Alice began the school year with two expectations that turned out to be wrong. First, she expected that for one reason or another, her family would have to move between September and May, because they always did. Second, she expected to finish up the school year as solitary as she began. A friend—that is, a flesh-and-blood friend to sit by on the bus and go over to her house in the afternoons—never figured in her plans for the year. Except for Darla in kindergarten and Amanda in second grade, all her friends are in books. Book friends are easy to take with you when you have to move (especially if you kind of forget to return them to the library), and they don’t argue when you make a place for yourself in their story.
But now she has a real friend, and what’s good about that is a whole lot better than what’s bad. It started because of Kaitlynn’s new idea. “Want to hear what my next story’s about?” she up and asked right after Christmas vacation.
Alice looked up from her book, startled. Kaitlynn had talked to her before, in a hit-or-miss kind of way, but never actually stopped for an answer until now. “What’s it called?”
“‘The Mystery of the Empty Bus Stop.’” Alice’s jaw must have dropped or something, because as soon as Kaitlynn saw a reaction, she swooped down on the bus seat beside her. And stayed there for the rest of the school year.
“Here’s what I’ve got so far,” she began. “There’s a magic bus that takes kids away to the world of their imagination, where everything they dream about comes true. So every morning, the bus makes its rounds and picks up all the kids who had dreams the night before, only not all of them, because we all have dreams but we don’t always remember. I’m thinking maybe the bus picks up the kids who wake up in the morning with the dreams they had still on their minds. The ones they can’t quit thinking about. What do you think?”
“Well…” Alice wasn’t used to being asked what she thought. She had to cough once and clear her throat. “That might not be so good. What if you have bad dreams? Like…your parents are missing or somebody died or gets really hurt?”
Kaitlynn considered this. “Okay, I’ll work on it. Maybe only some dreams come true, after they run them by headquarters or something. Anyway, the bus comes by this one bus stop every day because somebody’s signed up to ride it, only he’s never there. And that’s because he’s a prisoner of his wicked stepmother who locks him up every time the bus comes around. But one of the riders is this really brave girl who uses her own dream-come-true to get into his dreams and—why are you staring at me like that? It’s just a story.”
Alice knew about stories. But she knew other things too, and what Kaitlynn was telling her was a reflection of those things, totally rearranged. It was like going through the looking glass, for real. “Why does the stepmother lock him up?”
“Why? Because she’s evil.”
“But…” Alice started to get the hang of objecting. “Suppose the boy is sick, or…can’t walk or something like that, and the stepmother—or maybe just mother—thinks she’s doing the right thing by keeping him home?”
“Do you want to hear this story or not?”
“Sure.” Alice mentally zipped her lips. “Go ahead.”
But Kaitlynn had lost momentum. She pulled a strand of hair from behind her ear and twirled it around her finger. “See, somebody has to be evil, or else it’s not a good story.”
“I know. But people can do the right thing for the wrong reason, or the wrong thing for the right reason, and sometimes that’s more interesting.”
Kaitlynn stuck the strand of hair in her mouth and chewed on it. “You think so?”
“Uh-huh. Like, what if the boy was crippled in a—a tragic accident, and he lives in an underground hideout, and his mother won’t let him out because she thinks he’ll only get hurt again, only somebody—like his grandmother, maybe—thinks he should get out and toughen up, and they’re always fighting over it?”
Kaitlynn kept on chewing. “Hm. What kind of tragic accident?”
• • •
Actually, the accident would have been a lot more tragic if Ricardo’s seat belt wasn’t buckled, but it didn’t have to happen at all. Daddy had driven their old Ford Galaxie to the convenience store in Arrowhead Rock to buy a half-gallon of milk. They couldn’t afford a whole gallon—Alice remembered her parents fighting about that before her father stomped out of the house, taking Ricardo with him. They took the long way home (what they called home at the time, an abandoned farmhouse on a foreclosed cattle ranch) so Daddy could cool down. This being Oklahoma, where roads were straight as ladders, he was already going a little too fast when he came to the top of a long steep hill. There was a creek bridge at the bottom, and the only other traffic was halfway down the hill, a single tractor carrying a round hay bale.
“I hate it when tractors hog the road like that,” Daddy said. “What if we throw a little scare into him, make him move over?”
“Go for it, Daddy,” Ricardo said. At least, that’s what Daddy said Ricardo said. They flew downhill in the Galaxie, laying on the horn, and were rewarded by the sight of the tractor lumbering to the shoulder. Daddy laughed before noticing the patrol car in the opposite lane.
He stomped the brakes, forgetting the right front brake shoe had a way of seizing up. The vehicle scissored across the highway and slammed into the concrete bridge abutment.
• • •
Friendships were best, Alice discovered, if each person brought something different to it. She and Kaitlynn were the same in the kind of stories they liked but different in what they got out of them. Kaitlynn wanted action: one thing after another, bam-bam-bam. Alice wouldn’t mind the story going a little slower, because she wanted to know about the people: How did they grow up? What were the saddest or happiest things that ever happened to them? And (especially) why did they do the things they did?
“Because,” Kaitlynn would explain frustratedly, “it’s time for something to happen.”
“But…things happen because of people, don’t they?”
It led to some interesting discussions (okay, arguments) that made the bus rides go faster and helped them both determine what they were working toward. Before either of them realized it, the story became Alice’s as much as Kaitlynn’s. The magic-dream-bus idea was abandoned—or rather, it kind of drifted away while they were deciding who the missing boy was and why he couldn’t ride the bus.
Albert (as Kaitlynn decided to call him) was crippled (Alice’s idea) because of experiments by his mad-scientist uncle (who should have just used mice). Having an uncle that cruel was almost too much for Alice, who objected when Kaitlynn wanted the mad scientist to lock the poor little boy in a snake pit. (Kaitlynn was probably more spooked by her experience with Cornelia on the bus than she cared to admit.) “We’ll need more obstacles for the hero to overcome on her way to rescue Albert! And snake pits are about the worst kind of obstacle there is!” Alice thought it was way too creepy, but they compromised by leaving the pit in and taking Albert out. That is, the uncle didn’t actually throw him in there but was always threatening to. That ought to be evil enough.
• • •
Actually, Alice could see the need for obstacles—in real life, they sort of happened anyway, whether you needed them or not. After the accident, their whole life became an obstacle. First the hospital, where surgery saved Ricardo’s life but couldn’t save his legs. Then Daddy disappearing because he felt so bad. Then GeeGee’s arrival to take care of things (which Mama wasn’t too good at).
GeeGee was the only person they could call on, being Mama’s mother, but her coming meant terrible arguments, during which GeeGee called Daddy a screwup who was better off gone and Mama screamed that she just wanted to be left alone to make her own mistakes. But she couldn’t be left alone with two kids to take care of, could she? That’s when GeeGee made her an offer, and Mama had no choice but to take it.
The offer was to move to GeeGee’s old house, which was empty and needed a little fixing up, and use her truck when she didn’t need it, and get Ricardo into physical therapy. All that, in exchange for one thing: that Daddy stayed gone. Mama said okay. But after they moved, one of the first things she did was get a library card so Alice-the-little-reader could check out books. But also so Mama could use the library computer to get in touch with Daddy and let him know where they were.
Somewhere in north Texas, he got the message. Then he hiked and hitched his way right to them, arriving after midnight on August 16.
“What did you expect?” he asked as he was explaining into the night. “Did you think I’d skip off to Mexico? Family’s family, Brenda Kay; no moral dilemma there. And we’re staying family, and we can look after each other with no help from anybody.”
It stunned him to see the shape Ricardo was still in: no strength, few words, had to be carried everywhere. Alice saw Daddy blink and swallow hard before saying, “But we can’t turn the clock back, can we? First order of business is a wheelchair—we’ve got to get him out of bed ASAP.”
“We’re waiting,” Mama said. “They haven’t got us in the system yet.”
“Phooey on the system. We’re staying out of the system as much as we can. Anybody know where we can get a wheelchair?”
Alice did.
She’s the one who told him about the one the Pasternaks had. She knew what Daddy would do, and stealing was the only name for it, no matter that the Pasternaks weren’t using their wheelchair and he meant to return the item as soon as Ricardo didn’t need it anymore. That made her accessory to a crime, but it felt good to have somebody in charge again.
But he wasn’t in charge of where she lived and where she went to school. His mother, Mary Ellen Hall Truman, had offered to let Alice live with her so she could ride the school bus to Centerview. Daddy was dead set against it: government schools were for government drones. He could teach her everything she needed to know or how to find out what neither of them knew. They’d done it before, hadn’t they? She’d missed big chunks of second, third, and fourth grade and never saw the inside of kindergarten at all. However, this time the only person on his side of the argument was Alice. Both grandmas were against him (even though they didn’t know it, because they didn’t know he was around), but so was Mama. Like it or not, Alice was going to school.
She found a way to show her appreciation to Daddy, though. One Saturday afternoon in September, she and Mama stopped by the library on the last day of the semiannual book sale, and Alice noticed five boxes left under an Everything must go! sign. She whispered to her mother, and her mother talked to the desk clerk, and the next minute, they were loading boxes of books in the pickup to take home and be rewarded by one of her dad’s huge smiles: “These’ll get me through the winter!”
Daddy read everything: old westerns and romance novels and biographies of people you’d never heard of; college textbooks and county histories and seldom-read classics like Moby-Dick. But the real find was Basic Principles of Physical Therapy, third edition. Besides giving Alice the idea for her science fair project (which won a first-place ribbon for her age-group), that book helped prove Daddy’s point that anything you want to know, you can teach yourself (exactly why school is such a big fat waste of time). Using a few Basic Principles during the fall, he almost got Ricardo on his feet and walking again, or so he claimed. Daddy was positive that if the unfortunate incidents of late January hadn’t happened, Ricardo could have kissed his wheelchair good-bye.
• • •
Their story got more complicated over the winter. Kaitlynn wanted to hurry up and get to the rescue by the really brave girl on the bus, but Alice was more interested in Albert and his family and exactly why he was a prisoner. They decided that the uncle wasn’t all bad, because after crippling the boy, he now wanted to cure him. But maybe that wasn’t so good either. Kaitlynn insisted that the uncle wanted to claim all the credit for himself, which meant keeping Albert a prisoner so he could continue his experiments. And she still wanted Albert to spend one night in the snake pit. “But just one. It’s an accident. And they’re supposed to be healing snakes, not poisonous. Uncle Ralph didn’t mean to leave him in there.”
• • •
And actually, Daddy didn’t mean to crash Ricardo a second time. That happened on a nice January afternoon—the day before the science fair, in fact—when the weather broke at sixty degrees and he pushed Ricardo up to the bus stop while Mama was taking a nap. Daddy wasn’t supposed to do that, because GeeGee could show up at any time. But he’d been reading about the healthy effects of natural sunshine, and a warmish, sunny afternoon in January was too good to pass up.
Ricardo stood up. In fact, he actually walked a few steps, which made them both so giddy they started a game of tag—with Ricardo back in his chair—that got a little wild. It ended when Daddy ran behind the shed and Ricardo followed in his wheelchair and got so excited he overbalanced and fell over. He made a grab for Daddy while going down, but only broke off the belt buckle that was specially engraved with his high school logo. Ricardo hurt his back again, leading to a big fight between their parents and other complications.
Daddy never found his buckle either.
• • •
Once or twice per week, Kaitlynn would climb aboard the bus with a new idea that had just popped! into her head the night before. Like giving Albert a talented but snotty big sister who sucked up all the family money to launch her showbiz career. One of Kaitlynn’s best ideas was having the little prince send messages to the outside world by a friendly bluebird named Blackie. (Why Blackie? Because it sounded better than Bluey.) That’s how the hero of the story (a girl bus-rider who sounded suspiciously like Kaitlynn) came to know of his predicament and decide to rescue him.
“Don’t tell anybody,” she confided to Alice, “but Bender got a Christmas card from the bus stop—I mean, from somebody in the house. He wrote this dumb note to their address, and the kid who lives there wrote back.”
“How did Bender know it was a kid?”
“You would too if you’d seen it. He showed it to me: big letters, a little shaky, like a second grader would write.”
• • •
Actually, Ricardo would be in fourth grade if he were going to school, but the accident messed up his brain a little. Or so the grown-ups thought. Alice didn’t think so—he’d misplaced some words and took longer to say anything while searching for them, but his brain was working fine otherwise. And he was as fond of practical jokes as ever, especially after he’d learned to get around in the wheelchair. Alice was the one who gave him the pompom that Shelly left at the nursing home back in September (the one she should have returned except she knew Ricardo would love it). She should have guessed what he would do with it. And who would help him.
What happened with Bender was even worse—or better, depending on how you looked at it. Ricardo wanted to know everything about the kids on the bus, so Alice told him about the rolled-up papers Bender liked to stick behind his ear. When she saw that paper rolled up in the mailbox, she was so surprised she tried to distract Bender with a spitwad, which totally didn’t work. Then there was the Christmas card—actually two Christmas cards because Miranda got one too. Alice read the poem to Ricardo (which she knew was Miranda’s because of an overheard conversation on the bus), and Ricardo figured out a way to let her know he liked it.
Sweet, in a way, but it was probably a good thing GeeGee finally surrendered in her campaign to get Ricardo in school. If she’d kept on turning down Farm Road 152 every morning, he would have been discovered sooner or later, and Mama just wanted everybody to leave them alone. Daddy wanted the same thing, especially since no one was supposed to know he was even there.
• • •
In March, Kaitlynn had the idea that a pet would be nice to add to the story: a little dog Albert could find under a bush or hiding in a tunnel. “Like where you found Panzer! How did you think to look in the culvert?”
Alice shrugged, even though she’d explained already: holes are great places to hide.
Actually, she knows this from experience.
Friday and Saturday nights were some of her best memories of the winter just past: her family sitting around the woodstove like a scene from Little House On the Prairie, Daddy with his book and Alice with hers, Mama with her needlework or a crossword puzzle and an open box of Cheez-Its, Ricardo with his sketchbook and pencils. Ricardo didn’t read so well. Mama could read perfectly well but said she couldn’t concentrate when Daddy was in the room. He’d always have to share whatever he was into. “Hey everybody, listen to this,” he’d say, then he’d read out loud about the great blizzard of 1934 or how gold mining got started in South Africa.
“Wow!” said Ricardo almost every time.
“Um,” said Mama, stubbing out a cigarette. “What’s a five-letter word for ‘cured meat’?”
The sappy wood popped in the stove, Ricardo’s pencils clicked softly on the wheelchair tray as he swapped colors, Mama hummed as she erased a word, and Alice wedged a bite out of her apple, crunching it to tall slivers of tangy-sweet juice. It was the kind of scene to make Kaitlynn jump up and down and wave her arms and say What’s happening?!
Good memories are stitched together from plain materials.
However…if an outside sound invaded their cozy little scene, namely the mash of rubber tires on gravel, Ricardo would say “Hark!” Her parents would lay aside whatever they were doing and calmly but swiftly stand up. Daddy—without a word—would move his chair back to the table, put on his coat, tuck his book under one arm, and look around to make sure he left no visible clues behind. Mama, meanwhile, would go into the bedroom, flip over the rug beside the bed, and tug on the rope pull under the rug to lift up a slab of floor. She held it up while Daddy let himself down into the crawl space (stocked with food and blankets and a flashlight), and then let it carefully down. He pulled the rope back through the hole, she replaced the rug, and by then it was just about time to answer the door.
The visitor was usually GeeGee, stopping by to visit or drop off some groceries. But once it was a social worker, and another time a truant officer, wanting to know why Ricardo wasn’t in school. Mama handled that visit all right, because Daddy was right there under the floor. She couldn’t handle things too well when he was gone, and he was gone for two whole weeks in February.
That was after the big fight following Ricardo’s spill, when Daddy stormed out of the house and hitched rides to Oklahoma to see his buddy Ed. After a week or so, Ed gave him the money for a bus ticket back.
The whole incident was silly; he didn’t have to lose his temper and take the risk of catching pneumonia while hiking over the countryside in dead winter. But risk-taking was in his nature—one of the reasons GeeGee called him a screwup. GeeGee began to suspect he was hiding out in the neighborhood but didn’t know for sure until she found a box of library-sale books in the bedroom closet. That led to a fight between her and Mama, which Alice didn’t hear but Ricardo told her about.
One good thing about living with her other grandma: she missed most of the fights.
• • •
Kaitlynn couldn’t make up her mind about how to rescue Albert. Or rather, she had lots of ideas but couldn’t settle on just one. Maybe his sometimes-crazy uncle could go all the way crazy, like poor Mr. Pasternak Senior, and be sent away to a nursing home—asylum, that is—but of course that wouldn’t leave much room for a heroic rescue. The brave girl on the bus could train a commando team to overpower the bus driver and storm the underground lair. Or she could outwit the bus driver, castle guards, sorcerers, dragons, snakes, and whatever else stood in her way to reach the prisoner and fetch him out. “What do you think?” she asked Alice. “Strong or sneaky?”
“I think sneaky is better. It’s more interesting.”
Alice never thought of herself as sneaky, but eight whole months of keeping a huge secret was making her think again. GeeGee found out through her own investigations, but Grandma still didn’t have a clue that her son was hiding out within five miles of her house. As to exactly why he was hiding, that’s what Alice can’t figure out. True, he was breaking GeeGee’s one condition for helping Mama and Ricardo and herself, but she has an idea there’s more to it. GeeGee never liked Daddy, but you’d think his own mother would. And you’d think he would want to see her, if only to say “Hi, I’m okay, but I’m not supposed to be here and I know you can keep a secret.”
Grandma had arranged her life pretty much the way she wanted it—which probably didn’t include having a granddaughter move in with her. But she’d agreed it was best the girl go to school and have a normal, routine life for a change.
And that’s what Alice had, if “normal” meant the meals came on time and the floors were swept and dishes didn’t stack up until you had to wash a few or else eat out of the box.
As for “routine”—it sounds good until you have to get up at 6:30 just because Grandma volunteers at the hospital from eight to noon Monday through Thursday and needs that time to get her chores done so she can golf in the afternoon if the weather’s nice or play bridge with the gals if it’s not.
“I lead an active lifestyle,” says Grandma. “I’m not one to sit around watching the tube and griping about the world.” This was often said after dinner, while watching the tube and griping—about food prices, politicians, nice linen slacks that shrink in the wash, shoes that don’t fit right after you buy them, greenskeepers, TV quiz show contestants who don’t know enough to pass eighth grade, bread that goes stale, and fish that tastes fishy. And sons who never take advice because they think they know better, and daughters-in-law who just let things happen to them and may not be all that bright.
And what about neighbors who don’t let you borrow stuff because they say they might need it again? As if they thought you’d never return it! When old Mr. Pasternak turned down Grandma’s request to borrow their wheelchair for poor little Ricardo, Alice had heard her complaining about it to one of the gals on the phone. “This is all about what happened twenty years ago, mark my words. As if I had anything to do with it! I haven’t been able to control Jason since he was nine, so what could I do with a high school senior?”
That was the first Alice had ever heard about something happening twenty years ago. Grandma seemed to think it served the Pasternaks right when the item was stolen. Nor did she put two and two together when Mama told her they’d found a wheelchair for Ricardo anyway.
Grandma wasn’t speaking to GeeGee—from both her grandmothers’ random comments, Alice gathered it was because each blamed the other for how their kids turned out. One thing they agreed on was that Ricardo should go to school where there were qualified teachers and assistants who could help him. But Mama turned out to be more stubborn about that than anyone expected. Nobody knew that Daddy was right there, backing her up.
Nobody knew that Ricardo was smarter than he let on.
Nobody knew how long Alice’s parents could keep their secret, but surely not forever.
• • •
By May, Daddy is becoming very edgy after too many nights spent outside in the rain because of nosy county officials and mothers-in-law. “It sounds like something in a book,” Alice tells him. “Like a fugitive hiding from the law.” Grandma has just dropped her off for the weekend, and she’s got two brand-new books from the library to read.
“It belongs in a book,” he sniffs. “The Count of Monte Cristo meets the great outdoors.” He sneezes twice in a row. A damp, chilly spring is hanging on and so is his cold. “But wait’ll you hear my escape plan. Got a surprise for you, Lissa. Let’s take a walk.”
It’s a beautiful sunny day, with more in the forecast. As they hike a threadlike path that leads up from the house, Daddy seems to expand, like one of those sponge creatures that swell up when you drop them in water. Except in his case, he’s finally drying out.
The path leads to the top of a limestone bluff overlooking a little valley. The view opens up like a postcard: branches clothed in fuzzy green, white blossoms blowing like wedding veils, a deep cleft in the ground where Drybed Creek runs—when it’s running, which it only does in rainy seasons. A red-tailed hawk circles at eye-level, wings spread like he’s hanging on invisible strings.
“How about that?” Daddy asks.
“It’s beautiful.”
“You like it? It’s yours.” Daddy opens his hand and sweeps it over the view, like one of those girls in evening dresses showing off a prize in a game show. “Slip it in your pocket to take with you when we go.”
“What?” She’s not sure she heard those last few words correctly.
“It’s time to say adios, Lissa-girl.”
Her voice seems to fall off the bluff. “Say wha-a-a-a-t?”
“It’s time to go. Don’t you think?”
She realizes, of course, that they’ve seldom stayed in one place even this long, but the when-where-why questions are coming so fast, she can hardly hear his explanation.
They are starting a new life (again!) up north—way up north. Daddy is going first, hitching a ride with a friend of a friend who drives a truck and has a regular run from Tulsa to International Falls, Minnesota. The truck driver will pick him up just outside Centerview and (after a little money changes hands) keep on truckin’ north, while Daddy takes it easy in the bunk. The following weekend, Mama will borrow the pickup and fail to return it.
“But that’s GeeGee’s truck! And it’s stealing.”
“No, it’s borrowing. We’ll get it back, uh, sooner or later.”
“When will all this happen?”
“Next week.”
Alice can’t speak for a few minutes, during which Daddy lays out a time line: the trucker picks him up on Wednesday morning and gets to International Falls on Thursday night. Daddy has a prepaid cell phone and a calling card so he can be in touch with the family, and as soon as he finds a place, he’ll let them know—maybe by Friday night. Then Mama will hit the road with Alice and Ricardo.
“But…” Alice begins.
Daddy isn’t listening. “That was my mistake all along, coming back here. To make a new start, you need a totally new place where nobody’s ever heard of you and you can make your own reality out of whole new material. After a year or so, we’ll be settled. I’ll have a job and start working Ricardo’s therapy again, and we’ll be taking care of ourselves, just like we were before—”
“But I don’t want to go.”
Now it’s his turn to be dumbfounded and speechless.
“I—like it here,” she goes on. “I like my teacher and my school and…and I have a best friend and our story’s not finished yet and—”
“What story?”
“The…the one I’m writing with Kaitlynn. My friend.”
“You’re not spilling any beans to Kaitlynn, are you?”
“Of course not! It’s just a story.”
“Lissa, you want stories? You’ve already got more’n you know what to do with. Stick with me, kid, and you’ll never lack for stories.”
“But, Daddy, that’s not it. It’s just—”
“Just what? You’re family’s not enough for you anymore?”
“No!”
“You want your old man to be a loser all his life?”
“No!”
“What’s it going to be then? We stick around so you can go to some government school where they stuff your head with crap and you can have some cookie-cutter friend who’ll probably drop you like a brick next semester or—”
“Daddy!” She throws herself at him, but he’s already backed away.
“Or you can go with your mom and brother and me. Unless you’d rather stay behind. If that’s the case, we may just have to do what’s best for us.”
That little word goes right through her. Until now, she was always part of us, but he said it like she wasn’t—like she was cut off, a lonely arm waving futile fingers.
He starts down the skinny path she can barely make out in the fading light. “Daddy!” she sobs as he disappears. Running after him, she cries again, “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean it!” Patches of his red plaid shirt flicker through the brush. “Don’t leave me! Please!”
He stops long enough for her to catch up but doesn’t say another word as they wind down the path toward home. And barely speaks to her all weekend.
• • •
So this week will probably be her last at school.
Alice feels her wheels slowing down, crawling to a stop. Now they’ve begun to turn—very slowly—in reverse. After settling down in one direction and feeling pretty confident about it, now she has to change back. Forward or reverse? It’s hard to say. And it’s harder to do, especially since she can’t tell anybody.
Her family is going to just disappear, like always.
But this time, it’s different. This time it’s going to be hard. Never before has she walked through her remaining days in a particular place with thoughts like, This is my last spelling test, my last book report, my last game of kickball. I hope Kaitlynn won’t think I don’t like her—maybe I should give her some kind of going-away present on Friday? Without telling her I’m going away?
On Tuesday night, she goes to bed but can’t sleep. Daddy’s leaving tomorrow is the main thought that crowds out her other thoughts. She won’t have a chance to tell him good-bye, but if all goes according to plan, she’ll see him next week, in a brand-new place that has no place in her mind yet. Mama’s been packing, sorting out the essentials and deciding how much will fit in the pickup. The wheelchair is essential, of course. Daddy only intended to borrow it from Mr. Pasternak Senior and return it as soon as Ricardo could walk again, but his plans didn’t quite work out. So that will be one of the first things to pack.
Alice sits up in bed and looks out the window. A round steely moon spreads light like butter on a white-bread landscape. She has to pack soon—just what she can carry in her gym bag and her backpack, because she’s only supposed to be going home for the weekend. What about the coat Grandma bought for her, the only new coat she’s ever had? Probably no room for it.
She’s never had so much to leave behind.
Toward dawn, lightning flickers on her eyelids. She remembers the weather report last night: morning thunderstorms likely. But the constant light pulsing nervously in the sky comes with no thunder and no wind.
“Feels like tornado weather,” says Grandma as she locks the front door on their way out. Pausing by the calla lilies near the garage, she adds, “Look at their droopy heads, when they usually stand up straight. Everything’s too still. I don’t like it.”
Fat drops are spattering the windshield by the time they reach the bus stop. “I’ll wait,” Grandma says. “Terry won’t be long.” Grandma hardly ever refers to GeeGee by her real name—usually avoids referring to her at all. What does that mean? Within two minutes, the sprinkle has become a shower, then a cloudburst, slicking the cars and setting windshield wipers a-swish.
Igor and Little Al streak across the common to the gazebo, where Bender, Matthew, and Jay are already waiting. Shelly runs from the opposite direction. On the east side of the loop, Mrs. Haggerty stops to pick up Miranda, who’s hurrying along in an oversize yellow rain slicker.
“There she is,” Grandma says as the bus curves over the hill and rolls toward them. “May as well wait till she stops. No hurry.” The bus pulls into the Y and backs up by the gazebo. Grandma taps the steering wheel fretfully. “I’d almost drive you to school myself, except I’ve got to go the other way this morning.”
“It’s okay.” Alice pops open the door. “Bye, Grandma.”
She slams the door and runs toward the bus, thinking, My next-to-next-to-last morning bus ride…
As she squeezes in line, Kaitlynn’s first words to her are, “I got a great idea last night! I figured out how to get our hero out of the dungeon—”
“Move it!” Spencer calls behind them. “We’re getting soaked!”
“Quack-quack,” GeeGee is saying to hurry up the littles. She smiles briefly at Alice, then glares out the rearview mirror. “Just hold your horses, lady,” she mutters to Mrs. Thompson, who’s fuming behind the STOP sign again.
“It’s too wet to go to school!” Igor complains as he climbs aboard.
“You’re not sweet enough to melt,” GeeGee says. “Move along, folks! Find a seat and let’s get this show on the road!”
I may never hear her say that again, Alice thinks.
Shelly shakes her head as she starts down the aisle, showering the littles with raindrops from her hair. (“Hey!” “Hey!” they protest.) Spencer unwraps his guitar case from his jacket, and Miranda slides into the seat across from Igor, sneezing. Matthew and Bender are the last to board, dashing from the gazebo and leaping the steps, one after the other. GeeGee slams the door and puts the bus in gear as the two boys head for the back. She forgets to pull in the STOP sign; behind them, Mrs. Thompson lays on her horn.
“Cool it, Mom.” At the back window, Bender makes a calming motion with both hands, which probably just irritates her more. GeeGee belatedly closes the sign, but a van is coming toward them on the road and Mrs. Thompson is still stuck behind the bus. There won’t be any more places to pass until they reach the highway. Bender laughs. “You learn patience by being patient. That’s what my mama always told me.”
He and Matthew have been in fine spirits ever since the state science fair—in which they didn’t win the chance to go to nationals but were ranked third from the top, so they “go out in a blaze of glory,” as Bender says.
I wonder if he’ll be a math professor? Or a comedy writer?
“Let me tell you my idea,” Kaitlynn begins eagerly. Alice listens, though she can’t keep her eyes from roaming. Directly behind them, Spencer has taken his guitar out of the case to check for water damage. Once it’s out, he strums a few chords.
“This land is your land!” Jay sings, clapping off-rhythm. “This land is my land!”
“Can it, dork!” Spencer laughs.
Is Jay going to be an Olympic runner some day? And Spencer a musician, like his dad?
Two rows ahead, Miranda scoots toward the center aisle. Igor is waiting on the opposite seat. She takes an envelope out of her backpack and passes it over. His eyes are big as quarters as he takes it.
I hope Miranda writes more poems. I hope Igor graduates.
Shelly turns around halfway in her seat. “I have an announcement! Only sixty-three days, seven hours, and two minutes until I leave for camp!”
“You mean five hours, one minute, and thirty-two seconds,” Bender corrects her.
Only two more days of Shelly’s announcements.
“So how about this,” Kaitlynn is saying. “Instead of knocking the guard out with a rock from a slingshot, what if she gets Blackie to slip the keys from his pocket while he’s sleeping?”
“Umm…” Alice hasn’t been paying attention.
Behind them, Jay says, “Holy cow.”
The cloudburst has become a gully washer. The rain is pouring down in sheets, torrents, buckets. They’ve started down the hill toward Drybed Creek, and GeeGee has slowed almost to a crawl. The windshield wipers barely make a dent in visibility, even going full speed.
From the back, Bender says, “Oh no.” And he’s not kidding.
“No!” he says again. “Don’t try—Mom, NO!”
Bender is moving up the aisle, yelling out the left-side windows. “Sit down!” GeeGee calls sharply, but not loud because she’s focused on keeping the bus on the road. Alice catches a glimpse of an SUV passing them in a wedge of water, its roof gleaming like a seal’s back.
Bender stops in the aisle, five rows from the driver, and stares out the front window. All talk, all eyes are frozen as Mrs. Thompson’s SUV slides across the yellow lines into the lane in front of them—and keeps sliding, across the line, onto the shoulder, and completely off the road.
One little girl screams. Bender drops like a rock, right there in the aisle, gripping the seat backs on either side.
GeeGee is struggling with the bus. All at once, everyone realizes it’s floating, caught in a strong current that’s about to carry them away. The back end swings dramatically to the right until they’re almost sideways.
“Oh my goodness!” Kaitlynn gasps, clutching Alice’s hand.
“Everybody hold on!” GeeGee yells. “Move to the right!” The screams begin: high yelps from the littles, shrieks from the girls, startled shouts from the boys. Alice sees Bender grab two kids and disappear between seats on the right side; seizing Kaitlynn’s other hand, she ducks to the floor.
Get down, get down! somebody—or everybody—is saying. On the right!
She pushes Kaitlynn in that direction, but the bus is already tipping. As it goes over, the two girls slide between seats like pinballs, bouncing as the bus slams on its side in the churning ground, sliding fast and then slow until it shudders to a stop. And everything is quiet.