Somebody on This Bus Is Going to Be Famous

by J. B. Cheaney

  Shelly hears an answering call.

  “See if you can find some scissors, or a knife!”

  She’s glad it’s Miranda. Miranda’s a good friend…smart too…

  “Shelly! Your neck is caught in a fork of this bush. You’re choking, ’cause your weight’s pulling you down and your hair’s all tangled up in the branches…”

  What’s she saying…wait? For what? Or was it weight? You’re a good one to talk about weight, girlfriend…Did she say bush? In the bus?

  Somebody is scrambling over the back of the seat, which is now sideways, and everything is upside down and she’s just now starting to realize that her throat really, really hurts and Star Camp is less than two months away and she can’t sing like this…

  “Simon had scissors in his backpack,” says Igor. “Wow! She’s pretty scratched up!”

  What?

  Miranda: “See if you can hold her head up.” A pair of hands fumble around the top of her head—how did anyone get up there?—and a sound bites down right next to her ear: chomp, chomp. Like her hair is being chewed off.

  Miranda: “These are terrible scissors. Like from kindergarten.”

  Igor: “First grade. They won’t let little kids have anything sharp. You’ll have to cut a little at a time.”

  The crunch of the scissors is kind of soothing. Shelly could go to sleep if it weren’t for the iron clamp on her neck. And the pain. Yes, the pain, which is slowly bearing down on her now along with a rising panic. Does anybody know they’re out here?

  • • •

  Spencer is slipping away even from his dreams. While turning over with the bus, he bounced off the side of the opposite seat just before slamming the window frame headfirst. He doesn’t feel anything and appears to be peacefully sleeping. But there’s plenty going on inside his skull, none of it good.

  Blood vessels have sprung like fountains, and brain cells are dying for lack of oxygen. He shouldn’t be asleep. Sleep is the last thing he should do. He needs to wake up, needs to have people asking him questions, snapping their fingers in front of his face, slapping him even—anything to stop his long downward slide into that place where brain cells die and muscles forget how to move. Somebody needs to say Hey, Spencer! Wake up!

  But there’s nobody to say it.

  • • •

  The first thing Kaitlynn is aware of is a tingling in her back, then a pressure in her ears, as if all the ideas she’s ever had are breaking up and shaking together. The first thing to do is remember who she is, then why she’s here, then where she needs to be. As the feeling in her back comes alive, the pieces of herself are jumping, finding each other, snapping together, and aiming upward. Next minute, she’s launched.

  Up, up, up—arrowing straight for the surface, even though it’s a long way and the higher she goes, the louder the buzz and the tinglier the tingle—though actually, she realizes now, it’s more like pain. Each little quiver on her back is growing spikes and digging in and making her pay for things she doesn’t even know she did…Up! Up! and the more she tries to outrun it, the worse it gets. She breaks, at last, upon a watery plain where the steady rain pummels her and the sobs of little children surround her and the outraged cries right beside her are the ones she’s making herself.

  • • •

  Alice’s jaw is sore from clamping down on it, trying not to scream. The rain, which had been hammering on the windows with watery fists, has lessened to a steady drumbeat that helps hold the panic down. Alice is trying to worry about Kaitlynn and Shelly and Spencer and everybody else, but pain is wrapping her up in the tight cocoon of herself. It’s just one arm, but it’s swallowed up her whole body. Tears track down her face and sobs jump in her throat, but she’s holding them down. So far. If she gave herself up to them, she’d shake to pieces. She thinks of little Albert in their story, finding courage to hold on—and that makes her think of Ricardo, coming to after smashing into that bridge abutment…

  “What’s going on!” shouts an indignant voice beside her—Kaitlynn’s. She sounds so mad, Alice somehow knows she’s going to be okay. “Where’s all this blood coming from??”

  “Kaitlynn!” yells Simon from the front. “Are you okay?”

  “NO, I’m not okay! I’ve got, like, a million cuts on me—is this glass?”

  That sparks another uproar; Alice sees Igor climbing back toward the front and hears a moan from Matthew—

  “Hey!” comes a voice from the back of the bus. “Lissa! Lissa-girl, are you in there?”

  She can’t believe it. “Daddy?”

  Her father swings his legs over the emergency door opening and drops into the aisle, climbing over the seats on his hands and knees to get to her. “Sweetheart! Babydoll! You’re alive—are you okay? Anything broken?”

  “Just an arm—NO!” She stops him just before he can catch her up, jangling bones and all, in a big bear hug.

  “Jeez!” He recoils as though stopped by an invisible hand. Then he reaches out to touch her good shoulder. “What can we use for a splint? Do you have anything we can wrap it up with?”

  “Sir?” It’s Miranda. “Do you happen to have a pocketknife?”

  “Sure thing. Here you go—” He fumbles it out of his hip pocket and tosses it to her. “I might need it back, though.” He slips off his jacket and is now unbuttoning his shirt. “I’ve got to cut some bandages.”

  “Daddy!” Alice is whispering. “Did anybody call 911?”

  “Yeah, your mom. When that guy showed up at our door. What can we use for a splint?”

  “I think we should wait for the ambulance,” she says, still whispering. “Why aren’t you gone?”

  “We were waiting for the rain to slack off. Who else is hurt in here?” He’s looking around distractedly. “Are y’all all accounted for?”

  Miranda pops up again. “Could you see about Matthew? And maybe Spencer? And we don’t know about Mrs. B—or Crystal—”

  “Matthew? Where’s Matthew?” He’s stretching his neck, searching the forward seats.

  “He’s toward the back,” Alice says. “Daddy! The ambulance’ll be here soon. Hadn’t you better go?” He’s not supposed to be here, but she can’t remember why.

  “Plenty of time,” he replies absently, crawling back the way he came. “Whoa! Are you Matthew?” Alice hears a murmur in reply. “I dunno, man, looks like you’ve lost a lot of blood already…”

  “There!” Miranda exclaims triumphantly. “You’re free! Careful, Igor. Let’s pull her up…hold the branch steady while I get her untangled…”

  “Is somebody coming to get us?” wails a little voice from the front.

  “Mrs. B’s awake!” comes another.

  Alice hears a groan from that direction. She turns her head in time to see Shelly rise from between the seats like—well, maybe like a vampire from his coffin. It sure doesn’t look like Shelly, her head bristling with tufts of black hair and her face red as a berry. She tries to talk but can’t squeeze out a word. Her painful smile twists into a grimace of terror.

  “Somebody please come get us,” whimpers a voice.

  All the littles start crying again, and Igor throws up his hands. “I give up!” Alice tries to call out to GeeGee, but her voice won’t carry.

  “Hey!” her dad’s voice rings out sharply. “Hey, kid! Wake up! What’s his name?” (Matthew mutters a response.) “Spencer! Listen to me, man! His eyes aren’t right—one pupil’s bigger than the other. Bad news—Spencer! That’s right, stay awake. Stick with us, man—No! Don’t check out on me. Open your eyes! Don’t do this again, Ricardo. Open your eyes!”

  Ricardo? Alice wonders. The rain is lighter but still loud enough, with the crying and shouting, that she can barely hear the scream of a siren as it lurches to the top of the hill and abruptly cuts off.

  “Daddy?” But her father doesn’t seem to hear,
either her or the siren. He’s holding Spencer up, supporting his head with one hand, putting words directly in his face (“What’s your last name, son? Where do you live? What’s your mom’s maiden name? C’mon, Spencer—focus!”). Smiling, encouraging…

  • • •

  The bandage helps for the first twenty yards or so. Then it’s back to grinding torture for every step until Jay reaches the highway. A patrol car, lights flashing, passes before he can flag it—he could have stomped in frustration. At least somebody knows, meaning his call got through, meaning more help was on its way. He can take it a little easier. But now that the urgency has let up, the pain sweeps in like water under a floodgate. He bites his lip and puts one foot in front of the other, limping.

  The patrol car pulls over to the side of the road. Jay notices another vehicle on the opposite shoulder, headlights peering through the gray curtain of rain. A patrolman, just a blur from this distance, seems to be waving his arms. As Jay hobbles closer, he can make out the words the man is yelling: “Are you from the bus?”

  Jay nods, noticing that the speed limit sign, which he’d passed thousands of times in his life and never really seen, is now at a cockeyed angle. He points: “It went off right there!”

  But the patrolman is no longer facing his way—he’s yelling in the other direction. Limping closer, Jay recognizes Bender as though he were somebody he knew a long time ago.

  “Are you sure?” the patrolman asks, and Bender is nodding. The cop reaches into his car for a radio and speaks into it urgently: “Dispatcher 7, this is Car 38. I’m at the bus scene on my way to check for injuries. We have an occupied vehicle in Drybed Creek, underwater. Repeat, underwater. Please dispatch another ambulance to the scene. Over—”

  He tucks the radio inside his poncho and nods to Jay. “You guys watch for help.” Then he’s gone; it’s like he dived down the slope headfirst in his hurry to get to the bus.

  Jay limps a little closer. “What?”

  Bender looks like he just went through a car wash: soaking wet, his clothes askew, and his hair every which way. “I couldn’t do it—I just—” His voice sounds funny, and it takes Jay a moment to realize he’s sobbing. “I tried—to save her—I—”

  “Who? Your mom?”

  “The—the—the current’s too fast. I stepped in—and—it knocked my feet out from under me! I almost didn’t get out.”

  “Is her car in the creek, is that what you’re saying? And she’s in it?”

  “Couldn’t even get to it.” Bender is waving one arm mechanically, like the handle of a car jack. “I tried—I tried—I—”

  “Good Lord!” The driver of the other vehicle, an old guy in overalls, has joined them.

  Squinting down the slope, Jay can make out something white crunched up next to something gray. In a flash, he interprets this as a top of an SUV partly wedged under the bridge. “Dude,” he says.

  “I hear a siren,” says the old man.

  The noise is coming at them like a distant parade, a sound that makes your ears stretch and your eyes strain to see it. The violent flash of LED lights show first—red, blue, white—as a patrol car and an ambulance sweep around the curve, as fast as they dare. They slow down on the descent to the river. The water seems to have boiled over the bridge. At its edge, the lead car pauses and a highway patrolman gets out with a stick. Wading carefully into the water, he stretches forward to measure its depth, then waves to the ambulance driver to proceed with caution.

  “I’ll tell ’em about your mom,” the old man says, starting down the hill. “You show ’em where the bus is.”

  Jay suddenly feels awkward, standing next to a boy he’s known all his life and never liked, whose mother is in peril right before their eyes. It’s even worse when the boy makes a noise like a calf stuck in a cattle guard and drops in a heap on the highway.

  “I tried to save her!” he sobs again.

  Jay remembers how he tried to pull his grandfather back from the brink and failed. The memory heaves up a mound of sorrow inside him and he doesn’t feel awkward anymore, just sad. He sits beside Bender, clutching his swollen ankle, and discovers he’s crying too.

  “Hey, dude. I know you tried. I believe you. I tried too.”

  “I should have saved her,” Bender chokes out and then adds, “Thorn would have.”

  “Who?”

  Jay remembers Thorn—his sister Jessica had a crush on him all through high school. He just can’t figure what the guy has to do with anything. Bender gives him the strangest look—did he think his brother was the center of the universe or something?

  “Hey,” Jay says, “it’s probably better you didn’t get to her now. That car’s the safest place to be, as long as no water’s getting in—”

  “It shouldn’t be there!” Bender kicks at the asphalt. “It’s stupid! It’s Myra Bender Thompson, the real estate go-to gal out to be number one in sales. Stupid! Always. Crash and burn. Knew it would happen someday. Wanted to tell her, but—we never talked.”

  Jay isn’t sure he wants the whole backstory. “Yeah, well, talking…that’s hard.”

  “So what? Everything’s hard. Everything real, anyway. Big frickin’ deal.” It sounds like Bender is mad at him now.

  “Okay, okay.” Jay wipes his nose on his sleeve and stares down at the raging water with the SUV stuck in it that they can’t do anything about.

  Funny to think that on a normal morning, they’d be at school by now, starting another day that feels a lot like the previous day. But for all the motion that doesn’t seem to take them anywhere—back and forth on the bus, around and around the track, on and off the honor roll—there’s this huge current, carrying them forward. And just now, almost, swallowing them up. Almost.

  The bumpy asphalt is digging into his butt. Everything is hard—and right now, he’s glad of it.

  He shouldn’t feel this—should he?—but something like ecstasy is tingling in his bones. The accident that swept over them didn’t kill him. It opened his eyes. For one endless moment, he can see the years ahead of him, taking him someplace real, not fuzzy and fading like the NFL. It doesn’t matter if he ever plays football or runs again: life itself, the throb of his ankle and the cold rain in his face and the thump of his eager heart, is totally amazing. And it’s just been handed back to him on a silver platter as wide as the world. For a moment, he’s dizzy with gratitude.

  The first ambulance has crossed the bridge and is now heading slowly toward them, lights blinking. Jay painfully stands up again, using Bender’s shoulder for leverage and knocking pebbles off his shorts. He points repeatedly to the bent speed-limit sign. The vehicle pulls over and stops.

  He wants to pass some of his gratefulness on to Bender but isn’t sure how. “Look…” he begins. “I’ll bet your mom’s all right. I hope so. But whatever… We’ve got things to do.”

  Bender heaves a huge sigh and pulls himself up. Jay reaches out to him, lays a hand on his shoulder—and since Bender doesn’t shake his hand off, it stays there, and anybody approaching would have thought they were the best of friends.

  • • •

  Within a week, they were all famous, in a way.

  Kids on Wrecked School Bus Rescue Themselves was the local headline written by Maribeth Grand and picked up by Associated Press. It was an exaggeration, of course; nobody was really “rescued” until the emergency vehicles arrived. But the kids had to take care of each other until then because their driver was unconscious. What made their story grow and sprout wings and fly to news outlets all over the country was a very important fact: they all survived. Some, like Spencer, had to spend a lot of time in therapy. Some, like Matthew and little Crystal Applegate and Myra Bender Thompson, came close to actual death. But all survived, and none were ever quite the same.

  One more interesting sideline to the story was how Jason Stanley Hall raced to the scene to rescue h
is daughter and stayed to pull Spencer back from oblivion and revive Mrs. B—who happened to be his mother-in-law! His very name heaved up unhappy memories of the class of ’85 and their infamous graduation ceremony. No wonder he didn’t want to be seen or recognized, but putting personal concerns aside to lend a hand made him a hero. For a while, anyway.

  All the riders were heroes, for a while. But their fame quickly faded.

  Mrs. B’s, however, grew and grew.

  First, she was fired—not for the accident so much as for all the other little irregularities that came out during the investigation. Irregularities like making an unauthorized stop every day for four months, allowing Christmas decorations on the bus, failing to report the snake incident, and (possibly) going a little too fast on the downhill slope just before going off the road, even though she swore she wasn’t.

  The good thing about being fired was it gave her time to devote to her secret project. By November of next year, it was done: a book. A novel for children based on her experience as a school bus driver and titled Somebody on This Bus Is Going to Be Famous.

  There is just enough fiction in it not to be sued and to keep readers guessing about how much of it really happened and how much not. Only her former riders knew for sure.

  And they’re not telling.

  • • •

  No fair! you say. You tricked us!

  We thought all along it was going to be one of the kids who’d be famous, but it turns out to be the only grown-up.

  But wait a minute (I say). They’ve got lots of time to be famous. Or not. And anyway, fame isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I still have to get up and get going and deal with aches and pains and grown-up children who can’t seem to make up their minds and furnaces that stop working and drivers who cut me off in traffic and repairmen who don’t show up and booksellers who don’t return my calls and librarians who forgot they asked me to come and talk to their students. Being famous doesn’t fix any of that.