October

Bender was born to fame—just not his.

It started in kindergarten: “Are you Thorn Thompson’s brother?” That’s when John Thornton Thompson, otherwise known as Thorn, was the league soccer champion and the youngest representative ever to go to Boy’s State Leadership Camp. By the time Bender got to fifth grade, the questions sounded skeptical: “Are you Thorn Thompson’s brother? The guy who led his team to the state basketball championship and was a National Merit Scholar and is now at Dartmouth College on a full scholarship—are you sure you’re related to him?”

But it’s obvious: Bender is the image of Thorn but stamped after the inkpad was nearly dry so the image is paler and completely washed out on some of the lines. He’s not so much overweight as puffy, with a face not ugly but forgettable. He doesn’t do sports, and his grades are only so-so. While Thorn streaked through the Centerview school system in a blaze of glory, Bender just serves his time, counting the days until he can graduate. Counting hours too: by the time he graduates from high school, he figures he will have spent 1,848 hours on a school bus.

He did the math in fifth grade. First, he palmed a stopwatch from Mr. Finagle’s office while getting a lecture for sneaking into the girls’ locker room during a gym class and stuffing all the socks in the shower drains. Then he used the stopwatch to time bus rides to and from school, every day of the week. Then he divided by five to get the average number of minutes on the bus every day, multiplied by five days per week, thirty-six weeks in the school year, for eleven years, K–10 (by eleventh grade, he planned to have his own car and never set foot on a bus again). That made a total of 1,848 hours, which broke down to:

two months,

two weeks,

two days,

and fourteen minutes,

plus a few seconds, which he seldom counts. Seconds would matter if he were calculating a voyage to Jupiter, but for the next four years, he just wants to use up that time in ways that resemble Thorn Thompson’s career as little as possible.

• • •

“Hey!” Igor blurts, stumbling to one side as Bender bumps him away from the back seat.

“I saw that, Bender,” calls Mrs. B from the front, her eyes piercing the rearview mirror. “Igor, let it go—just find a seat.”

Igor probably would have let it go on his own, since he’s about three sizes smaller and two grades younger than Bender. But when Mrs. B tells him to, he has no choice but to do the opposite and punch Bender in the stomach on his way up the aisle. Bender’s arm whips back so hard it nearly knocks Igor down. “OW!”

“Fight! Fight!” cheers Spencer.

“Boys! Do you want me to stop this bus and come back there?”

Igor says no, Bender says yes, but it’s kind of under his breath. Mrs. B has never Stopped the Bus and Come Back There, but she’s always threatening to. He kind of wants to know what would happen if she did, but maybe not today.

Matthew sits in the next-to-last seat, directly ahead. Bender studies his smooth dark neck and the sharp line made by his close-cropped hair and imagines drawing the hairline a little lower with a Sharpie pen. Would Matthew even notice? The guy seems to be in a world of his own most of the time.

Shelly has plopped down a few rows in front of Matthew while Miranda stops just past the middle. They haven’t been speaking to each other for a week, ever since Shelly’s nursing home gig—which, everybody gathers, did not go well. She’s been huffy lately: probably arguing with her folks about Shoot the Star camp (as Bender calls it). Today her nose is so far in the air she doesn’t notice he’s sitting less than sixty inches behind her.

Bender takes the rolled-up paper from behind his ear and clicks his mechanical pencil until a two-centimeter piece of graphite breaks off. Cupping his hand carefully around the paper tube, he sucks the lead inside, takes a breath, and spits it out.

Shelly whirls around, a hand on the back of her neck. “Bender!”

He’s already unrolled the blowgun and is staring out the window looking bored. “What?”

It’s perfect: just the right amount of irritation, not overdone. He’s a pretty good performer, just not in a show-offy way like her.

“You plinked me!”

“Plinked you? How?”

Mrs. B is negotiating an S-curve and can’t spare a glance in the mirror. That tiny piece of lead is invisibly rolling on the floor and nobody can prove anything. The perfect crime. He glances around and catches Jay nudging Spencer with a little grin. Bender frowns: What are you smilin’ at, punk?

With both hands in his lap, he rerolls the strip of paper, breaks off another piece of graphite, and loads up his blowgun. It’s intended for Jay, but at the last minute, he changes his target and swings over to Matthew.

Plink! Matthew puts a hand on his neck, on the hairline that Bender had contemplated lowering—but he doesn’t turn around. What’s with that kid?

Suddenly he notices the new girl, one row up on the opposite side. For the first week or so she was telling everybody her name—what was it, Alison? Or Alice?—and that she lived with her Grandma Mary Ellen Truman in the old stone house at the top of the hill, blah blah blah. That might have been interesting, because the Truman house was said to be haunted at one time. Old Mr. Truman’s first wife had died there, and so had he—making one wonder about foul play from the second wife. But the second Mrs. Truman is so ordinary, with her bridge tournaments and golf dates and volunteer work, she gives haunted houses a bad name. Kids didn’t even bother to make up stories about it anymore.

Her granddaughter Alison-or-Alice has a way of disappearing, like some wizard master gave her a cloak of invisibility. Her cloak is a book—she disappears into books. But right now, she’s looking at Bender.

He backs up against the window and points his blowgun at her threateningly. Mrs. B picks that exact moment to glance up in the mirror and catch him taking aim. The gun isn’t loaded but may as well be.

“I see that, Bender!”

Shelly spins around. “Aha! I knew that was you!”

Mrs. B makes him move to the front of the bus and surrender the weapon, which is stupid because it’s just a rolled-up piece of paper. Mrs. B realizes that, of course, and knows he can make another one just by tearing off a strip from his notebook but takes it from him anyway. “Sit right there.” She nods at the first seat while signaling for a right turn.

He considers reminding her of all the time they’re wasting because she insists on making this stop—two minutes and forty-five seconds of his life every day that he’ll never get back—but nothing he can say will discourage Mrs. B because he’s already said it. He settles down to a bumpy ride on the gravel road. Soon the shelter will appear to which they pull even, pause, back up, head out—

Wait a minute! He sits up straighter. He sees something: a flash of red disappearing over the rise beyond the shelter. It was a person, he’s sure of it: some kid or grown-up wearing something red, like a jacket. Or more likely a cap. Lifting his eyes, he notices, for the first time, a house. It was hidden by trees before, but now that the leaves are falling he can make out a roof, a corner, faded siding, peeling paint. He turns to Mrs. B, noticing her eyes twitching from the house to the road as her jaw sets like a trap. She saw the flash of red, just like he did. “Is that who we’re supposed to pick up?”

“What?”

“The person wearing the red cap or whatever it was.”

“Probably just a cardinal.” Mrs. B keeps her eyes resolutely on the gravel road as the bus snarls into low gear for climbing the hill.

Bender glances behind him. Matthew is gazing out the opposite window, Shelly is singing to herself, and Miranda is trying to ignore Kaitlynn. Igor is in the middle of a game of keep-away with his Yankees cap, tossed by Jay and Spencer during that dead space while Mrs. B is scanning the highway before making a turn. Then Bender notices the new girl watching him again. Immediately, her eyes flicker away. The bus lumbers onto the highway. “Turn around, Bender,” Mrs. B commands.

He turns around, facing forward again. What was that red thing? As bright as a cardinal, but bigger. He knows it was a person, and what’s more, he’s sure Mrs. B knows it too.

He doesn’t realize it then, but at that moment, his nibbling curiosity opens its jaws and clamps down hard.

• • •

Ever since he was old enough to remember anything (which would have been at approximately three years, five months, two weeks, and four days), his head overflowed with numbers. He figured out how to multiply before any math teacher even brought up the subject; his times tables were no sooner said than memorized. Numbers were friendly and practical. For instance, if you took thirteen steps to the mailbox every day and thirteen steps back, that was twenty-six, and if 2,810 of your steps made one mile, you’d walk thirty-seven miles per year just going to the mailbox. Wasn’t that worth knowing?

Bender is the one who goes to the mailbox because he used to get postcards from his grandmother, who traveled a lot. When he was in fourth grade, she took her last journey, as his mother put it (meaning she’d croaked), but the habit is so ingrained Bender still takes those thirteen steps to the mailbox every day, as though he might get a postcard from the great beyond.

One time, when she was visiting, he figured how fast her plane must have been going to get her from London to Kuala Lumpur in ten hours, twenty-three minutes. That was after she’d told him the approximate distance in kilometers. He was only ten years old, and he never even picked up a pencil except to write down the time in minutes. He did it in metric, which of course is easier to calculate, but his grandmother gave a little gasp when he told her the figure.

Then she fished a calculator out of her purse and started punching buttons. After a few seconds, she raised her head and stared at him. “Does your father know he has a potential Einstein in the house?”

He shrugged, not knowing what a potential Einstein was. And anyway, his father isn’t around much. He’s an insurance claims adjuster. Wherever there’s a flood or tornado or hurricane, Dad has to go figure out what the property damage is and exactly how much the insurance company will pay. Numbers—with dollar signs attached—make up Dad’s job, and when he comes home he retreats to the woodworking shop in the garage and measures and cuts wood for furniture his mother then has to figure out where to put. He made the bunk beds in Bender’s room, for when friends sleep over. Which they never do because they don’t exist.

Anyway, with all the numbers crowding his work and his hobby, Dad tunes them out during his downtime. That’s why Bender has never shared his potential. All that figuring he can do in his head stays there, except for the numbers that leak out on the bus, when nobody’s listening.

• • •

The first Friday in October, Shelly bounds onto the bus after almost everyone has boarded, whips out a couple of drumsticks, and beats a tattoo on the back of the front seat.

“Excuse me?” says Mrs. B.

“Attention, everybody! I hereby announce my candidacy for Youth Court! With liberty and justice for all!”

“What?” Spencer springs up from his seat. “I’m running for Youth Court!”

“Nothing like competition,” smiles Shelly. “Please make room for my campaign manager.”

Miranda squeezes past her and starts handing out fliers, even to the kindergartners who can’t read. “Vote for Shelly,” she says. “Vote for Shelly. Vote for—” Apparently they’re friends again, and Miranda looks happy as a pig in slop, as Bender’s mother likes to say. Sweet.

Spencer, on the other hand, is almost spitting. “How come you’re so civic-minded all of a sudden? You couldn’t care less about Youth Court! This is just résumé enhancement, right?”

“Whatever.” Shelly smiles even harder. “Now for a preview of my campaign song—”

“Oh no, you don’t,” Mrs. B cuts in. “Time to motor. Sit!”

Everybody sits, but Spencer is so hot you can almost see steam coming off him. Bender grins to himself—it looks like an interesting ride for a change. He waits until the bus has reached the highway before raising his hand. “I have an announcement too: my vote is for sale.”

Kaitlynn turns around to tell him he doesn’t have a vote because he’s in seventh grade and junior high kids don’t have anything to do with middle-grade youth court, blah blah—and he says, “Didn’t you ever hear of voter fraud?”

Spencer spins halfway around and points at Shelly. “That’s exactly what I mean! She’ll turn this campaign into Entertainment Tonight!”

“Chill, dude,” says Jay beside him.

Shelly turns her head and flutters her eyelashes at Bender. “Just for you, a special solo.”

“See? She doesn’t even care!” Spencer yells.

They continue the argument, Shelly insisting she’s always cared about justice and Spencer demanding she prove it, all the way to Farm Road 152 and down the hill. The bus backs up as usual, the three mailboxes scroll by—

Wait a minute.

The center mailbox has something tucked between the flag and the box: a large sheet of white paper or maybe poster board, rolled into a cylinder that sticks out about fourteen inches from the mailbox, like a giant cigarette or—

Bender feels a sting on his neck and claps his hand over a small, damp lump. A spitwad? From where? Across the aisle, Matthew is staring out the window, Alice-or-Alison is buried in a book, and Igor is bouncing in his seat, calling out, “Vote for Shelly! No, vote for Spencer!”

Igor owes Bender one—actually several. But so does Matthew. Which of them blew the spitwad? The bus makes a jerk and pulls forward, redirecting his attention to the back window. That tube of paper stuck in the mailbox looks like a giant blowgun.

Everybody knows his habit of rolling up pieces of paper after writing on them, but nobody knows why. He writes numbers he sees, like the mileage from St. Louis to Chicago or the capacity in gallons of a ten-foot-diameter wading pool. Then he invents word problems for them (in his head) and solves the problems (also in his head). But nobody knows that. Or do they?

The paper is stuck on the mailbox exactly like he sometimes tucks the rolls of paper over his ear. What if it’s a sign? What if there were special numbers written on that paper that only he could understand? Or is that totally crazy?

Bender’s thoughts come thick and fast as the bus climbs toward the highway. Who put—Why is it—What is it—Could it be for him?

Vote for Shelly! Vote for Spencer!

The faster his thoughts come, the more they jab at him like tiny bat claws. He can’t just sit here. He can’t let this go by—it might be really important! The bat claws dig into his brain until he can’t stand it: Out! Out! they tell him. Get off the bus, check it out. His eyes lock on the rear door.

Emergency exit. Do not open. Yeah, yeah. Alarms will go off, all that. No way can he sneak off the bus. But if he hits the ground running, he’ll be all the way to the mailbox before Mrs. B backs up; he can grab the paper, and if there’s anything on it, he might even have time to stuff it in his jacket.

The bus is at the highway, right blinker on. Bender eyes the handle of the emergency door; it’s actually no stranger to him. He’s imagined opening it many times, just to see what would happen. He’s even checked out the mechanism and located the safety latch underneath the handle. But now that he has a reason to open it, his nerves are jittering: does he dare? Does he have the nerve to act on some of the crazy thoughts he’s had? Nobody’s looking. Mrs. B’s head is turned to the left, waiting for a van to pass. If he listens closely, he can imagine the right turn blinker chanting, Now! Now! Now!

Or maybe that’s his pounding heart—NOW!

The bus wheels crunch as Mrs. B presses the accelerator. Bender jumps for the handle, pushes the safety latch, jerks the handle up, swings the door open, and leaps.

The alarm bells in his head are so loud he can’t hear the real alarm. So far so good—

But his plan to hit the ground running doesn’t work out too well. There’s a technique to landing on one’s feet, which Bender has never practiced. Instead of running, he stumbles and falls, moaning as pain shoots from ankle to hip.

The bus rolls back, and for a terrifying second (he’d never thought old Big Yellow could look so HUGE), he thinks it might just roll over him. Then Mrs. B sets the brake. Faces appear around the edge of the doorway: Alice-or-Alison, Jay, Spencer, Kaitlynn, Shelly’s little brother, Evan, and Kaitlynn’s little brother, Simon, all with wide eyes and open mouths.

Igor pops through the crowd. “Cool! I wanna do it too!” He jumps out the door like Bender had planned, only better: he lands on his feet and takes off running.

“IGOR!!” yells Mrs. B, who has pushed through the crowd. “Come back here, NOW!”

Igor freezes in mid-stride, then starts running backward in slow motion. Meanwhile, Bender groans again, partly for sympathy. But he isn’t getting any from the driver. With hands on her hips and her puzzled, angry face cocked to one side, she demands, “What the Sam Hill do you think you’re doing?”

She enlists Jay’s help in getting Bender back on the bus and tosses an Ace bandage from the first-aid kit for him to wrap his ankle with. It’s definitely sprained, maybe even broken. He feels it swelling, throbbing against the bandage until he can hear it in his ears. Just outside of town, he glances up at the billboard where his mother beams down at him: Myra Bender Thompson—Your Go-to Gal for Home or Investment! Her head perkily tilted to one side, she holds a house in one hand while the other sweeps over a map of the county, like she’s ready to get you any little property your heart desires. In real life, he can’t remember ever seeing her smile at him that way.

• • •

Certainly not today. When she picks him up at school, she’s mostly interested in letting him know she had to pass one of her appointments off to another agent in the office, and if the other agent makes the sale, she gets nothing (she’s number two on sales but closing in on number one). “What did you jump from? The nurse told me but I must have heard wrong. The emergency door of the bus?”

They go straight to the clinic to get his ankle X-rayed. No fractures, but his lower leg is swollen to the size of a watermelon by then. “Take it easy for a while,” the doctor tells him. “Use an ankle brace for a day or two, then support socks for a week. What did you say you jumped from?”

• • •

“What were you thinking?” His mother says once she’s slammed the car door and buckled her seat belt.

“I…always wanted to try it. See what would happen.”

Her sigh is more like an explosion as she puts the Suburban in reverse and shoots into the parking lot, screeching the brakes as a van honks behind her. “Just to see what would happen, huh? I used to know somebody like that. In high school. Always pulling stunts to see what would happen—until he went too far.”

“Went too far how?”

“People got hurt.”

“Like who?”

“I don’t want to talk about it, okay? It’s not the point.”

He wonders why she doesn’t want to talk about something as far away as high school. “What is the point? People getting hurt? I’m the only one who got hurt this time.”

His mother appears to struggle with what to say next as she taps an agitated rhythm on the steering wheel with one finger: one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three-four. “You were hurt—thank God, it wasn’t worse—but other people were inconvenienced, like me. Next time you start wondering what’ll happen if you do something, just use your imagination.”

He knows that’s all the sympathy he’s going to get. “Are you gonna tell Dad?”

She stomps the brake pedal at the edge of the parking lot, jerking them forward in unison. With her head turned to watch the right-lane traffic, she says, “Why should I? It would just give him another excuse for not coming home.”

That statement has an odd ring. “Why…why wouldn’t he just come home after he finishes the job?”

His mother makes a left turn—slowly, for her. “No good reason. That’s just it. Sometimes I think he makes up excuses to stay away longer.”

She glances at him, and the look is like an open door. The voice too. Sometimes he gets the sense that if he asked a serious question, like What do you mean by that? she’d give him a serious answer. As if she would like to talk to him. Sometimes he thinks he should walk through that door, answer that voice—but he can’t. He doesn’t know why. Watching the minivan ahead of them, he remarks, “Get Thorn to call him. He’d come home if Thorn asked him to.”

She stomps the brake pedal again as the minivan signals a turn. “For your information, Thorn is not a miracle worker.”

“Coulda fooled me,” he says.

A few days later, Miracle-boy himself emails from college: Hey, little bro. Mom says you jumped out of the back of a school bus. What’s up with that?

Thorn almost never emails him. Bender doesn’t reply.

• • •

Mrs. B decides that Bender should sit in the front seat of the bus, across from her, for an entire week. So she can “keep an eye on him.” It’s the seat reserved for notorious school bus criminals, and he qualifies, but he’s okay with that. Sitting this close, he can see all the numbers and gauges on the dashboard.

Because of the times he’s occupied this seat in the past, he already knows the average speed Mrs. B drives and the exact mileage to various points on the route. But now he gets to clock the distance to the mystery stop and check if Mrs. B’s rate is any faster or slower. No to the latter. After a week of jotting down odometer readings, he has a precise answer to the former: 2.83 miles.

He’s read somewhere that an average adult can walk one mile in twenty minutes. Given that he’s not an adult (though he might be average, especially compared to a certain spectacular individual whose initials are JTT), he should still be able to cover a mile in twenty-five minutes, and two miles plus 0.830 shouldn’t take much more than an hour. Or one hour and ten minutes, max.

He will pick a day when both parents are out, play sick, wait until the school bus leaves, and hike to the mystery stop. What he’ll do when he gets there, he leaves to inspiration. The plan is so simple it almost bores him, but as he’s already discovered, simple plans are more likely to succeed than the other kind.

• • •

During the last half of October, Halloween shares equal time with the campaign for Youth Court, which in previous years attracted no more attention than a Red Cross fund-raiser. But Bender has to admit, Shelly has given this race a lot of pizzazz. She teaches her campaign songs to the littles and belts them out on the bus, both coming and going. Such as:

I’d like to teach the school to sing in perfect harmony.

I’d like them all to vote for me upon November three.

Sometimes Bender joins in from the back, just to irritate Spencer. The genius didn’t expect this kind of competition, but he sucks it up and makes up for his lack of musical ability with computer-generated campaign signs like Spencer for the people! The people for Spencer! Jay, his manager, makes up a cheer and launches it every time the Vote-for-Shelly choir pauses for breath:

Two! Four! Six! Eight! Who do we appreciate?

Three! Five! Seven! Nine! Who’s the brain that’s really fine?

Spencer! Spencer! Spencer! YAAAAAYYYY!

Sometimes the campaign gets so rowdy Mrs. B actually pulls over on the side of the road until the noise level drops.

Meanwhile, Kaitlynn wants to know about everybody’s Halloween costume. For a week, she agonizes out loud (in-between campaign songs) before deciding to be a willow tree. Miranda is going as Cruella de Vil (though Bender thinks she has a few too many pounds on her for that) and Shelly grandly announces she will be a Supreme Court justice. Spencer (groaning loudly at Shelly’s choice) says he’s going as a mad scientist. Jay will borrow his grandpa’s old helmet and jersey (like last year), and voilà; instant football hero.

“A nearsighted football hero?” Bender asks. Jay scowls at him.

Igor will be a spider and Matthew a shrug—at least, that’s what he does when asked—and Alice-or-Alison looks confused, as though not sure what Halloween is.

And Bender? “A garbage bag.”

Jay says, “Yeah, right,” while Igor holds his nose and waves away imaginary fumes. But little do they know, including Bender, how true that will be.

• • •

As it turns out, Halloween looks like the best day to carry out his plan. Mr. Thompson is in Arkansas adjusting flood claims, and Myra Bender Thompson will be showing houses to a new client from Pennsylvania. The client has only one day to look, so they’re planning an early start.

When the alarm goes off in Bender’s room that morning, he lies awake for a few seconds. Then he moans. Last night, “Tornado Tim” Blair, the weatherman on Channel Five, predicted a 60 percent chance of rain beginning around midnight and continuing through the morning hours, with a low of thirty-four degrees which might climb to the forties by noon. Bender had wondered if he should call off his plan but decided that 60 percent didn’t mean anything when predicting the weather.

Right now, however, the chances of rain are 100 percent, and he can tell by the trembling drops on his windowpane that thirty-four degrees is cold.

He considers dropping the plan, getting up, and going to school instead of pretending to be sick and taking a hike. Or better yet, just pretend to be sick, stay where he is, and sleep the whole miserable morning into oblivion.

But…

It isn’t that often that both parents are out when he leaves for school. And from now on, the weather is only going to get worse, or at least more unpredictable, until spring. It’s now or never, sort of—put up with a little misery today or let the mystery drive him nuts every time Mrs. B backs up beside the empty shed on Farm Road 152.

With a long sigh, he launches phase one of his operation: unwrap the onion he cut last night and hold it over his face until his eyes and nose well up. Then turn on the heating pad under his blanket and put it to his forehead. After a few minutes, he stuffs the onion and heating pad out of sight and calls out, “Mom! I’m sick!”

He almost overdoes it, bringing his temperature on the scanning thermometer up to 103.4. His mother is wondering if she should call the doctor, but Bender suggests he might feel better with more sleep. Besides, she has houses to show.

“Okay,” she says doubtfully, tapping a finger on her cell phone. She’s ready to walk out the door in a navy blue pantsuit and the low heels she wears when she’s going to be on her feet a lot. “I’ll call at noon to see how you’re doing. And you call if you need anything…”

Half an hour later, he tears a garbage bag off the big roll of industrial-grade bags his father uses for the weekly pickup. He slits the bag up one side, making a poncho in case the rain decides to pour instead of drizzle. Then he plunges into the elements.

Cutting across the common, Bender almost collides with Panzer, Mr. Pasternak Senior’s dachshund. At the other end of a leash is Mr. Pasternak Senior. Both seem to materialize from behind a tree. “Whoa! Sorry…” Bender says, frantically trying to come up with a story for the questions the old man is bound to ask.

But Mr. Pasternak just nods irritably and says, “Watch where you’re going, buster! Kickoff is at two o’clock sharp.” It seems odd for him to be out walking in the rain, and Panzer doesn’t look too happy about it. As for what he meant by kickoff time, Bender doesn’t stop to wonder. He’s off like a shot.

In less than a minute, he’s across the loop and on the road, covering ground like Thorn Thompson setting a new cross-country record.

This stretch along Farm Road 216, from the gazebo to the highway, will be dicey. Anybody driving it is bound to see him in the open field, likely to know who he is, and even more likely to stop: “Bender? Did you miss the bus? Do you need a ride to school?” He plans to run alongside the road where the ground is a little lower and hit the dirt if he hears a vehicle. But the landscape is rougher than he expected, with all kinds of dips and—car coming! He drops immediately, and the garbage bag balloons over him, settling on his head.

The vehicle rolls on by. He doesn’t dare look up to see who it is.

But then it hits him—he has the perfect disguise! What could be more ordinary, less worth looking at, than a plastic bag along the road? True, it’s bigger than your average bag, but if he keeps well to the side of the highway and listens carefully for the sounds of an approaching vehicle, he’ll have plenty of time to cover himself and drop to the ground undetected. So the garbage bag is his Halloween costume after all. Ha!

Twenty-three minutes and twelve seconds later, he’s learned a few things.

Such as, “average walking speed” means a healthy adult walking briskly on a level path with no obstructions. Getting to the highway is the easy part. Now that he’s here, he has to stay inconspicuous, which means off the highway. No way can he duck under barbed wire, circle trees, and step over gullies at three miles per hour. After slipping on patches of mud and wet grass, he also learns that garbage bags don’t really keep the water out. Once he’s hit the ground a few times to hide from passing vehicles, even industrial-grade plastic leaks like a cotton sock.

Finally, an hour later, Bender learns that a mile is really long. Five thousand, two hundred, and eighty feet, and he has to fight for every inch of it (that would be 63,360 inches).

Being thirteen sucks, he thinks—not for the first time. These golden years from twelve to fifteen, that his dad sometimes wishes he could go back to, are a freaking POLICE STATE! Shuttled from school to home and back again, having his head stuffed full of stuff somebody else decided he needs to know, while what he really wants to know he can’t find out, and when he finally makes a prison break, the land itself seems to be against him—

He stops. Where is he?

Where is anything?

It’s not raining anymore, but that’s no help because he is wrapped in a fog so thick it’s blurred his sense of direction. While he was stumbling along, it sneaked up on him and threw its cold wetness over his head. And now…he’s trapped.

Okay, forget about the mystery stop; forget about everything but home, his own bed, his electric blanket. He’s clutching that pathetic garbage bag in a desperate effort to conserve heat, even though the dampness has worked all the way to his goose-pimply skin. He clenches his teeth to stop the chattering, listening for sounds from the highway. Once he can determine which direction it is, he’ll head straight for it and hitch a ride home. No matter who stops for him, even if it’s a serial killer. Even if it’s his mom.

Well, maybe he’s not that desperate.

After another fifteen minutes or so, though, he almost is. The fog packs him like cotton, so tight he can’t move. Or rather, any place he moves is exactly like the last place, and if he wanders, he’ll only get more lost. The silence is so thick no sound can penetrate, or just barely. How did he get so far away? From everything? Even the ground under his feet seems spongy and uncertain. Where am I? doesn’t even register, because he’s lost all sense of where. What if there’s no where here? Is that a reasonable question?

He shakes his head fiercely. Miles to the shed: 2.832. Miles to town: 7.59. Circumference of the earth: 24,901.55 miles. Total surface area: 197 million square miles, or 510 million square kilometers, rounded to the nearest hundred thousand. Somewhere on that vast expanse is him. “Hey!” he shouts at the top of his lungs to whoever might be around to hear. “HEY!”

His voice sinks into the cotton, like it never was.

Maybe he, Charles Bender Thompson, never was.

Too weird. He can feel the fog erasing him, like the mistake he suspects he is. Oops. Let’s redo that, or pretend he never happened, make him smaller and smaller…

He opens his mouth but no sound comes out. Instead, a sound goes in: a motorized sound, like a vehicle on a road—and it seems to be coming closer.

“Hey!” he shouts. Then he runs—or stumbles, with his gimpy ankle—over the bumpy ground in the direction the sound seems to be coming from. “Hey, stop!”

He jumps over a rut and skids on loose gravel. It’s a road! He can follow it, once he figures out which direction. Except that the sound is catching up to him, and he knows something has to be done, but his head is fuzzed up and slow and—

Out of the fog charges a Halloween nightmare: two glaring eyes and gleaming chrome teeth!

“Stop!” he screams. The creature stops, right after knocking him over like a bowling pin.

• • •

“Hey?” speaks a voice somewhere over his head. Bender jerks upright and his brain wobbles. Once his vision clears a little, he can make out a man standing over him—a man with a long stubbly chin and stiff brush-cut hair. On the gravel, a vehicle is idling.

It’s all coming back to him now: he has just run like a panicked possum to the middle of a road, where he stopped long enough to get hit by a truck.

Brilliant.

“Hey, kid? Are you okay?”

Do I look okay? Bender wants to reply, but his teeth are chattering again. His eyes are chattering too, or that’s what it feels like: he’s seeing in fast-shutter speed. He squints, finds something to focus on: a metal buckle on the man’s belt. It’s a bird, a big bird—eagle? With wings spread? He tries to speak, but what comes out is, “D-d-d-d—”

The man spits out a four-letter word and crouches on one knee, bringing the eagle closer—along with a long-bladed knife strapped menacingly to his belt. He pulls Bender’s eyelids open, glares at the pupils, grips his wrist while feeling for his pulse, aims questions at him like arrows. “What’s the day of the week?”

“Th-Th-Thu—”

“Got it. What’s your name?”

“B-B-Bender.”

“What’s your mom’s maiden name?”

“Bender.”

“No, I asked—Wait a minute.” The pressure on his wrist relaxes as the man sits back on his heels, eyes wide. “Was your mom Annie Bender, by any chance?”

Bender just stares back, vaguely recalling that his mother’s full name is Anne Myra Bender Thompson. But that doesn’t seem to have any relevance here.

“Crap!” the man says, making him jump. Doesn’t he have a blanket in his truck or something? The motor is thrumming briskly; bet it’s warm in the cab. “Don’t tell her you saw me. Don’t tell anybody. You’ve put me in a helluva moral quandary, you know that? No, you don’t. Listen—Man, what to do? I’m in kind of a hurry, but… Listen, what’s the story here? What are you doing out in the fog?”

Funny he should ask. Bender feels like he’s been in the fog all his life; fog is his natural state. “W-w-w—”

“Yeah, that’s easy for you to say. Ha-ha, forget it. Let me try again—where do you need to go?”

This one’s easy. “H-home.”

“Home. Don’t we all? Well, okay, is it close? Just nod, yes or no.”

Bender nods.

“Okay, lost boy, into the truck. Point me in the right direction, but if I start to think this is a trick, I’m letting you out, no matter where we are. Got that?”

If there’s a trick, it won’t be on his side of the equation. All his life, Bender has been told not to take rides from strangers. But somebody who’s shared a moral quandary with you (sort of) isn’t exactly a stranger, is he? The knife doesn’t give him a nice cozy feeling, but whether it’s smart or not, Bender knows he’s going to accept the offer.