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

with what to say next as she taps an agitated rhythm on the steering wheel with one finger: one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three-four. “You were hurt—thank God, it wasn’t worse—but other people were inconvenienced, like me. Next time you start wondering what’ll happen if you do something, just use your imagination.”
    He knows that’s all the sympathy he’s going to get. “Are you gonna tell Dad?”
    She stomps the brake pedal at the edge of the parking lot, jerking them forward in unison. With her head turned to watch the right-lane traffic, she says, “Why should I? It would just give him another excuse for not coming home.”
    That statement has an odd ring. “Why…why wouldn’t he just come home after he finishes the job?”
    His mother makes a left turn—slowly, for her. “No good reason. That’s just it. Sometimes I think he makes up excuses to stay away longer.”
    She glances at him, and the look is like an open door. The voice too. Sometimes he gets the sense that if he asked a serious question, like What do you mean by that? she’d give him a serious answer. As if she would like to talk to him. Sometimes he thinks he should walk through that door, answer that voice—but he can’t. He doesn’t know why. Watching the minivan ahead of them, he remarks, “Get Thorn to call him. He’d come home if Thorn asked him to.”
    She stomps the brake pedal again as the minivan signals a turn. “For your information, Thorn is not a miracle worker.”
    â€œCoulda fooled me,” he says.
    A few days later, Miracle-boy himself emails from college: Hey, little bro. Mom says you jumped out of the back of a school bus. What’s up with that?
    Thorn almost never emails him. Bender doesn’t reply.
    â€¢ • •
    Mrs. B decides that Bender should sit in the front seat of the bus, across from her, for an entire week. So she can “keep an eye on him.” It’s the seat reserved for notorious school bus criminals, and he qualifies, but he’s okay with that. Sitting this close, he can see all the numbers and gauges on the dashboard.
    Because of the times he’s occupied this seat in the past, he already knows the average speed Mrs. B drives and the exact mileage to various points on the route. But now he gets to clock the distance to the mystery stop and check if Mrs. B’s rate is any faster or slower. No to the latter. After a week of jotting down odometer readings, he has a precise answer to the former: 2.83 miles.
    He’s read somewhere that an average adult can walk one mile in twenty minutes. Given that he’s not an adult (though he might be average, especially compared to a certain spectacular individual whose initials are JTT), he should still be able to cover a mile in twenty-five minutes, and two miles plus 0.830 shouldn’t take much more than an hour. Or one hour and ten minutes, max.
    He will pick a day when both parents are out, play sick, wait until the school bus leaves, and hike to the mystery stop. What he’ll do when he gets there, he leaves to inspiration. The plan is so simple it almost bores him, but as he’s already discovered, simple plans are more likely to succeed than the other kind.
    â€¢ • •
    During the last half of October, Halloween shares equal time with the campaign for Youth Court, which in previous years attracted no more attention than a Red Cross fund-raiser. But Bender has to admit, Shelly has given this race a lot of pizzazz. She teaches her campaign songs to the littles and belts them out on the bus, both coming and going. Such as:
    I’d like to teach the school to sing in perfect harmony.
    I’d like them all to vote for me upon November three.
    Sometimes Bender joins in from the back, just to irritate Spencer. The genius didn’t expect this kind of competition, but he sucks it up and makes up for his lack