by Barry Lyga
"I like history," I told them stubbornly, because they seemed to find the idea of me being a historian funny. And even though I didn't like being a doll, I liked amusing my parents even less.
"I'm sure, honey," Mom said, but she said it in the same tone that she'd said, "Yeah, I bet."
5
No one expected the snow.
Flakes hit early on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving when I was on the bus. The weather report, though, said that the big stuff wouldn't come until later that night.
Instead, by ten o' clock or so, someone shouted, "Look at that!"
The soccer field was visible from Mr. Tunney's classroom. We couldn't see the turf at all. Snow had drifted up to half the height of the goals.
"Holy crap!" someone else said with all the fervor a seventh-grader can muster.
"That's enough of that!" Mr. Tunney said sharply, but by now twenty twelve-year-olds had gotten up and begun to congregate at the window.
"That's enough!" he said again, coming over to the window to shoo us back into our seats. "It's just snow; you've seen it before. Back to your seats."
Just as Mr. Tunney managed to get us back to our seats, the PA crackled and Mrs. Cameron, the principal, told us that schools were closing early. A cheer went up and Mr. Tunney threw his hands up in defeat.
***
I've thought about this next part a lot, and I'm still not entirely sure about it. I know that the storm ended up getting caught between two fronts and just kept spinning over our area, dumping more and more snow by the minute. I have vivid memories of watching the news that night, the weatherman gesturing clockwise over an image of the storm clouds as they spun like a pottery wheel.
I understand the storm just fine. I don't understand how I missed my bus.
We had to get to our lockers and pack up. The halls were a bustle of activity, kids shouting and laughing, teachers trying to ride herd on the whole thing. The PA would blare to life at random intervals, announcing this bus or that bus had arrived at this or that spot on the parking circle. I filled up my backpack and headed outside.
Snow swirled around me, thick like dust in a shaft of light. I was scared and thrilled at the same time. It was like being caught in a whirlwind. My heart pounded with excitement. I thought of snowballs, snow forts, snowmen.
Crunching the three inches of white powder under my feet, I made my way to the spot where my bus usually waited. But something was wrong—the kids getting on weren't kids who lived near me. And when I looked up into the bus, the driver was a stranger.
I backed up a step. The bus number was wrong.
I walked down the line of buses, looking for number 481. Nothing.
Well, OK, I figured. It's snowing. The roads are bad. It's just running late or backed up somewhere.
I fought against the press of kids heading for their buses until I was back in school. The PA announced that bus 10 was ready at the end of the parking circle.
I was waiting for 481, which, by some strange coincidence, was my batting average in sixth grade, the previous year. I had gone 26 for 54 with five doubles and two triples. What annoyed me, though, is that I know I could have broken .500 that year. Just one more hit—one more lousy hit—would have put me at .500. Two more hits would have been...
I did the math in my head: .519. Wow! Two more hits. Just two hits! If I'd been left in a couple more games and gotten, say, five more at bats ... I would have easily hit two or three times, no question. That would have made me ... Let's see ... that would have made me 29 for 59 ... which is only a .493 average, which is still higher than .481. Coach should have let me play those extra innings. If I'd played, say, ten more at bats and hit half the time, I'd be at ... 31 for 64, which is ... not much better. So I'd need to hit more than half the time, which I could have done, especially late in the season, when I was really into my swing. I went 4 for 4 in the last game of the season, 2 for 3 before that, 2 for 2 before that...
That was when I realized how quiet the hall had gotten. There was no one else there. I looked around. Maybe everyone was clustered around the door?
No. No one there.
What was going on? I wasn't the only kid on my bus! There had to be other kids here, even if my bus was the last one.
Maybe everyone was outside. Maybe I'd missed the announcement for my bus!
I ran outside, bursting through the doors into the swirling chaos of the storm. The snow was easily four inches deep now, and I almost lost my footing as I stepped into it.
The parking circle was empty except for slushy gray ruts carved into the snow by the tires and exhaust fumes of departed buses.
Maybe my bus was on its way? Maybe...
No. Even as a desperate seventh-grader, I knew that was wishful thinking. I'd missed the bus, plain and simple.
What could I do now? Could I walk home? I was pretty sure I could walk the distance—I was in good shape, after all—but I wasn't sure how to get home. Especially on foot. And the snow made the prospect all the more daunting. How high would it get by the time I got home?
I allowed myself a few seconds of panic, standing in the snow, alone in the whole wide world as far as I could tell. How would I get home? Would my parents be coming home early, trying to figure out where I was? What was going to happen to me?
I went back into school. It was so strange and so quiet in there, every footstep echoing off the lockers like the sounds monster feet make in movies.
A wall clock told me that it was just a little bit past twelve-thirty. There still had to be someone here, right?
I made my way through the corridors. It felt like being in a haunted house, only one with flickering fluorescent lights. The classrooms were all closed and dark. I tried a door—it was locked.
I walked faster. There had to be someone—
Just then, I turned a corner into the main lobby. Across the way, I saw the lights of the office.
In the office were the school secretary, the principal, and Mrs. Sherman, who was bundled up in a heavy coat and wool hat, tugging on a pair of very red leather gloves. "—like two years ago," she was saying. The secretary was pretty much ignoring her, typing on her keyboard.
"Um, excuse me?"
It was like I'd pulled a pistol and shouted, "No one move!" All three of them froze and turned to look at me.
Mrs. Sherman was the first to speak: "Josh, what are you doing here?"
"My bus isn't—"
"We called all of the buses," the secretary said with a little snappish edge to her voice. "All of them."
"Which bus are you?" the principal asked. "Four eighty-one."
"That was one of the first ones we called," the secretary said. "Didn't you hear it?"
Now I was getting pissed. How was this my fault? "I went to the stop, but it wasn't there."
"We announced it," she said again, as if that would reverse time and put me on the bus. "We had different stops for them all because they were ... Oh, who cares?" And she turned to look helplessly at the principal.
Who sighed and said, "Come into my office, Josh. I'll try to figure out what we're going to do. Don't worry—we'll get you home." She didn't seem terribly happy about it.
"Wait a minute," said Mrs. Sherman as I was following the principal. "Look, you have to stay, right?" The principal and the secretary nodded miserably. "Then let me take care of this. I'll call the parents and get them to come pick him up."
The principal narrowed her eyes, but I could tell she wanted to jump on this opportunity to ditch me and get back to whatever it was she had to do. I guess principals don't get snow days. "You sure?" she asked Mrs. Sherman.
"Of course. I'm only five minutes from here; I can spend a few more minutes here to square things away." She held out one red hand to me. "Come on, Josh."
I knew Mrs. Sherman a hell of a lot better than I knew the principal, whom I'd only seen in the halls and heard speak at the occasional assembly. I felt a little weird holding a teacher's hand, but I took the one Mrs.
Sherman offered. She smiled at me. "All right, let's take care of this."
Mrs. Sherman got my emergency procedure card from the secretary and took me out into the lobby. "Who do we want to try first?" she asked, squinting at Mom's tiny handwriting on the card. "Mom or Dad?"
Dad's job was pretty far away. I knew that because he regularly complained about his commute. But Mom was just down in Lake Eliot. "Mom."
"OK." She rummaged in her purse and pulled out a cell phone. Those were some tight-fitting gloves, because she was able to flip it open and punch out the number without taking them off.
I thought about how much Mom loved this job, how she had argued with Dad about vacation time. "She's gonna be pretty pissed," I told Mrs. Sherman, and then clapped a hand over my mouth as I realized what I'd said.
Mrs. Sherman tried to look angry, but she couldn't help herself. She giggled, rolled her eyes at me, and ruffled my hair. "Watch your mouth, goofball. And don't worry." She flashed me a reassuring smile—her dimple winked at me—and then she spoke into the phone:
"Hello, Mrs. Mendel? This is Mrs. Sherman, Josh's history teacher? Yes. No, no, there's nothing—Yeah, the snow. I know. Look, there was..." She looked over at me, chewed the corner of her lip for a second. "The buses got mixed up and some kids missed their buses. Is there any way you can come get—
"Oh. Oh, my God. Really?" Mrs. Sherman looked concerned. I guess something in my eyes echoed that concern, because she took my hand in hers and squeezed it tight. It didn't hurt—it felt kind of nice. "Yeah, yeah. I can see how that ... No, there's, uh, there aren't any of Josh's friends here. And I don't think we're allowed to send him home with one of them anyway. Is there a friend or a relative who could—I see. Right, right. No, I wouldn't want that, either."
Mrs. Sherman took a deep breath. "Look, Mrs. Mendel, if it's just going to be a few hours, why don't I just take Josh home with me?" I think my eyes might have popped out of my head, but Mrs. Sherman wasn't looking at me anymore.
"No, it's no bother. Really. I'm only five minutes from here. Let me give you my address and then you can just pick him up when you're ready."
They exchanged address and phone information. I felt a little weird thinking that I was going to see a teacher's home. I was going to go home with her. Was she going to make me do homework?
She hung up with Mom and put her cell away. "All right, Josh. You're coming home with me. Is that cool?"
The way she cocked her head and grinned at me as she said it, I couldn't help but say, "Yeah, sure."
Together, we cleared the inches of snow off her car and she explained what Mom had told her: The roads were even worse down in Lake Eliot and many of them had been closed to anything but emergency vehicles. Mom figured it was going to be a few hours before she could get out of Lake Eliot and back home, and Dad would take even longer.
"This just makes the most sense, don't you think?" She swept a big floe of snow off the windshield onto the ground. "Better than bothering the principal again."
"Yeah."
She was a careful, slow driver, focusing on the road, which meant I could look at her. It was weird how a coat and scarf and boots can make a woman's body look totally different, all straight and bulky and uncomplicated.
She looked over to check on me. "You OK?"
"Yep. Thanks for not telling my mom that I was the only kid who missed the bus."
She laughed. "I was a kid once, too, y'know. I know how parents flip out over little things. Don't worry about it."
And, strangely enough, that's what happened—I settled back in the seat and didn't worry about it.
She may have lived five minutes from school, but between traffic, snow, and plenty of time with the brake, it took more like twenty to get to her apartment complex.
I wasn't sure what to expect inside her apartment. It was basically normal and, therefore, sort of disappointing. I guess I'd been expecting something exotic. I had to remind myself that teachers are just normal people when they're not teaching.
The door opened into a living room-type area with a sofa facing a big entertainment center and a couple of chairs. There was a little round table with chairs tucked into a corner, and a big opening in the wall that showed the kitchen. A hallway ran back into darkness.
"Not much, is it? Make yourself comfortable," she said. "Are you tired? Do you want to take a nap? The bedroom's right down the hall."
I wasn't sure what to do. I had never been to a teacher's house before. I was afraid of doing something wrong. "No, thank you."
"Well, what do you normally do when you get home? Do you want to watch TV or something?"
"I guess."
"OK, well, take off your coat and your boots and sit down. Remote's on the table."
A minute later I had MTV2 going. Mrs. Sherman struggled out of her coat and tugged at her boots. One came off suddenly, flying out of her hands and hitting the wall, where it left a black scuffmark.
"Oh, goddamn." She caught her breath and turned to me. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that."
Dad said it all the time, but I felt bad for her because she felt bad. "It's OK."
"Please don't tell your parents I said that. They'll think I'm horrible."
Nah. They'd probably welcome her into the family. "I won't."
She grinned, "Our secret, right?"
"Yep."
"Want something to drink?"
I didn't want to say yes; it seemed like imposing. But I was really thirsty. "OK."
She ruffled my hair as she walked past me on the way to the kitchen.
"I don't have much!" she called from the kitchen. "Is OJ OK?"
I giggled at "OJ OK." "Sure."
A minute later she came in with a tall glass of orange juice for me and a wineglass for herself.
"Do you mind?" she asked, sitting across from me on a chair. She gestured with the wineglass. "It's not like I'm an alcoholic or anything. It's just that I always have a glass of wine when I get home from school. It's like a tradition."
"No, I don't mind."
I watched MTV a little while longer in silence. It wasn't very good, but I didn't know if she wanted to watch it or not, so I didn't say anything about changing the channel. After a few minutes, she got up and went into the kitchen, where I heard her use the phone.
"No, the roads weren't too bad yet. One of my students is here with me. Missed his bus. Yeah. I don't know. His mother works down near you, so who knows?" She opened the refrigerator. "I think we're OK. Maybe soda or something like that. We don't have anything to drink."
It was weird seeing her putter around in the kitchen, occasionally drifting out into the hallway. She wasn't wearing any shoes and her toenails were painted a vivid pink. She had tiny toes.
"You doing OK, Josh?" she called, craning her neck to look around the corner at me.
"Yeah!" I turned back to the TV quickly. Didn't want her to know I'd been looking at her feet.
I got bored with the TV, so I just looked around the room. It was almost all in black and white, with clear glass for accents. I had never seen a room so neat and ... straight. It just seemed like the whole room was set in a specific order. The artwork on the walls wasn't pictures or anything like that—it was patterns of colors. At first, they just sort of looked like someone had randomly splashed paint all over them, but the more I looked at them, the more I could detect a pattern of some sort. I wasn't sure what the pattern was, but I knew that it was deliberate. Cool.
I wandered to the entertainment center. On a shelf at eye-level there were a bunch of framed pictures. One of them was a little girl—kindergarten, maybe?—with pigtails, sticking her tongue out adorably at the camera. Another showed a guy around my age in a football uniform, sullen. There was a frame with two pictures in it, both of old people, but two different pairs of old people.
One picture, though, took my breath away. It was a photo of Mrs. Sherman in her wedding gown. I don't know enough about dresses to describe it, other than
to say that it fit her down to the waist like a second skin made of shimmering, neon white, where it flared into a wide skirt that seemed to be made of overlapping clouds. It was so low-cut in front that I couldn't imagine how her breasts stayed put or how there could be any more breast to cover in the first place. She seemed almost completely exposed, yet still covered. Her skin glowed bronze against the white of the gown, except for the darker valley where her breasts came together and seemed somehow to gesture below and between them.
And her smile. Her smile was hypnotic. It was as if she loved the camera itself and couldn't help letting it know.
I stared at it for a long time, memorizing every detail, looking for new details. My God! Zik and I had thought she was gorgeous before, but we hadn't had any clue! She wasn't just beautiful—she was supernatural.
I think if I'd stared any longer, there would have been a waterfall of drool running down my chin and puddling around my feet. I forced myself to stop looking at the photo.
Under the TV, on a shelf on the entertainment center, was another kind of heaven. I couldn't believe it—I crouched down to make sure I wasn't seeing things.
"Something wrong?" I almost jumped out of my skin. Mrs. Sherman was standing right behind me! The phone was nowhere in sight.
"Yes! I mean, no!" I got up and scurried back to the sofa. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—"
She shook her head. "What are you apologizing for?"
For staring at the picture, really, I guess. But I couldn't tell her that. "Nothing. I don't know. I just..." I pointed. "I can't believe you have them! Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo!"
"Oh, I should have known!" She rolled her eyes. "Yeah, we've got them all. They're George's."
"Wow! You let your son have all of these? My parents won't let me get any video games."
"Not my son. I don't have any kids. George is my husband. He's a game tester. That's why we have all these things. We don't even have a DVD player—we just use the game machines."