Busload of Misfits

For a while after that, nothing happened. But once we were about a half hour down the road, I started hearing this leaky tire sound.

“Psst!… Psst!”

When I looked around, the girl across the aisle was staring at me. She seemed kind of pretty, in a pretty-scary kind of way. I’d never seen a kid that young with a real tattoo before, but she had this crazy snake around her arm. She had some muscles too. That snake looked like it could wrap around my neck and squeeze my head right off. I couldn’t help but wonder how old she was when she got it in the first place. I bet her first words were telling the tattoo artist what color its eyes should be.

“I’m Carmen,” she whispered. “What’s your name?”

“Rafe,” I whispered back.

“What’d you do?” she said.

“Huh?”

She looked at me like she’d just figured out how dumb I was. “Why are you here?” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “I got expelled.”

“Is that all? That’s nothing. I once—” she said.

But then I heard a lion roar from the front of the bus.

“WHO’S TALKING???”

Fish was on his feet and coming up the aisle before I could even break a sweat. At least he wasn’t looking at me.

“CARMEN, WAS THAT YOU JABBERING BACK HERE?” he said.

“Nah,” she said, like she barely cared. “I heard someone, though.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet,” Fish said, right in her face. Then he looked around at all of us. “Next one of you cockroaches to let out a peep gets ten extra pounds in their pack tomorrow morning! Are we clear? Do not test me on this.”

Nobody answered. I guess we were all learning the rules of the game pretty fast. And we were all in the same boat.

Or on the same doomed bus, anyway.

But then that got me thinking.

This wasn’t a program you signed up for on purpose. Everyone on that bus had done something to get themselves shipped out here for a week of suffering. Maybe something really bad.

What was Carmen about to say?

So if you were me, you know what else you’d be thinking, right? What did all these other kids do? And, How far to the nearest hospital?

Some of them seemed kind of sad and scared, but some of those kids just plain looked like their favorite hobby was ripping other people’s faces off. (Hello, Carmen!) I know you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover and all that, but at the time, the cover was all I had to work with.

But that got me thinking about something else. What did everyone see when they looked back at me?

What did my cover look like?