Camille McPhee Fell Under the Bus (2 page)

“Camille!” she yelled. “Are you okay?”

I was flat on my back, staring up into the sun. Mrs. Spittle got out of her bus and helped me stand up.

“I didn’t even see you, Camille. Are you all right?” Mrs. Spittle brushed the snow off my coat with energetic swats. It felt a little bit like she was karate-chopping me with her bare, big-knuckled hands.

I nodded. Mrs. Spittle grabbed my backpack and cooler and handed them to me.

“An all-white coat is a bad idea,” she said. She put her hands on her hips and looked down at me. “You even have on white boots. That outfit is a complete safety hazard. You blend in with the scenery.”

I stretched my arms out and looked at my coat. It was no longer pure white. Dirty slush and ice had spattered dark spots all down my front. I looked like a Dalmatian.

“Are you good enough to board and go to school?” she asked.

I looked at the steps leading up to the bus.

“We ran over Camille McPhee!” somebody shouted from inside. Multiple gasps floated out of the bus’s open door.

Mrs. Spittle charged back onto her bus.

“Nobody ran over anybody!” she yelled down the aisle. She swung her blond bob ferociously from side to side.

“I think I see blood,” Danny said. “I think we cracked her head open.”

Mrs. Spittle pulled the bus’s handset from the loudspeaker.

“Listen up,” she said. “Camille is fine. She did not receive any open wounds.”

“I can see blood all over her coat!” somebody said.

Mrs. Spittle placed her hand out in front of her, as if she were signaling them to stop. “There is no blood. Camille’s coat has been splattered with dirty snow. She fell down. She fell under the bus.”

I heard everybody on the bus laughing hard. I felt more and more light-headed. I wondered how long it would take everyone to forget about Camille McPhee falling under a school bus. I hoped two weeks.

“The next person who makes a sound is getting a written warning,” Mrs. Spittle said into the handset. She talked so loudly that the loudspeaker squeaked, releasing sounds like metal scraping metal. “And the person after that is going to get a written warning
and
help me clean up this bus.”

She had silenced everyone. Written warnings got mailed to your parents. And cleaning up the bus meant
coming face to face with dangerous floor garbage. She looked at me.

“Camille, are you going to board?” she asked, sitting back down in the driver’s seat.

I looked into my cooler. Everything had fallen out, even my orange. I was already feeling shaky, and I could see my ham sandwich and mozzarella sticks lying lifeless in their plastic Baggies underneath the bus. Then I looked back up the stairs. The metal ridges designed to prevent slipping were coated in slush. I turned and looked at the long row of blurry faces fogging the windows, staring out at me. The bus looked full. Who would I sit next to? Usually, I didn’t care. But today I did.

“I don’t feel good,” I said, tears rolling onto my cheeks.

“You’re not coming to school?” Mrs. Spittle asked, fastening her seat belt.

I shook my head.

She frowned. “From now on, please walk slowly. It’s your best and safest rate of speed.”

“Okay,” I said.

I crept back across the road, this time waddling like Polly, and waited at the top of my driveway. Once the bus left, I wanted to pick up my food. Mrs. Spittle waved to me as the bus leapt forward and rolled down
the road. I waved back, and as I did, one of the bus’s back tires ran over my orange, squashing it flat, shooting juice and pulp several feet. One large squirt landed right in my eye.

After some rubbing, I opened my eyes and saw Mr. Lively’s dog, Pinky, dart into the road for my sandwich. I had two neighbors: the Livelys and the Bratbergs. I thought they were both interesting. But only one of them had a dog. Pinky was a pure white and deaf Dalmatian. My dad called him an albino. Mr. Lively was a very thin and mostly hairless person who only heard you when you yelled his name really loud several times. I watched Pinky inhale my sandwich and scarf down all my food. I hoped he hadn’t eaten the wrappers. Those aren’t good for dogs.

“Camille! Camille!”

The sound was coming from the Bratbergs’. I looked into their yard. I didn’t see anybody.

“Up here!”

I looked up. Four people were standing on top of the house: Mrs. Bratberg and her three kids—Dustin, Brody, and Samantha. Those three used to ride the bus with me. But not anymore. They got kicked off. And it’s permanent. Because they opened up the back emergency door while we were moving and threw a first grader’s backpack out onto the road. And it had a Game Boy in it.

I felt some sympathy for them, because they didn’t know that the backpack had a Game Boy in it. Because backpacks aren’t made out of see-through material. After that, the Bratbergs didn’t go to school. They learned everything at home.

“Camille! Are you sick?” Mrs. Bratberg called to me.

“Not really,” I said. “Are you stuck on your house?”

“No, I’m teaching a lesson about gravity.”

I watched her drop something off the roof. It looked like a wad of tinfoil. All the Bratbergs stared at it.

“What was that?” I asked.

“Leftovers,” Mrs. Bratberg said.

It was clear to me that learning science in school was nothing like learning science at home.

“Is your father in town?” she asked.

I shook my head. I did not think it was smart to yell the answer, because a robber might have heard me.

“Can you come over and be a mother’s helper tomorrow?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

Mrs. Bratberg ran a business in her house, and sometimes she needed an extra set of hands to watch her kids. She sold things on eBay. Mostly it was stuff from her basement and garage that looked old. For a while, I thought they were antiques. But Mrs. Bratberg called them retro bargains. She said they were things from her childhood, like records and lamps and hot
pants, that had become valuable again. I could only be a mother’s helper when my father was out of town. He didn’t want me to watch the Bratberg kids even if their mom was in the next room. Because he thought I was too young to handle dangerous situations. And he thought the Bratbergs were very dangerous.

Mrs. Bratberg waved to me.

“I only need you for an hour,” she said.

I waved back. That was a relief. The Bratbergs sucked a lot of my energy. I watched her throw something else off their roof. It looked like a loaf of bread. Then I turned to go inside. When I climbed the front steps to my house, my legs wobbled like pudding.

I kicked off my snow boots at the front door and stumbled down the hall in my socks. I felt very dizzy. I didn’t peek back in at my mother. I wasn’t ready to talk about my day yet. When I got to my room, I collapsed on my squeaky bed. I crawled under the covers and tried to pretend like none of this had happened. Like fourth grade was still going pretty good.

Did you just fall underneath Mrs. Spittle’s bus? Did you just miss chocolate-milk day? Did Pinky just eat all your food and is your blood sugar so low that you could slip into a coma?
I groaned and reached for some jelly beans that I kept in my dresser drawer. Because I didn’t have a single friend who would stick up for me, I was sure everybody at school was laughing about what had
happened. I was sure that nobody cared about how I was doing, or if I’d suffered a contusion.

I’d suffered one of those before. The summer before second grade, I fell off the diving board at the public swimming pool the wrong way. Instead of falling forward, into the water, I fell sideways, onto the cement. It’s actually very easy to do. Because those boards are quite wet and bouncy. And the swimming instructors make you jump off them in your bare, slippery feet.

Sally was in my swim class, and after I fell that day she came and found me in the locker room and told me, “Diving is very dangerous. They should put pillows around the pool edges.” I held a bag of frozen peas to my head and agreed with her. But nobody in my school was as nice as Sally. They were all a bunch of laughers. I hoped Japan understood how lucky it was to have her.

I wiped some hot tears off my cheeks and tried not to think so much about Sally Zook. But it was hard. Sally was very important to me. I’d wanted to be her friend from the moment I met her in her purple swim-suit. Because Sally looked a lot like Snow White, and I thought that was neat. She had pale skin, dark hair, and blue eyes, and even though she was allergic to coconut, that’s exactly what she smelled like. After we became friends in swim class, all through second and third grades she saved me a seat on the bus. Sometimes our mothers took us to the mall.

We did all the things very good friends do. Except we didn’t e-mail each other. Because her parents were afraid of computers. They had one. But Sally wasn’t allowed to use it. Except for playing video games about math and spelling. And neither one of us liked those games. We liked playing real games together. Like who could run the fastest with an egg on a spoon. Or who could hold an ice cube the longest. Or who could throw my mother’s couch cushions the farthest. But then everything changed. Sally’s dad took a job in Japan.

At first, I wasn’t worried, because Manny and Danny told Sally that it was against the law to move to a country that we’d fought against in a war. But they were wrong. When the Zooks moved in September, I sat on my front steps with my mom and we watched Sally leave. Sally waved to me from the back window of her car as her family drove to the airport, and even though I tried not to, I cried. Before she left, she promised to write and send me a bathrobe. (She called it a kimono, but the way she described it made it sound exactly like a bathrobe.) I never heard from her again.

Because, like my mother said, I was
hopeful
, I thought that when I made a friend I would have that friend in my life forever. But Sally only lasted two years. For the rest of September, I moped around the house. I moped so much that my parents took me to the zoo. There was a touring exhibit of a pack of dingoes.
As I stood watching all these dingoes, I noticed one dingo off by itself in the corner. It looked shinier than the other dingoes. Maybe that was because it was the only dingo in the sun.

As I watched that shiny dingo, I realized that it didn’t care about the rest of the pack. It looked totally content. It looked proud. And happy. I also noticed that it had a stubby tail, one only half as long as the other dingoes’ tails. If I were a dingo, that would have really bugged me, and I probably would have tried to lie on my tail so no one else could see how wimpy it looked. But this dingo didn’t care a fig about the other feisty, nipping, bushy-tailed dingoes.

That was when some guy in the crowd said, “Look at that smart dingo in the corner, flying under the radar.”

The man was talking about my dingo. That was when I realized that without Sally, the rest of fourth grade was going to be really rough. Because I didn’t need friends who would leave me or forget important promises. I needed to find myself a corner where I could sit and admire myself. So I hatched a plan. From that point on, at school, I was going to try to fly under the radar too. Other than falling underneath my own bus, I thought I was doing a decent job so far.

I ate some more jelly beans and waited for my mother to finish practicing her routine. I knew she
wouldn’t be mad at me. My mother was very sympathetic to people who fell down. Once, when she was my age, she had fallen down an escalator. She called it her only near-death experience. At department stores, she still took her time getting on escalators.

The jelly beans helped. I felt much less fuzzy. I was about to drift into a wonderful sleep. But I didn’t. I never realized how loud our phone was until it started to ring. My mother didn’t answer it. From my bedroom I heard the machine pick up. And it was a voice I recognized. It was Jimmy! The guy who worked at the paint counter at Home Depot. Jimmy was also a contractor. My mother had hired him to do some construction work for us—without my father’s permission. Which meant, of course, big trouble.

Chapter 3
Lies

“M
axine,” Jimmy said. “I can knock that wall out today!”

When I heard this, my stomach began feeling awful, like I’d just eaten eggplant. (Eggplant is a risky vegetable for me.) Jimmy’s news was terrible. Why? Knocking down walls was all part of the crisis.

The crisis started when my mother stopped watching soap operas and became a certified aerobics instructor. Her specialty was kickboxing. This meant that she chopped and kicked the air in front of her on a
pretty regular basis. Mostly, this happened in the den or the kitchen. She’d plant her feet and yell, “Hook! Uppercut! Hook! Uppercut!” She liked to throw her punches in the direction of the refrigerator.

When she agreed to teach an early-morning class at a nearby gym, she told me that she might not be able to spend as much “quality time” with me as she normally did before school. But she’d pack my cooler for me at night. And nothing else would change. That’s when my father explained what was really happening here. My mother had turned forty and she was having a midlife crisis. He said that I shouldn’t take anything she did personally. He said that was how
he
was going to handle it.

But her midlife crisis was not a small thing. Even though my father said that we couldn’t afford it because we’d just gotten out of the hole, my mother wanted to change everything: the color of the walls, the carpet, the furniture, the roof, the kitchen appliances. She even wanted to replace the toilet seat.

“Imagine how much better it would feel with a little cushion on it,” she told my father.

“I don’t want to imagine it with a little cushion, Maxine. We don’t need it. We need to stay out of the hole.”

These were the last words my father spoke before he left on a business trip to Seattle.

I heard my mother turn off her music. My coat made me sweat, but I didn’t feel like taking it off. Underneath my hood, my hair felt like somebody had warmed it in an oven. I cocked my head so I could see out my bedroom door. A bright pink blur flew down the hall. Then the bright pink blur zoomed back in the other direction. She replayed Jimmy’s message.