Jesus Land. Julia Scheeres
minutes pass. There’s a faint clatter that grows louder and I open my eyes to see headlights tunneling toward us through the mist. David stiffens before recognizing the unmistakable rattle of a tractor, then goes back to pacing the road.
When the giant machine clanks into view, the farmer riding it lifts his arm at a right angle to his body as if he were swearing on the Good Book, and I wave back grandiosely, with both hands, as if I were the Queen of the Rose parade. Party Hardy.
After the farmer chugs by, David walks to the middle of the road, crosses his arms, and squints into the mist.
“You in a hurry to go somewheres?” I yell over the tractor’s wake. He doesn’t answer, and I laugh and it comes out as a belch, and I laugh again.
As I’m practicing a hip-thrusting dance move I saw watching American Bandstand while Mother was at work, the low roar of a diesel engine rises over the fields.
David backs up to the side of the road, and I pick up my backpack and stand beside him.
“Relax,” I tell him.
“Easy for you to say,” he says, giving me a knowing—and disapproving—look. So he knows I’ve been drinking. So what. He’s always been such a goody-two-shoes.
We both turn to watch the headlights grow brighter. It’s the school bus, No. 26, just like it said in the letter. The yellow tube shudders to a stop ten feet past us, and as we walk around it, I keep my eyes on the ground. We’re at the end of the route, and it’s full of kids by now, all staring down at us through the windows, sizing us up. Not a care in the world.
The door folds open with a bang.
“There’s s’posed to be three kids at this stop! Where’s the third one at?” shouts the driver, a fat woman in a purple pantsuit. The ceiling light above her seat makes her white bouffant glow like a sunlit cloud. She studies the clipboard in her hands as I climb the short stairway.
“Name, first and last.”
“Hello, my name is Julia,” I say brightly. “Julia Scheeres.”
She crosses my name off her list and looks up as I step aside for David. Her mouth drops open when she sees him, and she turns back to me.
“Who’s that?” she asks.
“I’m David Scheeres,” he answers quietly.
Her eyes dart between David and me.
“He’s my brother,” I say impatiently, aware of a murmuring behind us.
“Brother, huh?” she says flatly, as if I were lying.
“Brother, yes.” I bend to find his name on her list and tap on it. “Right there. David Scheeres.”
She crosses out his name, shaking her head. Why does this have to happen today, of all days? Can’t we please be normal just for once? My heart crimps despite my fuzzy-headedness.
“And where’s the third kid?” she asks, lifting her list to her face, frowning.
“That would be Jerome Scheeres. He won’t be joining us today.”
She arches her stenciled eyebrows.
“Jerome, huh?” She grunts and scribbles something next to his name before scooping a hand toward the innards of the bus. “Go find yerselves a seat.”
I swivel around; rows of white faces point in our direction. A pocket of space materializes at the back of the bus and I throw my head back, put on my Farrah smile, and I sashay down the narrow plank of the aisle, carefully avoiding protruding limbs. Not a care in the world.
Two rows before we reach the empty bench, a black boot slams down in front of me, heel first. My eyes sweep over it and up the jean-clad leg and the United Methodist T-shirt to the orange hair of the boy wearing it. It’s one of them. One of the graveyard boys. Beside him sits a smaller, orange-haired kid with the same pug nose; they must be kin. Brothers.
The graveyard boy glares up at me, his eyes sparking. A corner of his mouth jerks upward like a growling dog.
“Nigger lover,” he snarls. There’s spit tobacco stuck in his gums. I stare at his mouth.
My Farrah smile collapses and hatred wells up in me, too, matching his hatred ounce for ounce, but there’s also fear kicking at my ribcage. The bus lurches forward and I stumble over his leg and fall onto the empty bench. When I look up, David’s swaying in the middle of the aisle, gawking down at the boot.
I stand. “David!”
He gingerly lifts his foot over the boot and when he’s mid-stride, the boot rockets up and slams into his crotch. Laughter clatters around us, and the graveyard boy joins in as he retracts his leg. David twists his mouth into a sick smile and shakes his head, as if he were dealing with a mischievous child.
I grab his wrist to pull him to the bench, pushing him into the spot next to the window. For the duration of the ride to Harrison, as ripe cornfields whisk past the bus windows, David keeps his head bent and his eyes clamped shut. I try to pray, too, but my mind goes blank after the “Dear God.”
The bus rumbles up Harrison’s curved driveway and stops at the end of a long line of yellow buses. We wait until all the other kids drain out to join the throng of bodies moving up the sidewalk before standing. The driver watches us walk up the aisle in the rearview mirror, but turns her head when she sees me glaring at her. Witch.
At the school entrance, two middle-aged men in dark suits, Principal Day and Assistant Principal May—we were warned during orientation that yelling “May Day!” would get us an automatic detention—stand on opposite sides of the doorway, greeting students.
“Welcome back!” Principal Day says to me as we cross the threshold. Assistant Principal May looks blankly at David, who glances at him then looks away.
As we walk side by side over the foyer’s gold linoleum floor, I try to catch David’s eye, but he’s scanning the crush of white faces, searching—as I’ve been—for a sign. A nod. A smile. A kind look. A potential friend. Instead, there’s a lot of staring, a lot of whispering. A lot of eyes darting back and forth between us, and Dear God, I could use some Comfort now.
The foyer dead-ends in a cafeteria with a barnlike peaked ceiling. We wind through round blue tables in the center of the room to avoid a row of boys in baseball caps slumped against the wall.
“Woah, nice udders!” one of them shouts to a girl strolling by them. She presses her books to her chest and quickens her pace; they laugh at her.
Before we turn down separate hallways to our lockers, I grab David’s arm. He turns to me with wide eyes.
“Remember Florida,” I say. Remember there’s a better place than this.
He nods solemnly. I step away from him, and a moment later he’s engulfed by a wave of white bodies.
I locate my locker along the long gray wall of lockers and consult the palm of my hand, where I wrote the combination in permanent ink last night. After two tries, the door wobbles open and I dump the textbooks for my afternoon classes in the bottom of the narrow cavity. The first hour warning buzzer sounds over the hallway speakers, and the dim corridor reverberates with the sound of hundreds of lockers slamming shut. First hour starts in two minutes; get caught in the hallways after it starts, automatic detention.
I follow the stampede up a trash-strewn stairway to the second floor. As luck would have it, my first period is Algebra. Math, my worst subject. Most of the seats are already taken when I walk through the classroom door. The Preppies, all pink and green Izods and Sperry topsiders, have claimed the back rows, setting their backpacks on the chairs in front of them to wall themselves off from everyone else. Next to the window are the Hoods, in their black jeans and hooded sweatshirts. In the front rows are kids with pencils and calculators aligned on their desktops: the Nerds. The middle of the room is sprinkled with kids who don’t appear to fit into any of