The Ride Home Read online

  Copyright © Gail Anderson-Dargatz 2020

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: The ride home / Gail Anderson-Dargatz.

  Names: Anderson-Dargatz, Gail, 1963– author.

  Series: Orca currents.

  Description: Series statement: Orca currents

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190169095 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190169109 | ISBN 9781459821422 (softcover) | ISBN 9781459821439 (PDF) | ISBN 9781459821446 (EPUB)

  Classification: LCC PS8551.N3574 R53 2020 | DDC jC813/.54—dc23

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019943970

  Simultaneously published in Canada and the United States in 2020

  Summary: In this high-interest novel for middle readers, thirteen-year-old Mark adjusts to the long ride home on the school bus after moving to a small town to live with his grandmother.

  Orca Book Publishers is committed to reducing the consumption of nonrenewable resources in the making of our books. We make every effort to use materials that support a sustainable future.

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Edited by Tanya Trafford

  Cover artwork by gettyimages.ca/Joseph Devenney

  Author photo by Mitch Krupp

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  orcabook.com

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  23 22 21 20 • 4 3 2 1

  For all us rural kids who endure a long bus ride home

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  I step into the school bus and stand next to the driver’s seat, looking for a place to sit by myself. The bus smells like rotten oranges, sweaty running shoes and cheese. It’s the middle of November, and this is my first time on the bus. In fact, this afternoon is the first time I’ve been on any school bus. Back in Vancouver I took public transit, the city buses. And Gran dropped me off this morning on my first day at this school.

  “Keep moving,” the driver says. But she doesn’t bother to look up from the romance novel she’s reading. She’s about as old as Gran, in her sixties. And she wears a fedora. Not just a hat. A fedora. Like, an old man’s hat. I bet she’s like that teacher I had in sixth grade who wore a different hat to school every day. A cowboy hat one day, a crown the next. Thinking she’s being funny or fun. But at least that teacher had pizzazz, energy. This driver appears worn out, like she’s been driving the school bus for a while now. Too long. She nods wearily in my general direction. “Take a seat.”

  Yeah, I think, but where? Most of the seats already have at least one kid in them. Super-little kids, probably kindergartners, sit in the first rows at the front, and what look like elementary kids are just behind them. The ones who look like they’re around ten or eleven, younger middle schoolers, take up the middle of the bus. The biggest kids, the cool eighth graders, are at the back.

  Seating on the school bus is by age group then, I guess. Well, except for this one girl who’s clearly the weird kid. She’s about my age, thirteen or so, but is sitting three seats from the front with the young kids. She is wearing glasses, and her hair is bunched into a knot. She has these big headphones on and is reading a book. I can see the title. It’s a textbook on how the brain works. A smart kid then.

  It’s clear that everyone in each little group knows one another. They’re friends. I’m arriving at this school late in the fall. Even if I wanted to, which I don’t, I doubt I’ll make friends now. Who cares? It’s not like I’m staying long anyway.

  I start to make my way down the aisle. A red-haired girl whispers to another girl, and they giggle at me like I’ve got my fly open or something. I check. I don’t. I feel my face heat up.

  “Hey, fresh meat!” some guy shouts.

  “What’s with the merman hair?” the red-haired girl asks. Oh, so it was my hair they were giggling about. There are a few dye jobs on the bus. But nothing like my bright neon green and blue spikes. I just had it done before…well, before.

  I ignore them, keeping my eyes on the single empty seat I spotted at the very back. I want nothing to do with these rural freaks. I’m only staying with Gran until Mom gets back on her feet. Then I’m back to the city, first chance I get.

  I slide into the empty seat next to the emergency exit. I figure here, at least, I’ll be left alone. But then a guy dressed in a black hoodie pulled low over his face turns in his seat to look at me. He’s wearing black lipstick. And what little hair I can see is dyed black. His face is pale, like he never sees the sun. There are circles under his eyes like he never sleeps. The guy is the Grim Reaper. All emo.

  “Hey, Merman. I wouldn’t sit there if I were you,” he says. “That’s Jeremy and Sophie’s seat.”

  Two people couldn’t sit here. The seat I’m in and the one on the other side of the emergency exit are only big enough for one person. And anyway, back in the city, nobody “owned” a bus seat. I stare out the window, hoping he will leave me alone.

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” says Emo.

  My reflection stares back at me. That colorful spiked hair. Ocean-blue eyes (or so Gran tells me). The new puffer jacket Gran inflicted on me. Warm, but not my style. I look tired, almost as tired as Emo. No, I look sad.

  I refocus on the school parking lot. It’s been snowing since before lunch, the first snow of the season. The school grounds are covered in the stuff. Clouds hang low over the surrounding hills. Winters are gray and depressing here. I remember that from Christmas visits to my granny’s. Vancouver is cloudy all winter too, of course. But at least we hardly ever get snow. This first snowfall has turned to slush on the roads and made them slick. A few parents picking up their kids have trouble driving their cars up the hill to the school.

  “That’s my seat.”

  I look up to see this muscled guy in a Canadian tuxedo—a jean jacket and jeans—staring down at me. He seems too old to be in middle school. Jeremy, I presume. Behind him a girl with blond hair dipped in green grips his bicep. This must be Sophie.

  “Our seat,” the girl adds.

  I wave a hand to object. “But there’s only room for one in this seat.”

  “Exactly,” the girl says. So they’re a thing.

  “Take that seat,” I say, pointing at the one on the other side of the emergency exit.

  Emo and several of the eighth-grade kids in nearby seats are watching the drama unfold with interest.

  “I don’t think you understand,” Jeremy says. There’s a warning in his voice. “You’re sitting in my seat.”

  “Our seat,” Sophie corrects him.

  “Seriously?” I ask.

  “Out, now!”

  “Is there a problem back there, Jeremy?” the driver asks, using the PA system.

  “No problem,” Jeremy calls back. “The new kid is just moving out of my seat.”

  “Our seat,” Sophie says. It’s like there’s an echo in here.

 
“Get a move on,” the driver says, her voice booming over the speaker. “We need to get going. The roads are slippery. It will be tough driving today.”

  “Fine,” I say. “Whatever.” I sling my backpack over to the other single seat. Then I watch as Jeremy sits in “his” seat. The girl all but sits on top of him, her legs crossways over his lap. She giggles and giggles. Then, god, they start to kiss. To avoid looking at them, I peer up at the ceiling, then squint when I realize there is a blob of pudding up there. Hardened, fossilized, but still clearly pudding.

  My phone buzzes, and I click on Messages. Gran.

  How are you doing, Mark? Get on the bus okay?

  Yeah. We’re about to leave.

  Made any friends?

  No.

  And I’m not going to bother, I think of adding. What’s the point in trying to make friends? I’ll only be here a couple of weeks max. Why would I want to make friends with any of them anyway? Local yokels, the lot of them.

  Another message from Gran pops up.

  I talked to your mom today.

  There is a long pause in which neither of us texts.

  Finally the phone vibrates again.

  She’s okay. But it’s going to be a long haul this time.

  A long haul. A phrase Gran uses a lot. She means things aren’t going to get better any time soon. Mom isn’t going to get better anytime soon. I refuse to believe that. Because that would mean Mom’s stuck in that creepy hospital. And I’m stuck up here. On Gran’s farm in the middle of nowhere. In this crappy small-town school. On this stinking bus.

  Ugh. Jeremy and Sophie are making slurping noises in the next seat. I roll my head back and stare up at the petrified pudding on the ceiling. This is going to be a long ride.

  Chapter Two

  The bus ambles out of town, rocking back and forth down the highway. City transit isn’t exactly quiet, but at least people keep to themselves. The kids on this school bus, on the other hand, are nuts. Half of them are screaming at each other. The other half are yelling just to make themselves heard as they talk to their friends.

  One orange-haired kid is hurling bits of cheese. Cheese. The only kids who are quiet and keeping to themselves are the kindergarten kids right up front. Oh, and that weird girl in the third row. She’s got these massive headphones, like, noise-canceling headphones. I wish I had a pair.

  Gross. Now Jeremy and Sophie are really kissing in the seat. I mean, there’s tongue action.

  Jeremy catches me squinting at them in disgust and disbelief. He stops kissing and gives me the stink eye. “Do you mind?” he asks. “A little privacy, please?”

  Privacy? On a school bus?

  Then he goes back to snogging the girl. That’s it. I’m out of here. I grab my backpack and stand up, steadying myself with a hand on the back of a seat as I try to figure out who to sit with. A skinny kid with blue bangs shakes his head. Okay, I won’t sit with him. A girl in yoga pants shifts toward the aisle. Her neither then. I take another step forward, but the bus careens around a sharp corner and I tumble over the seat and headfirst into Emo. I find myself cozying up to Mr. Grim Reaper.

  Then the driver suddenly brakes, hurling me sideways into the aisle as she turns abruptly into a pullout. She gets out of her seat and stomps down the aisle as I pick myself up. Now that the driver is standing, I realize just how short she is. I’m sure some of the fourth graders are taller than her. But the expression on her face is just plain scary.

  “Uh-oh,” says Emo.

  “Hey!” the driver calls out. “You! New kid!”

  “My name is Mark.”

  “Don’t give me lip.”

  “I wasn’t—I was just telling you my name.”

  She tilts her head up to talk to me. “Argue with me, and you’ll get a memo.”

  “A what?”

  Emo nudges me. “You don’t want that,” he says quietly. “A memo is a note you have to take home. It says you got in trouble. Get three and you could be kicked off the bus. I’ve got two.”

  “But I didn’t do anything!” I say.

  The driver wags a finger at me. “You got up and switched seats while the bus was moving.”

  “I do that all the time on the city buses.”

  “School buses?”

  “No. City transit.”

  She pushes back her fedora. “Didn’t you read the Bus Riders Code of Conduct?”

  “The what?”

  “The bus rules that the school sent home with you.”

  I glance back at Jeremy and Sophie. They’ve stopped making out, for the moment. I suspect they didn’t get a copy of the Bus Riders Code of Conduct either. “Nobody sent anything home with me,” I tell the driver. “I just started school today. I lived in Vancouver until Friday.”

  “What happened?” the cheese-hurling kid calls out from several seats down. “You get expelled or something?”

  I scowl at him. “None of your business.”

  But Cheese Kid won’t let it go. “No, really. What did you do? You hit a teacher? I bet you hit a teacher.”

  The driver reaches up to hold a finger to my face. “On this bus, you don’t get up and walk around while the bus is moving. Understand?”

  “But they were making out back there.” I wave a hand at Jeremy and Sophie. “I didn’t want to see that all the way home.”

  “Jeremy, is that true?” the driver asks. “Don’t lie to me. All I have to do is review the security footage to find out.” She points up at the camera mounted on the ceiling above the emergency exit. Jeremy nods and mumbles. Then he pushes Sophie’s legs off his lap, and she falls into the aisle. The girl sheepishly gets up and slides over to the other single seat.

  “This isn’t the place for that kind of thing,” the driver says. “I’m separating you two. Jeremy, go sit in the front seat.”

  He stands. “With the kindies? No way.”

  “You want another memo?” the driver asks. “You get a third, and you won’t be riding this bus anymore.”

  “My mom will kill me,” Jeremy says.

  “Yes, she will.” The driver gestures forward with both hands, like a flight attendant. “To the front.”

  On his way past me, Jeremy slugs my arm. “You’ll pay for this,” he says.

  Once she gets back up front, the driver calls out to me. “And you!” Now that the kids are quiet, watching us, her voice carries all the way to the back of the bus.

  “My name is Mark!” I shout back.

  The driver snorts. “If I know a kid’s name, it’s because he keeps getting into trouble. I can see I’m going to remember your name. So, Mark, if you need to change seats, do it when we stop to let a kid off. But only with my permission. Understand?”

  I look back at Jeremy’s girl and the empty seat beside her. She glares at me. I’m not sitting back there again. “Can I move now?” I ask the driver.

  “Hop to it!” she says.

  I slide into the seat with Emo. Even dressed like the Grim Reaper he seems more welcoming than these other kids. At least he tried to warn me not to sit in Jeremy’s seat. He lifts his black lip at me. I’m not sure if it’s a smile or a sneer. I can’t see his eyes under the hoodie. “Hey,” I say, in a half-hearted attempt to be friendly.

  The driver picks up her mic to finish her lecture. “I don’t want any more trouble from any of you. The roads are bad enough today with all the snow. I don’t need more distractions. You don’t want to be the cause of an accident, do you?” When nobody replies, she raises her voice. “Do you?”

  The kids grunt and mumble. I guess they’re agreeing. Most of them are now lost in their phones. When the driver settles back in her seat, the screaming and yelling starts up again. A hard eraser pelts me in the back of the head. I see it tumble into the aisle. “Hey!” I say, turning.

  Jeremy’s girlfriend, Sophie, gives me a nasty smile. I rub my head as I swivel in my seat. But Jeremy is also glaring at me from the front, two rows up from Weird Girl. He’s sitting next to a little
girl dressed in a princess outfit. As Jeremy hulks there beside her, staring at me, I watch the princess take off her crown and put it on Jeremy’s head. He leaves it on as he flips me the bird. Great. All I wanted was to sit by myself and be left alone. I knew I wasn’t going to make any friends here. But I didn’t think that just ten minutes into this bus ride I would already have enemies.

  Chapter Three

  I nudge Emo. “How long is this bus ride anyway?” I ask him.

  He slowly turns my way, and I can finally see his eyes. Once I get past all that white face makeup and black eyeliner, I can see that his eyes are greenish-yellow and puppy-dog sad, like my Gran’s Lab’s. I wonder what Emo looks like without the makeup and hoodie. Like someone else entirely, I bet.

  “The bus ride?” I ask again. “About how long?”

  Emo lets out a long sigh, as if I’ve interrupted him while in some difficult task. Like thinking. “Depends where you get off but about an hour and a half,” he says finally. “If Grace is on the bus.”

  “Grace?”

  “That girl who always sits at the front with the little kids. She’s sort of, you know, odd.”

  So I was right. She is the weird kid. But if this guy thinks she’s weird, she must be truly strange.

  “She lives way out on the end of Lost Lake Road,” says Emo. “If she’s not on the bus, then we don’t have to go that far. Then it’s only an hour’s drive.”

  An hour. Back in Vancouver I was home from school in less than ten minutes. “I have to spend more than two hours a day on this noisy, smelly bus?”

  “Or longer,” Emo says.

  “Longer?”

  “If Ida has to deal with things.”

  “Ida?”

  “The driver.”

  “What do you mean, if the driver has to deal with things?”

  “You’ll see.” Emo eyes Cheese Kid, who is once again hurling bits of cheddar. Everybody needs a hobby, I guess. “So what did you do?” Emo asks me.

  I tilt my head at him. “What?” I have no idea what he’s talking about.

  “To get expelled.”

  “Who said I got expelled?”