Somebody on This Bus Is Going to Be Famous

by J. B. Cheaney

  “What’s that?” he asks as Matthew studies the object he picked up.

  Matthew jerks in surprise. “I don’t know. Some kind of belt buckle or…I don’t know.” Reluctantly, he holds it out: a rectangular piece of pewter-colored metal with an eagle on it, wings spread as though ready to take flight.

  “Might be valuable,” Spencer says.

  “Maybe.” Matthew sticks it in his jacket pocket.

  “You might be stealing,” Spencer says, more pointedly.

  “Finders keepers. I guess.”

  “So…” Spencer awkwardly gets around to what he really wants to know. “Did you set up your project in time?” Matthew nods in reply, his eyes on the ground. “What’s it about? Besides ‘physics’?”

  “Black holes.”

  “Really?” Spencer feels his stomach tightening. “What about them?”

  Matthew glances around, like he hopes for an alternate universe to open up nearby. Why can’t he ever just look at anybody? “Like…equations based on general relativity and a computer model of what it would take to turn our sun into a black hole.”

  Spencer opens his mouth to say something totally fake like, “Sounds cool,” when a shout from the bus breaks off the conversation.

  They run around the shed. Two boys are standing in the open doorway of the bus. Igor holds a rippling orange-and-gold corn snake by the neck. If a snake can be said to have a neck. “See? She’s nice. Her name’s Cornelia, and my stepdad got her for Christmas. She’s the best part of my science project, and I was going to show and tell about her during the judging today. Only my backpack fell over when Shelly threw that head at me and—”

  “I didn’t throw it at you!” Shelly sputters.

  “Hey, Spence,” Bender says. “Sorry about the little rodent.” He holds out a clenched fist, from which something is swinging by the tail: Lucy, who appears to be deceased, stiff little legs splayed like a tick’s. “At least we rescued it before Cornelia got her jaws on it. The other one got away.”

  All at once, Kaitlynn starts talking again. “I just opened the cage to pet them, one time, then I closed it again, only I guess it wasn’t closed all the way, because when I saw that snake, I jumped and the mouse cage hit the floor and I’m really sorry because now your project is ruined and….”

  Spencer’s reaction surprises everybody, most of all himself. He laughs. In fact, he laughs so hard his legs can’t hold him up anymore, and he collapses on the rough gravel road.

  February

  Matthew Tupper never expected to be famous. But after the science fair, he was, a little. Because he had to go and win it.

  “Black Holes and White Dwarfs” was just something he got interested in, right about the time his mother decided he had to do a science fair project. “It’s time you started participating in school, not just dreaming your life away. Dreams have to meet reality sooner or later.”

  His grandmother disagreed. “Participate in what, I’d like to know? The system? The system that kept our people oppressed for my-lennia?”

  “Not millennia, Mama. Centuries, maybe.”

  “Makes no difference. If Matthew participates in the system, it oughta be ’cause he wants to, not ’cause you make him. Stop aggravatin’ the boy.”

  “I don’t call it ‘aggravating’ to insist he do his best and get off that planet he lives on…”

  And there they’d go. One good thing about a mama and a granny who are at odds all the time is that once they start arguing, they forget about him.

  Though, to be fair, they don’t mess with him much, being busy with their own stuff. His mother teaches English at the community college while working on her PhD in African American literature. His grandmother leads a double life: Granny at home and “Uthisha the Zulu Storyteller” at folk festivals, schools, and book fairs all over the Midwest. She had traced her ancestry, near as she could tell, to South Africa—so the Zulu thing isn’t all the way bogus. But she was born Gloria Potts in Kansas City. They moved here two years ago, mostly so Matthew could go to a nice small-town school and not be tempted to join a gang. Which is okay with him, but shows you how clueless his mother is sometimes: they don’t have gangs on that planet he lives on.

  Some of his teachers worry about him. “Are you feeling all right, Matthew?” “Are things okay at home?” “Have you been getting enough sleep?” Yeah, yeah, yeah to all that. He knows what they’re thinking, though. It was the same in Kansas City. Every time some kid goes berserk and shoots up his school, all the teachers and neighbors and relatives are shocked. “He was such a quiet young man, never bothered anybody.” “He was so polite.” “He always followed directions and colored inside the lines.” That’s Matthew.

  Except it isn’t.

  Sure he colors inside the lines, but that’s because he figured out a long time ago that if you just do what they want, they’ll leave you alone. Mostly. Doing what they want doesn’t take a lot of brainpower, and that’s good, because whatever he happens to be interested in, he thinks about all the time. He used to assume this was normal but has begun to see it’s not.

  Like when Calvin moved away. Calvin was his best friend—duh, only friend—in third and fourth grade, probably because he was brainy and bookish and his dad, a professor at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, was dating Matthew’s mother. That threw them together a lot, like on picnics and trips to the zoo. But they’d already used up their common interests when Calvin came over to say that his father had just accepted an offer from the University of Wyoming.

  He wasn’t happy. Matthew got that, but not much else. He was lying on his stomach by his grandmother’s rose garden, studying an anthill and wondering if ants ever got tired.

  They didn’t seem to, running around like machines. But even machines had to get their energy from somewhere, like batteries. If ants wore down, how did they get recharged? Or maybe they didn’t; maybe they just wore out and dried up and new ants took their place, again and again and again. How could you tell? It wasn’t like they had any distinguishing marks.

  Maybe he could borrow a bottle of his mother’s nail polish and mark each one with a tiny dot and then change color the next day, and the next, and see how long the original colors stuck around, and keep records—

  “Hey, man? You hear anything I said?”

  Calvin was interrupting some interesting questions. “Uh…you’re moving.”

  “Way to go, Sherlock! Do you remember why?”

  “Did you tell me?”

  Calvin stood up and kicked the anthill into oblivion. “That’s it! Bet you won’t even notice when I’m gone.”

  He was right about that. Matthew didn’t notice too much, though they parted on good enough terms and Calvin said he would email but only did once. Which was okay, because Matthew didn’t even once.

  By the end of that same summer, his mother earned her master’s degree and accepted a teaching job at a community college eighty miles away. The family moved to Hidden Acres—White Breadville, Granny called it. The neighbors thought she was priceless. Matthew’s obsessions migrated from insects to perpetual motion to time travel to relativity to astrophysics, leading to this year’s science fair project he was glad was over. Except he had to go and win it.

  • • •

  “You’re famous!” Kaitlynn hollers as she jumps on the bus and waves her copy of a newspaper in his face. It’s February, and those are her first words to him all year.

  Jay leans over the seat to have a look. “That’s you all right. Didn’t know you won. Way to go, dude.” That’s the most Jay has ever said to him too.

  “Thanks,” Matthew says uncertainly.

  “Did you see it, Spencer?” Kaitlynn pokes the newspaper at him, but Spencer just shakes his head, pushes past her, and plops down in the next-to-last seat.

  “Everybody sit down!” Mrs. B shouts, putting the
bus in gear.

  “Let me see.” Bender reaches over the backs of two seats. This is his first day back on the bus after a week of suspension for causing a disturbance with his shrunken head. (Igor’s been suspended for two weeks.)

  Kaitlynn hands the newspaper back, meanwhile chattering away, “It’s a really long article. Maribeth Grand wrote it—she’s the same one who came over and interviewed me! To tell the truth, I didn’t understand all the science stuff…”

  To tell the truth, Matthew is thinking, the reporter didn’t seem to understand it either—he’d bet anything she hashed up the explanation.

  “…and if you read the whole article, it says at the end that the project is going to the regional science fair…”

  Unfortunately so, and he may have to ride the thing all the way to state.

  “…or even nationals! I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a National Science Fair, but it’s in Washington, DC, every summer and—”

  “Cool,” Bender says, scanning the article. “Local African American boy makes good.”

  “Bender!”

  “What? He’s not African American?”

  “Ice it, dude,” Jay mutters.

  “What’d I say?”

  Miranda and Shelly send disapproving looks to the rear. But Matthew feels himself smiling, almost. Personally, he thinks this tippy-toeing around race is stupid. His mother would have gone cold and rigid at Bender’s remark, like she did when Coach Beall wanted him to try out for basketball (“Is that all he thinks you’re good for?”). His granny would pop and sputter, like she does when telling how her husband, Tom Tupper, got beat up when he tried to vote in Cass County, Missouri, in 1956. But Matthew himself feels nothing whatsoever. Yep, he’s African American. In the whole big cosmic scheme, so what?

  He glances sideways at Bender, who has unfolded the newspaper and is staring at the bottom of the page. Suddenly, he tears off the corner.

  “Hey!” Kaitlynn protests. “That’s my newspaper.”

  “Sorry,” Bender says, quickly handing it back. Except for the part he keeps. “Saw this thing I have to… It’s not important. Just have to…show my dad. I mean, my mom.”

  • • •

  Matthew’s mother brings a newspaper home that evening. “Well, what do you think? Was it worth the trouble to turn in a science project?” He’s supposed to say yes.

  He shrugs instead.

  “Just suckin’ up to the Man,” his grandmother sniffs. She’s putting together a feathered headdress for a Chicago book festival weekend after next. The dinette table is covered with feathers that make him sneeze. “Go ’long wit’ choo!” she says irritably to the flying down.

  “The Man pays my salary, mama,” his mother replies mildly. “Hey, bro,” she says as Matthew passes her on the way to his room. “At least look at the article, okay?”

  He takes the newspaper to his room and flops on his bed. He’ll look at the article so he can say he did and then forget about the whole thing until regionals comes around. Propped on his elbows, he turns to page two—

  And there he is! Accepting the certificate of merit for top-rated science fair project. He can’t quite look at himself in the picture. Mr. Barnes, the junior high principal, is grinning at the camera, and the chairman of the judging committee (whose name Matthew can’t remember even though the man teaches at the same college as his mother) is presenting the certificate with one hand and shaking Matthew’s hand with the other. That was right after he congratulated Matthew on originality and execution but suggested he work on the math before regionals.

  “Now smile,” he remembers the reporter saying. Matthew smiled, though in the picture it’s more of a smirk, and now he remembers why. When the shutter snapped, he was recalling how Bender held Spencer’s dead mouse by the tail and imagining a similar dead mouse hanging from the judge’s hand as it shakes his.

  Below the fold are letters to the editor, where readers have a chance to complain about misplaced stop signs or price gouging at the gasoline pump. Something catches his eye: a little drawing about two by three inches, just above a notice in the lower right corner. He frowns at it. After a few seconds, he shifts his right hip to pull something out of the pocket and lay it down beside the drawing. It’s a perfect match, except for size: two eagles, wings lifted to launch, one in ink and one in pewter. The ink image is sharper, enough that he can read the words on the banner streaming from the eagle’s beak: Class of ’85. The artist’s initials are in the corner, though they’re too small to make out.

  Ever since picking up the clamp-on buckle at the bus shed, he’s carried it in his pocket. No particular reason—he just likes the weight and coolness of it. Sometimes when his thoughts go sailing off past Polaris, he feels his fingers curling around it, as though to anchor himself to a little chunk of here and now. His fingers are grasping now, as he reads:

  Eagles Soar Again!

  It’s almost twenty years! To all you class of ’85-ers who skipped our tenth reunion: it’s time to come out of the woodwork! Local Centerview Eagles can make the reunion committee’s job easier if you make your presence known. Also, if you can pass along any contact info regarding our fellow alumni who have moved out of state—except perhaps He Who Shall Remain Nameless—please, please, please send it to the PO. Box below. Let’s make our twentieth-year milestone the best ever!

  Reunion committee co-chairs,

  Tricia Evertts Knox

  Anne (Annie) Myra Bender Thompson

  Matthew reads the notice at least three times. Apparently, something happened to the class of ’85 that a lot of them would like to forget. And apparently, one particular person in the class had a lot to do with it. He Who Shall Remain Nameless reminds him briefly of Calvin, a Harry Potter fan, whose face he can barely recall and whose presence he doesn’t miss.

  There’s only one person he misses, even though (or maybe because) he’s never met him.

  Years ago, his father was one of those things he thought about all the time. Thinking being all he could do, because his mother wouldn’t tell him squat: “He was a very important person in my life at the time, Matthew. An intelligent man who’d made something of himself. But he did not want to be a father. He said he would help me in any possible material way, and when you got older and needed such help, you could call on him. But he couldn’t give much of himself, you see? That bucket’s done emptied out long ago.”

  Except it hasn’t. There are ways Matthew doesn’t look like, talk like, or act like his mama. There are times he catches her looking at him as though she’s seeing someone else. As though he’s haunted by a ghost—by He Who Shall Remain Nameless.

  It’s kind of creepy.

  Matthew stares at the paper eagle in the newspaper while tracing the raised contours of the pewter eagle with his fingers.

  The reunion committee for the class of ’85 is looking for lost classmates. What if Matthew’s father (whose name his mother promises to tell him when he’s older) is also looking for him? What if he’s roaming up and down the corridors of Matthew’s brain, looking for an opening in time and space to touch him? Matthew’s heart speeds up, imagining that touch, but he doesn’t know if he longs for it or fears it.

  Abruptly he remembers Bender tearing out this corner of the newspaper and feels curiosity nudging him in the side.

  • • •

  Where he comes from, February is Black History Month and Valentine’s Day is a white holiday started by some dead white saint. The schools he went to in Kansas City never had any use for it, and he himself can’t see the point of spending an hour on February 14 frantically trading little cards with hearts and cartoon characters on them and making sure you had one for everybody in class. At least by seventh grade, Valentine’s Day isn’t something he has to participate in.

  Hardly anybody does. Shelly announces she’ll serenade your sweetheart for f
ive dollars per song (Matthew doesn’t think she got many takers), and Kaitlynn is telling everybody she was up until ten-thirty last night making special cards for all her teachers, former and present. The littles’ little backpacks are bulging with cards as they clamber on board. One of those backpacks ends up in the aisle, and Matthew accidentally kicks it while heading for his seat.

  “Hey!” squeaks a voice behind him. Matthew bends down to pick up the backpack and return it. But the next minute, he’s surprised to find himself flat on his stomach, his head ringing from an encounter with the floor.

  He didn’t just fall. He was pushed.

  He hauls himself up and turns around, expecting Bender. But Bender has already claimed the back seat. Instead, it’s Spencer: the wiry, jumpy redhead who seemed unusually interested in his science fair project.

  Matthew doesn’t think in terms of race very much; “live and let live” is working okay for him. But he’s the child of his mama and granny and the kind of schools he went to before moving here and probably something in his DNA too—because the minute he turns around and sees Spencer smirking at him, he thinks, White Boy. And then he punches.

  Spencer boings back like a spring. He’s smaller than Matthew but faster, and in about two seconds, Matthew is on the floor again with Spencer on top of him, getting in two hits for every one of Matthew’s. A ruckus breaks out all around them, but Matthew feels like he’s in a pod by himself, punching back at the unknown force that has been trying to get to him for a long, long time.

  Then all of a sudden, he’s punching air. A ring of white faces is hanging over him, roughly heart-shaped (is it still Valentine’s Day?) with Spencer at the point, flushed and panting, held back by Jay. Then both of them are pushed aside by Mrs. B, whose face is as red as Spencer’s.

  “What’s this about? I’m surprised at you, Spencer. You too, Matthew. The quietest, nicest boys on this bus—what have you two got to fight about?

  • • •

  Thinking about that question takes up most of the morning: what has he got to fight about? And where did the fight come from? Not until after lunch does Matthew realize something. His belt buckle with the eagle on it, whose weight felt so solid and reassuring in his pocket, is gone.