Somebody on This Bus Is Going to Be Famous (22 page)

“Daddy!” She throws herself at him, but he's already backed away.

“
Or
you can go with your mom and brother and me. Unless you'd rather stay behind. If that's the case, we may just have to do what's best for
us
.”

That little word goes right through her. Until now, she was always part of
us
, but he said it like she wasn't—like she was cut off, a lonely arm waving futile fingers.

He starts down the skinny path she can barely make out in the fading light. “Daddy!” she sobs as he disappears. Running after him, she cries again, “I'm sorry! I didn't mean it!” Patches of his red plaid shirt flicker through the brush. “
Don't leave me!
Please!”

He stops long enough for her to catch up but doesn't say another word as they wind down the path toward home. And barely speaks to her all weekend.

• • •

So this week will probably be her last at school.

Alice feels her wheels slowing down, crawling to a stop. Now they've begun to turn—very slowly—in reverse. After settling down in one direction and feeling pretty confident about it, now she has to change back. Forward or reverse? It's hard to say. And it's harder to
do
, especially since she can't tell anybody.

Her family is going to just disappear, like always.

But this time, it's different. This time it's going to be hard. Never before has she walked through her remaining days in a particular place with thoughts like,
This
is
my
last
spelling
test, my last book report, my last game of kickball. I hope Kaitlynn won't think I don't like her—maybe I should give her some kind of going-away present on Friday? Without telling her I'm going away?

On Tuesday night, she goes to bed but can't sleep.
Daddy's leaving tomorrow
is the main thought that crowds out her other thoughts. She won't have a chance to tell him good-bye, but if all goes according to plan, she'll see him next week, in a brand-new place that has no place in her mind yet. Mama's been packing, sorting out the essentials and deciding how much will fit in the pickup. The wheelchair is essential, of course. Daddy only intended to borrow it from Mr. Pasternak Senior and return it as soon as Ricardo could walk again, but his plans didn't quite work out. So that will be one of the first things to pack.

Alice sits up in bed and looks out the window. A round steely moon spreads light like butter on a white-bread landscape. She has to pack soon—just what she can carry in her gym bag and her backpack, because she's only supposed to be going home for the weekend. What about the coat Grandma bought for her, the only new coat she's ever had? Probably no room for it.

She's never had so much to leave behind.

Toward dawn, lightning flickers on her eyelids. She remembers the weather report last night: morning thunderstorms likely. But the constant light pulsing nervously in the sky comes with no thunder and no wind.

“Feels like tornado weather,” says Grandma as she locks the front door on their way out. Pausing by the calla lilies near the garage, she adds, “Look at their droopy heads, when they usually stand up straight. Everything's too still. I don't like it.”

Fat drops are spattering the windshield by the time they reach the bus stop. “I'll wait,” Grandma says. “Terry won't be long.” Grandma hardly ever refers to GeeGee by her real name—usually avoids referring to her at all. What does that mean? Within two minutes, the sprinkle has become a shower, then a cloudburst, slicking the cars and setting windshield wipers a-swish.

Igor and Little Al streak across the common to the gazebo, where Bender, Matthew, and Jay are already waiting. Shelly runs from the opposite direction. On the east side of the loop, Mrs. Haggerty stops to pick up Miranda, who's hurrying along in an oversize yellow rain slicker.

“There she is,” Grandma says as the bus curves over the hill and rolls toward them. “May as well wait till she stops. No hurry.” The bus pulls into the Y and backs up by the gazebo. Grandma taps the steering wheel fretfully. “I'd almost drive you to school myself, except I've got to go the other way this morning.”

“It's okay.” Alice pops open the door. “Bye, Grandma.”

She slams the door and runs toward the bus, thinking,
My
next-to-next-to-last morning bus ride…

As she squeezes in line, Kaitlynn's first words to her are, “I got a great idea last night! I figured out how to get our hero out of the dungeon—”

“Move it!” Spencer calls behind them. “We're getting soaked!”

“Quack-quack,” GeeGee is saying to hurry up the littles. She smiles briefly at Alice, then glares out the rearview mirror. “Just hold your horses, lady,” she mutters to Mrs. Thompson, who's fuming behind the STOP sign again.

“It's too wet to go to school!” Igor complains as he climbs aboard.

“You're not sweet enough to melt,” GeeGee says. “Move along, folks! Find a seat and let's get this show on the road!”

I
may
never
hear
her
say
that
again,
Alice thinks.

Shelly shakes her head as she starts down the aisle, showering the littles with raindrops from her hair. (“Hey!” “Hey!” they protest.) Spencer unwraps his guitar case from his jacket, and Miranda slides into the seat across from Igor, sneezing. Matthew and Bender are the last to board, dashing from the gazebo and leaping the steps, one after the other. GeeGee slams the door and puts the bus in gear as the two boys head for the back. She forgets to pull in the STOP sign; behind them, Mrs. Thompson lays on her horn.

“Cool it, Mom.” At the back window, Bender makes a calming motion with both hands, which probably just irritates her more. GeeGee belatedly closes the sign, but a van is coming toward them on the road and Mrs. Thompson is still stuck behind the bus. There won't be any more places to pass until they reach the highway. Bender laughs. “You learn patience by being patient. That's what my mama always told me.”

He and Matthew have been in fine spirits ever since the state science fair—in which they didn't win the chance to go to nationals but were ranked third from the top, so they “go out in a blaze of glory,” as Bender says.

I
wonder
if
he'll be a math professor? Or a comedy writer?

“Let me tell you my idea,” Kaitlynn begins eagerly. Alice listens, though she can't keep her eyes from roaming. Directly behind them, Spencer has taken his guitar out of the case to check for water damage. Once it's out, he strums a few chords.

“This land is your land!” Jay sings, clapping off-rhythm. “This land is my land!”

“Can it, dork!” Spencer laughs.

Is
Jay
going
to
be
an
Olympic
runner
some
day? And Spencer a musician, like his dad?

Two rows ahead, Miranda scoots toward the center aisle. Igor is waiting on the opposite seat. She takes an envelope out of her backpack and passes it over. His eyes are big as quarters as he takes it.

I
hope
Miranda
writes
more
poems. I hope Igor graduates.

Shelly turns around halfway in her seat. “I have an announcement! Only sixty-three days, seven hours, and two minutes until I leave for camp!”

“You mean five hours, one minute, and thirty-two seconds,” Bender corrects her.

Only
two
more
days
of
Shelly's announcements.

“So how about this,” Kaitlynn is saying. “Instead of knocking the guard out with a rock from a slingshot, what if she gets Blackie to slip the keys from his pocket while he's sleeping?”

“Umm…” Alice hasn't been paying attention.

Behind them, Jay says, “Holy cow.”

The cloudburst has become a gully washer. The rain is pouring down in sheets, torrents, buckets. They've started down the hill toward Drybed Creek, and GeeGee has slowed almost to a crawl. The windshield wipers barely make a dent in visibility, even going full speed.

From the back, Bender says, “Oh no.” And he's not kidding.

“No!” he says again. “Don't try—Mom, NO!”

Bender is moving up the aisle, yelling out the left-side windows. “Sit
down
!” GeeGee calls sharply, but not loud because she's focused on keeping the bus on the road. Alice catches a glimpse of an SUV passing them in a wedge of water, its roof gleaming like a seal's back.

Bender stops in the aisle, five rows from the driver, and stares out the front window. All talk, all eyes are frozen as Mrs. Thompson's SUV slides across the yellow lines into the lane in front of them—and keeps sliding, across the line, onto the shoulder, and completely off the road.

One little girl screams. Bender drops like a rock, right there in the aisle, gripping the seat backs on either side.

GeeGee is struggling with the bus. All at once, everyone realizes it's floating, caught in a strong current that's about to carry them away. The back end swings dramatically to the right until they're almost sideways.

“Oh my goodness!” Kaitlynn gasps, clutching Alice's hand.

“Everybody hold on!” GeeGee yells. “Move to the right!” The screams begin: high yelps from the littles, shrieks from the girls, startled shouts from the boys. Alice sees Bender grab two kids and disappear between seats on the right side; seizing Kaitlynn's other hand, she ducks to the floor.

Get
down, get down!
somebody—or everybody—is saying.
On
the
right!

She pushes Kaitlynn in that direction, but the bus is already tipping. As it goes over, the two girls slide between seats like pinballs, bouncing as the bus slams on its side in the churning ground, sliding fast and then slow until it shudders to a stop. And everything is quiet.

The first thing Bender notices is the roof, which is now on the side. There's a big dent in it; he guesses it was made by a tree. A tree probably stopped them from sliding into the creek. They are in a new dimension where down is up—or actually, sideways, for the bus has come to rest at an angle, right side windows mashed into mud and brush, front end angled down. The place where the ceiling curves is now the lowest point of the bus, a trough where everything slides. Rain lashes the opposite windows over his head; wind and water roar all around them, but the interior of the bus is still strangely silent.

“Ow,” says a little voice under him. He's on top of Simon Killebrew, with Marilu Wong on top of him. “Are you okay?” he whispers to the girl, who dumbly nods.

“Get off me,” sputters Simon.

Bender pushes Marilu until she can steady herself, then grabs the seat to pull himself up. Simon squirms out from under him and slides to the curve of the ceiling like a fried egg. “Do you think we might be dead?” he quavers.

Bender looks around, unsure how to answer that question. The silence, which seemed to be miles deep, is starting to break up in whimpers and moans. The darkness is pulling back from a dim gray light crisscrossed with leafy branches and thrumming rain. Yellow hazard lights pulse against the back window: blink, blink, blink. It's like a heartbeat. They're not dead—at least not all of them—but he's not sure they're all the way alive.

It feels like some kind of in-between place, where they've come to the end of one thing but don't know how to get to the next thing. The blink of the hazard lights reminds him of that string of dots at the end of a paragraph when the author wants to leave you guessing…

“Bender!” Jay's head is poking up from the tangle of arms and legs and backpacks in the rear. “You okay?”

“I think so. You?”

“Maybe. My foot feels…I don't know. How's Mrs. B? Can you see her?”

Bender squints in the dim light. The driver is tumbled more or less upright in the stairwell, limbs twisted like a puppet's. Something about her doesn't look dead, but she's out like a light. That means…?

“I see her. She's not moving.”

Jay swears emphatically, then asks, “You know how to get the emergency door open?”

Bender flexes his ankles and knees. They seem to be working. He begins a slow crawl toward the back of the bus, walking sideways along the ceiling, stepping carefully over whimpering kids and moaning kids and kids who remain ominously still. He tries not to recognize faces until he comes to one he can't help but recognize: Matthew's, eyes wide open and staring at him from the ceiling.

Funny—he can't remember Matthew ever looking directly at him. “Hey!” he whispers.

Matthew is between two seats, on top of a window. His eyes flicker downward, at a spear of glass jutting out of his thigh.

Bender takes a deep breath, sucking in every four-letter word he knows. “Um. You…need help pulling that out?”

“Better not.” Matthew's voice sounds surprisingly calm though even softer than usual. “It's in the neighborhood of the femoral artery. I could bleed to death.”

“Right.” Bender swallows the dry lump in his throat. “Sure. Don't go anywhere.”

Matthew smiles thinly. “Okay.”

“Bender!” hisses Jay. “Help me with this door.”

He climbs over the next-to-last seat and grabs the emergency handle. “There's a second latch…right here…” His fingers go right to the latch as though they still remember from last fall, and the door pops open, making a flap they can crawl under to get out.

“Nice,” says Jay.

“Guys!” It's Igor, balancing on the upturned seat five rows ahead. “What do we do?”

“How're you?” Jay calls back. “Anything broken?”

“No—I landed on Miranda.”

Miranda pushes herself up from the corner, hair tumbled and eyes bleary. “At least I'm good for a pillow.”

“We're going for help,” Bender says, though he wasn't sure until then exactly what they were going to do. “Y'all see who's hurt. See if anybody's got a phone that works. We'll be back as soon as we can.”

“It's still raining,” Jay says.

No—it's pouring. If the emergency door had opened uphill instead of down, the bus would have been a swamp by now. Rain is cascading down the hill, and Bender suddenly remembers what he saw just before the bus left the road.

“My mom! I've got to find her!”

“What'll I do?” Jay asks.

“Run up to the road—flag the first car—”

“I'm not even sure if I can
find
the road!”

“It's uphill, you idiot!” Bender climbs through the opening, squeezing under the heavy door. “Come on, everybody says you're a runner—run for your life!”

He drops to the ground, and a burst of wind almost knocks him flat. He staggers to the lee of the bus, where the overhanging roof offers a little shelter, and tries to get his bearings. It's about 0.4 miles to the bridge from where they left the road. Near as he can remember, his mother's SUV had skidded off a little closer to the bridge. If it continued straight, at a thirty-six degree angle from the road (more or less), and nothing stopped the car…she'll be in the creek now. Oh God—no time to lose. “Oh God,” he prays, and plunges into the watery world.

• • •

After only three steps, Jay realizes there is something wrong with his right foot. Something broken or sprained. Rain streaks his glasses; he rips them off and lurches into a half-crawl, half-climb, his right foot shrieking in pain at every step. He pushes through brush and grass and chest-bumping wind, and it doesn't feel like he's making any headway at all. Branches snag his shirt and face, whip his bare arms. After what seems like hours, he trips on a root and sprawls in the mud, drained and disoriented. What now?

Go
long, Jay—go long!

Sunlight gleams on his grandfather's silvery hair and outlines the backward arch of his quarterback arm. “We faked 'em out, boy—clear shot! Get your butt in line: here it comes!”

In his mind's eye, a football sails overhead. He backpedals, arms out, fingers spread—

Splat! How come the ground here is so muddy? And…flat? Like a path. Like maybe even the old railroad bed he'd discovered only five weeks ago. The one he knows where it goes.

Pass
completed! Run for it!

He pulls himself up. The monsoon is slacking off to a downpour. He takes a shaky breath and sets off at a lopsided jog, heavily favoring his left leg. His pace blurs the spatter of rain until it sounds a little like cheering crowds, with Poppy's voice in his head providing the play-by-play: “Look at him go! He's at the seventy-yard line! The sixty—the fifty—the forty—can nobody stop this demon of speed?”

Nobody's stopping me
, he thinks.
Nobody
can
stop
me
.

Pain joins his team, like the block at his side. They could do this together. Half-crippled, half-blind, he runs and runs and runs, each step an electric shock that jumpstarts the next one. He runs as though he will never run again, and maybe he won't. But never mind:
it's for you
, he thinks;
for
you
. “For you!” he cries out loud. And keeps on, to keep going: “You! You! You!”

The gravel road leaps at him, like a rope stretched across the finish line. It almost trips him, but he recaptures his balance. Almost there! He can blurrily make out the bus shed. He turns without hesitation to his left, even though that part of the road goes downhill and the extra jolt of gravity jars his injured foot so badly he could scream. And maybe he does. By the time he reaches the door of the house—on a little porch, under a little roof—it's already open, and Jay is not surprised to see a boy in a wheelchair framed by the doorway.

• • •

“The letter!” Igor gasps. “I lost my letter!”

Miranda is looking at him like she just woke up. “What letter?”

“The one you gave me!” He feels frantically around his pockets, searches for his backpack. A stream of water from the cracked emergency door is making its way down the trough where the windows curve into the ceiling. There's just enough light to see how dark the water is.

“Blood!” he screams. “It's going to get all bloody!”

As if he'd turned on a faucet with that scary word, the screaming and crying begins, mostly from the littles. Igor can barely hear them for the clamor in his own head. Just a few minutes ago, he was holding it in his very hand—a letter from Bobby Price. To him. He didn't have time to read anything but the signature:
Dad
. Now it's like the man himself is torn away, and he feels like a little kid lost in a mob. “I've got to find it!”

Something charges up at him from the depths and cracks him on the head.

It's Miranda.

Did she just
headbutt
him? “Ouch,” he says.

She's rubbing her head too. “Get a
grip
.” He's never seen her so mad, not even when she yelled at Shelly. “Forget the stupid letter! We've got people hurt here—maybe worse. You can move easier than I can—go see about Matthew and Spencer while I check on the littles.”

Pain restores Igor to his senses. He chokes back his loss, squeezing his hands into fists. Then he climbs up to balance on the seat and look around. The floor—or what's floor to him now—is like a horizontal ladder, its rungs made of the edge of each seat back. With that image in mind, he climbs it, loping like a monkey from one rung to the next.

Spencer is peacefully nestled beside a broken guitar. There's a gash on his head that's bleeding a lot, but it doesn't look deep. Igor moves on to Matthew—and confronts a bloody slab of glass.

“Don't touch it,” Matthew says. No way is Igor touching it—in fact, he barely makes it to the emergency door in time to hurl.

• • •

Matthew understands that all he has to do is keep still. It doesn't hurt yet—his legs feel almost numb. It's like a matter/antimatter state, the instant before one wipes out the other. He could just go to sleep right now, and maybe not wake up. It could happen. He's always felt a little not-here anyway. Suppose he never was here, just a dream? He's thought about that before, but it's not a comfortable thought because you always had to wonder, whose dream?

He feels his mind start to tip and drift away from the present, as it's inclined to do when chasing some idea into limbo-land. Except for the glass.

The glass is pinning him down. For the first time, he can't just float away; he has to stay here. He's got to concentrate on right here, right now, or…there might not be a here and now for him. “For me,” he whispers. His leg begins to tingle with little pinpricks that will soon command all his attention, mind and body both, pinned to the moments as they pass. Staying alive will command all his attention. “Don't move anybody unless you have to,” he says to Miranda.

“I know,” she replies, staring at him.

• • •

His face is
gray
. Miranda is slow to move, not because she's hurt but because (her brain takes its own sweet time figuring this out) her yellow rain slicker is caught in a crack made by the dented-in roof. Wiggling out of the raincoat takes so much time that Igor completes his mission and passes her on his way to the front with a quick reassurance: “I'm okay now.”

He scrambles forward to check on his brother and the others, reporting back at intervals: “Katie's leg hurts—may be broken!” “Evan's scrunched up under the seat—Evan, are you okay?” Pause. “He says he's okay! Ally, can you get up? Way to go! Now stay right where you are. Where's Diana…? Are you sure she didn't come today?”

“Mrs. B's phone is ringing!” a little voice calls out.

“I can't get to it,” Igor says. “She's laying on it.”

“Is she breathing?” Miranda asks.

“I think so. Crystal Applegate's out cold!”

“Don't move her!” Matthew warns.

“
I
know!
”

Miranda bites her lip. Her whole body feels like it was run over, but she climbs carefully over the seat in front of her.

“Kaitlynn?” Simon's voice quavers from the front two seats where Igor is corralling the kids who can move on their own. “Can you hear me, Kaitlynn?”

“I'm headed her way,” Miranda tells him. “Give me a minute. Everybody stay calm!”

The littles seem to take that as permission to panic. A fresh wave of screams rises from the front. “Quiet! Hush!” Igor keeps saying. Miranda climbs over a seat and hears someone whisper, “Help me up.” One arm waves feebly—Alice's.

“I think my other arm's broken,” she says when Miranda leans over her. “I stuck it out to keep from crashing into Kaitlynn…she's under me. Help me up?”

Very carefully, Miranda leans down to tuck her fingers around Alice's waistband, pulling up while the girl grabs the seat back with her good hand. She chokes off a little scream as her broken arm swings loose, and Miranda can feel tears soaking into her T-shirt. “It really hurts,” Alice whimpers.

“I know.” Miranda is using her gentlest voice. “Can you use your legs? Climb over the seat back here and slide next to the window. The boys went for help—everything will be—”

She's stooping down to Kaitlynn and suddenly realizes that the blackish water underneath her is actually blood! “How is my friend?” Alice asks between sobs.

“Just a minute…wait just…a minute.” Miranda is feeling around Kaitlynn's head. The window underneath has shattered and left about a million cuts—but none of them look too deep. She picks up Kaitlynn's limp wrist, feeling for a pulse. Mom showed her how to do this a few times, but she goes through some long anxious seconds before finding it, strong and fast.