Unspeakable Things(15)

“You shouldn’t have spied on them.”

She had our regular seat saved, the new regular seat across the aisle from Gabriel, the one I’d convinced her to move to after the glove incident, but he hadn’t yet boarded. The Lilydale school buses picked up high schoolers first, which was backward in my mind, but I suppose they figured the older kids could handle extra motoring time better than the little kids.

After picking up the high schoolers, the buses arrived at the combination elementary and middle school to load up on us K–8 kids before the route officially began. Town kids were dropped off first, followed by the Hollow kids who lived on Lilydale’s perimeter, with deep-country kids getting off very last. That route was reversed in the morning. That meant that Seph and me were first on—the sun barely peach fuzz on the horizon—and last off.

An itty-bitty bonus of this crap deal was that on the days he rode the bus, I got to watch Gabriel walk to and from it. Some afternoons, his mom was waiting for him on the front porch of their clean-looking, roomy rambler, a row of hostas bordering each side of the sidewalk, turning it into a green carpet. She always appeared happy to see him. I wondered what she’d think of me.

The thought gave me a shivery thrill and brought me back into the moment.

“Yeah, big duh I shouldn’t have spied on them,” I said to Sephie. “It wasn’t like I tried to.”

Clam swaggered down the aisle, his elbow connecting with my shoulder, maybe accidentally. I studied his back, looking for evidence of him being attacked. He still seemed like he was behaving rougher than usual, but that was it. I rubbed the sore spot he’d made, wondering if Sephie knew he was the one that Betty had been referring to. Clam’d been on our bus route forever. Sephie knew him as well as me, maybe better. Plus, Clam’s best friend, Wayne Johnson, had a crush on Sephie, and she seemed to be returning the favor. He was a year younger than her and even poorer than we were, but Sephie liked the attention. Maybe Wayne had mentioned something.

I dropped my voice. “You hear what happened to Clam?”

Sephie shrugged, her face a full-on pout. I realized she’d been crotchety since I’d boarded, only giving me half her attention.

“Jeez Louise, Seph, what’s your problem?”

The bus lurched away from the curb. No Gabriel.

Karl, our ham-faced bus driver, seemed to be checking over all the boys, maybe watching for Gabriel, just like I was doing. Sephie took so long to answer that I thought she didn’t hear me. Finally, she looked me square in the face. “I’m failing chemistry.”

That jolted me like a snake bite. “Dad’s not gonna like that.” He hated any attention drawn to us or our house.

She stared glumly at her hands. “I know.”

My gut sank lower and lower. Dad was an equal-opportunity rager. If he was mad at her, everyone’s life was going to be miserable. “How could you?”

She shrugged and kicked at the worn book bag at her feet. “It’s a stupid class, anyhow.”

Her chin quaked. This was going from bad to worse. Sephie’d made herself invisible by being a shy, mostly C student who was good at volleyball and never stepped out of line. If she wept right now, though, she was done for. Tears guaranteed her a terrible nickname, as soon as the doofuses around us could figure out anything that rhymed with “crybaby.”

The bus pulled away from the school. I continued to massage the spot Clam had bumped as something occurred to me. “Hey, you said you’re failing. That means you haven’t failed yet, right? Want me to help you study?”

Sephie leaned forward to tug an envelope out of her book bag. “You could try, but it won’t make any difference. I still need Mom and Dad to sign this letter saying I have two days to get my grade up to a D, or it’s summer school for me.”

“Silly Sephie, it makes all the difference. If we work hard tonight and tomorrow and you get a good-enough grade on your final, you pass. Ergo, no summer school, which means no angry Dad. You know he always likes it better when we come up with a plan rather than just bringing him bad news.”

I could see her wheels spinning. “You think I could learn all of chemistry in two nights?”

I moaned. “You don’t know any of it?”

“It’s a hard class! And Mrs. Tatar is the worst. You’ll see when you get to high school.”

I doubted it. Besides, Mom always said a bad teacher was a window, not a wall. I opened my mouth to argue, but before I could squeak out a word, the whole mood of the bus exploded.

“Green Goblin!”

I don’t know who shouted it, but our response was automatic. Everyone on my side of the bus sucked in their breath and glued their faces to the windows to search for the green Chevy Impala. Those across the aisle yelled at us to confirm the Goblin sighting. He’d had that nickname forever, maybe gotten it when he was in high school. He’d gone to Lilydale, graduated about the same time as Dad.

Goblin had a harsh face, all angles and stubble, lips so thin they weren’t more than a cut, black porcelain-doll eyes. He looked like he smelled sour, though he couldn’t be older than forty. He mostly kept to himself, but he exuded that creepy frequency that kids’ radars picked up on. It was a hard-and-fast rule that we all yelled out “Green Goblin” and held our breath on the occasions his car passed our lumbering bus, which was more often than you’d expect because he lived at the end of the bus route, just down the road from me and Sephie. We were supposed to hold our breath when we ran into him in public, too, but since he was our neighbor, Sephie and me let that rule slide sometimes. This time of year in particular, we’d spot him when we’d bike over to check out his patch of wild strawberries. They grew just off the road, on his side of the ditch, but we were both always too chicken to run over and grab them, even though they fruited early and shone like rubies in the sun.