Somebody on This Bus Is Going to Be Famous

by J. B. Cheaney

  “So stick to running,” says Spencer. “You’re a great runner.” Jay makes a noise, something between a snort and a laugh. “No, seriously. You ran over seven miles that day, and it might have been farther if—”

  “Dude,” Jay says warningly.

  “If what?” asks Bender.

  Spencer says, “Remember that night he was late and everybody was looking for him?”

  Jay rounds on him furiously. “Dude!”

  “He found some kind of hermit’s hideout on the old railroad bed. Hey, let go!” Spencer squirms out of the half nelson Jay locks on his neck. “Scared the crap out of him.”

  “I told you not to tell!”

  “I didn’t promise!” Spencer rubs his neck. “It’s not the kind of secret you ought to keep. What if he’s somebody wanted by the FBI?”

  Bender is all over it: Where? When? Who? Igor, preoccupied with his own thoughts, can’t muster much interest in some old hermit, whatever that is. Bender pulls a piece of newspaper out of his pocket. The other boys are gathering around it when Little Al tugs on Igor’s shirt. “There’s Mom.”

  A blue station wagon pulls up, hand frantically waving from the window. Sighing, Igor slouches over. “Here’s your lunch,” his mom sniffs. “And Little Al’s.” She hands over two paper bags, and Igor imagines the contents: a slapped-together PB&J, a bag of chips, and maybe an apple if she had one to throw in. “And here’s your backpack. I couldn’t find Little Al’s. I’m sorry, honey, but I wish you wouldn’t bring up…certain things. It makes me crazy.”

  “I know,” Igor says simply, his arms loaded with stuff. He doesn’t say I’m sorry.

  “I’ve gotta go—Jade’s in her playpen and Samantha’s waking up.”

  “Okay.” Igor steps back from the car, hands Little Al his lunch, and is all the way back to the gazebo before he hears the station wagon rev up and make a wide U-turn.

  “Zip it,” Bender is saying. “Here come the girls. If Kaitlynn gets hold of this, we’ll have to have a neighborhood garage sale for the guy.”

  “Just forget I said anything,” Jay says. “Or he said anything,” he adds with a kick at Spencer. “My dad would have a cow if he finds out I didn’t tell him first.”

  “My dad would think it’s a hoot,” Spencer says.

  “My dad wouldn’t hear even if I told him,” Bender says. “Even if he still lived with us.”

  “My dad doesn’t seem to exist,” Matthew says.

  And my dad, Igor is thinking, is going to hear from me. He’s made up his mind; the comet has crashed.

  • • •

  Dear Dad Bobby Mr. Price,

  This is Jim. Even tho evrybody calls me Igor. I am in 5th grade now. I dont do too good in scool but evrybody likes me. Almost, ha. My step dad is cool. He got us a snake for Cristmas. Its a corn snake. She belongs to both of us but I get to keep her in my room. I want to know if you will get out on peroll soon. Thats all for now.

  Love,

  Igor (Jim)

  p.s. Dont tell mom I wrote to you.

  Rereading the letter, he realizes he should have started over after the cross-outs on the first line rather than going on. His teacher is always making the class turn in a sloppy copy, then rewrite after corrections, so he was probably thinking he’d make a neat copy after the first draft. But the joke is on him: aside from the first line, the letter is almost painfully neat, much better than his usual work. If he tried to copy the whole thing, it would probably look worse than the original.

  But how does it sound? Does he say too much about his stepfather, like enough to make his real father jealous? Probably okay—there’s more about the snake than about Big Al. Is it bragging to say that (almost) everybody likes him? Even if it’s (mostly) true? Should he include one of his wallet-size school pictures from the kitchen drawer or wait to see if Bobby Price writes back?

  But wait—what if his dad does write back? What would that do to Mom, to receive an envelope addressed to “Jim” from Tanglewood Medium Security Prison? After pondering for a minute, Igor adds one more postscript:

  p.s.s. If you write back, dont send it to me. send it to Miranda Scott at 370 Courtney Circle ect.

  That raises the stakes. He’ll have to admit the truth to Miranda: that the man in jail is a closer relative than he’d said. It would also mean breaking numerous promises to his mother that he wouldn’t tell anybody—but the promise is half-broken already.

  Igor decides to let the letter go, just as it is. He sneaks a stamp and an envelope from the desk drawer in the family room, copies the return address on the face of his envelope, slides his letter inside, and slaps a stamp on it. Tomorrow morning, he’ll slip it into the Mulroonys’ mailbox and raise their flag—they both leave for work early, so nobody will know.

  It’ll be easy. So why is his heart pounding like a jackhammer?

  • • •

  On Wednesday, achievement tests start. For two days, he sits in strange classrooms filling in ovals in test booklets, pushing his brain like a wheelbarrow past rows of words and numbers. It seems tougher this year than usual, and maybe that’s because the letter is on its way west, taking his brain with it.

  Friday is an early dismissal day. In the morning, he and the bus arrive at the gazebo at the same time. He lines up with the others, feeling perfectly still inside. So much so that Mrs. B remarks, “Are you okay, Igor?”

  Bender, Matthew, Jay, and Spencer are holding a conference in the back. As Igor takes a seat by himself, Shelly climbs aboard with a pair of sparkly pompoms, which she pumps up and down while screeching, “I have an announcement!!”

  From the back, Bender groans loudly.

  “When I got home from school yesterday, there was a letter waiting for me. From Shooting Star Camp.” She pauses. “I got a partial scholarship! And…I’m…IN!”

  Shelly waves the pompoms again and leads three cheers. On her way down the aisle, she slaps high fives with the littles, Kaitlynn, even Alice, finally dropping down beside Miranda.

  “Does this mean you can stop selling stuff?” asks Jay.

  “And making announcements?” asks Bender.

  “Congratulations,” says Mrs. B. “Let’s roll.”

  Sitting one seat behind her, Igor can feel the energy radiating from Shelly. But Miranda seems to wilt like yesterday’s french fries. He hears her ask, “Why didn’t you call and tell me last night?”

  “Last night? I had a ton of people to call. My grandmas and Aunt Maria and Aunt Shonda and my dance teacher and voice coach and everybody on the Y-Team and this booking agent I’ve been talking to. Plus I had to write a letter of acceptance, and then Mom and I went through all my costumes to see if I should take any with me, and we made a list of the supplies we had to buy—the baby crying all the time—and listen to my dad wonder how we were going to find money for the airfare and…”

  Shelly chatters happily all the way to school. At every single stop, she jumps up to wave her pompoms and make her announcement. Miranda barely says two words. Igor notices—funny how feeling quiet makes him notice stuff. Like the little sniffs Miranda is making and the way she flicks at her eyes with her index finger.

  When they finally pull into the bus line at school, Shelly is first to pop up. While she’s hurrying to gather her stuff, one of the pompoms flips to the floor under Miranda’s feet. “Oops! Hand me that, would you, Mir?”

  Miranda picks up the pompom. Then she stands and hurls it with all her might to the rear of the bus where it bounces off the seat Bender and Matthew just vacated.

  Shelly looks more puzzled than angry. “Wha—What’s with you?”

  “Get your own stuff from now on!” Miranda clutches her backpack in both arms and pushes past Shelly, marching up the aisle like she’ll plow right through the windshield if Mrs. B doesn’t let her off. Mrs. B is not supposed to let anybody off before th
ey’re all the way in the bus lane, but she takes one look at Miranda’s face and pushes the door lever without a word.

  Igor’s eye falls upon a lunch sack listing sadly on its side where Miranda’s feet used to be. He squeezes past Shelly and scoops it up. Hurrying up the aisle, he waves the bag at Mrs. B and points out the window. “She left it. Can I—”

  With a sigh, the driver opens the door again. Igor glances back; every face has the same stunned expression except Shelly, who throws up her hands in total cluelessness. “What?” she asks Igor. He shakes his head and leaps all three steps with a single bound.

  Though she’s moving right along, Miranda’s not hard to catch up to. “You left this,” he says, holding out her lunch bag.

  She snatches it out of his hand, walking a little faster as their bus inches up beside them. Soon the doors will open and spill everybody out, and he knows she wants to get out of range. They turn the corner of the bus lane and head up the big curve of sidewalk leading to the main entrance. Two flags snap on the wind as they pass the flagpole.

  Miranda says, “She could have called me.” Her voice sounds weepy. “I helped her with all that. I managed her campaign, made most of the Christmas ornaments she sold, let her steal my poem, collected canned goods—”

  “Steal your what?”

  “My poem.” Miranda sniffs loudly. “My poem about the empty bus stop, that Shelly got me to turn in with her name, and she got a one on it and it was in the book. But somebody knew it was mine, because I got an anonymous Christmas card with a copy of the poem in it. My poem. And besides”—sniff—“I did almost all the baking for her bake sale—which was my idea too. She—she could have at least called me.”

  He recognizes the sounds of an oncoming meltdown from long experience with his mom and has already started feeling the side pockets of his backpack for a wad of Kleenex.

  Miranda almost runs the last few steps, aiming at a spot under the porch roof where a shadow waits to hide her. Pressing her back against the concrete wall, she gulps out, “I’m not jealous or anything. I’d be happy for her if she’d let me be happy with her. I don’t mind being the ugly boring friend, I just—just wanna be—I just—”

  He found it! Digging out the scrunched-up package, he pulls a scrunched-up (but clean) tissue from it just in time. Her breath is chugging and her nose is running as she snatches it from him.

  “You’re not ugly,” he says. And means it, even though, with her red eyes and wet nose, she has looked better.

  The first bell rings. “Thanks,” she sniffs then stuffs the tissue in her pocket and bolts for the door before she has to meet anyone from the bus.

  Igor follows more slowly. If he’s late, it won’t be the first time.

  • • •

  When school gets out at noon, Shelly tries to talk to Miranda but soon gives up and takes her assigned seat. She’s still pumped but not so obnoxious about it. Igor is starting to pay more attention, and he notices that when Bender and Matthew board the bus, Bender stops for a quick message to Spencer and Jay. The four of them, now that he thinks about it, have been very chummy for the last week or so, and it’s starting to bother him. What’s up with that? Are they cooking up a plan? And why can’t he be part of it?

  It’s a rowdier ride than usual and seems twice as long, but finally the bus reaches its final destination. As the last riders pile off, Igor falls in behind Spencer and Jay, who are heading in the same direction as Matthew and Bender. He lags back, watching the four of them meet at the gazebo.

  Sometimes acting impulsively is a good thing—if he’d stopped to consider his next move, someone would have noticed him. He jogs across the grass as though taking a shortcut toward home, then angles back in a straight line that ends in the rose of Sharon bushes beside the gazebo entrance. From here, he can pick up almost every word.

  A plan is being made. After a few seconds, it seems the plan has some glitches, and a few seconds more reveals the glitch is Spencer.

  “Tell your mom you can’t do it,” Bender is saying. “So what if you miss one Space Camp orientation?”

  “I can’t tell her that,” Spencer says. “She’s already ticked off at my dad because I took up the guitar—says it distracts me from academic pursuits.”

  Bender makes a rude noise. “This is an academic pursuit. It’s all about knowledge.”

  “But what are we supposed to do with it?” Jay flops on the bench over Igor’s head, making it creak.

  Matthew says something, which Igor can’t make out because Matthew’s on the other side of the gazebo and his voice is quiet.

  “Never know what?” Jay replies. “Yeah, okay, so it may fill some gaps, but—”

  “We could fill one gap really easily,” Bender interrupts, “if you could just find out what happened to your uncle.”

  Igor’s ears perk up. They actually tingle. Might “your uncle” be Uncle Troy?

  “I told you,” says Jay. “My dad said he slipped on some marbles and fell down a flight of concrete steps.”

  “We all know there’s more to it than that—” Bender gets no further because Igor has popped out of the bushes and run around to the gazebo entrance.

  “Is that what you want to know?”

  “Where’d you come from?” Bender demands.

  “You want to know what happened at high school graduation? Class of ’85?” They’re all staring at him in surprise, an expression that usually turns to impatience or worse. But he has something they want, for the first time since he can remember. He’s received all kinds of attention in his life—laughter, mockery, anger, and frustration—but this is the best.

  He says, “I know exactly what happened.”

  Early Dismissal

  By 1:30 that afternoon, here’s what they know:

  Jason Stanley Hall is hiding out very close. Bender has seen him.

  Matthew has his pewter eagle, picked up behind the bus shed.

  Jay knows where one of his hideouts is, or at least he could probably find it.

  Somebody in the house has tried to communicate with them, or at least with Bender—

  Possibly somebody in a wheelchair. Spencer saw the tracks.

  The person in the wheelchair has been injured. A small person? Yes, if the chair was taken from Pasternak Senior’s back porch—which is kind of a wild guess, but Jay’s grandmother is also a small person. But how could the thief have known the chair was there?

  The property where the bus shed sits is owned by Mrs. B. That explains why one of the shouting voices Jay heard that night sounded familiar. From what he remembers of the argument, Mrs. B suspected someone was there who wasn’t supposed to be.

  The person she was arguing with might have been renting the house and letting an extra person stay there who wasn’t supposed to. Like Jason Stanley Hall?

  And, thanks to Igor, they now know that if JSH is hiding out, it’s because he’s not welcome in the community. At least not by certain people who may have never forgiven him, including the Pastnernak Seniors and maybe even Myra Bender Thompson. He’s a persona non grata, says Spencer.

  While he’s in a sharing mood, Igor goes maybe further than he should and shares what Miranda told him about her poem—torn from the book and sent to her by someone who knew she wrote it, even though Shelly’s name was on it. Almost certainly the same someone who sent Bender a Christmas card, even though it’s harder to figure out how that person could have known who wrote the poem, when Miranda and Shelly were the only ones who did.

  Somebody knows more than he or she should. That’s the link they’re missing, but they may have a way to find it. The plan Igor interrupted was for an overnight camping trip and stakeout. They were trying to figure out how to get four individuals with different schedules together on the same weekend.

  “You mean five,” Igor says.

  Bender sighs, exasper
ated.

  Spencer asks, “What’s the big hurry anyway?”

  After a pause, Bender says, “I want him to be at the reunion. First weekend in June.”

  “What reunion?”

  “The class of ’85. My mom was in that class, also every frickin’ senior who carried those marbles. I’ll bet none of ’em ever owned up to it. I think they should. JSH is the only one who knows who they all were. He should be the one to call them out.”

  Spencer scoffs, “How do we make him do that—lock him up? Besides, it was twenty years ago. Water under the bridge and all that.”

  “For some people,” Jay says. “Some of us are still dealing with it.”

  No one comes up with a reply to that, even though they’re all thinking similar thoughts about the potential stored in a handful of marbles. Maybe Bender’s right. Somebody needs to own up.

  May

  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?”