Somebody on This Bus Is Going to Be Famous

by J. B. Cheaney

  Miranda speaks first. “…Alice?”

  The girl looks up from her book, blinking. “Hi.”

  “What are you doing here?” That sounds a little rude, especially coming from Miranda, but Shelly doesn’t even care enough to ask. The sooner she gets out of this nightmare, the better.

  “I’m…waiting for my grandma.” Alice’s finger flicks one corner of a page in a way that gets on Shelly’s nerves.

  “Oh,” Miranda says. “Is she a patient?”

  Miranda must be pretty shook up too, Shelly thinks, to ask if Alice’s grandma is a patient in a pediatric clinic.

  “No,” Alice says. “She’s here with my—I mean, she’s a volunteer.” Abruptly, Alice returns to her book.

  Shelly picks up a copy of Highlights, barely noticing a few minutes later when Mrs. Truman pushes out a boy in a wheelchair, and Alice jumps up as though she can’t wait to leave. Shelly knows the feeling, but just as the sliding door opens and shut behind her, she wonders if she missed an opportunity.

  Mrs. Truman, Alice’s grandmother, once owned all the Hidden Acres property before selling it to Jay’s grandfather for development. She’s probably loaded—maybe Mrs. Truman would consider contributing to a worthy young performer’s scholarship fund? Shelly doesn’t get too far with that thought before Miranda’s mother bustles into the waiting room with a smile as bright and wide as her polyester hips. “So, how did it…”

  Her voice dwindles to nothing as she gets a good look at their faces.

  Nobody says much on the way home. Miranda is probably feeling terrible. Which she should, after ruining the show.

  “Do you need any help with your stuff?” she asks as they pull up in front of the Alvarez house.

  Not from you, Shelly thinks but only shakes her head. She drags the gym bag out of the car and down the side of the house so she can sneak it in the back door. Hearing voices in the kitchen, she stashes it behind the washing machine to unpack later.

  The voices belong to her mother and Uncle Mike—her least favorite relative. Like, all she needs to make this day just perfect is him. Mom puts on a smiley face when Shelly walks in. “Hi, honey! How was the show?”

  “Fine.” She crosses to the fridge to get a glass of orange juice, which she read somewhere is good for the throat after a performance. “They really liked the Lollipop song.”

  “What did I tell you?” The over-bright tone in her mother’s voice tells Shelly (a little too late) that she’s interrupted an argument.

  “Did you do a show today, Beanpot?” That’s Uncle Mike.

  Shelly closes the door of the fridge and slowly turns. “I really, really hate it when you call me that.”

  He’s the kind of guy who used to be cute—she’s seen his high school pictures—but now he’s sort of gone slack. Everything hangs on him: his jeans, his stubbly chin, his hairy belly peeking under a T-shirt that’s too short. “Hey,” he says, throwing up his hands. “It’s a compliment. Little Mexican Beanpot—means you’re cute and peppy and kind of brown—”

  “That’s enough, Mike,” Mom interrupts. “Or I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

  “Don’t bother. I’m leaving.” Shelly stalks through the kitchen and into the hallway—without the orange juice. The voices sharpen and speed up behind her until she cuts them off with a slam to the door.

  She queues up Claire’s latest album on her iPod, throws herself facedown on the bed, and sings into her pillow:

  You think you know where I come from

  but you don't have a clue;

  Think you’ve got me on a string, but baby;

  I've got a bead on you.

  Claire probably understood about rotten relatives—she grew up in Arkansas with a house full of rowdy siblings. Had to fight her way to the top. She got her start in country and western, but fortunately all she kept of that phase were her signature white cowboy boots. Maybe Claire had a sucky nickname too. Shelly slams the mattress with her toes, remembering how Uncle Mike picked her up at school one day in third grade and nearly ruined her life by yelling across the front lawn, “Heeeeey, Beanpot!” That was all it took for her to get stuck with Beanpot for the next two years. Accompanied by farting noises.

  Shelly clenches her fists. They don’t have a clue. Claire overcame a lot to get where she is. If she can do it, Shelly thinks, so can I. So can I!

  Her mother is knocking on the door even before the song is over. “Sorry about that,” she says, sticking her head inside.

  Shelly doesn’t turn over. “Was it your fault?”

  “In a way. I should have shown him the door as soon as he asked for a loan. Or as soon as I said no the first time.”

  “Must’ve made him mad. He hasn’t called me a Mexican beanpot since I was eight.” It was because her ears used to stick out like jug handles, and because her face was round and kind of brown.

  “He’s just a bigot, Shelly. And a has-been. His greatest days were in high school, when he got to run with the Molehill gang—”

  “The Molehill gang?” Shelly pulls out one of her ear buds and turns over to look at her mother.

  “Just the crowd he hung out with. They were into pranking. Their last one got him expelled—but never mind. The point is, Mike’s not worth a second of your time.”

  “I know. I’m focused.” But it’s okay to feel bad once in awhile, isn’t it? Sheesh.

  “Good,” her mother says. “Oh—I’m going to run a load of laundry after dinner. If you have anything to throw in, get it now.”

  As the door clicks shut, Shelly remembers what she’d left in the utility room. She’d better sneak those box lights into the garage before getting more unwelcome questions about the show. While her mother is putting dinner together, she quietly unpacks the gym bag and notices, for the first time, that one of her Mylar pompoms is missing.

  • • •

  The next morning, Mrs. B is yawning her head off and doesn’t ask about the gig. Bender does, but Shelly is used to ignoring him. Though she makes a point of not sitting with Miranda, she feels a tiny bit better. It’s Friday, thank goodness, and by Monday, her flop will be ancient history. Besides, every entertainer has horror stories about bad acoustics or equipment malfunctions or tornadoes or whatever, and now she does too. Just like a pro.

  Because she’s sitting alone, Shelly pays a little more attention to what’s going on outside the bus. Because she’s bored, she can understand why Bender gets so bent out of shape when Mrs. B turns off on Farm Road 152. Because she’s on the right side, she notices the little shed when the bus backs up alongside it, and suddenly her hands are clapped to the glass and her eyes are staring so hard they could pop right out of her head. It’s like that guitar chord at the end of Claire’s latest CD, when you think the last song is over: claaaaang!

  On the corner post of the shed is a metal bracket, the kind people put on gates and doorposts to hold a flag. Stuck in the bracket is a purple and silver pompom, exactly like the one she left at Sunset Hills.

  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 th
rough 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.