Somebody on This Bus Is Going to Be Famous (15 page)

She covers her surprise at Matthew having company. But surprise is harder to conceal when she invites Bender to dinner, and Bender accepts. Since it's Granny's night to cook, they have black-eyed peas and cornbread, which Bender scarfs down like a brother, with perfect manners. Granny takes a liking to him. Even insists he stay while she tries out one of her new stories.

Matthew is used to sitting on the floor in a darkened room while Uthisha the Zulu Storyteller, in native dress, moans and wails through a tale of how the zebra got its stripes or why the Zulu people are so tall and strong. Her stories are based on real African folktales, but she juices them up with a little jive talk or hip-hop rhythm. To Bender, it's all new, though; sitting beside him, Matthew feels the rock-solid attention, the chuckle at a joke, the gasp of surprise. He is drawn into his grandmother's act like never before and has to wonder why he can hear it better through someone who's still pretty much a stranger to him.

“What was that all about?” his mother demands when the front door finally closes behind their visitor, a little after eight.

“What was what all about?”

“Is this kid your new best friend?”

Matthew feels for the eagle in his pocket and gazes at the door. “Don't you want me to have friends?”

She sighs. “I want you to have the kind of friend who knows when it's time to go home.”

“But you invited him to dinner. And Granny invited—”

“Never mind. Let's go wash up.”

But while rinsing dishes for Matthew to stack in the dishwasher, she can't let it alone. “I wish I could figure out his game.”

“What game?” Matthew asks, studying a smudge of butter on a plate.

“He's sly. I don't believe his Mr. Manners act for a minute. And what's with all that yammering on about his brother?”

Matthew shrugs. Then he realizes they knew a lot about Thorn now and very little about Bender.

Mama wipes her hands and hangs up the dishtowel. “I'd watch that one if I were you.”

• • •

Next morning, the temperature gauge reads fifteen; the littles are huddled with their parents in steamy cars by the gazebo, and the big kids wait until the last minute to dash across the crunchy grass and get in line. Bender boards last, stopping beside Spencer. “Did you do it yet?”

Spencer squints up at him. “Do what?”

“Apologize to Matthew for knocking him down.”

Spencer's shifty eyes glance out the window. “It was an accident. And he punched me first.”

“Any time, Bender,” Mrs. B calls from the front.

“I'm not done,” Bender says to Spencer and unhurriedly takes his seat.

Spencer whirls around, his glance raking Matthew before settling on Bender. “Not done with
what
?”

“Are you messing with him?” Matthew asks later—much later, when Bender is over at his house and they're trying to dig up more online information on J. S. Hall and the class of '85.

“Messing with little Spencer?” Bender's eyes widen innocently. “
Me?
”

“Might've been an accident, like he said. And I did hit him first.”

“No way it was an accident. His flinty eyes've been digging holes in you for weeks.”

“Guess I never noticed.”

“Well, you ought to start noticing things, dude, before you get run over by a truck.” Bender points to the screen. “Try typing in ‘high school graduation pranks.'”

“That would give us a million hits. And it would be everybody else's tricks, not the one we're looking for.”

“So what? Might give us some good ideas.”

Matthew sighs, already a little bored with the project. In his opinion, people are not as interesting as astral bodies. His fingers tap restlessly over the keys before clicking the drop-down menu on the browser bar. “Okay, but first—this is my favorite website right now: Oxford University's astrophysics page. Outstanding animations.” He clicks a link.

Bender leans forward reluctantly and stares at the flaming star on the screen as it burns from white to yellow to deep orange, finally collapsing to a lump of matter so dense that nothing can escape from it, not even light. Little by little, Bender's attention is captured; first he looks, then reads, then rereads, then looks again with growing comprehension. Matthew doesn't see this, since he's also staring at the screen. But somehow he feels it.

“So that's what a black hole is,” Bender says at last.

“Uh-huh.”

“Weird. That's my family.”

“Your what?”

“My brother. Thorn's always been squat in the middle of everything, like a big fat sun, sucking up all the oxygen. Even when he went away to college. But…”

After a brief silence, Matthew clicks the replay button, and the star bursts to brilliant white again. “But what?”

Bender's voice sounds dry and crinkly. “We went on this family ski trip over Christmas? First vacation in four years. It was a big deal because Thorn hasn't been home since June—he did this hotshot political internship in DC over the summer. So the folks were all excited and happy—Dad didn't build anything all month, and Mom hardly picked any fights with him—and Thorn met us at Breckinridge just like they'd planned, except…when he got off the plane, we didn't recognize him.”

The dying star on the screen pulses through its orange phase. “Why not?”

“He looked like a homeless guy. He'd let his hair grow and he hadn't shaved in a week and his beard was coming in all stubbly. My mom walked right by him before he called to her. We went to dinner right after that, and he told us he'd dropped out of Dartmouth. Just dropped out—in the middle of his junior year. Said he didn't know what he wanted anymore but he had to get away, go find himself. He actually said that.”

Go
find
myself
, Matthew thought. What would that be like? How would you know where to start looking?

“The folks didn't take it very well,” Bender went on. “At all. And you want to know what's funny? It's exactly what I'd wished for since I was six—to see them beat up on
him
for a change. But now that they were actually doing it, it wasn't fun. They both think he's on something—drugs, I mean—and Mom believes he's gonna go up to Alaska and starve to death, like that dude who camped out in the bus. Or fall in a freezing river or something. They yelled at each other for three days. Thorn and my mom, that is. Dad just clammed up, and one day, he disappeared and we didn't see him until dinner. The last night, they told us they were splitting up and Thorn's, uh, news had nothing to do with it; it was already decided. Real sweet family vacation, all in all. I did learn to ski, though. It's fun. Wait a minute.”

The red star on the screen crumples and shrinks into nothingness. Bender touches the screen, at the cold dark center. “It's like
that
. Like Thorn just turned the light out. But he's still there, and we're still circling around him like always, but we can't see him anymore. Can't talk about him, but his gravity is dragging worse than ever. It's dead center at our house—this freaky quietness, even though my mom has the TV on all the time. I feel like we should, you know, talk sometimes, but we've never learned how.”

That might explain why Bender is always slow to go home. Matthew frowns at the thought of his own black hole: his invisible dad, thick and silent with a gravitational pull so strong it could warp him. If he let it.

“Theoretically,” Matthew says, “if you were a virtual particle with an antimatter twin, the mass of the black hole would pull you in but your antiparticle could escape.”

“That's nice. This was your science fair project, right? You going to regionals?”

Matthew blinks, like he's been under some kind of spell. “I have to. Probably won't get beyond that, though. The judges say it's weak on math.”

For the first time, Bender looks at him. Matthew, still gazing at the screen (after clicking the replay button one more time), feels the intensity of an idea forming in someone else's head. “Weak on math?” A pause and then, “You want some help with that? By the way, what's for dinner?”

• • •

On Monday morning, Bender does not head for the back seat but slides in beside Matthew so suddenly the latter backs up against the windows. “Guess what I learned last night?”

“Uh…”

“My mom says anybody can find out who owns property around here. You just take the address in to the county assessor's office and they'll tell you.”

“So?” Matthew is still backed up, wondering who wants to know who owns what.

“
So?
She's going to find out who owns that house on Farm Road 152!”

“Oh.” Since they've been working on his black hole project all weekend, Matthew has forgotten Bender's interest in the Mystery Stop.

“Yeah, go figure. Here all our high-tech Internet research turns up nada and the answer might be right under our nose. Or in the courthouse.”

“Hey Bender! I'm in your seat!” a voice comes from behind them: Igor's. It's his first day back on the bus. “Bender? Aren't you going to do anything?”

“Take it,” he calls back idly. “By the way—” to Matthew again, who has relaxed somewhat. “We'll have to refigure that gravity equation. I was reading up on Planck's constant last night…”

Spencer sprawls into a forward seat, spilling his backpack so Jay has to sit somewhere else.

“What's going on?” Igor pipes up as Mrs. B puts the bus in gear. “I'm gone two weeks and everybody reshuffles like a card deck?”

Ignoring him, Bender stretches forward and taps Spencer on the shoulder. “How about that apology, whiz kid?”

“Bug off.” Only Spencer doesn't exactly say
bug
.

“Oooooo. Bad attitude, dude. I could file a complaint with Youth Court. What if you had to come up before yourself?”

Spencer doesn't answer, just hikes his shoulders. From across the aisle, Jay says, “He quit Youth Court.”

“What? After that hard-fought campaign for truth and justice? All for naught?”

“Yeah, well,” Jay explains, “he's been throwing himself this pity party ever since he didn't win the science fair.”

Spencer whirls around. “Screw you, jock!”

“Get over yourself, nerd!”

“Boys!” Mrs. B, pausing at the highway stop sign, turns all the way around with a disbelieving expression. “What's got into you two? I thought you were best friends.”

“What about you?” Spencer hisses at Jay. “You've been pissed ever since your Super Bowl team lost.”

Jay's face turns rocky. “My. Super Bowl team.
Didn't
. Lose.”

“Are you sure? Maybe you couldn't see to read the score. Or maybe your grandfather got confused.”

Jay seems to curl up on his seat—then he springs at Spencer.

“That's it!” yells Mrs. B, who's been watching closely. “Come up to the front, Jay.”

It's the first time Jay has occupied that seat since fourth grade. He shifts his backpack to one shoulder and marches forward defiantly.

From the back, Igor's voice creeps out like a baby duck after a thunderstorm. “What's going on?”

Bender turns to Matthew with a lopsided grin. “Sad, really. Death of a beautiful friendship.”

As for Matthew, he feels like he's being dragged by the heels into the real world. And he's not sure he likes it.

Around eight o'clock that night, the phone rings; turns out it's for him. “Why, Charles Bender Thompson!” he hears his granny answering. “Haven't seen you in a fly's age! How you be, honey?” The two of them have quite a little conversation, Mama sighing and shaking her head at the computer, before Granny gives up the phone.

“Guess what?” is Bender's greeting.

Matthew is trying to guess the last time somebody called him. “What?”

“Remember I told you my mom was checking property records at the assessor's office?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, she did, and she even made a copy of the map. Actually, they're called plats. I'm looking at it right now: five acres, one house, one barn, a pump house,
and
a bus shed. Guess who owns it?”

Matthew feels a yawn coming on. “Who?”

“Teresa Birch.”

Matthew is about to say, “Who?” again when his jaw closes with a snap. Because he remembers, from some overheard conversation, that Teresa Birch is better known as Mrs. B.

Jay Thomas Pasternak III doesn't care about fame. He just wants to play running back for an NFL team (first choice Cowboys, second choice Steelers) and have one magic season and go to the Super Bowl. Maybe more than one magic season. “Jay Pasternak: MVP”; “Pasternak Smashes Records”; “Pasternak Scores Upset of the Year.” Those were the kinds of headlines he imagines, but that doesn't mean he wants to be famous. All it means is he wants to be the best running back ever. Though he'd settle for top ten if he has to.

His father likes to say Jay got a running start by popping up in a family of four older sisters who liked to chase him. If he didn't feel like getting caught and tickled or dunked in the pool or dressed up as a baby to play house, he ran. Fast. Sneaky too—he figured out all kinds of ducks and dodges and how to fake one direction and go another. He developed a trick of slowing down a little until they were right on top of him before turning a quick one-eighty that put him face-to-face with four screaming demons who were always taken by surprise. Then he'd do an end run or plow right through. When they tried to surround him, he ducked and wove so fast their grabbing hands grabbed only air.

“He's a running back,” said his grandfather, Jay Pasternak Senior. “Sure as shootin'.”

“Maybe,” admitted his dad, Jay Pasternak Junior.

Senior had played quarterback at the University of Kansas during a championship season, which was a very big deal. Junior, Jay's father, wasn't interested in football, which was also a big deal because Senior made it one. When Uncle Troy was in high school, he made up for Junior's lack of interest: captain of the team in his senior year and headed for the University of Missouri on an athletic scholarship. But then the accident happened. It's a good thing Jay III came along, with not only a talent for the game but a passion for it too. Poppy could finally forgive Dad for not loving football, because Dad had had a kid who did.

Starting right after New Year's, Jay and Poppy have their own little betting pool for the NFL play-offs; each contributes a bag of Skittles to the pot and writes their predictions on a chart. Poppy always ends up with more Skittles as the season progresses.

Except for this season, which sees Jay ahead of Poppy by mid-January. That might have been an early warning, but it's not until they're watching the quarterfinals that Jay begins to wonder if something might be wrong. For one thing, even though Poppy follows the action just fine, he has a hard time keeping the teams straight, continually matching Arizona against Dallas and New England to Tennessee, when it's the other way around.

By Super Bowl time, Poppy's pick is Arizona and Jay's is New England. Poppy seems sharp as a tack during the pregame show and stays one step ahead of the announcers during the first half. But during halftime, he gets up for a beer and comes back with a carton of orange juice, which he carefully pours into an empty Coors can and sips while making angry faces at the blond girl prancing around the stage. “Who's that broad?”

“It's Claire. She's hot right now.”

“She's got to be cold in a skimpy outfit like that. Whoo-hoo, sister! Put it on! Put it on! Look at the way that top jiggles. Any minute now, she's going to pop right out of—”

“Jay!” Geemaw seems to materialize outside her craft room door. “Watch what you're saying to the boy.”

“What do you mean? Come look at this chick, and tell me how long until—”

Geemaw plows into the room like an oil tanker; for a small woman, she can throw her weight around when she wants to. “Jay, I think you'd better watch the rest of the game at home.”

“But—but they won't even have it on at home! Dad'll be watching some World War II junk on the History Channel!”

“I'll give him a call. I'm sure he'll make an exception.” She picks up Jay's coat and starts helping him on with it, as though he were five years old. Meanwhile, Poppy is making the kind of comments about Claire that Jay has only heard from guys at school and in the movies he's not supposed to watch. Which surprises him: isn't Poppy too old to know words like that?

“We'll see you tomorrow,” Geemaw promises while hustling him toward the back door. “Come over after school and you two can talk about the game.”

She must have called Dad as soon as Jay was out the door, for once he's crossed his grandparents' backyard and taken the shortcut through the woods, Dad's watching a Super Bowl SUV commercial. Jay wipes the fog off his glasses and sits down as the third quarter begins, even though his sister Julie complains she's missing
The
Vampire
Chronicles
. Dad watches with him, though having no interest whatsoever, he can't say anything intelligent about the plays. So he doesn't say anything, and neither does Jay, and the whole house seems so quiet and strange it's like watching in solitary confinement at some prison.

When the game is finally over (New England wins), Mom makes hot chocolate, and the three of them sit down at the kitchen table for a talk. None of his sisters participate: Joanna and Jessica are in college now, Jaynell is working on a science project at her lab partner's house, and Julie is gabbing on her phone. Once the talk starts, Jay realizes he's being told things his sisters already know.

“Poppy's…had some issues lately,” Dad begins.

“Is he going nuts?”

“No, no. It's just that…well, he's in his eighties, Jay. At that age, some people lose a little…they start to lose…”

“Their marbles,” Jay finishes. No point beating around the bush.

“I wouldn't say that,” his mother protests. “But he is losing some memory, some sense of where he is.”
Marbles
, Jay corrects her silently. “It's called dementia.”

In other words, nuts. “Are they going to lock him up?” His voice sounds thin and strange to his ears.

Both parents jump on that phrase. “Oh no no no,” Mom says, while Dad begins, “Well, I wouldn't put it that way, but…”

The
but
is left hanging, like one of those cartoon characters that runs off a cliff before realizing there's gravity down there.

“What we mean,” continues Mom, “is that's not the plan
now
. But he's become pretty challenging for Geemaw. She deals with a lot of things we don't see. Haven't you noticed how she does all the driving now?”

Jay recalls the trip he took with his grandparents last summer. Geemaw did most of the driving, but he thought that was because Poppy wanted to sit sideways in the front seat and chat with Jay in the back. When he wasn't making comments on Geemaw's driving, that is.

Dad goes on, “Last Thanksgiving, he decided to go out for a beer at two in the morning and drove the car into a ditch. If it had have been a tree or a utility pole, he might be dead now. Geemaw called me, and I found him asleep behind the steering wheel with only a sweater over his pajamas and the temperature around thirty degrees. So—”

“Maybe he was sleepwalking,” Jay interrupts. “Did you think about that?”

His dad sighs. “Hey, bud. I know how you feel, but—”

“No, you don't!” Jay jumps up so fast he knocks over his chair. He's shouting, he's so mad. “You
don't
know how I feel.” They didn't know how it felt being the only one in the family to go nearsighted, and they don't understand now. It's complicated—the weight of his grandfather's hand on his head, from five years old to ten, and how his grandfather knew when to stop putting a hand on his head. The gleam in his eye when anticipating a brilliant play. Or the way the setting sun makes a little halo of silver hairs on his balding head as Jay runs long to catch a pass, snapped from that quarterback arm that never forgot how to throw. That's all part of how he feels, along with the chalky taste in the back of his throat.

“Now, sweetheart,” his mom begins.

“Settle down, Jay,” his dad says. “Nobody's decided anything yet.”

Not
yet
. If not yet, then when?

Jay's already faced one crisis this year, and Poppy's the one who got him through it. Sure there are nearsighted NFL players, he said; lots of 'em. Ever heard of contact lenses? By the time Jay graduates high school (with a football scholarship), he'll be dazzling the coaches and recruiters so much nobody will even ask about his vision.

But how will Poppy get him through this crisis, if Poppy is the crisis?

• • •

March blows in from the south this year, with a string of sunny warm days that send the sweaters, jackets, and hoodies to the back of the closet. “Don't lose them,” everybody's mother says. “You'll need them again.”

But while boarding the bus in Windbreakers, they know they'll be walking home in T-shirts. Bender even climbs on in wearing a T-shirt, followed by Matthew. Bender pauses to tie Marilu Wong's pigtails together (“Hey!” she squeaks), and Matthew says, “Back of the bus, white boy.”

They laugh, and Jay follows, shaking his head. He takes a middle seat, trying to remember if he finished his homework last night or just dreamed he did.

Shelly is asking everybody if they'd like to buy a luscious milk chocolate candy bar for her Star Camp fund. “They're just Hershey Bars!” Bender calls from the back. “For four times what you'd pay at Dollar General.”

“They are not!” Shelly protests. “Look at this elegant gold wrapper.”

“My mom and I bought four,” Miranda says loyally.

“Hey, Jay!” Igor says. “What'll you pay for my cheese sandwich so I can buy cigarettes and hang out on the street this summer?”

“Sit down, Igor!” shouts Mrs. B, who hasn't yet forgiven him for the snake incident.

Spencer boards last, dragging down the aisle and dropping on the seat opposite Jay like a used dishrag. They haven't spoken to each other in a couple of weeks, but Jay's forgotten why. “What's up?”

Spencer glances at him quickly, suspiciously. “Last night, I told my mom I don't want to go to Space Camp. She still wants to fight about it.”

“What? She's been trying to get you in for two years! And you were all excited last fall.”

“I
thought
I was excited. Back when I
thought
I was smart.”

Jay sighs and shakes his head. “Get over it, dude. You can't—”

“Shhh!” says Spencer.

An argument is going on up front. Mrs. B, her hand on the door lever, is telling somebody they can't get on. “Sir, this is a school bus,” she's insisting. “We're not going to Union Station.”

A voice comes from outside, a voice Jay immediately recognizes, with a plunging heart. “I have to catch the 9:30 express!” Poppy exclaims. “It'll take thirty minutes to get there! What's the matter with you, woman?”

Jay starts to stand up but doesn't know what he will do after that, so he kind of hangs in between standing and sitting.

“Sir, please step back. I have to—I'm closing—No!” Mrs. B slams the door on Poppy's fist. As he bangs the door, she shifts down and revs the accelerator, pulling away so fast the old man staggers back. He raises his fist as the bus rolls by—Jay can see him and faintly hear him, shouting words he's not supposed to around the children. Panzer barks indignantly.

Jay slowly sits down. Spencer is staring at him. So are Shelly, Miranda, Kaitlynn, Igor, Matthew, and Bender. “Sorry, man,” Spencer mutters, and from the back comes a snicker from Bender, followed by a “Shhh!” from somebody else.

In all his days, Jay can't remember a ride that quiet.

• • •

“Jay,” his mother tells him that afternoon, “Terry Birch called this morning and told me what happened on the bus.”

“It was just a mistake,” he says defensively. “Poppy thought the school bus looked like that senior citizens van that takes old people to town to shop…”

She isn't buying. “The school bus looks nothing like the OATS bus, Jay. A few days ago, he forgot he gave up driving and pitched a fit when he couldn't find his car keys. Geemaw called me, and it was all we could do to—”

“All
right
, I get it. You're gonna lock him up in an old folks home.”

“Nobody's made any decisions yet.”

“But you're getting there. He's just a little confused, that's all.”

His mother is looking at him with pity in her eyes, and he hates that. “I'm really sorry, Jay. This is always a sad thing to watch.”

He grabs an apple from the basket on the countertop and takes a bite out of it. “I'm watching, all right. Don't try anything sneaky.” He storms off to his room before she can ask him to explain what he means.

Two days later, March blows cold again. There's even a 60 percent chance of late-afternoon snow in the forecast: possible accumulation three to six inches. Everybody's hopeful that it will be the first good snow of the winter. “Maybe I won't see you tomorrow,” is Mrs. B's touching farewell.

Spencer catches up with Jay as they start toward home. “You still got your sled?” he asks, as though their little spat had never happened.

“If my sister didn't wreck it when she had her slumber party.” Julie told him, after the fact, how five girls had piled on his sled and rode it downhill in a heavy frost.

“We could try it on that hill behind the Ellisons' house. It's nice and steep.”

“Cool.” Jay holds out a fist, and they bump knuckles.

“By the way,” Spencer goes on, “I changed my mind about Space Camp. You're right, I just need to—”

“Hold on a minute.” Jay has spotted his grandmother striding toward them, dressed like a bag lady with polyester slacks stuffed into rubber boots, her good dress coat flapping about her knees and gray hair springing wildly from a crocheted cap. Fear clutches him—is she going crazy too?