by Amy Ignatow
He was lying in the muddy grass about fifteen feet from the bus, which was overturned in the ditch on the side of the road. Lightning flashed, and for a split second he could see a figure near the bus. Nick stretched out his wet arms to the guy, trying to call out to him. “Hey . . .” His voice sounded tiny and weak. Nick put his palms on the rain-soaked ground and tried to push himself up. The mud made a disgusting sucking sound as it reluctantly released the bulk of his body. “Hey!” he called out again, a little bit louder. He struggled to his feet.
Dizzy. Did I hit my head? It looked to Nick like he’d been flung fifteen feet from the rolling bus. Of course I hit my head. But his head didn’t hurt. Was he dead? Maybe I’m dead. Do dead people get this soggy? Probably not. Nick hadn’t been to church since his dad died, but it seemed doubtful that his jeans would be this caked with mud in the afterlife. Also, if he was dead, he’d be seeing his dad. No, for better or worse, Nick was alive.
Nick tested his legs. Walking was definitely not a problem. He began to slog through the soggy field to the ditch, where he saw someone who appeared to be wearing a straw hat struggling to open the back door of the bus.
A gruesome thought occurred to him. Oh no. What if there were dead bodies? What if he only lived because he’d been lucky enough to be thrown from the bus? And how, exactly, was I thrown from the bus? None of the windows had been open and the bus looked intact. Weird. Nick stopped moving forward. Where was he, even?
“COME!” Hat Guy had spotted him. Nick ran to the back of the bus and grabbed the emergency handle, which Hat Guy had somehow not figured out how to work. The door swung open and the smell of gas filled the air, along with some other sort of pungent chemical that Nick couldn’t place. He and Hat Guy started to cough.
The first person they saw inside was Cookie Parker. She was trying to make her way toward him and her eyes were wide with fear. Nick saw a small stream of blood running down the side of her head. “WE HAVE TO GET EVERYONE OFF THE BUS,” she screamed, and pointed to a brown-haired girl who was passed out near the open door.
“Are you sure we should move her?” Nick yelped.
The passed-out girl moaned. Cookie looked at her. “YES!” she yelled.
Nick found himself momentarily annoyed. When had Cookie Parker become a doctor? Yet there he was, climbing into the chemical-stank bus and grabbing the girl’s arms to pull her out of her seat.
Hat Guy put his hand on Nick’s arm to stop him. “No no,” he said. “I get her. I’m stronger.”
For the first time, Nick took a good look at the stranger. He was tall, but he looked young, only a few years older than Nick. He was dressed in black pants and a white shirt with no buttons on it. Nick recognized the style. The Amish boy gently pushed past Nick and Cookie and lifted the girl up like she weighed nothing.
The brown-haired girl moaned again and opened her eyes. They were glowing bright yellow. Cookie let out a small, sharp shriek.
Farshad sensed other people moving near him, but he didn’t open his eyes. Everything hurt and he was pretty sure that seeing his surroundings wasn’t going to make him feel any better.
“Hey.” Farshad felt a hand shaking his shoulder. He opened one eye and saw a chubby kid with glasses who was dripping water onto him. “Hey, are you okay?” the kid asked. “Can you move?”
Farshad blinked a few times, trying to get his eyes to adjust to the low light. He tried to stretch and found that he was lying on his side but could move. “Yeah,” he said, “I think so.”
“We’re getting out of the bus.” The kid knelt down next to him and began fumbling with his safety belt. Through Farshad’s fuzziness some small part of him felt a pang of sadness. He couldn’t remember the last time that someone his own age had talked to him like he was a human being. He gently pushed the kid’s hand away and unbuckled his own safety belt.
“NICK!” a female voice screamed. The kid spun around. Through the darkness Farshad could make out Cookie Parker’s features. She had blood on her face and she looked frightened. “NICK, I CAN’T TELL IF YO—IF MR. FRIEND IS BREATHING.”
“Are you okay here?” Nick asked Farshad. He nodded and Nick clumsily made his way over some seats to where Cookie Parker was shrieking. Farshad got up, grabbed his backpack, and climbed over the seats to join them.
It didn’t look good. Mr. Friend was passed out and his leg was pinned at a weird angle underneath one of the seats.
“Okay,” Nick said. “Okay okay okay. We have to find a way to get him . . . unstuck.”
“How?” Cookie asked. “He looks all twisted and gross. Are we totally sure he’s alive?”
Nick climbed over a seat and put his ear near Mr. Friend’s mouth. “He’s breathing. Can we move this seat?” he asked, gesturing to the twisted piece of metal that was crushing the substitute teacher’s right leg.
“Sure, no problem.” Cookie rolled her eyes as Nick tried to crawl under another seat to see if there was a way to move it. “Let me just grab my portable Jaws of Life out of my bag.” She began to cough.
“I don’t think we should wait,” Nick mumbled. “It smells really weird in here.”
For the first time, it occurred to Farshad that maybe his dizziness had more to do with the chemical and gas smells than it did with hitting his head. Nick grabbed the bottom of the seat and wheezed as he tried to lift it. “A little help?”
Cookie shot Farshad a look as if to say, Is he serious? Through his fog, Farshad felt a surge of anger, because this was Cookie Parker, and Cookie Parker did not get to share knowing looks with him. “Move,” he said, pushing past her and grabbing the other end of the seat. It really wasn’t that heavy, but the metal made a horrible screeching sound as he lifted it up. It was so loud he could feel it in his teeth. He tossed the seat aside and it landed with a dull crash. “Get him,” Farshad grunted to Cookie and Nick, who stared at him for a moment before each took hold of one of Mr. Friend’s arms and dragged him to the back of the bus. Farshad followed them out into the rain, where a strange boy was standing, staring at a cell phone.
It was only a matter of seconds before Farshad was drenched. They hauled Mr. Friend about thirty feet down the road to where a brown-haired girl sat clutching her backpack. “Is he dead?” she asked, looking at Mr. Friend.
“He’s breathing.” Nick wheezed under the weight of the substitute teacher as they roughly set him down on the pavement. Mr. Friend let out a small groan. “Any reception?” Nick asked the stranger, who looked like he was in his teens.
“I’m sorry, I can’t make it go,” he said somewhat helplessly.
Cookie snatched the phone away from him and held it up. “I got bars,” she said, dialing 911.
A wave of dizziness hit Farshad and he sank to the wet pavement next to the brown-haired girl. She was using her rain jacket to protect her backpack, but the rest of her body was soaking wet. “Are you okay?” he asked her.
“I’m very cold,” she said, her teeth chattering as she hugged her things to her chest. “And also soggy.” She looked at him with light blue eyes. “You don’t look very good.”
“I’m okay,” he said tiredly, but his head felt light and his eyelids were heavy.
“Should we put him in my buggy?” he heard the teenager ask. He had a strange accent.
Farshad looked up and saw a horse looking down at him. That was new. Behind the horse was a covered buggy.
“I don’t know if we should keep moving him.” Nick said. Lightning momentarily illuminated the sky and Mr. Friend whimpered without opening his eyes.
“My farm isn’t far from here,” the boy said. “I can go and get help.” He climbed into the buggy and set off down the road.
“He seemed nice,” the green-eyed girl said to Farshad. His head was spinning.
Flashing red and blue lights of emergency vehicles appeared in the distance, and Farshad felt a measure of relief. He closed his eyes and felt his body hit the wet ground.
The emergency room at Muellersville Memor
ial seemed really loud to Cookie. It was probably just a symptom of the mild concussion that the doctors suspected she had, but the noise made it hard for her to think. She wanted very badly for her mother to come.
Closing her eyes didn’t help to block out the noise. Everyone in the hospital seemed to be thinking aloud, which hurt Cookie’s head and was also just very annoying. “Left . . . another left . . . right,” one female voice said. Cookie opened her eyes to see a woman wearing scrubs weaving her way through the hallways. “Where’s the exit? I swear I came through here,” another guy said. It was like they couldn’t think without opening their mouths. Didn’t they understand that there were traumatized and potentially concussed people trying to get a little rest?
Cookie couldn’t stop thinking about the girl’s eyes. It wasn’t real, Cookie told herself. It was a trick of the lighting, or the lightning, or stress, or the result of a mild concussion. After all, when she’d gone back to get her phone, the girl’s eyes had been some perfectly unremarkable shade of brown. So it was all in Cookie’s slightly busted-up head, right?
Only, it wasn’t. She was absolutely positive that Nick had seen it, too. His mouth had dropped open, and they’d shared the same astonished WHAT THE??? look. She knew that he’d seen what she’d seen and she knew that he knew that she knew that he’d seen it.
“Second left . . .” Cookie heard her mother coming and sank back into her pillow, relieved. She’d deal with Nick and all this freaky yellow-eye stuff later.
Nick did not like hospitals, for obvious reasons, but when the doctors heard that he’d been thrown fifteen feet from the bus, they weren’t particularly eager to release him. He had tried to explain to them that, really, he felt fine, and that being kept in a hospital bed was going to terrify his mom (she REALLY didn’t like hospitals), but they wouldn’t let him out and wouldn’t give him back his soggy clothes. Nick just had to sit and wait for the inevitable Mom Freak-out.
To her credit, Nick’s mom kept it together for, oh, maybe four seconds. “Hi, sweetie,” she said as she came into the room with his aunt Molly right behind her. His mother looked wild-eyed and frazzled, and his aunt’s strained expression revealed that his mom was gripping Molly’s hand tightly enough for it to hurt.
“Hi, Mom,” Nick said. “Did you bring clothes?”
You’d think that saying something simple like “Did you bring clothes?” would not hit any emotional triggers, but Nick probably could have said something like “So, how about them Phillies?” or “My hovercraft is full of eels,” and his mom still would have burst into sobs. His dad probably would have smiled and muttered, “So predictable.”
“Look, Angie, he’s fine,” Molly said gently, using her right hand to rub life back into her left one.
“Really, Mom, I’m okay,” Nick said.
“You are never getting on a bus again!” Nick’s mom howled, and Molly and Nick stared at her until she calmed down. “Okay, okay,” she said, wiping her red nose with the tissue Molly handed her. “Okay, you can get on a bus. That may have been a little extreme.”
“I’m fine, Mom,” Nick said as she clutched his hand. “Did you bring clothes?” he asked again. Molly held out a plastic bag, and he wondered how exactly he was going to get his mom and aunt out of the room long enough to change.
“Excuse me, Mr. Gross?” A uniformed police officer stood in the doorway. “We’d like to ask you a few questions about the accident.”
“Sure,” Nick said. Mr. Gross. Weird. The officer pulled up a chair and took out a little notebook. Nick told him about how he’d woken up in the field and seen the guy (the driver, he guessed) fleeing the scene, and how he’d made his way back to help the Amish kid and Cookie get everyone else off the bus. He didn’t mention the girl’s eyes turning bright yellow or Farshad Rajavi lifting up a bolted-down bus seat like it was made of cardboard—either of which would have made Nick seem like he’d been hit pretty hard on the head. His mom didn’t need that. Also, the officer never asked anything like “And did you by chance notice if any of your bus mates were suddenly in possession of crazy-weird superpowers?”
There had to be a reasonable explanation. The girl’s yellow-looking eyes were probably just a trick of the light, and Farshad must have been full of adrenaline to pull up that seat, which would explain why he went unconscious right before the ambulance arrived. That’s what happens to people who have an adrenaline surge, right? They collapse when it’s over? Jay would know. Nick made a mental note to check on Farshad before leaving the hospital (after he had pants on). Sure, everyone called Farshad “Terror Boy” and pretty much hated his guts, but it was sort of a personal rule of Nick’s to always be nice to people in hospitals.
Farshad felt floaty. The doctors had told his parents that he had a concussion and would have to spend the night at the hospital for observation. His father had brought a pile of books for Farshad to read so that he wouldn’t get bored or watch too much television, but the thought of reading was laughable. The doctors had him on some sort of pain medication that made the words swim in front of his eyes.
His mother had wanted to stay in the hospital room with him, but after the police officer took his statement (bus crashed; we got out of bus) and the school principal had come for a quick visit to see how he was doing, Farshad just wanted to be left alone. Plus, who can sleep with their mom trying to get comfortable in a hospital chair next to them? It took a while for his father to convince her to leave so that Farshad could get some rest.
After they were gone, Farshad tried to watch some television, but there wasn’t much on. It turned out that the idea of watching television in bed was a lot more exciting than actually watching television in bed. There was a knock at the door and he turned off the set.
“Hey, how are you doing?” It was Nick, the chubby kid from the bus.
“Hey,” Farshad said. His voice sounded weird in his head. “They have me on medication. You?”
Nick was dressed in regular clothes. “Nah, I’m fine, they’re letting me out. How long do you have to be here?”
“They’ll let me out tomorrow morning,” Farshad said. “They think I have a slight concussion and they want to keep me under observation.”
“Lame,” Nick said, pulling up the visitor’s chair and sitting down without an invitation. “But otherwise you’re okay? No broken bones or anything?”
“No, I’m fine,” Farshad said. His tongue felt sluggish. “You?”
“Not a scratch. The doctors say it’s a miracle, because I was thrown so far from the bus.”
“I don’t believe in miracles,” Farshad said. He really didn’t.
“No, me neither,” Nick said. “I guess I’m just lucky.”
Farshad’s head started to pound. He wasn’t feeling particularly generous. “I don’t believe in luck, either.”
Nick chuckled. “Then I guess I’ve discovered a new talent for getting safely thrown out of moving vehicles. I wonder if I could somehow parlay this incredible skill into a career?”
He was a weird kid. “You could maybe be a stuntman?” Farshad suggested, hoping that maybe Nick would start by jumping out the hospital window and leaving him alone.
Nick smiled. “That makes sense, what with my action star physique.”
Farshad understood that Nick was being friendly, but he just didn’t feel like taking the weird kid’s charity. Anyway, was he supposed to acknowledge that Nick was a little fat by laughing, or maybe lie and tell him that he looked great? Farshad chose neither, closing his mouth and staring down at the television remote in his hand.
After a few awkward seconds Nick got up. “Well, my mom’s waiting,” he mumbled. “Guess I should go and let you rest. Feel better soon.”
There was another knock on the door, and Ms. Zelle poked her head into the room. Farshad immediately felt self-conscious of the fact that he was only wearing a flimsy hospital gown. He was weirdly grateful for Nick’s presence, even though the kid’s face had become much, much pinker.
“Hey, guys,” Ms. Zelle said quietly, coming into the room. “Mind if I come in?”
“Sure.” Farshad gestured to the seat that Nick had just vacated.
“I was just leaving,” Nick said, moving to the door.
“No, no stay,” Ms. Zelle said, settling in. “Don’t leave on my account. I wanted to know how you are both doing.”
“Fine,” Farshad and Nick said in unison.
Ms. Zelle looked at them with a worried expression on her small, delicate face. “Now, I’m sure that’s not true,” she said, “but if you’re being brave, I’ll just have to believe that.” She looked down at her phone for a moment. “I came here to see how Ry—how Mr. Friend was doing, but I can’t seem to find his room, so I thought I’d check on you. I don’t suppose you’ve seen him, have you?”
“No,” Farshad and Nick said, again at the same time.
“Of course not, you’re too busy getting better.” Ms. Zelle smiled at both of them as she stood up. “Okay, well, I’m going to keep looking. Feel better soon, both of you, and remember, I’ll be in school if you ever need to take a break or talk about anything. Sometimes being in an accident can have some weird residual effects on a person.”
“Like what?” Nick asked as Farshad said, “Thanks, bye.” Ms. Zelle smiled one last time and left the room. Nick shuffled out after her. Farshad leaned back, shut his eyes, and immediately regretted not thanking Nick for coming, as well. It really was a decent thing to do. But he was tired and his head hurt and he just wasn’t used to kids his own age being decent.