Unspeakable Things(29)

Sweet lass.

I will see you around.

promise

The first time I read “swoon” was in one of Lynn’s mom’s romance novels that I borrowed (secretly) back when Lynn and I were tight. I’d been immediately disgusted by the word. As if a girl couldn’t even hold up her own head for the sheer manliness of some guy. But here I was, swooning over a cursive-scribbled yearbook note.

Sephie tugged on the back of my jeans. “I can see your plumber’s crack.”

Impossible. My shirt was tucked in. Still, I fell back into the bus seat, eyes closed and smile intact, letting the sweet smell of rain-washed lilacs and the last-day bus fumes wash over me. “Gabriel signed my annual.”

“Should I book the church now?”

Her tone chiseled through my joy. I opened one eye. “What’s riding you?”

Her head drooped, the ear nearest me poking through her brown hair. She clutched a letter, the Lilydale High School, ISD 734, rubber stamp marking its corner. It was crumpled, as if she’d been twisting it.

Both eyes were open now. “Sephie! You didn’t?”

“I failed the final. I have to go to summer school.” She was too despondent to even weep.

“Dang.” I scrambled for a way to make it better. “But hey, Dad already knew it could be coming, and besides, this weekend is a party, so he’ll be in a good mood. This is perfect timing!”

“Easy for you to say.”

“Guess what?” I asked, hoping to distract her. I leaned over, unzipped my backpack, and rummaged around until I located the pink invitation. “Did I ever tell you uptight Lynn invited me to her birthday party?”

Something like jealousy darkened Sephie’s face, but her inner sun won out. “No way! I thought you guys weren’t friends anymore.”

Another bus driver stepped onto the bus. He looked over us kids like an auctioneer at a cattle sale, then leaned to whisper into Karl’s ear. Karl glanced up at all of us in the mirror, his jowls waggling, eyes seeming to settle on me and Sephie, only that didn’t make any sense. He nodded at the other bus driver, who got off.

The bus lurched away from the curb. No Gabriel. Oh well. We’d already decided we were getting together this summer. The plan was in motion.

I tapped Sephie’s knee with the envelope. “I didn’t think we were friends anymore, either! Probably they’re going to sacrifice me.”

I didn’t know Wayne had been listening, but he snickered, leaning over me to snatch the envelope. “It’d be a virgin sacrifice.”

Sephie had Wayne’s ear in one hand and my pink party invitation in the other before I spun all the way around.

I grabbed the envelope, feeling big with Sephie on my side. “I heard what happened to Clam,” I said. I was safe saying it, mostly because Clam wasn’t riding the bus. He’d gotten detention on the very last day of school.

Wayne’s face slammed closed like shutters in the wind. “You didn’t hear shit.”

Sephie and I exchanged a look. It felt like I was on the edge of something big. “Did too. I know somebody whose mom works in the hospital.”

He pinched and twisted a soft bit of flesh at his throat, quick and violent. His eyes appeared extra shiny. “Yeah, well, it was his own fault.”

“How do you mean?”

Wayne shrugged, only it was disjointed, like someone had yanked his shoulder strings.

“Wayne?” Sephie asked.

He wasn’t going to respond, so I asked the question I was sure both Sephie and I were thinking. “Did you get attacked, too?”

He stood abruptly and made his way toward the back of the bus. Middle schoolers never sat there. It wasn’t a written rule, just the way things were. Sephie and I stayed quiet until all the townies, including the Hollow kids, stepped off the bus. Without Wayne and his weird, angry sadness, we could finally relax. It was the last day of school, after all.

Karl even agreed to crank up the radio when “The Stroke” came on. I’d already gotten burned by thinking Olivia Newton-John’s “Let’s Get Physical” was about exercise, so I was going to assume this one referred to sex. One by one, the country kids streamed off the bus until it was only me and Sephie choking on the gravel dust pluming in the open windows as Karl swung past the old Swenson house, the one that a new family had moved into last week. I was hardly paying attention. Summer. I felt wild and large, bigger than the bus, huge as the sky.

Straight ahead was Goblin’s house. Looking at it, I was gripped by the best idea.

“Sephie! Let’s go pick those wild strawberries from Goblin’s ditch.”

She shook her head so hard that her hair fell across her eyes. “You’re crazy.”

“Am not!” I stood, grabbed my backpack, and hollered to Karl, “Let us off here, please!”

Karl never said much, and he looked like a grumpy hound dog, but he handed out jelly beans on Halloween and Easter, wouldn’t yell at a kid who got sick on the bus, and broke up a fight a couple years ago without turning anyone in. He’d been staring at some of us longer than comfortable this past week, but I imagined it was the same on all the buses since Clam had been attacked.

Karl grunted a response. I wondered what bus drivers did in the summer. Construction work? In any case, he pulled over, tapping his blinker lights and pulling out the stop sign.