different bus home, which the school allowed because they knew the situation.
"Sure," the stepsister said. Fine for her: She's planning on going into geriatric nursing—not a career any normal fifteen-year-old aspires to. Besides, she's not related. For her, Nana is a test subject, the same as any other Alzheimer's patient. Gia is a suck-up, trying to impress my mother, because she knows how I hate to go to the nursing home.
"I need to catch up after missing yesterday afternoon's classes," I explained.
"Some other time then," Mom told me mildly. "See you there," she said to Gia. To both of us she added, "Don't be late for your bus," even though she was the one who had struck up the conversation.
Of course the wicked stepsister is beautiful enough she can pull herself together at a moment's notice. I ended up running to the stop after the bus beeped its horn, which was no surprise to me or the bus driver.
I sat in the seat my best friend, Shelley, had saved for me, while the wicked stepsister took the first empty seat because half the kids on the bus are her best friends.
I took my glasses off since Parker Henks gets on the stop after I do. Even though we've been in a lot of the same classes since middle school so he's probably noticed by now that I wear glasses, I always like to look my best for him, whether he glances my way or not.
My backpack was on my lap, my glasses on top of my backpack, and I was talking to Shelley, because I didn't want Parker thinking I was sitting around waiting for him to notice me. Parker didn't even glance in my direction, which might have meant that he really, truly hadn't noticed me or it might have meant that he hadn't noticed me in the same way I hadn't noticed him. But because I wasn't noticing him, it was hard to work out. In any case, he was headed for the back of the bus, followed by three ninth-grade boys who were laughing and poking and shoving one another as they walked down the aisle, and the next thing I knew one of them jostled me, knocking my backpack to the floor.
I looked down just in time to see a size twelve Adidas come down on my glasses.
"Stop!" I yelled, but the guys were still goofing around and I nearly lost my fingers when I reached down.
"See what you've done!" Shelley told them.
I held up my maimed glasses. The lenses were all right, but the arms of the frame were both broken—one cracked but still dangling, the other snapped entirely off—and one of those little whatever-they're-called things that hold the glasses off your nose was smushed flat against the lens.
"Wasn't me," all three of the boys said simultaneously. Each accused another of being the one with big feet and no inkling where he was stepping. Each accused another of starting the shoving. "Duct tape'll fix that," one of them suggested.
The bus driver yelled, "Find a seat!" and the boys moved toward the back of the bus, still spreading the blame around, saying things like, "Wouldn't've happened if she'd been wearing 'em," which was something my parents, too, were sure to point out.
As the bus began moving once again, Shelley asked, "What are you going to do? Will you be able to see if you ask the teachers to let you sit in the front row?"
Like anybody would
ask
to sit in the front row.
"Shelley," I said, "without my glasses, I won't be
able to
find
the front row." Never mind finding the right classrooms. I sighed. "I'm going to have to call my mom and tell her what happened and get her to take me to one of those one-hour eyeglass places." Where the frames cost twice as much. I told Shelley, "My mom's going to kill me."
"No, she won't," Shelley argued. "Statistics show that homicides related to eyewear breakage are actually down this year."
Cute. I gave her the benefit of the doubt and guessed she was trying to make me feel better. I said, "My mother is excitable."
Shelley looked skeptical. "Your dad seems calm and reasonable—he won't let her actually kill you."
"You mean my mother's current husband," I said. I reminded her, "At the moment my dad is living in Hong Kong with the woman formerly known as his secretary."
Shelley rolled her eyes. I think. I was sitting close enough that I'm fairly sure I saw correctly. She said, "Whatever."
Before I could complain that a best friend should be more sympathetic, we were all suddenly thrown forward, with a terrible screech of brakes, and the bus swerved, and we were flung left, then right.
I braced myself for a collision.
Nothing—beyond startled gasps, squeals, and yells, then thuds as assorted kids, backpacks, books, and portable CD players hit the floor.
I bounced between the back of the seat in front of me and my own seat as the bus came to a stop.
"Everybody all right?" the driver shouted.
People were picking themselves up off one another and off the floor.
Those in front were standing to see over the heads of those with seats near the front right-hand windows.
The bus driver didn't wait to see if we all answered that we were okay. "Pedestrian accident near the corner of East and Elmwood," he announced into his two-way radio. He didn't wait for the dispatcher, either, but flung the door open, yelled, "Nobody leave the bus!" then ran outside.
Shelley pushed me out of the seat, and we joined the press of kids at the front.
"What happened?" I asked. By squinting I could make out a crowd of people on the street corner, all looking in the direction of the intersection, where there was a smaller cluster of people crouched or kneeling on the asphalt. The bus had stopped in the middle of the street, at a diagonal. "Did we hit someone?"
Somehow I'd ended up near Gia, the wicked stepsister, and she answered, "No, somebody else did."
I squinted harder but really couldn't make anything out, which was probably all for the best.
Those at the windows leaned out and shouted to the people on the sidewalk. The story, as near as I could make out from too many people talking at once, was that a car coming from the opposite direction had tried to beat the bus through the intersection to make a left-hand turn—apparently not seeing the lady crossing the side street.
Our bus driver shoved his way back onto the bus, past the kids who were crowding the doorwell. He ignored all the questions, grabbed the first-aid kit, then warned again, "Nobody leave the bus."
After five minutes that seemed like forever, sirens approached, first a couple of police cars, then an ambulance.
"Is she going to be all right?" Gia called out to our bus driver as he came to stand by the bus now that the ambulance guys had arrived.
"I'm sure she'll be fine," our driver said. "But the police want to talk to me as a witness, so I need to get you another bus."
We pointed out that we were two short blocks
from school, but he ignored us and got on the radio to speak with the dispatcher. We were all crowding the front of the bus, so we all heard the dispatcher say that another bus could pick us up, and we all heard him say it would be in about twenty minutes, depending on traffic. Judging from how the traffic around us wasn't moving, we all knew we could add at least another ten minutes to that estimate. Even with the windows open, we were beginning to get sweaty and cranky in the May heat. We complained, loudly, that we were within two minutes' walk of school, with only one side street to cross, and the youngest of us were in ninth grade.
Our logic, or our whining, finally worked, and our driver told us we could go, if we all stuck together and went straight to school. We all vowed on our honor.
"Think you can make it without your glasses?" Shelley asked me as the bus emptied around us, everyone having already forgotten that sticking-together promise.
Walking around without glasses in your own home is totally different from walking around on the street without being able to see, but what choice did I have?
Which was when inspiration struck. "Hold on," I said, suddenly remembering my mother saying she'd
put yesterday's sunglasses in my backpack. "Wait till you see these."
I found them in the little front zippered section, tracking them down by sniffing for the scent of Lysol.
"Whoa!" Shelley said, knowing that mirrored sunglasses—with or without the smell—weren't my usual style.
"But they're prescription lenses," I told her. I put them on, and once again everything took on a pink glow. Still, everything came into focus, too. "Shelley!" I exclaimed, feigning sudden recognition. "It's you!" Then I asked, "Do they look too awful?"
Shelley shrugged.
Okay, well then, I'd take them off as soon as I got to school and wasn't in danger from traffic.
The bus was empty now, except for the two of us, and I glanced out the window to assure myself that Parker Henks wasn't in the vicinity. He was halfway down the block already, with a group that included my wicked stepsister. The closest kid was Julian York, who'd paused just beyond the crowd of accident onlookers to readjust his backpack. Nobody had stopped to wait for him, either. Julian was new this year, and I'd never really talked to him beyond "Hi" and "Mind if I move this chair to that table?" and "What page did Mrs. McDermott say to turn to?" He'd struck me, back in September, as too tall
and too skinny, but now after eight months of not really looking at him, I said to Shelley, "Hmm, Julian's not half bad looking," trying to sound Shelley out to see what she thought.
Shelley raised her eyebrows at me. "Maybe you better not depend on those glasses too much," she suggested.
In any case, he had moved on by the time we stepped off the bus. Shelley asked, "Do you really think that lady will be all right, or was our driver just telling us that because we're kids?"
Over the heads of the crouching ambulance attendants, I saw the accident victim sit up. "Well, I guess that answers that," I said.
"What?" Shelley asked.
"She's sitting up."
Shelley stood on tiptoe but must have been at a bad angle, because apparently she still couldn't see. She asked, "Really?"
The woman got up.
"Geez," I said. "You'd think they wouldn't let her do that."
"What?" Shelley asked.
Though the woman looked about sixty or so and was wearing a flowered dress, maybe Shelley mistook her for one of the ambulance attendants, because
Shelley was still craning her neck, trying to get a better look at the stretcher the ambulance guys had set down, while the woman was walking away.
I was amazed that no one tried to stop her, to tell her, "Let us check you out, just in case you're lightheaded or something." But they weren't even looking at her. Everyone ignored her totally. She walked through the crowd, right up to me.
"Are you an angel?" she asked, which seemed proof to me that she was confused enough to need medical attention.
"No." I was too surprised to ask her if she was sure she should be walking. Her dress was smudged from lying in the street, and her knees and one elbow were scraped, but that was the only blood on her.
Except, I suddenly noticed, for a slight red dribble from her right ear that stuck a wisp of her gray hair to her cheek.
"What?" Shelley asked, distracted, still facing the intersection, as though she had not heard the woman's question but only my answer.
The woman looked around. "Oh," she said. "Sorry. My mistake." She started walking toward a patch of light on the sidewalk so bright that even with my sunglasses I couldn't look straight at it. The woman walked into the light, then turned to wave
good-bye to me, smiled the most beautiful smile I've ever seen, and dissolved. A moment later the light also dissolved.
I grabbed Shelley's arm. "Shelley"—my voice, once I got it to work, was quavering—"did you see that?"
"I'm afraid so," she answered. But she didn't seem nearly as freaked out as she should have been. In fact, she
still
wasn't even looking in the right direction.
I looked back at where the ambulance attendants were lifting the stretcher to put it back into the ambulance—the stretcher, with a blanket covering a still form beneath it.
"Wow," Shelley said in a shaky whisper, "she must have died while we were standing here watching."
I whipped those glasses off my face faster than if there had been a cute boy in the vicinity.
"What?" Shelley asked me, but she was still mostly watching the ambulance guys. She probably thought I was trying to avoid seeing any details, not realizing I'd already seen way too many.
The thing was, I knew what I'd seen. There was no use in trying to convince myself that I was dreaming or that the glasses had caused some sort of distortion. I had seen a ghost, a spirit, whatever you want to call a dead person who's up and walking. Talking, too, though apparently Shelley hadn't heard. Whoever heard of glasses improving your hearing?