Somebody on This Bus Is Going to Be Famous Read online

  • • •

  The first Friday in October, Shelly bounds onto the bus after almost everyone has boarded, whips out a couple of drumsticks, and beats a tattoo on the back of the front seat.

  “Excuse me?” says Mrs. B.

  “Attention, everybody! I hereby announce my candidacy for Youth Court! With liberty and justice for all!”

  “What?” Spencer springs up from his seat. “I’m running for Youth Court!”

  “Nothing like competition,” smiles Shelly. “Please make room for my campaign manager.”

  Miranda squeezes past her and starts handing out fliers, even to the kindergartners who can’t read. “Vote for Shelly,” she says. “Vote for Shelly. Vote for—” Apparently they’re friends again, and Miranda looks happy as a pig in slop, as Bender’s mother likes to say. Sweet.

  Spencer, on the other hand, is almost spitting. “How come you’re so civic-minded all of a sudden? You couldn’t care less about Youth Court! This is just résumé enhancement, right?”

  “Whatever.” Shelly smiles even harder. “Now for a preview of my campaign song—”

  “Oh no, you don’t,” Mrs. B cuts in. “Time to motor. Sit!”

  Everybody sits, but Spencer is so hot you can almost see steam coming off him. Bender grins to himself—it looks like an interesting ride for a change. He waits until the bus has reached the highway before raising his hand. “I have an announcement too: my vote is for sale.”

  Kaitlynn turns around to tell him he doesn’t have a vote because he’s in seventh grade and junior high kids don’t have anything to do with middle-grade youth court, blah blah—and he says, “Didn’t you ever hear of voter fraud?”

  Spencer spins halfway around and points at Shelly. “That’s exactly what I mean! She’ll turn this campaign into Entertainment Tonight!”

  “Chill, dude,” says Jay beside him.

  Shelly turns her head and flutters her eyelashes at Bender. “Just for you, a special solo.”

  “See? She doesn’t even care!” Spencer yells.

  They continue the argument, Shelly insisting she’s always cared about justice and Spencer demanding she prove it, all the way to Farm Road 152 and down the hill. The bus backs up as usual, the three mailboxes scroll by—

  Wait a minute.

  The center mailbox has something tucked between the flag and the box: a large sheet of white paper or maybe poster board, rolled into a cylinder that sticks out about fourteen inches from the mailbox, like a giant cigarette or—

  Bender feels a sting on his neck and claps his hand over a small, damp lump. A spitwad? From where? Across the aisle, Matthew is staring out the window, Alice-or-Alison is buried in a book, and Igor is bouncing in his seat, calling out, “Vote for Shelly! No, vote for Spencer!”

  Igor owes Bender one—actually several. But so does Matthew. Which of them blew the spitwad? The bus makes a jerk and pulls forward, redirecting his attention to the back window. That tube of paper stuck in the mailbox looks like a giant blowgun.

  Everybody knows his habit of rolling up pieces of paper after writing on them, but nobody knows why. He writes numbers he sees, like the mileage from St. Louis to Chicago or the capacity in gallons of a ten-foot-diameter wading pool. Then he invents word problems for them (in his head) and solves the problems (also in his head). But nobody knows that. Or do they?

  The paper is stuck on the mailbox exactly like he sometimes tucks the rolls of paper over his ear. What if it’s a sign? What if there were special numbers written on that paper that only he could understand? Or is that totally crazy?

  Bender’s thoughts come thick and fast as the bus climbs toward the highway. Who put—Why is it—What is it—Could it be for him?

  Vote for Shelly! Vote for Spencer!

  The faster his thoughts come, the more they jab at him like tiny bat claws. He can’t just sit here. He can’t let this go by—it might be really important! The bat claws dig into his brain until he can’t stand it: Out! Out! they tell him. Get off the bus, check it out. His eyes lock on the rear door.

  Emergency exit. Do not open. Yeah, yeah. Alarms will go off, all that. No way can he sneak off the bus. But if he hits the ground running, he’ll be all the way to the mailbox before Mrs. B backs up; he can grab the paper, and if there’s anything on it, he might even have time to stuff it in his jacket.

  The bus is at the highway, right blinker on. Bender eyes the handle of the emergency door; it’s actually no stranger to him. He’s imagined opening it many times, just to see what would happen. He’s even checked out the mechanism and located the safety latch underneath the handle. But now that he has a reason to open it, his nerves are jittering: does he dare? Does he have the nerve to act on some of the crazy thoughts he’s had? Nobody’s looking. Mrs. B’s head is turned to the left, waiting for a van to pass. If he listens closely, he can imagine the right turn blinker chanting, Now! Now! Now!

  Or maybe that’s his pounding heart—NOW!

  The bus wheels crunch as Mrs. B presses the accelerator. Bender jumps for the handle, pushes the safety latch, jerks the handle up, swings the door open, and leaps.

  The alarm bells in his head are so loud he can’t hear the real alarm. So far so good—

  But his plan to hit the ground running doesn’t work out too well. There’s a technique to landing on one’s feet, which Bender has never practiced. Instead of running, he stumbles and falls, moaning as pain shoots from ankle to hip.

  The bus rolls back, and for a terrifying second (he’d never thought old Big Yellow could look so HUGE), he thinks it might just roll over him. Then Mrs. B sets the brake. Faces appear around the edge of the doorway: Alice-or-Alison, Jay, Spencer, Kaitlynn, Shelly’s little brother, Evan, and Kaitlynn’s little brother, Simon, all with wide eyes and open mouths.

  Igor pops through the crowd. “Cool! I wanna do it too!” He jumps out the door like Bender had planned, only better: he lands on his feet and takes off running.

  “IGOR!!” yells Mrs. B, who has pushed through the crowd. “Come back here, NOW!”

  Igor freezes in mid-stride, then starts running backward in slow motion. Meanwhile, Bender groans again, partly for sympathy. But he isn’t getting any from the driver. With hands on her hips and her puzzled, angry face cocked to one side, she demands, “What the Sam Hill do you think you’re doing?”

  She enlists Jay’s help in getting Bender back on the bus and tosses an Ace bandage from the first-aid kit for him to wrap his ankle with. It’s definitely sprained, maybe even broken. He feels it swelling, throbbing against the bandage until he can hear it in his ears. Just outside of town, he glances up at the billboard where his mother beams down at him: Myra Bender Thompson—Your Go-to Gal for Home or Investment! Her head perkily tilted to one side, she holds a house in one hand while the other sweeps over a map of the county, like she’s ready to get you any little property your heart desires. In real life, he can’t remember ever seeing her smile at him that way.

  • • •

  Certainly not today. When she picks him up at school, she’s mostly interested in letting him know she had to pass one of her appointments off to another agent in the office, and if the other agent makes the sale, she gets nothing (she’s number two on sales but closing in on number one). “What did you jump from? The nurse told me but I must have heard wrong. The emergency door of the bus?”

  They go straight to the clinic to get his ankle X-rayed. No fractures, but his lower leg is swollen to the size of a watermelon by then. “Take it easy for a while,” the doctor tells him. “Use an ankle brace for a day or two, then support socks for a week. What did you say you jumped from?”

  • • •

  “What were you thinking?” His mother says once she’s slammed the car door and buckled her seat belt.

  “I…always wanted to try it. See what would happen.”

  Her
sigh is more like an explosion as she puts the Suburban in reverse and shoots into the parking lot, screeching the brakes as a van honks behind her. “Just to see what would happen, huh? I used to know somebody like that. In high school. Always pulling stunts to see what would happen—until he went too far.”

  “Went too far how?”

  “People got hurt.”

  “Like who?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it, okay? It’s not the point.”

  He wonders why she doesn’t want to talk about something as far away as high school. “What is the point? People getting hurt? I’m the only one who got hurt this time.”

  His mother appears to struggle with what to say next as she taps an agitated rhythm on the steering wheel with one finger: one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three-four. “You were hurt—thank God, it wasn’t worse—but other people were inconvenienced, like me. Next time you start wondering what’ll happen if you do something, just use your imagination.”

  He knows that’s all the sympathy he’s going to get. “Are you gonna tell Dad?”

  She stomps the brake pedal at the edge of the parking lot, jerking them forward in unison. With her head turned to watch the right-lane traffic, she says, “Why should I? It would just give him another excuse for not coming home.”

  That statement has an odd ring. “Why…why wouldn’t he just come home after he finishes the job?”

  His mother makes a left turn—slowly, for her. “No good reason. That’s just it. Sometimes I think he makes up excuses to stay away longer.”

  She glances at him, and the look is like an open door. The voice too. Sometimes he gets the sense that if he asked a serious question, like What do you mean by that? she’d give him a serious answer. As if she would like to talk to him. Sometimes he thinks he should walk through that door, answer that voice—but he can’t. He doesn’t know why. Watching the minivan ahead of them, he remarks, “Get Thorn to call him. He’d come home if Thorn asked him to.”

  She stomps the brake pedal again as the minivan signals a turn. “For your information, Thorn is not a miracle worker.”

  “Coulda fooled me,” he says.

  A few days later, Miracle-boy himself emails from college: Hey, little bro. Mom says you jumped out of the back of a school bus. What’s up with that?

  Thorn almost never emails him. Bender doesn’t reply.

  • • •

  Mrs. B decides that Bender should sit in the front seat of the bus, across from her, for an entire week. So she can “keep an eye on him.” It’s the seat reserved for notorious school bus criminals, and he qualifies, but he’s okay with that. Sitting this close, he can see all the numbers and gauges on the dashboard.

  Because of the times he’s occupied this seat in the past, he already knows the average speed Mrs. B drives and the exact mileage to various points on the route. But now he gets to clock the distance to the mystery stop and check if Mrs. B’s rate is any faster or slower. No to the latter. After a week of jotting down odometer readings, he has a precise answer to the former: 2.83 miles.

  He’s read somewhere that an average adult can walk one mile in twenty minutes. Given that he’s not an adult (though he might be average, especially compared to a certain spectacular individual whose initials are JTT), he should still be able to cover a mile in twenty-five minutes, and two miles plus 0.830 shouldn’t take much more than an hour. Or one hour and ten minutes, max.

  He will pick a day when both parents are out, play sick, wait until the school bus leaves, and hike to the mystery stop. What he’ll do when he gets there, he leaves to inspiration. The plan is so simple it almost bores him, but as he’s already discovered, simple plans are more likely to succeed than the other kind.

  • • •

  During the last half of October, Halloween shares equal time with the campaign for Youth Court, which in previous years attracted no more attention than a Red Cross fund-raiser. But Bender has to admit, Shelly has given this race a lot of pizzazz. She teaches her campaign songs to the littles and belts them out on the bus, both coming and going. Such as:

  I’d like to teach the school to sing in perfect harmony.

  I’d like them all to vote for me upon November three.

  Sometimes Bender joins in from the back, just to irritate Spencer. The genius didn’t expect this kind of competition, but he sucks it up and makes up for his lack of musical ability with computer-generated campaign signs like Spencer for the people! The people for Spencer! Jay, his manager, makes up a cheer and launches it every time the Vote-for-Shelly choir pauses for breath:

  Two! Four! Six! Eight! Who do we appreciate?

  Three! Five! Seven! Nine! Who’s the brain that’s really fine?

  Spencer! Spencer! Spencer! YAAAAAYYYY!

  Sometimes the campaign gets so rowdy Mrs. B actually pulls over on the side of the road until the noise level drops.

  Meanwhile, Kaitlynn wants to know about everybody’s Halloween costume. For a week, she agonizes out loud (in-between campaign songs) before deciding to be a willow tree. Miranda is going as Cruella de Vil (though Bender thinks she has a few too many pounds on her for that) and Shelly grandly announces she will be a Supreme Court justice. Spencer (groaning loudly at Shelly’s choice) says he’s going as a mad scientist. Jay will borrow his grandpa’s old helmet and jersey (like last year), and voilà; instant football hero.

  “A nearsighted football hero?” Bender asks. Jay scowls at him.

  Igor will be a spider and Matthew a shrug—at least, that’s what he does when asked—and Alice-or-Alison looks confused, as though not sure what Halloween is.

  And Bender? “A garbage bag.”

  Jay says, “Yeah, right,” while Igor holds his nose and waves away imaginary fumes. But little do they know, including Bender, how true that will be.

  • • •

  As it turns out, Halloween looks like the best day to carry out his plan. Mr. Thompson is in Arkansas adjusting flood claims, and Myra Bender Thompson will be showing houses to a new client from Pennsylvania. The client has only one day to look, so they’re planning an early start.

  When the alarm goes off in Bender’s room that morning, he lies awake for a few seconds. Then he moans. Last night, “Tornado Tim” Blair, the weatherman on Channel Five, predicted a 60 percent chance of rain beginning around midnight and continuing through the morning hours, with a low of thirty-four degrees which might climb to the forties by noon. Bender had wondered if he should call off his plan but decided that 60 percent didn’t mean anything when predicting the weather.

  Right now, however, the chances of rain are 100 percent, and he can tell by the trembling drops on his windowpane that thirty-four degrees is cold.

  He considers dropping the plan, getting up, and going to school instead of pretending to be sick and taking a hike. Or better yet, just pretend to be sick, stay where he is, and sleep the whole miserable morning into oblivion.

  But…

  It isn’t that often that both parents are out when he leaves for school. And from now on, the weather is only going to get worse, or at least more unpredictable, until spring. It’s now or never, sort of—put up with a little misery today or let the mystery drive him nuts every time Mrs. B backs up beside the empty shed on Farm Road 152.

  With a long sigh, he launches phase one of his operation: unwrap the onion he cut last night and hold it over his face until his eyes and nose well up. Then turn on the heating pad under his blanket and put it to his forehead. After a few minutes, he stuffs the onion and heating pad out of sight and calls out, “Mom! I’m sick!”

  He almost overdoes it, bringing his temperature on the scanning thermometer up to 103.4. His mother is wondering if she should call the doctor, but Bender suggests he might feel better with more sleep. Besides, she has houses to show.

  “Okay,” she says doubtfully, tapping a fi
nger on her cell phone. She’s ready to walk out the door in a navy blue pantsuit and the low heels she wears when she’s going to be on her feet a lot. “I’ll call at noon to see how you’re doing. And you call if you need anything…”

  Half an hour later, he tears a garbage bag off the big roll of industrial-grade bags his father uses for the weekly pickup. He slits the bag up one side, making a poncho in case the rain decides to pour instead of drizzle. Then he plunges into the elements.

  Cutting across the common, Bender almost collides with Panzer, Mr. Pasternak Senior’s dachshund. At the other end of a leash is Mr. Pasternak Senior. Both seem to materialize from behind a tree. “Whoa! Sorry…” Bender says, frantically trying to come up with a story for the questions the old man is bound to ask.

  But Mr. Pasternak just nods irritably and says, “Watch where you’re going, buster! Kickoff is at two o’clock sharp.” It seems odd for him to be out walking in the rain, and Panzer doesn’t look too happy about it. As for what he meant by kickoff time, Bender doesn’t stop to wonder. He’s off like a shot.

  In less than a minute, he’s across the loop and on the road, covering ground like Thorn Thompson setting a new cross-country record.

  This stretch along Farm Road 216, from the gazebo to the highway, will be dicey. Anybody driving it is bound to see him in the open field, likely to know who he is, and even more likely to stop: “Bender? Did you miss the bus? Do you need a ride to school?” He plans to run alongside the road where the ground is a little lower and hit the dirt if he hears a vehicle. But the landscape is rougher than he expected, with all kinds of dips and—car coming! He drops immediately, and the garbage bag balloons over him, settling on his head.

  The vehicle rolls on by. He doesn’t dare look up to see who it is.

  But then it hits him—he has the perfect disguise! What could be more ordinary, less worth looking at, than a plastic bag along the road? True, it’s bigger than your average bag, but if he keeps well to the side of the highway and listens carefully for the sounds of an approaching vehicle, he’ll have plenty of time to cover himself and drop to the ground undetected. So the garbage bag is his Halloween costume after all. Ha!