by Obert Skye
It wasn’t quite the magical night that Cinderella experienced. No one turned a vegetable into a vehicle or rodents into horses, but Ozzy did take off several inches of hair and the butterfly shirt and put on shoes for the first time in years.
There was excitement in the air. The cloaked house felt warm, like an oven cooking something wonderful. Tomorrow was the first day of school.
It was actually the first of March, so it wasn’t everyone’s first day. But it was for Ozzy—and because of that, he could hardly sleep.
Charles Plankdorf stroked his beard as he sat behind his mahogany desk at Harken Corp. He was attempting to control his breathing. Attempting. The project he cared about most was on the brink of falling apart. The science team were still not producing. The latest test results had come back and they weren’t good. After so many years of bitter disappointment, he was sick of it. Charles wasn’t accustomed to losing. His father had taught him many hard lessons about the importance of finishing what he began.
The intercom on his phone buzzed. He pressed a button and shouted at the phone. “What is it?”
A bored voice said, “Eric’s here to see you, sir.”
Charles’s breathing exercises collapsed and, red-faced, he yelled, “Send him in!”
Eric entered the office and approached the desk.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” Eric apologized. “But as you know, the results are still negative. The board is recommending that we no longer pursue this course. They want—”
“‘No longer pursue’?” Charles shouted. “Throw away years and years of work on an idea that could give us all unlimited power? The board are cowards.”
“Nonetheless, it’s a failure. I’ve been sent to tell you that we—”
Charles slammed his fists down, making both the desk and Eric shake.
“Tell the board I need more time. I will make this work. I’ll put everything I have into it. We’re close; I know it. Remind them that once we have a working formula, we’ll have the ability to stop all hunger, anger, and misguided will. We’ll be bathing in money and we’ll change the course of mankind.”
“They’re aware of your goals,” Eric said. “They need you to stop.”
Charles gave Eric a look that indicated the conversation was over.
Eric had grown to hate Harken Corporation. The things they had done and were doing strangled his soul. The place was destroying him—and Charles was the worst part of it.
“Go! Just go,” Charles insisted.
Eric was happy to oblige.
Ozzy stood on the side of the highway looking like a tourist who was not only lost but in no condition to be out of bed. He’d woken up early and hiked more than two miles, arriving at the Mule Pole Highway a little after dawn.
His chopped black hair was slicked back and combed into a style Clark swore he’d seen before. He wore one of his father’s dress shirts, blue paisley with pearl buttons. His pants were a shade of purple that older folks might have found trendy when disco was popular, but that anyone under fifty would find embarrassing. The dress shoes he had chosen pinched his toes, making it hard not to wince anytime he took a step. Ozzy didn’t know what he might need at school, so he held a pencil in one hand and his pocketknife in the other.
“Are you ready?” Clark asked.
“I think so.”
“If you wonder what to do or say, just be quiet. People will think you’re mysterious.”
“I can do that.”
“I hope they come,” Clark said.
“The bus stops for some kids a little up the highway. So when it sees me it should stop.”
“Okay,” Clark tweeted. “Once you get on, I’ll fly behind and find a spot near the school to hide while you’re there. There are some really interesting metal things I can hang out with. Remember that flagpole?”
“The one in front of the school?”
“Yeah, that’s the one. She seems sort of tall and standoffish, but I think if we spent some time together we’d get along.”
The yellow bus appeared around the curve. Instantly Ozzy’s heart began racing. He waved Clark away and the bird flew into the trees. Standing up straight, Ozzy tried to look brave. The bus got closer, its engine thundering.
Clenching his fists around his pencil and knife, Ozzy tried to calm his breathing. He looked expectantly as the bus approached, but it didn’t even slow down, whizzing right on by. A blast of air pushed Ozzy backward, and he rocked slightly on his heels. He watched the yellow vehicle disappear into the distance and sighed a sigh of both relief and disappointment. Clark flitted back from the trees and landed on his head.
“So, what happened?” the bird asked.
“Well, it didn’t stop.”
“I saw that. Should we hike into town?”
“No way,” Ozzy said. “These shoes are killing me. Besides, it’s more than four miles from here. By the time we got there, school would be half over.”
“Should we try again tomorrow?”
“I guess. Maybe I’ll wave at the bus driver next time.”
Ozzy took off his shoes and crossed the highway, stepping off the asphalt into the trees.
About twenty-three hours and fifty minutes later he was back in the same spot, wearing the same clothes, standing the same way. Clark was in the trees when the yellow bus popped up on the horizon and sped closer.
Ozzy leaned forward and waved.
The bus blew by without stopping.
Clark glided in from the trees. “You probably should work on your wave. I’ve seen other people do it and they look much less pathetic.”
Ozzy waved to see what it looked like.
“Oh, boy,” Clark said. “That’s not going to make anyone stop.”
“So what do we do?”
“First we work on your wave.”
“And I’ll stand in the road so the bus has to stop,” Ozzy suggested.
“Perfect.”
Ozzy and Clark went back to the cloaked house to practice.
Another twenty-four hours later, Ozzy stood on the highway. He was just as nervous as before, but now there was an added element of fear—if the bus decided not to stop, it could easily be the end of his quest.
Ozzy stayed planted for ten minutes in the middle of the road before any vehicle appeared. It wasn’t the bus, though, so he stepped off the road. Once the car had passed, he returned to his spot.
Half an hour later, only two more cars had passed by, and neither one was a bus.
“Maybe the bus driver hated your wave so much that he went a different way.”
“Let’s go home so I can change. We need to hike into town to figure this out.”
Ozzy returned to the cloaked house and changed into something more comfortable. Then, as he had done more often lately than he could count, he ran through the forest to Otter Rock. By the time he and Clark arrived, it was past noon.
They hid in the trees on a ridge just east of the high school. The moment they arrived they saw instantly that something was wrong.
“Where is everyone?”
The school was deserted; there were no cars in the parking lot or buses parked to the side.
“Don’t they have school every day?” Ozzy asked.
“I don’t know. The flagpole’s still there.”
“Maybe it’s like Harry Potter. He had weekends and holidays off. I’m going into one of the shops on Main Street and ask them what day it is.”
“Good for you. I’ll stay right here and chat up the flagpole.”
Ozzy made it to Main Street with no problem and, before he could talk himself out of what he was doing, dashed into the first business he saw, a jewelry store called Sparkles. A woman was standing inside behind a glass counter.
Ozzy pushed on the door a little too hard and found himself half stumbli
ng in. He stood up, trying to catch his breath, and noticed the woman was staring at his shoeless feet.
“Um, what day is it?” Ozzy asked.
“Excuse me?” the woman said, more confused than bothered.
“Is it a holiday today?”
The woman smiled. “Not that I know of. It’s Saturday, March 5th.”
“And there’s no school on Saturday?”
“No.”
It was more information than Ozzy could have hoped for.
“Thank you.” Ozzy paused. “That is what people say, right?”
The woman smiled again. “If they’re being polite.”
“Well, then, thank you,” Ozzy said.
As Ozzy left the shop, not looking where he was going, he ran into someone, falling backward onto his rear. He looked up and saw, backlit by the sun, a strange silhouette of a man wearing a pointed floppy hat. The sun made it hard to see the man clearly.
“You okay?” the man asked, reaching out to pull Ozzy up. Reluctantly Ozzy reached out.
“I think so,” he said as the man pulled him to his feet.
“Nice to know people still think,” the man replied. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to move. I hate to think what the consequences might be if I’m not home by sunset.”
The strange man seemed to be wearing some sort of bathrobe and shivered as he said “sunset.” He took off, striding away purposefully. Ozzy rubbed his eyes and watched as he disappeared, then he ran back to where Clark was supposed to be hiding. After a brief search, he found him sitting in a tree about a block away.
“How’s your flagpole?” Ozzy asked.
“I tried talking to her, but she was really pretty stiff, personality-wise. Just a tall stick. What about you?” Clark asked. “Did you find someone to ask?”
“Yes. She kept staring at my feet.”
“You do have nice feet, but I think most people wear shoes when they’re outside.”
“They also told me that it’s Saturday. And there’s no school on Saturday.”
“Just like your wizard books said.”
“And if there’s no school on Saturday, then there’s none on Sunday. So . . . I think we should return to the cloaked house and regroup. That way I’ll be ready for Monday.”
The mechanical raven hopped down from the tree and sat on Ozzy’s head.
“Oh, I bumped into someone while I was coming out of the store. He was blocking the sidewalk and I fell to the ground.”
“People are so bulky.”
“He was wearing a pointed hat. Like a wizard. And he had on a robe of some sort.”
“The way some of you humans dress yourselves is embarrassing.”
They hiked back to the cloaked house. When they got there Ozzy ate the last pouch of dried apples and a seven-year-old can of creamed corn.
Monday morning took far more courage than Ozzy had thought he would need to leave the cloaked house and hike to the highway.
“You can do this,” Clark kept encouraging him. “Just think—you’ll get on the bus, go to school, find Sigi, and she’ll help you find your parents. Boy meets bus meets girl meets parents.”
“I hope so,” Ozzy replied.
This time, the boy and the bird exited the trees farther up the road, near the spot where train tracks crossed the Mule Pole Highway. Ozzy had a plan. He had never seen a train there, but he had heard some from a distance on more than one occasion.
Where the tracks crossed the road, the shoulders of the highway were long mounds of dirt that looked like giant fat snakes running parallel to the asphalt. Next to the tracks there was a tall, yellow tree and two railroad crossing signs that looked like big Xs against the sky. The crossing signs were familiar because Clark had been sort of sweet on them for a while. Ozzy had made the trek out to the signs once or twice when it was nearly dark and Clark was still trying to get the signs to talk to him.
Clark tried not to make eye contact with them as Ozzy stood on the right side of the road next to the tracks.
“And you really think this will work?” Clark asked.
“I’m pretty sure buses have to stop before they cross the tracks, remember? We saw it happen with that one when you came to visit the signs. They even opened the door. I have no idea why. Maybe . . .”
Ozzy heard the bus coming.
“Get into the trees!”
“I’ll be in that tall yellow-leafed one. I think I just saw a dove fly in there.”
The bird flew off and the boy stood there with his pencil in one hand and his knife in the other.
The bus drew nearer. The sound of its engine gave Ozzy’s heart fits and made him doubt every aspect and piece of the plan. It drew closer still. Ozzy wondered if there was enough time for him to throw up before it arrived.
It got closer, and he heard it downshift and watched it decrease its speed. Ozzy discovered he hadn’t breathed in a while and sucked in a lungful of air.
The bus came to a complete stop just before the tracks. It snorted like a giant yellow beast and then the driver opened the door to check for trains. Not waiting for permission, Ozzy stepped onto the bus and climbed up the metal stairs.
The driver stared at the boy in disbelief. He leaned back in his seat and looked at Ozzy as if he were a new responsibility that he didn’t want.
“You can’t bring that knife,” was all he said.
Ozzy looked at the knife in his hand and tossed it back out the door before it closed. The bus driver motioned with his thumb for Ozzy to move back into the bus and the vehicle began to move slowly.
Ozzy Toffy had never thought his plan would work. Now he was on the bus and wasn’t sure what to do next. There were rows and rows of empty seats; only a handful of students were already on board. One student stared at him, one didn’t even look up, one had headphones over his ears, and another was working on homework she should have completed over the weekend. A boy with dark blue eyes and the left side of his head shaved looked at Ozzy and what he was wearing.
“Nice clothes,” the boy said, laughing.
“Thanks.”
“Who are you, anyway?”
“Ozzy.”
“You live by the train tracks?” he asked.
“We just moved here.”
“Whatever,” the boy said. “I wasn’t looking for a conversation.”
Ozzy moved two rows down the aisle and took a seat on the right side of the bus. He looked out the window and saw a small black dot flying behind them.
Nobody else talked to him the rest of the ride, and the bus filled up almost completely before it finally reached Otter Rock High.
It took everything Ozzy had not to leap from the bus and run back home, but he knew if he ever wanted things to change in his life, he needed to go forward. The books he’d read told him that things happened when people acted on their own. So he shuffled into the school with everyone else and picked a random classroom to enter.
He sat down at one of the desks and waited.
Boys and girls, both louder than wolves and as interesting as spring, filed into the room and sat down where they wanted. The desks around Ozzy stayed empty.
A bell rang and a man with more stomach than butt came into the room carrying a stack of folders and looking as bothered as most people did at the end of a hard day.
“Quiet! No talking.”
He set the folders on his desk and began to write on the whiteboard at the front of the room. He talked as he scribbled.
“Now, there’s no time to hear all the wonderful things you did to improve the world this weekend. I’m sure all of you stepped outside of yourselves and did something of value.”
He finished writing and turned around to face the class.
“Oh, wait, you’re teenagers. You probably spent the weekend staring at your phones.”
/> None of the students made a noise.
“Regardless, you were to put down your phones and read the fourth and fifth chapter of Animal Farm. Who’d like to give us their thoughts?”
Nobody raised their hands so Ozzy decided he’d give it a go. Animal Farm had been in one of his parents’ boxes, and he’d read it a couple of times so far.
The teacher saw Ozzy and stared sternly at him.
“Who are you?”
A few of the other students laughed, happy to have their teacher talking about something else.
“I’m Ozzy Toffy.”
“And you’re new here?”
Ozzy nodded.
“Fine. The office never tells me anything. So, you’re new and the only one who’s read the assignment? Perfect. Well . . . tell me what you thought.”
“I think the book believes it’s more important than it really is.”
The teacher looked stunned. “Really?”
“It had a few words I didn’t understand, which was good, but the rest of the writing was sort of unpleasant.”
“Yes, well, that’s because it’s a classic. Who else has something to say?”
And just like that, Ozzy was a student at Otter Rock High School. The teacher didn’t seem to be interested enough to find out who he was or why he was there. When class was over, he followed a couple students to another room. The next class was almost the same as the first, and the third was worse; the teacher just asked him his name, wrote it down, and never addressed him again.
Ozzy was tall enough that no boys wanted to mess with him and quiet enough that the girls were left to imagine what he was really like. The way he was dressed made him odd enough to be ignored. Regardless, he loved what was happening. People were doing things and interacting. A girl lent another girl a pencil. Two boys argued over the score of a sporting event. A couple of kids stared at him and one girl asked him if he was an exchange student.
“Exchanged for what?”
“You know, a different country.”
“No.”
“Then why are you dressed like that?”
At lunchtime, Ozzy followed the herd to the cafeteria, where he mimicked them by getting in line and grabbing a tray for food. He saw three women putting delicious, warm-looking things on plates and handing the plates to the students. One handed a plate of hot mashed potatoes and turkey to Ozzy.