Somebody on This Bus Is Going to Be Famous (20 page)

He found it! Digging out the scrunched-up package, he pulls a scrunched-up (but clean) tissue from it just in time. Her breath is chugging and her nose is running as she snatches it from him.

“You're not ugly,” he says. And means it, even though, with her red eyes and wet nose, she has looked better.

The first bell rings. “Thanks,” she sniffs then stuffs the tissue in her pocket and bolts for the door before she has to meet anyone from the bus.

Igor follows more slowly. If he's late, it won't be the first time.

• • •

When school gets out at noon, Shelly tries to talk to Miranda but soon gives up and takes her assigned seat. She's still pumped but not so obnoxious about it. Igor is starting to pay more attention, and he notices that when Bender and Matthew board the bus, Bender stops for a quick message to Spencer and Jay. The four of them, now that he thinks about it, have been very chummy for the last week or so, and it's starting to bother him. What's up with that? Are they cooking up a plan? And why can't he be part of it?

It's a rowdier ride than usual and seems twice as long, but finally the bus reaches its final destination. As the last riders pile off, Igor falls in behind Spencer and Jay, who are heading in the same direction as Matthew and Bender. He lags back, watching the four of them meet at the gazebo.

Sometimes acting impulsively is a good thing—if he'd stopped to consider his next move, someone would have noticed him. He jogs across the grass as though taking a shortcut toward home, then angles back in a straight line that ends in the rose of Sharon bushes beside the gazebo entrance. From here, he can pick up almost every word.

A plan is being made. After a few seconds, it seems the plan has some glitches, and a few seconds more reveals the glitch is Spencer.

“Tell your mom you can't do it,” Bender is saying. “So what if you miss one Space Camp orientation?”

“I can't tell her that,” Spencer says. “She's already ticked off at my dad because I took up the guitar—says it distracts me from academic pursuits.”

Bender makes a rude noise. “
This
is an academic pursuit. It's all about knowledge.”

“But what are we supposed to do with it?” Jay flops on the bench over Igor's head, making it creak.

Matthew says something, which Igor can't make out because Matthew's on the other side of the gazebo and his voice is quiet.

“Never know what?” Jay replies. “Yeah, okay, so it may fill some gaps, but—”

“We could fill one gap really easily,” Bender interrupts, “if you could just find out what happened to your uncle.”

Igor's ears perk up. They actually tingle. Might “your uncle” be Uncle Troy?

“I
told
you,” says Jay. “My dad said he slipped on some marbles and fell down a flight of concrete steps.”

“We all know there's more to it than that—” Bender gets no further because Igor has popped out of the bushes and run around to the gazebo entrance.

“Is
that
what you want to know?”

“Where'd you come from?” Bender demands.

“You want to know what happened at high school graduation? Class of '85?” They're all staring at him in surprise, an expression that usually turns to impatience or worse. But he has something they want, for the first time since he can remember. He's received all kinds of attention in his life—laughter, mockery, anger, and frustration—but this is the best.

He says, “I know exactly what happened.”

By 1:30 that afternoon, here's what they know:

Jason Stanley Hall is hiding out very close. Bender has seen him.

Matthew has his pewter eagle, picked up behind the bus shed.

Jay knows where one of his hideouts is, or at least he could probably find it.

Somebody in the house has tried to communicate with them, or at least with Bender—

Possibly somebody in a wheelchair. Spencer saw the tracks.

The person in the wheelchair has been injured. A small person? Yes, if the chair was taken from Pasternak Senior's back porch—which is kind of a wild guess, but Jay's grandmother is also a small person. But how could the thief have known the chair was there?

The property where the bus shed sits is owned by Mrs. B. That explains why one of the shouting voices Jay heard that night sounded familiar. From what he remembers of the argument, Mrs. B suspected someone was there who wasn't supposed to be.

The person she was arguing with might have been renting the house and letting an extra person stay there who wasn't supposed to. Like Jason Stanley Hall?

And, thanks to Igor, they now know that if JSH is hiding out, it's because he's not welcome in the community. At least not by certain people who may have never forgiven him, including the Pastnernak Seniors and maybe even Myra Bender Thompson. He's a persona non grata, says Spencer.

While he's in a sharing mood, Igor goes maybe further than he should and shares what Miranda told him about her poem—torn from the book and sent to her by someone who knew she wrote it, even though Shelly's name was on it. Almost certainly the same someone who sent Bender a Christmas card, even though it's harder to figure out how that person could have known who wrote the poem, when Miranda and Shelly were the only ones who did.

Somebody knows more than he or she should. That's the link they're missing, but they may have a way to find it. The plan Igor interrupted was for an overnight camping trip and stakeout. They were trying to figure out how to get four individuals with different schedules together on the same weekend.

“You mean five,” Igor says.

Bender sighs, exasperated.

Spencer asks, “What's the big hurry anyway?”

After a pause, Bender says, “I want him to be at the reunion. First weekend in June.”

“What reunion?”

“The class of '85. My mom was in that class, also every frickin' senior who carried those marbles. I'll bet none of 'em ever owned up to it. I think they should. JSH is the only one who knows who they all were. He should be the one to call them out.”

Spencer scoffs, “How do we make him do that—lock him up? Besides, it was twenty years ago. Water under the bridge and all that.”

“For
some
people,” Jay says. “Some of us are still dealing with it.”

No one comes up with a reply to that, even though they're all thinking similar thoughts about the potential stored in a handful of marbles. Maybe Bender's right. Somebody needs to own up.

Alice began the school year with two expectations that turned out to be wrong. First, she expected that for one reason or another, her family would have to move between September and May, because they always did. Second, she expected to finish up the school year as solitary as she began. A friend—that is, a flesh-and-blood friend to sit by on the bus and go over to her house in the afternoons—never figured in her plans for the year. Except for Darla in kindergarten and Amanda in second grade, all her friends are in books. Book friends are easy to take with you when you have to move (especially if you kind of forget to return them to the library), and they don't argue when you make a place for yourself in their story.

But now she has a real friend, and what's good about that is a whole lot better than what's bad. It started because of Kaitlynn's new idea. “Want to hear what my next story's about?” she up and asked right after Christmas vacation.

Alice looked up from her book, startled. Kaitlynn had talked to her before, in a hit-or-miss kind of way, but never actually stopped for an answer until now. “What's it called?”

“‘The Mystery of the Empty Bus Stop.'” Alice's jaw must have dropped or something, because as soon as Kaitlynn saw a reaction, she swooped down on the bus seat beside her. And stayed there for the rest of the school year.

“Here's what I've got so far,” she began. “There's a magic bus that takes kids away to the world of their imagination, where everything they dream about comes true. So every morning, the bus makes its rounds and picks up all the kids who had dreams the night before, only not all of them, because we all have dreams but we don't always remember. I'm thinking maybe the bus picks up the kids who wake up in the morning with the dreams they had still on their minds. The ones they can't quit thinking about. What do you think?”

“Well…” Alice wasn't used to being asked what she thought. She had to cough once and clear her throat. “That might not be so good. What if you have bad dreams? Like…your parents are missing or somebody died or gets really hurt?”

Kaitlynn considered this. “Okay, I'll work on it. Maybe only
some
dreams come true, after they run them by headquarters or something. Anyway, the bus comes by this one bus stop every day because somebody's signed up to ride it, only he's never there. And that's because he's a prisoner of his wicked stepmother who locks him up every time the bus comes around. But one of the riders is this really brave girl who uses her own dream-come-true to get into his dreams and—why are you staring at me like that? It's just a story.”

Alice knew about stories. But she knew other things too, and what Kaitlynn was telling her was a reflection of those things, totally rearranged. It was like going through the looking glass, for real. “Why does the stepmother lock him up?”

“
Why?
Because she's evil.”

“But…” Alice started to get the hang of objecting. “Suppose the boy is sick, or…can't walk or something like that, and the stepmother—or maybe just mother—thinks she's doing the right thing by keeping him home?”

“Do you want to hear this story or not?”

“Sure.” Alice mentally zipped her lips. “Go ahead.”

But Kaitlynn had lost momentum. She pulled a strand of hair from behind her ear and twirled it around her finger. “See, somebody has to be evil, or else it's not a good story.”

“I know. But people can do the right thing for the wrong reason, or the wrong thing for the right reason, and sometimes that's more interesting.”

Kaitlynn stuck the strand of hair in her mouth and chewed on it. “You think so?”

“Uh-huh. Like, what if the boy was crippled in a—a tragic accident, and he lives in an underground hideout, and his mother won't let him out because she thinks he'll only get hurt again, only somebody—like his grandmother, maybe—thinks he should get out and toughen up, and they're always fighting over it?”

Kaitlynn kept on chewing. “Hm. What kind of tragic accident?”

• • •

Actually, the accident would have been a lot more tragic if Ricardo's seat belt wasn't buckled, but it didn't have to happen at all. Daddy had driven their old Ford Galaxie to the convenience store in Arrowhead Rock to buy a half-gallon of milk. They couldn't afford a whole gallon—Alice remembered her parents fighting about that before her father stomped out of the house, taking Ricardo with him. They took the long way home (what they called home at the time, an abandoned farmhouse on a foreclosed cattle ranch) so Daddy could cool down. This being Oklahoma, where roads were straight as ladders, he was already going a little too fast when he came to the top of a long steep hill. There was a creek bridge at the bottom, and the only other traffic was halfway down the hill, a single tractor carrying a round hay bale.

“I hate it when tractors hog the road like that,” Daddy said. “What if we throw a little scare into him, make him move over?”

“Go for it, Daddy,” Ricardo said. At least, that's what Daddy said Ricardo said. They flew downhill in the Galaxie, laying on the horn, and were rewarded by the sight of the tractor lumbering to the shoulder. Daddy laughed before noticing the patrol car in the opposite lane.

He stomped the brakes, forgetting the right front brake shoe had a way of seizing up. The vehicle scissored across the highway and slammed into the concrete bridge abutment.

• • •

Friendships were best, Alice discovered, if each person brought something different to it. She and Kaitlynn were the same in the kind of stories they liked but different in what they got out of them. Kaitlynn wanted action: one thing after another,
bam-bam-bam
. Alice wouldn't mind the story going a little slower, because she wanted to know about the people: How did they grow up? What were the saddest or happiest things that ever happened to them? And (especially) why did they do the things they did?

“Because,” Kaitlynn would explain frustratedly, “it's time for something to happen.”

“But…things happen because of people, don't they?”

It led to some interesting discussions (okay, arguments) that made the bus rides go faster and helped them both determine what they were working toward. Before either of them realized it, the story became Alice's as much as Kaitlynn's. The magic-dream-bus idea was abandoned—or rather, it kind of drifted away while they were deciding who the missing boy was and why he couldn't ride the bus.

Albert (as Kaitlynn decided to call him) was crippled (Alice's idea) because of experiments by his mad-scientist uncle (who should have just used mice). Having an uncle that cruel was almost too much for Alice, who objected when Kaitlynn wanted the mad scientist to lock the poor little boy in a snake pit. (Kaitlynn was probably more spooked by her experience with Cornelia on the bus than she cared to admit.) “We'll need more obstacles for the hero to overcome on her way to rescue Albert! And snake pits are about the worst kind of obstacle there is!” Alice thought it was way too creepy, but they compromised by leaving the pit in and taking Albert out. That is, the uncle didn't actually throw him in there but was always threatening to. That ought to be evil enough.

• • •

Actually, Alice could see the need for obstacles—in real life, they sort of happened anyway, whether you needed them or not. After the accident, their whole life became an obstacle. First the hospital, where surgery saved Ricardo's life but couldn't save his legs. Then Daddy disappearing because he felt so bad. Then GeeGee's arrival to take care of things (which Mama wasn't too good at).

GeeGee was the only person they could call on, being Mama's mother, but her coming meant terrible arguments, during which GeeGee called Daddy a screwup who was better off gone and Mama screamed that she just wanted to be left alone to make her own mistakes. But she couldn't be left alone with two kids to take care of, could she? That's when GeeGee made her an offer, and Mama had no choice but to take it.

The offer was to move to GeeGee's old house, which was empty and needed a little fixing up, and use her truck when she didn't need it, and get Ricardo into physical therapy. All that, in exchange for one thing: that Daddy stayed gone. Mama said okay. But after they moved, one of the first things she did was get a library card so Alice-the-little-reader could check out books. But also so Mama could use the library computer to get in touch with Daddy and let him know where they were.

Somewhere in north Texas, he got the message. Then he hiked and hitched his way right to them, arriving after midnight on August 16.

“What did you expect?” he asked as he was explaining into the night. “Did you think I'd skip off to Mexico? Family's family, Brenda Kay; no moral dilemma there. And we're staying family, and we can look after each other with no help from anybody.”

It stunned him to see the shape Ricardo was still in: no strength, few words, had to be carried everywhere. Alice saw Daddy blink and swallow hard before saying, “But we can't turn the clock back, can we? First order of business is a wheelchair—we've got to get him out of bed ASAP.”

“We're waiting,” Mama said. “They haven't got us in the system yet.”

“Phooey on the system. We're staying out of the system as much as we can. Anybody know where we can get a wheelchair?”

Alice did.

She's the one who told him about the one the Pasternaks had. She knew what Daddy would do, and stealing was the only name for it, no matter that the Pasternaks weren't using their wheelchair and he meant to return the item as soon as Ricardo didn't need it anymore. That made her accessory to a crime, but it felt good to have somebody in charge again.

But he wasn't in charge of where she lived and where she went to school. His mother, Mary Ellen Hall Truman, had offered to let Alice live with her so she could ride the school bus to Centerview. Daddy was dead set against it: government schools were for government drones. He could teach her everything she needed to know or how to find out what neither of them knew. They'd done it before, hadn't they? She'd missed big chunks of second, third, and fourth grade and never saw the inside of kindergarten at all. However, this time the only person on his side of the argument was Alice. Both grandmas were against him (even though they didn't know it, because they didn't know he was around), but so was Mama. Like it or not, Alice was going to school.

She found a way to show her appreciation to Daddy, though. One Saturday afternoon in September, she and Mama stopped by the library on the last day of the semiannual book sale, and Alice noticed five boxes left under an
Everything
must
go!
sign. She whispered to her mother, and her mother talked to the desk clerk, and the next minute, they were loading boxes of books in the pickup to take home and be rewarded by one of her dad's huge smiles: “These'll get me through the winter!”

Daddy read everything: old westerns and romance novels and biographies of people you'd never heard of; college textbooks and county histories and seldom-read classics like
Moby-Dick
. But the real find was
Basic
Principles
of
Physical
Therapy
, third edition. Besides giving Alice the idea for her science fair project (which won a first-place ribbon for her age-group), that book helped prove Daddy's point that anything you want to know, you can teach yourself (exactly why school is such a big fat waste of time). Using a few
Basic
Principles
during the fall, he almost got Ricardo on his feet and walking again, or so he claimed. Daddy was positive that if the unfortunate incidents of late January hadn't happened, Ricardo could have kissed his wheelchair good-bye.

• • •

Their story got more complicated over the winter. Kaitlynn wanted to hurry up and get to the rescue by the really brave girl on the bus, but Alice was more interested in Albert and his family and exactly why he was a prisoner. They decided that the uncle wasn't all bad, because after crippling the boy, he now wanted to cure him. But maybe that wasn't so good either. Kaitlynn insisted that the uncle wanted to claim all the credit for himself, which meant keeping Albert a prisoner so he could continue his experiments. And she still wanted Albert to spend one night in the snake pit. “But just one. It's an accident. And they're supposed to be healing snakes, not poisonous. Uncle Ralph didn't
mean
to leave him in there.”

• • •

And actually, Daddy didn't
mean
to crash Ricardo a second time. That happened on a nice January afternoon—the day before the science fair, in fact—when the weather broke at sixty degrees and he pushed Ricardo up to the bus stop while Mama was taking a nap. Daddy wasn't supposed to do that, because GeeGee could show up at any time. But he'd been reading about the healthy effects of natural sunshine, and a warmish, sunny afternoon in January was too good to pass up.

Ricardo stood up. In fact, he actually walked a few steps, which made them both so giddy they started a game of tag—with Ricardo back in his chair—that got a little wild. It ended when Daddy ran behind the shed and Ricardo followed in his wheelchair and got so excited he overbalanced and fell over. He made a grab for Daddy while going down, but only broke off the belt buckle that was specially engraved with his high school logo. Ricardo hurt his back again, leading to a big fight between their parents and other complications.

Daddy never found his buckle either.

• • •

Once or twice per week, Kaitlynn would climb aboard the bus with a new idea that had just
popped!
into her head the night before. Like giving Albert a talented but snotty big sister who sucked up all the family money to launch her showbiz career. One of Kaitlynn's best ideas was having the little prince send messages to the outside world by a friendly bluebird named Blackie. (Why Blackie? Because it sounded better than Bluey.) That's how the hero of the story (a girl bus-rider who sounded suspiciously like Kaitlynn) came to know of his predicament and decide to rescue him.