“WHY?” THE KID ASKED AGAIN. He wasn’t older than eleven or younger than eight, since the kids on the bus were exclusively between third and fifth grade.
“Because I have to be,” I said back to him mechanically while I stared, stagnant and cramped, out the window.
“Why?”
“Because the judge said so.”
“Why?” he said, musically and shittily.
“Because she said I was lucky enough to be a minor and she determined I wasn’t dangerous and because if I don’t prove I’m a responsible member of society, then my scholarships will be shot down and I’ll end up at GCC and working in Guthrie for the rest of my life,” I monotoned to the window, past my thin reflection, using the exact words the judge had used. I decided not to mention the irony of punishing me for acting dangerously by putting me around a bunch of innocent children.
The other little kids on the bus were mostly talking with each other, sleeping, or being aggressively ignored by the teenage Camp Buddies. Except for the kid sitting next to me. Behind us, there were two more busloads of kids and Buddies2—a busload for one of each of the counties making up the tri-county combo: Lake, Cook, and DuPage County.
“Why?”
“Because if there’s a school that can reject you based on a criminal record, it’s Duke. And Duke is a place you want to go.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re picky. Like really, really picky. And because now I’m not necessarily someone they would still want,” I said, not explaining that I didn’t care whether or not it was Duke anymore, which is where I’d always thought I’d go, as long as it was Anywhere but Here. That I would take The University of There in an instant, even if it meant pulling myself apart to get it. That it could be a crap college in some small town, in another state, hours from a city I’d never heard of, so long as it wasn’t in Guthrie.
“Wh—”
“Because my cousin and I made some bad decisions.”
“Why—”
“Because they didn’t seem like bad decisions at the time.”
“Why?” the kid asked, steeling himself. He had gotten tired of the Why game thirty miles back, and had stopped until we’d pulled over at a travel center, where he’d bought a Red Bull from a vending machine. At some point it had stopped being a game to him and had transformed into a battle of wits.
It was a battle I wasn’t going to lose.
“Because we were over-caffeinated and spent too much time watching adventure movies and because we didn’t plan for things going balls-up.” In the window, I saw his face crinkle up a little, like he wasn’t used to people saying things like “balls-up” around his baby ears. “Just balls to the fucking sky,” I said, watching him to see if he’d go running to the front of the bus to tell the hulking driver about me.
The driver looked like an aging bodybuilder who’d fallen on hard times and had to supplement his allowance for bronzing creams and Heavy Things to Pick Up by driving children to and from museums and camps. Exactly the kind of person who had enough misplaced frustration to pick me up and bend me in half over his head when Why Kid inevitably went screaming up the bus aisle to tell on me.
And who knows, maybe getting theatrically murdered by an angry bus driver was a fitting end for someone who was supposed to be smart and supposed to be a superhero but who wasn’t smart enough or heroic enough to stop his cousin from getting shot.
When Why Kid didn’t, I yawned and stretched the hand that was supporting my head against the window.
“Why?” he said, recovering.
“Because we were unstoppable,” I said. Outside, the Midwest ticked by like a scale model on treads: barn, barn, field, field, field, field, corn, cows, barn, billboard about God, field, field, field. We’d driven out of Illinois, skirted the top of Indiana’s industrial corridor, and hooked up into Michigan, due north. “We had plans.”
“Why?”
“What.”
“What?”
“Exactly.”
“What?”
“You meant ‘what.’”
“Why?” Why Kid asked, visibly becoming frustrated and tangled up in his own stupid game.
“Because why isn’t the question you really want to ask me. ‘Why did you have plans?’ is probably more nihilistic than you meant it to be,” I said against my palm.
“What, then?” he asked, exasperated.
I looked over at him. “What were our plans?”
“Yeah, what plans?” he said, exactly like someone not old enough to add, “Jesus fucking Christ, just answer the question.”
I almost said, “We wanted to give our miserable little town a jolt, something new for them to care about besides politics. To get them to look up from their fucking phones. We just happened to have different ideas about how to do it. I wanted a town full of people to see all of our gods playing Guns ’n’ Roses together. We’d bring people together through something absurd and beautiful. Charlie wanted everything to burn though, and I guess it all kind of backfired,” and when I’d pause to let him think I was done and when he took a breath to ask me “Why?” again, I’d say, “Because it turns out you can’t ever really know someone. Even your best fucking friend, who is also your cousin. We just wanted to do something big, and funny, and ridiculous; instead, a bunch of bad shit happened, and I’ve spent almost a year wondering how fucking dead I have to be, given the fact that I haven’t cried even one time.”
I almost said, “You’re not talking to a bad person, kid, you’re talking to a goddamn robot.”
Instead I said, “It involved a bowling alley and Guns ’n’ Roses.”
Twenty minutes later he’d given up or forgotten about asking “Why?” and had moved onto the real, burning questions locked away in his fourth-grader brain. “But why aren’t there seat belts? My mom says I always have to wear my seat belt,” the kid said to me.
Talking to him wasn’t half as bad as having to listen to the Buddy sitting a few rows behind us. He’d loudly introduced himself as Jeffrey to the kids sitting around him before narrating every Podunk landmark we passed. This kid was ten times better than hearing another word from the sentient travel magazine behind us. The worst part was that he didn’t need to be everything that he was so loudly being. There were plenty of students and Buddies alike sleeping or talking quietly. Jeffrey was just making it known that he was the type of person whose own mother always wanted to tell him, Goddamn, dude, just shut up for like five minutes.
“Right, I get that. What I’m saying is that your mom is wrong.” His forehead scrunched up and he looked like a person who’d gazed into the abyss and found the single most terrifying secret that the universe had to offer. “No, I mean, she’s mistaken. About this. Yes, you should wear your seat belt. But it’s different on a bus.”
“But why?” he asked, more legitimately than before.
“Okay, do you actually want to know? I can give you a grown-up answer, but…” I raised my eyebrows at him, eyebrows that said, “It’s going to be full of big words that you aren’t going to understand and then you’re just going to ask ‘why’ again but I’m not going to explain it all over just because you were dumb and didn’t listen.” The kid’s face went deadly serious and he nodded, ready to receive whatever extremely confidential and adult information I was about to give him. “All right. Seat belts wouldn’t do much of anything on a bus, so they rely on compartmentalization. It—see? Huge words. Compartmentalization is the seats being so close together and with high backs that absorb impact. Specifically—”
“Do you ever have to pee so bad it makes you mad? Like just absolutely livid?” one of the other Camp Buddies, four or five rows up and within earshot of the bus driver, said. He was not-quite-yelling to his friends who were sitting on the other side of the aisle. They were some of the few Buddies that didn’t have their Buddy shirts on. I looked down at the brightly colored Buddy Shirt that hugged me like claustrophobia and tried to imagine what kind of jokes Charlie would have made about it.
The Buddy who had to pee was wearing a shirt that said, “WWJD” with a picture of John Denver giving a thumbs-up.
The immense bus driver’s eyes flicked up in the rearview mirror, just long enough to betray that he was, unfortunately, listening. The abundantly hydrated Buddy went on with his pee spiel, much to the rolling laughter of the little kid sitting in the window seat next to him. The kid had a hatchet-job haircut—like it had been done in the dark, in the kitchen, by a mother with a grudge.
“It’s actually beginning to boil inside of my body, that’s how mad it’s making me. It’s just going to come out as yellow steam. It’s infur—Furinate! I’m going to furinate as soon as this bus slows under fifty. Like Speed, but with pee. Peed.” I recognized the John Denver Buddy as the one who’d bought three Red Bulls immediately before I got to talking with the Why Kid. The empty cans were a pyramid of bad decisions at his feet. He combed his dark hair out of his face with his hand, then looked over at the kid sitting next to him, making sure he was still smiling.
The bus driver was shaking his head, but not in a “Man, do I love my job and these wacky kids” kind of way. I was going to continue explaining compartmentalization to the kid next to me, but my physics lesson couldn’t compare to this.
“Toilet’s in the back,” the driver said to the mirror.
“That?” the Buddy said, pointing back without turning around. “I’m not falling for that. I’m not going into your execution tube. One press of a button and I get launched out of the bottom of the bus with my pants around my ankles.”
The bus driver didn’t say anything, but his bleary, jaundiced eyes told the Buddy to go endlessly fuck himself.
Pee Guy had black hair and dark skin, and was handsome in that unintentional “Yes, this is legitimately bedhead” kind of way.
“Just go pee in the thing, Faisal!” said the Girl Buddy sitting across the aisle from Pee Guy, turning and motioning toward the bathroom in the back of the bus. She was wearing an oversize Evanston Panthers Class of ’18 hoodie that didn’t quite manage to hide her frenzy of brown hair. When she turned and her eyes landed on mine, they lingered in a flash of recognition. She spun back around and leaned over on her knee to Faisal, who nodded for a second and slipped back into the forward and upright position. After a beat, he dramatically stretched and looked back at me. The girl slapped him in the ribs and his hands shot out in a “What?” gesture. The Buddy sleeping next to her against the window shuffled around a bit, somehow managing to tune out all of the bus noise—I could only see the back of his head from where I was sitting, but he’d slept through the last pit stop we’d made and I’d gotten a look at him. He slept like the kind of person who could fall asleep without a second thought on a bus full of wolf-children. His surprisingly crisp button-down shirt and side-parted haircut made him look Wall Street, even while sleeping.
I knew they recognized me because it had been ten months since the bowling alley, and when it turned out that the community didn’t take kindly to their gods being publicly burned, we’d hit the news and the town had hit us back. The first leg of the ordeal had been heavily televised because the facts weren’t all in and everyone was outraged and demanding to know why we’d done it.
I cleared my throat and tried to figure out how to best hide behind the hand I was leaning on. It was still technically possible that the camp admins would decide my best and most effective job over the next week would be doing the camp’s dirty work, somewhere tucked away where nobody could see. Something that didn’t involve me talking to people any more than I needed to.
But I knew it was too late. They had already seen me, picked up my scent, and they’d be the same as everyone else I’d dealt with since Charlie.
They, the good God-fearing people of Guthrie, had insisted that what we did was a hate crime, even when I’d told the police and reporters and the lawyers and the judge and my parents and anyone who would listen that we were trying to be funny, and maybe even do something good. Stupidly.
Mr. Coleman, one of two barbers in Guthrie, and someone who gives free haircuts to police officers and veterans, said, “That’s what they all say. Allah, Islam, whatever.”
Hollie Bridge, a girl I’d gone to school with since I was in kindergarten, started a local charity called WARMTH which raised funds for the bowling alley and stood for We ARe More Than Hate.
Stirring testimonies from prominent members of Guthrie—and, to a lesser extent, Greenfield—ranged from outrage and contempt to a terrible, rattled melancholy. That was the worst part: the slow pain. Footage that would’ve broken your heart and then glued it shakily back together. The news story juxtaposed our high school portraits over the burning remains of the bowling alley, to really emphasize how far we’d fallen. Then they showed the community holding vigils and praying together: solemn masses of people wearing WARMTH shirts holding hands regardless of card-carrying religion, Christian hands holding Muslim hands holding Jewish hands holding the hands of every shade of faith in between. We were an example of what happened when the privileged youth got restless.
All of the stations shared variations of the same footage. It always started with a shot of the reporter standing in front of Pinz!, the screen undercut with some tired version of the superimposed smear campaign “Local Arson, Possible Hate Crime” before the camera panned up to the half-destroyed, still-smoldering bowling alley. Depending on which network was airing the piece, it would either cut back to the anchors, looking as upset as reporters are allowed to look, or to footage taken the previous summer of a very happy barbecue that Pinz! had hosted in its parking lot.
They always rolled the “after” shot next: it was B-roll taken when the sun had finally come up and the fire had been put out. The focus of the shot was on the gods-blob. It was a cloud-shaped heap of blackened, bruise-colored plastic with bits of fabric and hardened bubbles dotting its surface. The camera always lingered on the smoking Holy Blob while the booming newscaster solemnly narrated in omniscient voice-over.
Then the public reactions.
The angriest reaction we saw, the one lined with the most wrath and resentment, was Reverend Harper’s. Harper on camera with the church behind him, which was notably lacking a Jesus with a Gibson guitar. Harper, who had seen us take his Jesus with a Gibson guitar. Harper, who was a minister and not a priest.
Most of the other religious leaders just looked confused.
Eventually it would cut to the courtroom, when I got to talk. By this point it was spring; when most of the facts had lost their mystique and most of the outright fiction had been sheared away—when the hateful dust settled and it became clear that our crime was being idiots, not bigots—we were slowly but inevitably becoming nothing more than a footnote in small-town folklore.
Living that close to Chicago, there were always bigger stories to pay attention to.
Still, some people persisted—like the lady in line at the coffee shop, who’d had the same flash of recognition in her eyes before tugging at my sleeve and saying, “Jesus still loves you, even if you hate Him.”3
Or the kids at school who would lower their volume whenever I walked by, who would watch me like they were waiting for me to start screaming and crying and confessing that the news reports had all been right. They looked at me the way doctors look at benign tumors. Unsettling and unwelcome, but not life-threatening. Probably.
And each time they pointedly did or didn’t talk to me, every time they made sad, lingering eye contact before looking down and shaking their heads just the slightest bit, I’d feel the cold exhaustion dig itself deeper into my bones; I’d feel my undercurrent freeze just a little bit more. But I kept moving and I kept going to coffee shops and kept on showing up for class because I was Moses the Machine; I was the one who always got back up, the one who came back.
One of the advantages of growing up in a small town and being privileged is that sometimes the judge who decides your fate happens to also have been your soccer coach from third grade, not some daytime-television asshole who doles out theatrical Old-Testament punishments for crimes of every nature. The disadvantage of living in a small town is that sometimes third-grade-soccer-coaching judges also decide that your best course of action is a second chance surrounded by a bunch of screaming children in the woods for a week.4
The bus’s hydraulic brakes hissed as the driver pulled us off the highway past signs promising Camp Jaye’k, just three miles down the road. Ten more minutes of kids and Buddies alike staring out the windows of the huge yellow bus that relied on compartmentalization rather than seat belts to keep us safe. The three Buddies ahead of me settled back into their own worlds. Girl Buddy was trying to type something on her phone as No Longer Sleeping Buddy leaned across her lap to talk to Pee Buddy, who nodded, said something while gesturing with his hands, then started laughing.
Even this close to our destination—a time generally reserved for mild panic attacks and escape plans—the bus was a frenzy of individual ecosystems. From the Buddies in front of me talking with the hatchet-haired boy, to the Travel Show Host behind me pointing out native trees, to the clutch of angry-looking little kids in the back of the bus who were swearing loud enough for the bus driver to hear and then acting like it wasn’t them, to the little girl in the aviator hat sitting next to a student wearing noise-canceling headphones, the bus was a geopolitical map of life and hormones and stories, and up until just a few minutes ago, none of them had involved me.
A quarter mile down the country road, a small shape was trundling along the center line with its spiny back turned toward us. As we closed in on it and the bus driver made it clear that he had no intention of swerving around the porcupine, the girl with the brown hair next to Faisal spoke up, pulling her hood off, as if that would make her voice more clearly heard.
“Hey— There’s a—”
The front half of the bus let loose a collective squeal when the bus ran the porcupine over. Every ecosystem on the bus synced up as it banged under the front of the chassis, smacked up against the floor under my feet, and got tossed out behind the vehicle.
The curious kid next to me spun around and looked out the back window. His fingers dug into the back of the seat and he kept scraping his shoes against my leg, trying to get a better view. Behind us, the tiny broken shape lay motionless on the shoulder, upright but facedown, and it was impossible to tell if the other buses hit the broken-apart little animal.
“He hit it! Why didn’t he move?” he asked, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the bus hadn’t moved because that’s life: the bus does not swerve.
“Yeah, why didn’t you try to move?” It was the brown-haired girl who’d recognized me; she had a voice like classic rock, like power chords. She had a voice you paid attention to.
“Didn’t have room,” the driver said without looking back.
“It was moving with the bus; you didn’t have to swerve,” she said.
The driver didn’t say anything back.
“You aren’t supposed to swerve if you see an animal in the road. Especially if you’re driving a bus full of students,” I said to the kid as my phone buzzed in my pocket. Neither the kid nor the Buddies toward the front of the bus seemed to think the driver was anything less than an asshole though. General road precautions aside, they didn’t seem wrong about him either.
The kid had his face mushed against the window to try to get a look at the animal behind us when I pulled my phone out to check it. It was a text from my mother that said,
Hey SB!5 Have a great (court-ordered) time! You’ll do great. Love u lots.—Mom