The Ride Home Read online

  “You moved out here, to the middle of nowhere, from Vancouver, in November. Why else would you do that unless you got booted out of school?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe my mom got a job up here. Maybe I came here for the view. Maybe an alien spacecraft dropped me off.”

  “Is that what happened?”

  I peer at him. He seems serious. Is he stoned? “You really think aliens left me here?” I ask.

  “No, I mean the bit about your mom getting a job here.”

  “No.”

  “So why did you move up here then?”

  I stare past him at the thick snowflakes that are falling even faster now. I don’t want these hicks knowing my story. I don’t want to talk to them, period. “Stuff went down,” I say.

  “I hear ya.” Emo nods, but he keeps talking. “My brother got expelled.”

  I put in my earbuds and fiddle with my phone, picking tunes, thinking this will shut him up. I sat with Emo because I figured he’d be the brooding type. You know, quiet. And, well, he seemed like the only one willing to sit with me. But he just keeps talking.

  “He set the school Christmas tree on fire last year.”

  I pull out one bud, thinking I hadn’t heard him right. “Seriously?” I ask. “Your brother set the Christmas tree on fire?” I mean, who does that? Maybe the Grinch.

  Emo, suddenly animated, nods his head up and down. “It was cool.”

  “Okay...” I say slowly.

  “I wish I could get expelled.”

  I lift my eyebrows and shake my head slowly, but he doesn’t notice. His face has lit up, and he’s lost in his happy memory of the burning Christmas tree. Wow.

  “You like fires?” he asks.

  “What do you mean?” I’m starting to really worry about this guy.

  “Fires, explosions. You know, watching things burn and blow up?”

  “I used to watch MythBusters when I was a kid. So yeah, I guess.”

  Emo pulls out a lighter and flicks it on and off. “I like watching things burn.”

  I glance nervously at the driver, Ida. I can see her tired face in the big rearview mirror. “Are you really allowed to carry lighters on the bus?” I ask Emo.

  “Are you kidding?” he says. “We’re not allowed to carry anything cool on the bus. No lighters. No knives. No firecrackers. Nothing that could explode.”

  I shift a little to the left, toward the aisle. So what else is this guy carrying? “You smoke?” I ask, trying to gauge just how crazy this guy is. “That why you’re carrying a lighter?”

  “No way. Smoking is bad for your health.”

  Unlike knives or explosives, I think.

  He flicks the lighter again and again. “I just like watching the flames, seeing things burn.”

  “Yeah, you said that.” I scoot as close to the edge as I can without falling out of my seat. When I accidently bump his arm, the kid in the seat across the aisle shifts away and grunts like a caveman. He’s got this head of wild, unkempt hair, and he’s already got stubble on his chin. The guy sitting next to him could be his brother, his twin even. They both seem like the kind who punch holes in the wall when they’re mad. I shift a little back in Emo’s direction and scan the middle seats, hoping to spot another place to sit. Someplace less… life-threatening.

  “When’s the next stop?” I ask.

  But Emo is focused on his lighter, flicking it on and off. “I’m guessing these vinyl seats aren’t really flammable,” he says. “You’d think they wouldn’t make school-bus seats out of stuff that burns, right?”

  “Yeah,” I say, my voice cracking a little. “You’d think.”

  “But watch. All I have to do is hold the flame to the back of the seat, like this—”

  “Ah. You think that’s a good idea?”

  “And it burns, just like that.”

  The vinyl on the seat doesn’t really burn. A hole opens in the upholstery as the material sort of melts away in the flame. But it quickly stops “burning.”

  “Should you be doing that?” I ask, my voice all at once high and squeaky. “I mean, you could start a fire, in a bus full of kids. We could, you know, die.”

  “Nah,” he says. “The vinyl is flame-resistant. It won’t catch fire.” He blows away a whiff of smoke. “I don’t think so anyway.” Then he offers me the lighter. “You want to try?”

  “God, no!”

  “Fire is so cool.” The kid flicks the lighter again, presses it to the vinyl and watches as another hole appears. The back of the seat in front of us is full of holes. This must be Emo’s favorite seat.

  “I think you should stop,” I say. “I mean, setting the bus on fire is, you know, kind of dangerous.” A lot dangerous.

  “Nah, we do it all the time,” says Emo. “Don’t we, guys?”

  He leans forward to peer across the aisle at the cavemen. They bob their heads in unison and, together with Emo, pull out their lighters, flicking them into flame. I start to panic and stare wide-eyed out the front window, hoping vainly that we’ll stop soon. But we’re still on the highway, miles away from the turnoff to the gravel road that most of the kids live along.

  Both cavemen burn a hole into the seat in front of them. Emo nods in approval. “Cool,” he says. The smell of burning vinyl starts to fill the back of the bus.

  Chapter Four

  I peer at the driver’s face in the rearview mirror, willing her to smell the smoke so I don’t have to say anything. She’ll have to stop the bus then, and I’ll be able to move away from these clowns. But Emo and then one of the cavemen open the windows on either side of the bus. The cold, snowy air blows the smoke right outside.

  Emo flicks his lighter into flame and holds it up to my face. “What’s the matter, Mark?” he taunts. “You seem nervous.” The cavemen grunt and flick their lighters in my direction. The kids around us don’t even seem to notice. They just go on screaming or yelling or playing games on their phones.

  Then Emo leans even closer. “I bet that spiky green hair of yours would really burn.”

  My heart skips a beat. I don’t want to die here, on this frickin’ bus. I wave a hand at Ida, the driver. “Ah, excuse me?” I call out. “I think we have a problem here.”

  “What is it now, Mark?” she says through the mic.

  “Um, these kids are trying to set the bus on fire—”

  “What are you doing?” Emo hisses.

  “And my hair too,” I add.

  “What?” The driver pulls the bus to the side of the highway.

  Emo elbows me hard in the ribs. “Snitch.”

  I whisper back to him, “But you were threatening to set me on fire!”

  “I was only joking,” says Emo. “I’m not like my brother. Everybody knows that.” The kids in the seats closest to us nod their heads at me like I’m an idiot.

  The two cavemen quickly hide their lighters as the driver marches down the aisle. Ida stops and holds out her hand in front of Emo. “Give me that lighter!”

  He smiles, trying to appear innocent. But the Grim Reaper hoodie, black lipstick and eyeliner make it hard to pull that off. “What lighter?” he asks.

  “The one in your pocket.” She stares at Emo until he finally slaps it on her palm. “That’s a memo for you, Eric,” she tells him. “Your third, as I recall. This is your last ride.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” says Emo. “If I can’t take the bus, how will I get to school?”

  I tilt my head at him. “But I thought you said you wanted to get expelled.”

  “Not for real,” he says. “I’ve got plans. I’m going to get an engineering degree. I can’t get into university unless I finish high school.”

  I figure he likely won’t get into university if he keeps burning stuff either.

  “Let’s go,” Ida tells him. “Up to the front.”

  Finally. A seat to myself.

  I get out of the way as Emo stands to his full height. The kid is tall. Taller than me even. The driver follows him as h
e slumps down the aisle, his black hood still up. Several of the kindergarten kids go wide-eyed in horror as he approaches. Maybe they’re thinking he really is the Grim Reaper.

  Emo takes the seat in the first row opposite Jeremy and the little girl dressed in the princess outfit. He looks back at me and makes a gesture like he’s clicking his lighter. In response, his two caveman buddies beside me pull out their lighters and flick them at me. But they do it behind the seat, so the driver can’t see them. “I bet that backpack of yours is pretty flammable,” the first caveman says.

  I wave at the driver. “Ah, Ida?” I shout. “Okay if I move again?”

  “Be quick about it! We’ve got to get back on the road. The snow is getting worse.”

  I shift down several rows to the middle of the bus. There I nudge the Cheese Kid to move over. Somehow he now seems to be the sanest of the bunch. “Want one?” he asks, offering me a cheese curd.

  Jeremy is still wearing the little girl’s tiara. As the kindie hangs a necklace around his neck, he shakes his head slowly at me, narrowing his eyes. Mr. Grim Reaper just looks, well, grim. I am so in for it.

  As the driver pulls back out onto the snowy highway, Cheese Kid hurls some cheese curds back at a group of girls. He apparently has an endless supply of cheese products. In response, the girls pull out their yogurt tubes and start flicking them at him. I feel a glob of yogurt splat me in the side of the face. “Hey!” I say.

  “Sorry,” one of the girls says. “I was aiming for Chucky.” The cheese kid’s name is Chucky? Like that Chuck E. Cheese kids’ restaurant? It’s got to be a nickname. It’s just too perfect. His hair is orange. And his T-shirt is the same orange as that powdered cheese that comes with the boxed mac and cheese. Cheese is clearly his thing.

  “Hey, new kid,” he says to me. “Mark the Merman. I see you’ve been making friends.” He lifts his chin at Jeremy and Emo, who are still glaring at me from their seats.

  “I don’t want any more trouble,” I say. “I just want to be left alone.”

  “That’s going to be tough in a bus full of kids, right?”

  Yeah, but it’s never a problem on a city bus. I can be alone in a bus so crowded I’ve got to ride standing, hanging on to a bar. Everyone ignores everyone else, even as we’re forced to stand there smelling each other’s armpits. And no one throws cheese. Or yogurt. Or tries to set the bus seats—or me—on fire.

  “You were expelled from your last school, eh?” Chucky Cheese asks.

  “No, I was not expelled.”

  “What are you doing here then? Why are you starting school at, like, the end of November?”

  “Why is everyone here so nosy?”

  The kid blinks at me with lashes so blond they’re almost invisible. “Just asking,” he says. I notice his face is covered in freckles. He tosses a cheese curd up in the air and catches it in his mouth. I can hear it squeak against his teeth as he chews. “My parents moved me here last January,” Chucky says. “It sucked.”

  So Chucky Cheese has been here less than a year. But he fits right in. Or maybe he’s what this evil bus turns newcomers into—cheese-curd hurlers. I have to get out of here, quick.

  “And you’re coming from Vancouver?” he asks, chewing another curd. “Moving here must really suck then.”

  “Yeah, well, this is the last place I wanted to go. I mean, I love my granny and everything—” Crap, I shouldn’t have admitted I moved in with Gran.

  “You live with your grandma? That seriously sucks.”

  I shake my head. “Nah, she’s okay.” She’s kind of cool, actually. She sews costumes for a living. Dance outfits, Halloween getups, theater wardrobes. She ships the clothes to customers all over the place, through her website shop. Her Elvis-impersonator costumes are her biggest sellers. Go figure.

  In fact, Gran taught my mom to sew. Now Mom has her own home business too. She has a specialty-clothing line, making each dress by hand. Or at least she did. I have no idea what’s going to happen now.

  “So where are your parents?” Emo asks. “They move in with your granny too?”

  “No.”

  “Away on business?”

  “No.”

  “On holiday?”

  “No.”

  “Are they dead?”

  “No!”

  “In the army?”

  “No.”

  “Spies?”

  “No!” I scowl at him. “What are you? Some kind of detective?”

  Chucky pushes his face close to mine. He smells like cheese. Big surprise. “Did they give you up because you have some kind of weird disease?” he asks. “Like that flesh-eating disease? Are you all gross and contagious? Am I going to catch something just from talking to you?”

  “No!” God, this kid is relentless. He just won’t give up. I sigh. “My dad lives in Toronto, okay?”

  “So why didn’t you go live with him?”

  Good question. If I had gone to live with him, I wouldn’t be here, in hell, right now.

  Chapter Five

  I stare out at at the snow sliding sideways on the bus windows. “So...?” asks the cheese kid.

  “So what?”

  “Why didn’t you go live with your dad?”

  What can I tell this kid that will shut him up? Dad hasn’t been in my life for years. I get cards with money in them on my birthday and at Christmas. He remarried and has a whole other family. I have a half sister and half brother I’ve never met. When things got hard with my mom, he just left. “I don’t know him very well,” I say finally.

  “What about your mom? Is she dead?”

  “No.” I try to ignore Chucky, but he keeps staring at me until I can’t take it anymore. “My mom got sick, okay?” I say. This wasn’t the first time either. Every time Mom gets sick, I stay with Gran. And I’ve stayed with Gran a lot—every Christmas and summer and whenever Mom needs a break. But up until now those visits have only been for a week or two at a time.

  Chucky leans in, like he’s hoping for some big secret. “What kind of sick?”

  I don’t answer.

  “Does she have, like, cancer or something?”

  “No.”

  “Heart attack? Stroke?”

  “No.”

  “Grace’s mom had a stroke. Now she talks funny.” Chucky lifts his chin toward the weird girl.

  Well, that news about her mom explains why Grace is reading a book on how the brain works. “That sucks,” I say.

  “Grace used to sit here with us, in the middle of the bus. After her mom got sick, she started sitting up front with the kindies.”

  Now that I know what this bus is like, I figure Grace made the right choice.

  The girls squirt more yogurt our way. A blob oozes down my shoulder. Chucky Cheese kneels on his seat to lob more cheese. The girls toss more yogurt. And then out come the pudding cups. When squeezed just so, pudding cups can spray straight up to the ceiling. And it turns out nearly every kid on the bus has a pudding cup, like they’ve been saving them just for this. Gobs of pudding rain down. I hold my hands up over my head so pudding won’t get in my hair. Now I know why Emo keeps his hoodie up all the time.

  “Stop that! Stop it right now!” The bus driver yells through the mic. Then she stops the bus again. Once she has pulled over, she marches down the aisle. “Who started this?” she yells. “Come on, out with it!” Her face is red. A vein in her neck pulses.

  “It was the new kid,” somebody shouts.

  Ida glares down at me. “Mark?”

  “It wasn’t me! I don’t even have pudding,” I say. “I didn’t bring a lunch!”

  “You didn’t have lunch?” Ida seems worried, and I wonder if she’s about to offer me a granola bar or something.

  “I brought money for lunch,” I say. “Like I always do.”

  “Well,” she says, sniffing. “Isn’t it nice that some of us can afford to buy lunch every day.”

  “I don’t—I’m not rich.”

  But she isn’t listen
ing. She’s still after the culprit. She eyes Chucky.

  “Don’t look at me,” he says. “I don’t have pudding.” He holds up a bag of curds. “I have cheese.”

  “He really likes cheese,” one of the kids says.

  Oh, ya think? He likes throwing cheese, at least.

  The driver pushes on down the row, interrogating each of the kids. But no one confesses to the first pudding squirt or to squirting pudding, period, even though the bus is now dripping with the stuff.

  “All right,” she says finally. “You’ll all clean up the pudding.”

  There’s a collective groan from the kids as Ida goes back to her seat to grab some paper towel. She rips off sheets and hands them to everyone. I take mine and wipe the pudding off my shoulder before tackling the ceiling.

  So this is what Emo meant when he said the ride home takes longer when Ida “has to deal with things.”

  “Does something like this happen every day?” I ask Chucky.

  “Pretty much.”

  I sigh and accidentally catch Weird Girl’s—I mean, Grace’s—eye as she cleans pudding off the back of her seat. She raises one eyebrow and gives me a look as if to say, Can you believe this?

  Suddenly she seems like the sanest kid on the bus. The safest anyhow, even if she is sitting only two rows down from Jeremy and Emo. I can see now why she chooses to sit so close to the driver.

  Then, god, Chucky uses his pudding to draw on the window. He draws a… not sure I should say what. Let’s just say it rhymes with Venus. On the window. With pudding.

  Okay, that’s it. I’ve had enough of Chucky. The kid is gross and a walking food fight. I head down the aisle, ducking the pudding-covered balls of paper towel kids are now lobbing around the bus.

  I stop at the weird girl’s seat. Grace’s seat. “Okay if I sit here?” I ask.

  “Sure,” she says. “But do you think that’s a good idea right now?” She nods at Jeremy and Emo.

  Emo is leaning across the aisle, showing Jeremy something on his phone. They both smile back at me, like they’ve got something on me.

  I drop my backpack on the floor. “I’m assuming we’re sitting close enough to the driver that those two won’t chance—anything.”