It didn’t take long to settle into the new routine. I ride the school bus to Thornhill School in the mornings and the city bus home from Brookside after Ma’s shift is done at night. To get from school to Brookside, I walk. It’s only about twelve blocks, but it’s a long twelve blocks when you’re tired from school and luggin’ a backpack and you’re on your way to a home for oldies. It’s not exactly a destination to look forward to when you’re eleven.

Or even when you’re ninety, now that I think about it.

If I dawdle, I hear about it from Ma. “What took you?” she whispers, giving a worried look at the wall clock. “You’re not getting mixed up in anything, are you?”

“Ma-ah,” I groan, ’cause I’ve never been mixed up in anything. Her asking me that came on after we moved. Maybe ’cause we’re living in a “rough zone,” as she calls it, but our apartment is a long ways from the route I walk from school to Brookside, so her frettin’ like she does makes no sense to me.

Finally, she’ll see that I’m just tired and hungry and say, “Let’s get you a snack.”

Snacks at Brookside are okay. Not great, but okay. They’re for old folks, so they’re low in fat and sugar and salt, which adds up to them being low in flavor, too. They’re still better than the snacks marked D, which are for the diabetics and made with fake sugar, since real sugar could send them into a diabetic coma.

But the snacks are free and the juice is usually cold, which is mostly what matters. And after I’m parked at my regular table with my snack, Ma can quit worrying about me and what I might have been doing on the walk over and get back to work.

I don’t tell her this, but it’s not the walk she should be worrying about.

It’s the bus.

I don’t mean the city bus, either. She’s with me on that one, so she knows what I see there. She always has advice for me when we’re on it, too. “Don’t stare, Lincoln,” she’ll whisper. “He’s drunk.”

Like I haven’t seen drunk enough to recognize it? Like I haven’t figured out it’s the whole reason she dragged me halfway across the country? I know drunk, and I can usually ditch drunks. Ma…well, that’s a different story.

But back to the bus.

On the city bus, we’re allowed to sit anywhere. We can move away from trouble if it starts up, and that makes the city bus a safe zone compared to the school bus.

The rule on the school bus is little kids up front, big kids in back. And the first couple of weeks I followed that rule because it made sense to me.

Besides, what sixth grader wants to sit with first graders?

Before we moved, I used to walk to school, so I never knew how rough the back of a school bus can get. Ma doesn’t want me watching R movies or playing violent video games, but the back of a school bus is as bad as both.

Usually when there’s trouble brewin’, I find a way to sidestep it. I hush up, duck out, and live to see another day. So that’s what I tried to do on the school bus. I started bending the seating rule a little, not going all the way back when we piled on. I’m not exactly big for eleven, and I’m new, so the younger kids didn’t really know any different, and they didn’t seem to mind.

But the kids at the back of the bus sure did.

“Dude, ain’t you in Miller’s class? Why you sitting way up there?”

“Yeah, whatsa matter? You got a problem with us?” It was Hee-Haw #1. The one who wasn’t in my class.

I waved at them like, no hard feelings, but I guess there were hard feelings anyway, ’cause as the bus roared along, the teasing started. First they picked on my “drawl” and how I was “a Southern boy.” Then the names began flyin’. Hee-Haw #1 started off callin’ me the Wiz, but one of his herd thought that was a cool name—like I was smarter’n them, or a wizard. So he moved on pretty quick from that to messin’ with my name, calling me the Missing Link and the Weak Link and then just Link for short.

I knew they were trying to make me say something so they could make fun of the way I’d said it, but what it did instead was make me face forward and keep my mouth shut tight. But over time the names went from mean to meaner, ’til they were so bad I’d’ve been whupped to Sunday if I’d said them at home.

When they ran out of new names, they added shoving.

And when they got bored of the shoving, they added spitting.

By October they were up to spoon flinging. I got hit with grape bombs and tuna fish and Jell-O and whatever part of some other kid’s lunch they didn’t mind wasting. They were sly about it, so the bus driver never saw them, and everyone else was too afraid to do anything. Instead of trying to get rid of the flingers, the little kids tried to get rid of me. “You can’t sit here,” they told me, and who could blame them? I was the target, but with spoon flingin’ there’s lots of hits outside the bull’s-eye.

I didn’t know what to do about it. It’s not like I could tattle. I knew where that’d get me. And it’s not like I could change my mind and start sitting further back. Either way, I’d get murdered.

So I was stuck.

Stuck in the fling zone, with tuna in my hair.