Short Bus Hero

by Shannon Giglio

  Did I ever mention how cruel I think most humans are?

  “In a couple of weeks,” Lois says, letting go of Ally’s hand. “You can move in on closing day if you want, but you might be alone for a while. We’ll move in then, but everyone is so shaken up about Jason right now that moving in is the last thing on anyone else’s mind.”

  “Yeah,” Debra said, looking at Lois with a frown. “It’s always tough on the family and friends.” She touches the sleeve of Lois’s coat. “Leukemia is an evil, evil sickness.”

  Jason’s doctor had given Trish the bad news just days after diagnosing her son with DMS. He thought that Jason must have had DMS for months before they’d caught it with the blood test. The entire extended Cool People family was heartbroken and shocked by the news. While everyone had come to see the extravagant group home, no one was making any plans to move in yet. It seemed that none of the parents could bear to part with their children. And the Dear Ones themselves clung to the reassuring familiarity of their childhood homes with the tenacity of barnacles on an age-old boulder.

  “Mom,” Ally says, walking to the grand double staircase in the foyer, “I-I-I—” her eyelids flutter as her jaw ratchets, “know which r-room can be Ja-Jason’s.” She waves for Lois to follow her upstairs. Lois and Debra exchange a glance before following. Ally’s voice fills the space, amplified by the marble floor and cathedral ceiling. “It was going to be my-my-mine, but I want Jason to have it.”

  * * *

  Tears flood his mother’s eyes as liquid fire scorches the stream of his infected blood. He wants to puke and thrash and scream, all at the same time, but he does not have the physical resources. The steady flow of chemicals keeps him floating on a sea of controlled hemolytic destruction and synthetically quelled panic. He doesn’t understand what’s happening to him or why. He was fine one day—yeah, a little tired, but okay—and then…this. He sees the pity in his mother’s eyes and it hurts him just as much as the disease that’s working to destroy him from the inside out.

  “Stop doing this to me,” Jason says to Trish, under his breath, through his crooked clenched teeth. To her, though, it sounds like gibberish, speaking in tongues. She grips his hand tighter and watches the nurse adjust the drip on her son’s IV. Plop…plop…plop…plop. The clear liquid leaks faster from the overturned bottle hanging above. Plop plop plop plop. Burning, scorching, eradicating, killing. The war on abnormal cells.

  Jason thinks his mother is making everything worse by letting the doctor shove needles into him. He thinks she doesn’t love him anymore, like Ally, that she’s punishing him. He thinks it’s because he’s not normal, like his brother, Josh. The port sticking out of his chest makes him feel like a piece of malfunctioning machinery. He thinks of himself as a broken robot.

  I whisper to him that it’s only his body that’s broken.

  There is no God, Trish thinks, absorbing the scene around her. She’d had the same thought after having an ultrasound when she was pregnant with Jason, finding out that he had Down syndrome. Then there was his heart surgery. And Sylvia’s accident. And Ally’s suicide attempt. It was all too much for her. No God would do this.

  I am not authorized to advise her. It is what it is.

  She removes a bottle of pills from her purse and swallows a pink tablet with a sip of water from Jason’s big Styrofoam cup.

  I look for a rock to hide under.

  19. Pocrescophobia / pō-kres-kō-fōˈ-bē-ə / fear of gaining weight

  Sparse snow falls like ash from the endless milky black sky. Speeding toward the dazzling immorality of the Strip, Stryker watches tiny flakes of ice attach themselves to the window of the cab where they melt and reflect the brilliant neon blaze that lights up the night. An enormous sign in front of the brand new WWC Resort and Casino reads: “Welcome to Vegas Vilification, Brothers.” The cab cruises past and pulls up in front of the posh hotel next door where Stryker has reserved a junior suite.

  After checking in, Stryker changes into his workout gear and hits the resort’s deserted gym. I mean, come on, who uses the gym in Sin City? He plugs his iPod into his ears, straps on his weightlifter’s belt, and gets down to business. While he pushes out sets of deadlifts, curls, and squats, he tries not to think about Ally and Lois. When their innocent faces begin to creep back into his head, he cranks up the music or switches exercises, dissipating the Formans like the ghosts they are.

  He has a week to get back into fighting shape (ambitious, isn’t he?) and can’t afford any distractions.

  About an hour into his workout, another guy enters the gym. From the corner of his eye, Stryker evaluates the man’s physique. Medium height, blond, about twenty-five, thirty years old. He is amazingly ripped. Stryker envies the dude’s extreme definition, although he tries not to look at the guy, not wanting to give the wrong impression. Stryker turns away, squeezing out concentration curls while sneaking furtive looks in the wall-length mirror in front of him. It makes him feel like some kind of weirdo. He finishes up his set and heads for his room.

  The urge to hit the casino and swill single-malt scotch dogs him as he sits on his round bed, watching the in-house gambling channel, where they show you how to play but never how to win. The cash that he’d secured in his in-room safe calls to him in melodic and hypnotic tones, a siren beckoning a sailor to his rocky death. He pulls a protein bar and a bottle of vegetable juice from a plastic shopping bag and switches on some loud action movie where the answer to all of life’s problems is to blow stuff up.

  As if. Well, maybe…

  The following day, he encounters that same buff dude in the gym.

  “Hey, man, you juice?” The ripped dude speaks to him from the leg press. Stryker, who has just finished his workout, is wrapping the cord from his headphones around his iPod, open Velcro straps flapping from his fingerless Harbinger gloves. He looks around the room to see who the guy might be talking to. They are alone. Stryker thinks for a second that maybe the guy is talking on the phone, using one of those Bluetooth devices employed by the globe’s most self-important. The guy lets out a huff. “Yeah, I’m talkin’ to you. You’re Stryker Nash, ain’t ya?”

  Stryker narrows his eyes and churns his tongue behind closed dry lips. He glances at the door and looks back at the guy. “Um, maybe,” he says. Pause. “On both counts.” Stryker has been drug-free for a couple of weeks and is getting a bit droopy. He couldn’t afford to continue his usual Deca cycling since he’d been canned. He should be on post-cycle therapy at this point, but he’s willing to endure the side effects of foregoing that process in order to bulk back up. Ever since he’d seen this gym rat, he’d been thinking seriously about finding a little chemical assistance. “You holding?”

  “Dude,” the guy says, wearing a coyote smile, “I got whatever you need, man.” He walks over to the glass door and pushes it open, glancing up and down the dim corridor. Then, he struts over to his gym bag in the corner and unzips it to display its contents to Stryker. The guy snatches a white towel off the top, revealing a collapsible cavern crammed with pharmaceuticals.

  Stryker licks his lips.

  Fifteen minutes later, he stands in front of the mirror in his suite’s marble-tiled Roman bathroom, drawing liquid power from a small glass jar into the barrel of a brand-new syringe. Twisting his flabby torso, he sinks the short needle into the backside of his hip.

  The EQ prop is supposed to be one of the best fast-acting juices. It doesn’t work overnight or anything, but he might see some results in about five days, if he’s lucky. The Vilification is coming up fast—he hopes the EQ is fast enough. He doesn’t mind being a pin cushion for a few days.

  Later that evening, after a trip to an anonymous tanning salon, he surrenders to the one-armed bandits and three-shoe dealers at a seedy old off-Strip casino, where he hides behind his shades and hangs his head, hoping he’s not recognized.

  He feels human again. Sort of.

  20. Sanguivoriphobia / săn-gwē-vor-ē-fōˈ-bē-ə / fear of blood
eaters (vampires)

  “He’s still my favorite,” Jason tells Ally as they watch a replay of a VNO wrestling match in his bedroom. VNO stands for Vampires’ Night Out and every wrestler in the mid-sized organization is obligated to assume an appropriate persona. The organization was spawned by some pop-culture visionary bright enough to capitalize on the recent renaissance the fictional fiend has been experiencing. The VNO is in the middle of a tremendous growth spurt. Personally, I find the entire thing highly distasteful, but Jason and Ally and their peers think it’s fun and exciting. Lois, who shares my opinion, drives the kids to matches once in a while, since the VNO is based in nearby Wheeling, West Virginia.

  The Moravian Raven is Jason’s guy. He looks like the guy in the original film The Crow. Well, at least his make-up looks like that; I can’t comment on his naked face, since I’ve never seen him out of character. Instead of screaming into the microphones that are routinely thrust in his face, he remains quiet and still, whispering one or two-word answers to hyped-up reporters’ questions. Very Zen. It makes him really stand out, you know. He is one of the VNO’s biggest stars, second only to Lestat Graves, Vampire Superstar, who had, of course, pinched his name from one of the most famous vampires in literary history. I think there was a lawsuit about that at one time, but the plaintiff had dropped it because she wound up selling more and more books to the guy’s fans. Anyway, Jason loves Raven and has his posters hanging in his room, wears t-shirts emblazoned with his silkscreened image, and has dressed as him every Halloween for the past five years. Trish doesn’t mind. She doesn’t have to spend fifty bucks on a new costume every year.

  Jason’s proudest moment came at a special All Saints’ Day VNO match in Pittsburgh, two or three years ago, in which the Raven had wrestled Lestat Graves for the championship belt. Jason’s Big Buddy, from the Department of Social Services, had taken Jason, Ally, Mara, and the rest of the Cool People to the Mellon Arena that night. They all dressed in black and wore white greasepaint on their faces, blackening their eyes with Halloween make-up, to make them look like their heroes in the ring. They sat in an “accessible” area, very close to the action, thanks to a local business that had donated tickets to their cause. Jason and Ally held up a huge sign they’d made that said: “STARK RAVEN MAD.”

  At the beginning of the show, the wrestlers’ smooth white skin had shone like marble in a moonlit courtyard. They’d stalked each other, turning in slow graceful circles, until Graves couldn’t stand it any longer. He broke the tension, leaping at Raven, and sinking his sharp fingernails into Raven’s pale flesh, leaving scarlet talon trails behind. Raven’s face showed no trace of emotion as he clubbed Graves over the head with his thick tape-wrapped forearm, sending him crashing to the mat. As the battle wore on, their limbs and torsos, veiled in varying shades of pink, bore scratches, slashes, rips and bites. The Plexiglas partition separating the ring from the audience was splattered with dots and drips of gore, real and theatrical. The largely female crowd had howled from their sea of darkness, plastic fangs stretching their mouths wide.

  Raven appeared to hypnotize Graves, using the sharp amethyst crystal he wore on a leather strap around his neck. Graves stared at the crystal as the clock peeled off second after second. When his knees began to wobble in a pseudo-swoon, Raven had swooped in, catching him under the arms from behind. He trailed a menacing look around the crammed arena and bent his face to Graves’s stretched neck. Raven appeared to feast on his opponent’s faux blood. The crowd went absolutely batshit. The next day, sales of amethyst crystals exploded.

  After Graves had fallen in the final round of that match, Jason was escorted by his Big Buddy, right through the Plexiglas, up a makeshift flight of wooden steps, and into the red-stained ring. Raven presented Jason with his hard-won gold-plated “blood”-smeared championship belt and posed for the most precious picture of his young fan’s life. Jason’s Big Buddy had arranged the whole thing through Raven’s public relations liaison.

  Jason thought he had touched Heaven.

  Sitting in Jason’s room, watching the VNO, Ally has an idea. It is her very own—I did not whisper it to her, no one planted the seed in her imagination. Call it wholly organic. It sprung from the kind and blessed heart that beats within her.

  She will buy the Vampires Night Out.

  For Jason.

  21. Arithmophobia / ə-rith-mə-fōˈ-bē-ə / fear of numbers

  “A thousand on red five,” he shouts to the dealer manning the roulette wheel. Being a Star Wars fan, every time he’s in Vegas, Stryker hits the roulette wheel and puts a hundred dollars on Red Five. But, he is feeling super lucky this time, and it isn’t really his money, anyway, so he thinks what the hell and bets a grand.

  Bells and sirens ring out, people laugh, a collective “oh” rises from one of the poker tables, coins clatter out of a couple loose slot machines.

  Stryker is the only one at the roulette table.

  The ball flashes and clacks along the track. The wheel slows and the ball begins its slow bounce.

  Stryker watches with a smirk.

  There’s a lot more than a thousand bucks riding on this one.

  “Twenty-two black,” the dealer yells.

  Stryker hands the dealer a hundred dollar tip, grabs his gym bag, and marches off toward the WWC Resort. He hopes to have better luck there.

  Vegas sucks.

  22. Dikigorosophobia / dikˈ-ē-gor-ōˈsō-fōˈ-bē-ə / fear of lawyers

  Lois stands next to Ally in the gaping Wesbanco Arena, watching a Zamboni circle the pitted white ice, leaving a shining mirror in its wake. The Wheeling Nailers have a game that night, but that’s not why the Formans came to town.

  “Ms. Forman?”

  Lois and Ally turn away from the rink to see a heavy man in a battered suit approaching them on the concrete steps.

  “Hi, I’m Lee Cashbaugh,” the man says, extending his hand. “Exec veep of the VNO. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  “Hi, I’m Lois, and this is Ally.” Lois shakes his sweaty hand and puts her arm around Ally’s shoulders. More maternal protection compelled by some spot in her reptilian midbrain.

  “Hi,” Ally says, smiling at the floor. Her hair is a mess, and judging by her worn out track suit, you’d never guess she’s a multi-millionaire. Cashbaugh is caught off guard by her sloppy appearance. Lois, he could go either way on her—she’s at least got a Polo pony on her untucked shirt.

  “As you can see, they’re setting up for the hockey game in here right now but I wanted you to see the venue we normally wrestle in.” That is true, that he wanted them to see it, but, also, he isn’t ready to show them their crummy corporate offices—a couple of trailers, four blocks away. He gestures for the women to take a seat in the stands. He sits down in the row in front of them, smoothes his black comb-over, sets his bulging messenger bag on the floor, and turns to leer at them. “This is where the magic happens.” Cashbaugh had been expecting Drake Murray to show up any day and offer him millions for his growing vampire league, but, he’ll take a sloppy idiot lottery winner. Her money is just as green.

  I do not care for this man. He seems like a scumbag.

  Not that I’m judgmental or anything.

  “Oh, we’ve been here many times before, Mr. Cashbaugh,” Lois says, noting a gold tooth on the upper deck of the man’s alarming smile. “Ally and her friends are big fans.” Lois smiles at Ally, who has shoved her fingers in her ears and is rocking back and forth. Lois grabs the nearest wrist and gently pulls her hand away from her head. Sometimes that girl picks the worst time to tune out.

  “Yeah,” Ally says, “we…we…we love the…the…the VNO. Lestat Graves is…hot.”

  Cashbaugh coughs into his fist, anxious to get down to business. “So, what makes you want to buy the whole shebang?” He touches Ally’s knee with the hand he’s just unfurled. Channeling her inner Stryker, Lois cringes at the germs she imagines burrowing into the fabric of Ally’s pants. Cashbaugh just seems dirty to her. />
  I whisper to Ally and Lois that it’s okay, even though the guy looks like a creep.

  “My boyfriend Jay-Jay-Jason is sick and…and…and…” Her eyelids flutter while her tongue pushes at her teeth, stuck. Lois smiles at Cashbaugh, who glances at her. “I want to b-buy it for him. Maybe it-it’ll make him fee-feel better.” She knows it won’t cure him, but she also knows that this might be her last chance to make him smile.

  “Hello,” Lois’s lawyer, Tony Clifton, hurries toward them in the empty arena, his red tie flapping as he trots down the shallow steps. “Sorry I’m late. I’m Tony Clifton,” he says to Cashbaugh, shaking his hand. “I represent the Formans and will be handling all the details for them.” Lois watches Tony’s stainless gray eyes go right to Cashbaugh’s gold tooth. She imagines she sees some kind of shield go up behind her lawyer’s whole face. “What did I miss?” Clifton drove down to discuss the finer points of the multi-million dollar transaction Ally is certain she wants to make. This is not just window shopping, from what Lois told him on the phone. Heck, Clifton thinks he might even get to be on TV if this goes through. But, I don’t know about this Cashbaugh guy, he thinks.

  Cashbaugh seems both unnerved and relieved by the lawyer’s presence. He hates lawyers, but at least now he knows this deal could be for real.

  That’s just my guess.

  I can’t read his mind or anything.

  Oh, wait. Yes, I can.

  I hate lawyers, but at least now I know this deal is for real, Cashbaugh thinks.

  Am I good, or what?

  Call it a gift. No, wait, a blessing.

  23. Atelophobia / ə -talˈ-oo-fōˈbē-ə / fear of imperfection

  Stryker shoulders his way into the teeming locker room. Over-inflated muscle heads in various states of dress gawk at him, then turn to whisper to their neighbors as he pushes by. “Stryker Nash…?” “Stryker Nash…” “St…k…sh…?” The ripple of whispered syllables that follow him pin his eyes to the floor and tie a knot in his throat to match the one strangling his stomach. The hood of his jacket and his sunglasses hide most of his face, so no one knows for sure if it is really him. The whispering could be in his head. Call it an auditory hallucination.