42

NOW SHOWING AT A
BRAIN NEAR YOU.

We spent the night in the bus station. I was tired and hungry and scared. The donut man had gone home for the night. Everyone still there looked mean or crazy or both. The fact that I thought the donut man was mean at first too didn’t make me feel any better at three in the morning. I wouldn’t have had a wink of sleep except that Bitsie was desperate to keep me happy. He was worried I was going to take him back to the studio. I’m sure that’s the only reason he volunteered to stand guard.

Or rather lie guard. I put my knapsack on the bench so Bitsie could see out the hole at the top. Then I put my head on the knapsack and fell asleep.

It’s funny how you say “fall asleep,” because that’s not usually what happens. How often do you “fall”? Usually you just sort of float asleep. Like you’re on an air mattress or something, just drifting. One minute you’re in the shallow waters of Wakey-Wakey Beach; then, without even knowing it, you’ve floated out into the wide-open seas of the Slumber Strait. ⁵⁶

But that night I fell asleep, and I must have knocked myself out when I hit bottom because I didn’t move again until 6:55 when this really loud announcement came on.

“All passengers should now be on board for the 7:03 bus to Neewack, Goldrink, New Cumberland, Bousfield and Lower Shinimicas.”

I unstuck my tongue from the roof of my mouth, grabbed my knapsack and stumbled onto the bus half-awake. I was sort of glad I was feeling so terrible. When you need a toothbrush as badly as I did, it’s easy to keep your mind off your other problems. The back of the bus was empty so I put the knapsack against the armrest and stretched out over three seats. I was hoping to just fall asleep again. Hard—the way I did before—so that nothing could start worming around in my brain until I woke up in Bousfield.

Like Bitsie was going to let that happen.

He started yammering away about all the things he and Arnold’s puppets were going to do together. It was going to be so much fun after being cooped up with those foam-heads all these years. I couldn’t blame him for being excited, but that doesn’t mean I had to listen to him. The less I thought about what we were doing, the better. I closed the top of the knapsack to shut out his voice and tried to go to sleep.

He pulled open the side pocket and started talking about how he hoped they had cable up in Bousfield so he and the boys (as he called his soon-to-be new friends) could get the Sports Channel.

I stuffed the fake braids on my kerchief into my ears and rolled over and tried again. But it was too late. I wasn’t going to be able to fall asleep anymore. I lay there staring at the grey-carpeted ceiling of the bus and tried not to listen as my “pillow” yakked on and on about puppet movie theaters and puppet bowling alleys and puppet malls and all the wonderful things he was pretty sure he’d find in beautiful downtown Bousfield.

I didn’t know how I was going to survive a six-hour bus trip with old Motormouth blabbing away.

Then my head went all quiet inside, and Bitsie’s voice disappeared. I hadn’t zoned out like that in a long time. Not since Bess stole that bus back in Beach Meadows and it looked like we’d all end up in a ditch or Mexico or something.

Do you know what the funny thing was this time? When I wanted to blank out all the scary things that were happening right then, guess what I thought of.

Bess—stealing the bus. Suddenly, it didn’t seem so terrible.

It seemed kind of, I don’t know, “charming,” as my mother would say. I thought about Bess gunning down Sow’s Ear Road just the way it happened, but without feeling afraid of crashing or afraid of what the Mounties were going to do or afraid of the look on my mother’s face when we finally stopped. I thought about Bess singing that stupid song, which didn’t seem so stupid anymore, and her making Alyssa feel like a star just because of her bright pink throw-up.

For the next six hours I was glued to my own little mental movie, “Me and My Crazy Sister,” starring the zany but loveable Bess Mercer. The stealing, the lying, the broken windows all started to seem like the good old days.

Maybe that’s part of growing up. Have you noticed old people always think that way? Everything that happened before—no matter how horrible it must have been at the time—is better than whatever’s happening right now. That’s why Grammie gets all dreamy-eyed talking about the war,

I guess. Or why Kathleen loves telling stories about being poor as a kid and eating secondhand Queenburgers and having the heat so low that she had to wear her snowsuit to bed every night. You’d almost think someone forced her to give it all up for a fancy condo, expensive clothes and Apricot-Kiwi Emulsion.

I wasn’t thinking all that, of course. I was just enjoying the movie. Every so often a little thought would creep in that didn’t fit. Mum crying, say. Or Dad looking out the window at nothing. Or the sound of the social worker dropping Bess’s big, fat file on the kitchen table. When that happened the movie would click right off as if someone—probably Bess—had switched the channel to some gross thing like I Want You Dead or Abdominal Surgery or even one of those ads about starving babies. It’s hard to pretend life’s just grand when you’re watching a kid die or someone get their liver yanked out.

But I’d just grab the remote back—not the real remote, but you know what I mean—and start watching the Bess movie again. I chuckled when she locked the principal out of his office and sang dirty songs over the PA system until the janitor knocked the door down. I smiled at her giving me a shirt for Christmas that just so happened to be her size, not mine. I even had one of those little happy cries over the beautiful Remembrance Day speech she gave about our grandfather’s heroic war service, and this time it didn’t bother me a bit that our grandfather had flat feet and never went to war.

It didn’t matter. The stories did what they had to.

They got me to Bousfield without thinking how stupid I was for ruining my life.

⁵⁶ Okay, I admit it. That wasn’t my idea. I stole it from “Bytesie Goes Beddy-bye.” It was as stupid as most of the episodes, but I thought Audrey had a point about that falling asleep thing.