See You at Harry's (6 page)

I want to go with him. I want to so much.

“You go,” I say.

He shrugs and lopes off down the road toward his pine cave, as if he doesn’t care a single bit that I don’t join him. He doesn’t even look back once.

When I step on the bus, I pause at the third seat. It’s empty again. Waiting for me. But I keep walking all the way to the back. I keep my jaw clenched as I sit where Holden sat yesterday, in front of the same two boys. The people around me get quiet. It seems like ages before the bus finally starts down the road again.

One of the boys cranes his head close to the back of mine and sniffs.

“Looks like Hildy finally had a sex change,” he says.

There’s a brief quiet, then everyone around me laughs.

“See you at Hawee’s!” someone farther back whines.

I stare straight ahead at first, just like Holden did.

“Hey, Hildy,” one of the jerks whispers. “Come back here and sit on my lap.”

I feel a hot sting on my ear. One of them has pinged me just like they did to Holden.

My fingers curl into a fist.

“Hey, Hildy, how ’bout a kiss?”

Another ping.

I squeeze my fist tighter. My eyes are watering. How could Holden sit here like this and not
do
something?

“Aw, I think Hildy’s gonna cry.”

“What’s wrong, Hildy? Come back here and I’ll make you feel better.”

Someone yanks my hair.

“Nope, not a wig!”

I wipe one eye with the back of my hand.
Do not cry. Do not cry.

“I’m sorry, did that hurt, Hildy?”

Shut up. Shut up, shut up, shut up.

Another tear slips down my face.

“Oh, my God. She’s really crying!”

“Maybe she didn’t want to be a girl after a —”

The force of my fist against his jaw shuts him up midsentence.

The bus is silent again. I realize there might be a camera in the back of the bus and I’m going to be in serious trouble. Far more than if I’d skipped with Holden. I expect Trudy to pull over and haul me off the bus. But we keep moving on as if nothing happened.

I stay turned around, staring at the jerks. It’s funny because I realize they look alike. Thing One and Thing Two. I stare at them and hope they feel my hate burning their skin.

Thing One holds his jaw with a hurt-puppy look on his face.

“You’ll regret that,” Thing Two says.

I raise my aching fist at him. “You leave my brother alone,” I say.

“Oooooh. I’m scared.”

“You should be.”

He laughs. “You’re the one who should be scared. You and your queer brother. I can’t believe he needs a little kid to stand up for him. What a wuss.”

Thing One doesn’t say anything. Maybe my fist managed to do some damage. My fist sure throbs enough. Still, it seems to ache more with the desire to smash Thing Two’s nose.

The Things whisper threats in my ear all the way to school. No one sits with me, even though the bus is packed by the time we make the last pickup. I have no idea what the Things are doing behind my back, but I’m sure it’s not pretty. I hold my backpack tightly, ready to make a run for it as soon as we get to school. But everyone is up before me, and it’s obvious no one is going to let me out of my seat.

I sit back and wait, my cheeks burning. Day two at school and I’ve officially made enemies with everyone on the bus.

When it’s finally my turn to get up, I walk slowly, not knowing what I’ll face when I get off. When I reach Trudy, she puts out her hand to stop me. I’m afraid to look her in the eye, so I concentrate on her ugly hat instead. It’s grimy and the pom-pom hardly has any yarn left on it.

“You watch yourself, missy,” she says. “I know your type. Your brother, too. Troublemakers. I don’t stop my bus ’less someone’s bleeding normally, but if I see you act up again, you’ll be off my bus in a heartbeat.”

I feel my mouth drop open in shock.

She makes a face, imitating me.

We stare at each other like that for a few seconds. Then she moves her pink wrinkled arm, and I nearly fall down the steep steps trying to get away.

Ran’s waiting for me at my locker.

“What happened to you?” he asks.

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” he says, eyeing me up and down. “You look awful. Why are your ears bright red?”

Ran is wearing a brown shirt that says
DIG IT
in green letters.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

He keeps looking at me anyway. Like Charlie, he knows if he just waits long enough, I’ll cave. But I know he’ll be disappointed in me if I tell him what I did. Ran is a pacifist. He knows the art of ignoring bullies. I guess Holden does, too.

I hold my sore fist in my other hand.

“I’m fine,” I say.

He tilts his head a little to study me.

“OK,” he says, as if he knows I’m lying.

He turns to leave. The back of his shirt says
COMPOST FOR A CURE
, and underneath is a picture of the planet with a Band-Aid on it. As I watch him walk away, I wish he’d come back. I wait for him to turn around, but he just keeps walking.

At the end of school, I walk slowly to my line for the bus. I swear Trudy gives me the evil eye when I get on. The dirty pom-pom on her hat tips to one side. And the
TRUDY TRUDY TRUDY
letters feel like a chant.
Trudy’s gonna get ya.
I don’t know why she hates me. I’m not the one who started it. What about the ear pinging? What about how those jerks treated Holden? She didn’t seem to mind
that.

As I walk past, I look down at the dirty aisle floor. I mean to sit in the third row again, like Holden made me promise, but my legs have other ideas and I’m heading to the back of the bus for more torture. Maybe Holden and I are more alike than I thought.

Things One and Two take their seats behind me. They lean over and grunt in my ears before they sit down.

I look out the window at all the other students waiting in line for the sane buses.

I lean forward and squeeze the straps of my backpack. Exactly fourteen stops before my house. Thirteen. Twelve. The Things don’t bother me again, but I swear I can feel their silent insults stinging the back of my head. As we come up over the hill to my house, I slide over to the edge of my seat. But Trudy doesn’t slow down. “Hey! You missed the stop!” someone yells.

But the bus keeps chugging down the hill. When we get to the very bottom, she slows and pulls over. I get up and walk down the aisle, careful to watch the floor in case someone sticks out a foot to trip me.

“Sorry ’bout that. Didn’t even see you there,” Trudy says when I get to the front of the bus.

I start to step down, but she still hasn’t opened the door.

“Guess I’m used to looking for your brother,” she says in a high-pitched, lispy way just like the Things did when they were talking “gay.”

I’m too shocked to reply. The door swings open, and I jump off.

Was this legal? Could she do this? I shake my head as the bus pulls away. Then I look up the long, gradual hill I have to climb. It’s September and it’s still hot. I stand there, listening to the bus drive away. I wonder if Trudy is checking her mirror to see if I’m walking up the hill yet. Maybe I’ll get kidnapped, then rescued somehow. Then my parents could sue Trudy.

As I start to walk, my eyes fill with tears. I feel like a big baby for being so upset, but it really does hurt to be wronged. It hurts so much.

And then I realize. This is probably what Holden feels like every day.

N
O ONE’S HOME
when I finally get to the house. I drop my backpack in the hall by the door and go into the kitchen to pour myself some water. The house feels so quiet, I decide to go back outside and sit on the front steps. The sun blasts down on me, and I feel a drip of sweat slowly slip down my chest and into my belly button under my shirt. I leave my cup on the steps and walk to Holden’s tree cave and crawl inside. It’s cool and welcoming in a silent way. Holden has wiped the ground smooth, probably so he won’t get pine needles on his pants. I sit and listen to the traffic go by. I wish Holden were here now. Or Ran. But then I think about how disappointed they’d be if I told them what I did on the bus. Holden because I’d broken my promise about sitting in the back, and Ran because I’d used my fists instead of words.

I look at the hand that punched Thing One. I hear the ugly words they hissed in my ears. Feel the sting of their fingers. And I hate them. I hate the way they think.

After a while, my bum starts to get sore from sitting so long, and I climb out of Holden’s cave and walk home. Sara, Charlie, and Doll are on the living-room floor, playing Connect Four. My mom is in the kitchen, making dinner.

“Ferny! Come play!” Charlie yells when he sees me. He makes Doll do a happy dance by bouncing her up and down on the rug so it looks like she’s jumping.

“No, thanks. I have homework.”

“What’s up your butt?” Sara asks.

Charlie makes a farting noise.

“Nothing,” I say.

She raises her eyebrows. “You’re a sucky actress, Fern.”

I stop and glare at her. “Do you know about the bus?”

She shifts on the floor. “What do you mean?”

“Do you know what happens on the bus? To Holden?”

“The wheels on the bus go wound and wound,” Charlie sings.

“Shut up,” I say.

“Bad word!”

I glare at Sara.

“What happens?” she asks. But I have the feeling she has a good idea.

“They hurt him,” I say quietly, gesturing toward Charlie to make it clear I can’t go into detail in front of him.

She sighs, as if she can’t believe she has to explain it all to me. “I didn’t ride the bus senior year, but, yeah, I heard that some of the kids gave him a hard time.”

“And you didn’t do anything?”

“What do you want me to do? I told him to tell Mom and Dad, and he wouldn’t.”

“So that’s it?”

“Yes? Look, what happens on the bus is Holden’s problem. Not yours.”

“Holden doesn’t have a
problem.
They do!”

She flips a red checker into a slot. “He has a problem.”

“Stop calling it that!”

Charlie claps his hands over his ears.

“Sorry, Fern. But until Holden embraces who he is, it’s going to be”— she pauses —“an issue. That’s his problem.” She drops another checker in a slot. “It’s Holden’s choice to come out to us and ask for help. He needs to be the one to change things. I only egg him on so he realizes we all know. We all
know,
Fern — me, you, Mom, and Dad. But he’s the one who needs to say the words. He has to be the one to take the first step.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s how it works.”

“But what about the bus? Can’t you and I do something? Can’t we tell Mom —?”

“Tell Mom what?” my mom asks from the doorway.

Sara flashes me a shut-up glare.

“Nothing,” I say.

“Holdy has a pwoblem,” Charlie says, trying to shove two checkers down a slot.

My mom and Sara exchange a look, and that’s when Holden walks in the door.

We all turn toward him. He seems . . . great. I can’t imagine where he’s been all day, but he is sort of, well, glowing. He is radiant.

“What’s going on?” he asks.

My mom swings her dish towel over her shoulder. “And where have you been all day?”

Holden’s face falls. “What do you mean?”

“The school called. You weren’t there today.”

“Oh.”

My mom sighs. “Skipping already, Holden? On the second day? You can’t do this, honey.”

“What did you tell them? Did you tell them I was home sick?”

My mom shrugs. “I’m not going to do this again, Holden. You’ve used up your Get Out of Jail Free card today. There are no more.”

I can’t believe my mom actually covered for him! And from the sound of it, this isn’t the first time.

Holden shrugs again. “Thanks.”

“We need to talk about why you skipped school on the second day,” my mom says.

He looks at me accusingly.

“I didn’t say anything!” I say.

My mom turns to me. “You know something about this, Fern?”

The glow on Holden’s face is gone.

“Holdy has a pwoblem,” Charlie says again, matter-of-factly.

“Shut
up,
Charlie,” I say. I turn to Holden. “I swear I didn’t.”

“Didn’t
what,
Fern? What are you two hiding?” my mom asks.

“Just forget it!” Holden storms away and up to his room.

“Come back here!” my mom yells. But his door slams, and we all know he’s not coming back. She comes closer to me. “Are you going to fill me in on what’s going on?”

I shake my head, even though I want to tell her. I want to make her fix it. But I promised.

“Sara?” she asks.

“You need to ask him,” she says. But instead of going upstairs, my mom goes back to the kitchen.

“Ferny, you play with me,” Charlie says from the floor.

Sara bolts up before I can answer. “Have fun!” she says, sauntering into the kitchen after my mom.

Charlie pushes the trap that releases the checkers, laughing as they clank on top of each other into a heap. But I hardly pay attention. Am I the only one who cares that Holden is upset?