Somebody on This Bus Is Going to Be Famous by J. B. Cheaney Page A

a van to pass. If he listens closely, he can imagine the right turn blinker chanting, Now! Now! Now!
    Or maybe that’s his pounding heart— NOW!
    The bus wheels crunch as Mrs. B presses the accelerator. Bender jumps for the handle, pushes the safety latch, jerks the handle up, swings the door open, and leaps.
    The alarm bells in his head are so loud he can’t hear the real alarm. So far so good—
    But his plan to hit the ground running doesn’t work out too well. There’s a technique to landing on one’s feet, which Bender has never practiced. Instead of running, he stumbles and falls, moaning as pain shoots from ankle to hip.
    The bus rolls back, and for a terrifying second (he’d never thought old Big Yellow could look so HUGE), he thinks it might just roll over him. Then Mrs. B sets the brake. Faces appear around the edge of the doorway: Alice-or-Alison, Jay, Spencer, Kaitlynn, Shelly’s little brother, Evan, and Kaitlynn’s little brother, Simon, all with wide eyes and open mouths.
    Igor pops through the crowd. “Cool! I wanna do it too!” He jumps out the door like Bender had planned, only better: he lands on his feet and takes off running.
    â€œIGOR!!” yells Mrs. B, who has pushed through the crowd. “Come back here, NOW!”
    Igor freezes in mid-stride, then starts running backward in slow motion. Meanwhile, Bender groans again, partly for sympathy. But he isn’t getting any from the driver. With hands on her hips and her puzzled, angry face cocked to one side, she demands, “What the Sam Hill do you think you’re doing?”
    She enlists Jay’s help in getting Bender back on the bus and tosses an Ace bandage from the first-aid kit for him to wrap his ankle with. It’s definitely sprained, maybe even broken. He feels it swelling, throbbing against the bandage until he can hear it in his ears. Just outside of town, he glances up at the billboard where his mother beams down at him: Myra Bender Thompson—Your Go-to Gal for Home or Investment! Her head perkily tilted to one side, she holds a house in one hand while the other sweeps over a map of the county, like she’s ready to get you any little property your heart desires. In real life, he can’t remember ever seeing her smile at him that way.
    â€¢ • •
    Certainly not today. When she picks him up at school, she’s mostly interested in letting him know she had to pass one of her appointments off to another agent in the office, and if the other agent makes the sale, she gets nothing (she’s number two on sales but closing in on number one). “What did you jump from? The nurse told me but I must have heard wrong. The emergency door of the bus?”
    They go straight to the clinic to get his ankle X-rayed. No fractures, but his lower leg is swollen to the size of a watermelon by then. “Take it easy for a while,” the doctor tells him. “Use an ankle brace for a day or two, then support socks for a week. What did you say you jumped from?”
    â€¢ • •
    â€œWhat were you thinking?” His mother says once she’s slammed the car door and buckled her seat belt.
    â€œI…always wanted to try it. See what would happen.”
    Her sigh is more like an explosion as she puts the Suburban in reverse and shoots into the parking lot, screeching the brakes as a van honks behind her. “Just to see what would happen, huh? I used to know somebody like that. In high school. Always pulling stunts to see what would happen—until he went too far.”
    â€œWent too far how?”
    â€œPeople got hurt.”
    â€œLike who?”
    â€œI don’t want to talk about it, okay? It’s not the point.”
    He wonders why she doesn’t want to talk about something as far away as high school. “What is the point? People getting hurt? I’m the only one who got hurt this time.”
    His mother appears to struggle