But back to the Salvation Army: it’s too bad people have to make up their minds about whether to give to the needy while walking in and out of a store. People need time to think about those less fortunate and what their pitiful Christmas might be like with only a few cheap presents around the tree—if there even is a tree!—and a pot of beans on the table with maybe a bratwurst and a two-liter bottle of 7 Up. Hungry little children going to bed on Christmas Eve asking if Santa would come that night or were they too poor, and their sorrowful mom weeping into her pillow while their dad searches the Dumpster behind Toys“R”Us for any broken toys he might be able to fix… It’s enough to bring tears to Kaitlynn’s eyes just thinking about it.
And then, she has an idea!
On the second Wednesday in December, she steps in front of the littles to be first on the bus, a plastic kettle in hand. Actually it’s a witch’s cauldron left over from Halloween, disguised with a wreath of holly around the lip. She takes a seat at the front of the bus directly behind Mrs. B, who says, “You can’t sit there, Kait—”
But Kaitlynn quickly pulls a Santa cap out of one coat pocket and a string of jingle bells out of the other, crams the cap on her head, and grabs the bells by the knot in the string. Mrs. B opens her mouth again then closes it, as though deciding to hold off until she knows what’s going on.
As the littles file by, Kaitlynn holds the kettle in one hand and bounces the string of bells with the other. The littles don’t say much, just look puzzled, even her brother Simon.
The bigs are another story. Spencer stops in the narrow aisle. “I thought there was no solicitation.”
She doesn’t say anything, just keeps ringing.
“Logjam! Move on, there!” Mrs. B. calls.
Shelly rolls her eyes, Miranda shakes her head, Matthew passes by without expression. Alice glances at her and shyly smiles, Bender growls, Jay grins and drops in a gum wrapper, Igor swerves and pretends to throw up in the cauldron—that is, kettle.
Kaitlynn expects this. She just keeps ringing her bells, not saying a word—which in its way is even more remarkable than the steady jing-jing-a-ling that soon gets on everyone’s nerves.
“Knock it off, already!” Bender yells from the back.
“That’s enough, Kaitlynn,” Mrs. B agrees as she turns left on the highway.
Kaitlynn smiles, stops ringing, and continues to hold the kettle on her knees. And doesn’t say anything. At every stop, for Pat and Pat, Alison and Payton and Stella and Harley and the Bittmans and the Brothers Calamity, she holds out the kettle, and even jingles a little bit before the yells from the back drown her out. No big confrontations or questions, though—probably because everybody thinks this is just one of her ideas and tomorrow she’ll have another.
Only, when tomorrow comes, it’s the same idea.
Same kettle, same front seat, same no-talking and bell-ringing until Mrs. B tells her to stop. And no money.
This time, though, Mrs. B asks her to wait a minute while everybody else gets off at Harrison Elementary. “I’m not sure we’re allowed to do this, Kaitlynn.”
Kaitlynn guesses her meaning. “You mean ask for money? Like Shelly?”
“Right, but Shelly is raising money for herself. Is that what you’re doing, or is it for your church or for Girl Scouts?”
“No! I got this idea because it’s hard for me to give to the Salvation Army at Walmart because my mom’s always in a hurry so we walk by too fast and I was thinking it would be good to have our own kettle and if it’s on the bus we’d have plenty of time to think about what we could put in, like the quarter we were going to use to buy ice cream at lunch but—”
“Okay.” Mrs. B holds up one hand—like most grown-ups do sooner or later when Kaitlynn gets going. “So this is for the Salvation Army?”
“Maybe, but—Well, last night, I was thinking we could decide on our own needy family to help. Like…” She’s getting an idea, even as she speaks! “Like, you know how the newspaper has two needy families of the week at Christmastime? I could cut those out and put them on a poster, and we can put the poster in the bus and”—this was so cool!—“just before Winter Break, we could vote on which family gets the money!”
She can’t read Mrs. B’s expression but thinks the lady is impressed. Kaitlynn sure is.
The driver in the bus behind them taps his horn, meaning, “Move it!”
Mrs. B shifts the gear lever. “I’ll let you know this afternoon.”
She might have checked the official Bus Driver’s Rule Book or asked the boss—or maybe not. On her bus, Mrs. B pretty much is the boss. Anyway, that afternoon, making the last stop at Hidden Acres, she tells Kaitlynn to go for it. “But you need a way of accounting for money so everybody knows you’re honest.”
“I know.” Kaitlynn holds out her kettle, still empty except for one gum wrapper. “Could you keep this?”
Next morning, she finds the kettle under the front seat—with money in it! One five, four ones and four quarters make a nice little pile. A Post-it note is stuck to the side with tape. In very clear print, the note reads: Total to date: $10
Joyfully, Kaitlynn crams on her Santa hat. But before pulling out her bells, she fishes around in her backpack for change. “Ten dollars and thirty-five cents!” she announces. Then she shuts her mouth and rings.
“I still don’t think you’re allowed to do this,” says Spencer, the champion of law and order. But she just smiles.
“Move along, Spencer,” says Mrs. B.
“I know a good cause,” says Shelly. “My scholarship fund. No, really!” she protests as Miranda laughs her Shelly-you’re-so-funny laugh.
Matthew doesn’t appear to notice again, and Jay peers over his glasses to read the little sign. But Bender, last on as usual, says, “If I give you this, will you stop with the bells?” and drops in two quarters! Kaitlynn would have stopped ringing from surprise if he hadn’t asked her to.
On the way to school, Pat (the girl one) says she might have some change that afternoon. The rambunctious Brothers Calamity nearly knock the kettle out of her hand while getting on, but one of them (no telling who) puts in a nickel.
Bringing the total up to ten dollars and ninety cents!
That afternoon, she gets a more little change but a lot more questions. “What’s it for?” “Why’re you doing this?” “Who gets the money?” “Who keeps the money overnight?”
“I do,” says Mrs. B. “See you tomorrow.”
If Mrs. B is in on it, it must be okay. She’s barky and impatient and moody sometimes, but she’s not wanted by the FBI, so far as anybody knows.
That night, Kaitlynn makes a poster. She finds the last two newspapers and cuts out the pictures of the families of the week: Mr. Pressley, whose wife ran off and left him with three little kids under seven years old, and the Burtons, an older couple who took in their two grandchildren even though Mr. Burton has Parkinson’s disease.
She tapes the pictures to the poster, leaving room for four more families: two for each of the next two weeks. Across the top, she prints VOTE ON DEC. 20. That was the last day the newspaper would accept contributions.
With some holly stickers and a red ribbon at the top, the poster looks bright and Christmassy. It’s under her arm when she climbs the bus steps next morning, but she’s not sure what to do with it after that. And still nobody knows exactly what to do with her or the kettle. She props the poster behind her, but it keeps curling over and you can’t see much except the word VOTE, which makes it look like Kaitlynn is running for office. She doesn’t collect anything—not a penny!—on the whole trip to school, making her wonder if ten dollars and ninety cents is going to be her grand total. Enough for a very small turkey (or a very large chicken) for a needy-family Christmas feast, but not much more.
But that afternoon, Mrs. B has the poster up on an easel directly behind the driver’s seat
. It’s high enough so kids can easily see the whole layout while edging past Kaitlynn and her jingling bells. And when she gets off the bus, the afternoon total is eleven dollars and sixty cents!
“Thanks, Mrs. B,” she says before getting off the bus.
“You’re welcome, Kaitlynn. I like what you’re doing, especially since you got the idea on your own—right?”
Kaitlynn nods happily, her glasses bouncing up and down on her nose. “Ever since I read those two books on Mother Teresa, I’ve been wanting to make a difference. But my dad says we don’t have any slums here, so—”
“Do you mind if I keep the poster overnight? And add some kind of gauge to show how much money you’ve collected toward your goal?”
“Okay!” Kaitlynn isn’t sure what Mrs. B means by a “gauge,” but she doesn’t especially want to haul a bulky piece of cardboard back and forth. She hops down one step, then turns around. “But what’s my goal?”
“Oh…” Mrs. B reaches for the door lever. “One hundred dollars is realistic. That’s about one-fifty per rider, and it’ll give some family a start on a nice Christmas.”
Kaitlynn’s head is spinning as she steps off the bus. “One hundred dollars!” she says out loud to her own amazed brain. And Mrs. B had called it only a “start,” so if her bus raises one hundred dollars, maybe some bank in town would match it, and she’s no super shopper, but it seems to her you could buy a pretty good Christmas for two hundred bucks.
And she started it all with her great idea!
The gauge Mrs. B creates is a stack of bricks in five layers that looks like a chimney. Two boots stick out of the top, as if Santa had fallen in. This is probably because boots are easier to draw than Santa, but it’s cute. The bricks are white except for the bottom row, where two whole bricks and half of another are colored red. The rows are labeled 20, 40, 60, 80, 100—each brick representing five dollars. It looks great!
That afternoon, while the bus is waiting in the pickup lane to pull out on the street, Mrs. B lets Kaitlynn give a very short talk about each of the families on the poster and how the riders would get to vote on the one they’d like to give the money to. “And,” she adds, “let’s keep it a secret! No grown-ups will know, except Mrs. B. This will be something we do all by ourselves. Just us.”
On the ride home that day, she collects another dollar and sixty cents!
On Thursday, she adds another family from the paper and speaks about them that afternoon: Tommy and Brenda Carpesian with their new baby and their seven-year-old boy who went to the primary school and just found out he had MD. “That stands for…um…what is it again, Mrs. B? Oh yeah, muscular dystrophy, which means in a few years, he won’t be able to walk. Will they be our adopted family? Vote on December 20, and in the meantime, please give generously.”
By the end of the week, the bottom row of bricks is all filled in plus a sliver of the second: twenty-one dollars and fifteen cents!
But they have less than two weeks to fill in the rest of the chimney. Can they do it? Kaitlynn lies awake thinking about it on Friday night and decides that real life can be as exciting as a story about ZZZorinda.
But then it gets even better.
On Monday morning, the bus is strung with silver tinsel from one end to the other—a sparkly line draped over each window and held there with duct tape. The low winter sun strikes glints from the garland and dances on the tired old beige ceiling.
“Is this allowed?” asks Spencer after climbing on board.
“Move on back, please,” says Mrs. B.
“I like it,” Kaitlynn chirps before shutting up for the ride.
Shelly stops halfway down the aisle. “Could we, like, bring an ornament from home to hang up?”
“Please find a seat, Shelly,” says Mrs. B, and everybody notices she didn’t say no.
Bender is the last on. The sparkle doesn’t seem to create any answering sparkliness in him—he stomps up the steps and knocks the jingle bells aside, pulls the cap off Evan’s head, and jerks the hood of Simon’s sweatshirt over his eyes. Kaitlynn thinks of making a comment, but that would sort of break her vow of silence and won’t do any good anyway. She hears Mrs. B sigh deeply and mutter something about incorrigibles before putting the bus in gear.
Another day, another dollar—or actually eighty cents from Igor and Jay, but lately she’s been collecting more in the afternoon, especially if nobody bought dessert at lunch because it was dog-barfy apple crisp. Kaitlynn is feeling upbeat when the bus turns down Farm Road 152, but her mood shoots up like a Roman candle when the mystery shed rolls into view.
“Hey, they decorated too,” says one of the littles.
The familiar scene scrolls by on the opposite windows: mossy roof, smudgy smoke, wispy trees with their bare branches. Under the cloudy sky, everything is some shade of gray or brown—except for the big plastic ribbon mounted around the near wall of the shed, just under the roof, tied in a wide bow with a sprig of pine.
And it’s bright red.
The bus pauses a second longer than usual as Mrs. B’s eyes rest on the bow, looking thoughtful. Kaitlynn is trying to remember what was special about red ribbons, when the memory springs like a jack-in-the-box: Bender’s letter!
She twists around on the seat and looks toward the rear. Bender is staring out the window at the red bow, his jaw dropped like the bucket on Mike Mulligan’s steam shovel.
• • •
That afternoon, after a trip that drags even more than usual, Kaitlynn jumps off the bus and catches up with Bender at the gazebo.
“What do you want?” he snaps at her.
“You sent a letter, didn’t you?” His look tells her yes. “What did you say in it?”
“Nothing much.” He steps up into the gazebo, drops on a bench, and gazes up at the ceiling. “Just, ‘I know what you did last summer. The FBI has you under twenty-four-hour surveillance. If you want to talk, tie a red ribbon,’ et cetera.”
She gasps and swoops down beside him. “Bender!”
“I’m kidding, okay?”
“But there was something in it about a red ribbon, wasn’t there? Or else they wouldn’t have tied one.”
“Yeah. I just asked if anybody there drove a black or dark blue pickup.” He’s looking down, picking crud out of the brass plaque that’s mounted on the railing behind them. Kaitlynn knows what it says: In Honor of Troy Lawrence Pasternak, Class of 1985. Troy Lawrence was Jay’s uncle, who was hurt in an accident right after graduating from high school. Or killed?—though Kaitlynn thinks In Honor of instead of In Memory of means the person is still alive. But still hurt—that’s why the Pasternak Seniors built this nice gazebo for the neighborhood.
“A blue or black pickup? Why?”
“No special reason.” Bender glares, meaning there darn well is a special reason but she’d better shut up about it.
“Did you sign your name?”
“’Course not. I just wrote ‘From somebody on this bus.’”
“Okay.” That seemed like a good signoff—mysterious but not threatening. “So if they have a black pickup, they were supposed to tie the ribbon.” Bender nods shortly. “And they did! Now what?”
“Don’t ask me.” Bender is trying to look like his usual mean self, but there’s a lot going on underneath. “They might just be decorating for Christmas.”
“They’re not just decorating for Christmas, and you know it!” Suddenly Kaitlynn is talking to an empty space because Bender has bolted. He’s stomping down the gazebo steps. “Hey! You can’t give up now, just when it gets interesting!”
He totally ignores that, striding across the commons on a direct line to his house. She races to catch up with him. “I think you should send another letter to 508 Farm Road 152 and tell them you’re just a kid and don’t mean any harm, but if they’d like to meet, they could hang a candy cane on the—”
That’s Thursday. By Friday, the bus looks like an explosion in the Christmas factory, with decorations swaying from every dip of the sparkly tinsel garland. Igor asks if he can bring his family’s fake fireplace with the fake light-up logs and set it up at the front of the bus, but Mrs. B tells him to sit down. The kettle collects a handful of change, even a couple of dollar bills…
On Monday, the second row of bricks is all filled in and the third is over halfway. Sixty-three dollars and thirty cents! Kaitlynn can’t hold it in; a shout jumps out of her like a puppy let out of a carry-on cage after it’s been cooped up for a flight to Florida. Then she collapses on the seat and starts ringing vigorously. Everybody who files by has to turn and look at the poster. Simon gives her a nod and a thumbs-up, Shelly says, “Way to go!” Miranda gasps in surprise, Matthew gives a quick sideways glance, Alice likewise but she also drops a quarter. Jay says, “Awesome!” Spencer says, “Munificent!” and Igor forgets to do anything goofy.
Bender, last on again, takes something from his pocket and slaps it on the poster. As he stomps down the aisle, Kaitlynn turns her head to see what he put there: a color photo of the shed, dressed in its Christmas best, from such an angle that a corner of roof from the house beyond juts into the frame. There is a patch of light in the upper corner, meaning Bender had taken it from the bus window. And printed it from his computer, because there was a border left at the bottom, cut a little crooked, and labeled Mystery Stop.
Kaitlynn frowns, wondering if this should be allowed. Maybe they need some rules.
But that afternoon, the picture is gone. She secretly sighs with relief because now she won’t have to make a decision.
Except next morning, Bender does the exact same thing, with another copy of the same picture. And in the afternoon, it’s gone.
Wednesday: picture up in the morning, down again in the afternoon. Total contributions for three days: four dollars and seventy-two cents, meaning one more brick filled. Everybody wondering what’s up with Bender and Mrs. B (the only one who could be taking the picture down). Kaitlynn so excited she can hardly stand it. She cuts the last needy family out of the paper that night: Claudio and Virginia Esterbrook, whose baby was born with a hole in his heart and needs all kinds of surgery. She brings her double-sided tape so she can stick them on the poster while the others are boarding.
Somebody on This Bus Is Going to Be Famous Page 9