The Book of Lost Friends(6)

The world passes by in acute detail—the heavyset crossing guard with her blue-white hair and stooped-over body, thrusting the handheld stop sign. Wide-eyed kids motionless in the intersection. Books slip from a grade-school boy’s skinny arm, tumbling, tumbling, hitting, scattering. He stumbles, hands splayed, disappears behind the pipe truck.

No. No, no, no! Please, no. My teeth clench. I close my eyes, turn my face away, yank the steering wheel, stomp harder on the brake, but the Bug keeps sliding.

Metal strikes metal, folds and crinkles. The car bumps over something, front wheels, then back. I feel my head collide with the window and then the roof.

It can’t be. It can’t.

No, no, no.

The Bug hits the curb, bounces off, then stops, the engine rumbling, rubber smoke filling the car.

Move, I tell myself. Do something.

I picture a little body in the street. Red sweatpants, too warm for the day. Faded blue T-shirt, oversized. Warm brown skin. Big dark eyes, lifeless. I noticed him yesterday in the empty schoolyard, that boy with the impossibly long eyelashes and freshly shaved head, sitting all alone by the tumbledown concrete block fence after the older kids had picked up their new class schedules and dispersed to do whatever kids do in Augustine, Louisiana, on the last day of summer.

Is that little guy okay? I’d asked one of the other teachers, the pasty-faced, sour-lipped one who’d repeatedly avoided me in the hall as if I were giving off a bad smell. Is he waiting for somebody?

Who knows? she’d muttered. He’ll find his way home.

Time snaps into place. The metallic taste of blood tightens the back of my mouth. I’ve bitten my tongue, I guess.

There’s no screaming. No siren. No outcry for somebody to call 911.

I yank the gearshift into neutral, engage the emergency brake, make sure it’s going to hold before I unfasten the seatbelt, grab the handle, and ram the door with my shoulder until it finally opens. I tumble into the street, catching myself on numb feet and legs.

“What’d I tell you?” The crossing guard’s voice is toneless, almost languid compared to the spiraling pulse in my neck. “What’d I tell you?” she demands again, hands on her hips as she traverses the crosswalk.

I look first at the intersection. Books, squashed lunch box, plaid thermos. That’s all.

That’s it.

No body. No little boy. He’s standing on the curb. A girl who might be his older sister, perhaps thirteen or fourteen, has him by a fistful of clothing, so that he’s stretched on tippy-toe, an incongruously distended belly hanging bare beneath the hem of his T-shirt.

“What sign I gave you just now?” The crossing guard slaps a palm hard against the four-letter word STOP, then thrusts the placard within inches of his face.

The little boy shrugs. He looks more bewildered than terrified. Does he know what almost happened? The teenage girl, who probably saved his life, seems annoyed as much as anything else.

“Idjut. Look out for the trucks.” She shoves him forward a step onto the sidewalk, then releases her grip and wipes a palm on her jeans. Tossing back a handful of long, glossy dark braids with red beads on the ends, she glances toward the intersection, blinks at what I now realize is the Bug’s bumper lying in the street, the morning’s only casualty. That’s what I ran over. Not a little boy. Only metal and nuts and bolts. A minor miracle.

The pipe-truck driver and I will exchange insurance information—I hope it won’t matter that mine is out of state still—and the day will go on. He’s probably as relieved as I am. More, since he’s the one who ran the intersection. His insurance should take care of this. Good thing, considering that I can’t even afford to cough up my deductible. Between renting one of the few houses in my price range and splitting the cost of a U-Haul with a friend who was on her way to Florida, I’m tapped out until my first paycheck comes in.

The squeal of grinding gears catches me by surprise. I turn in time to watch the pipe truck disappear down the highway.

“Hey!” I yell, and run a few yards after it. “Hey! Come back here!”

The chase proves futile. He’s not stopping, the pavement is slick with the condensation of a humid south Louisiana summer morning, and I’m in sandals and a prairie skirt. The blouse I carefully ironed atop moving boxes is plastered to my skin by the time I stop.

An upscale SUV rolls by. The driver, a big-haired blonde, gapes at me, and my stomach turns over. I recognize her from the staff welcome meeting two days ago. She’s a school board member, and given my last-minute employment offer and the chilly reception so far, it’s no stretch to assume that I wasn’t her first choice for the job…or anyone else’s. Compounded with the fact that we all know why I’m here in this backwater little burg, it probably doesn’t bode well for my surviving the probationary period of the teaching contract.

“You never know until you try.” I bolster myself with the line from “Lonely People,” a hit-parade anthem of my 1970s childhood, and I walk back toward the school. Oddly, life is moving along as if nothing happened. Cars roll by. The crossing guard does her job. She pointedly avoids looking my way as a school bus turns in.

The Bug’s amputated limb has been moved out of the intersection—I do not know by whom—and people politely circumvent my car to reach the horseshoe-shaped drop-off lanes in front of the school.

Down the sidewalk, the teenage girl, maybe eighth or ninth grade—I’m still not very good at eyeballing kids—has resumed charge of the little crosswalk kid. The red beads on her braids swing back and forth across her color-block shirt as she drags the boy away, her demeanor indicating that she doesn’t consider him worth the trouble, but she knows she’d better get him out of there. She has his books and thermos jumbled in one arm and the mangled lunch box hooked by a middle finger.