Marsheila Rockwell

         Art stepped on to the short yellow bus, then paused and blinked twice, as though trying to catch a stray thought that flitted by too quickly.

         "Up you go, Artemis Thacker.  I've got other stops, y'know."

         Art looked up at the driver, wondering, as always, how the old man knew his given name.  And knowing, as always, that he'd never be able to ask, forbidden by the sign just above the driver's wide rectangular mirror that read:

 

NO TALKING TO THE DRIVER WHILE

THE BUS IS IN MOTION. 

Or even when it ain't.

        

         As he stepped into the bus and found his familiar seat, Art saw that he was the lone passenger.  Kelly wasn't here today—either she hadn't been up to the trek to the bus stop or, more likely, her parents hadn't been.  To their minds, it probably didn't make any difference whether Kelly made the daily trip to St. Dymphna's or not.  No doubt it was easier not to struggle through bathing her, dressing her in her crisp plaid jumper and lifting her into that monstrosity of a wheelchair some smug, self-satisfied engineer had designed to give kids like Kelly a more "normal, productive" life.  Besides, it wasn't like she'd understand anything the Sisters had to say once she got to school, anyway.

         What Kelly's parents failed to grasp—what all their parents missed through their myriad hazes of guilt and grief and resentment—was that none of the Short Bus Kids really learned anything at the small parochial school, despite the nuns' best efforts.  But on the drive there...well, that was a different story.

         Art settled into the dark green upholstery, three rows back on the left, and looked out at his father, who stood on the corner waving as the bus pulled away from the curb.  Art waved back, though he knew his father couldn't see him.  The bus windows were tinted so that its passengers could see out, but the world couldn't see in.  Which Art figured fit Sister Perpetua's definition of irony pretty well, though he'd never be able to tell her why.

         Art watched as his father's figure grew smaller with distance, bemused by the play of emotions that never failed to wash across the widower's face at such moments.  If a painter used that many conflicting colors on a canvas he meant to frame, he'd be called undisciplined at best, or, more likely, a hack.  God did it on his father's face and He was called mysterious.  Go figure.

         Art opened his Pokemon lunchbox to see what his father had packed for him today.  He cringed a little at the garish cartoon creatures that battled across the metal surface of the box—he was too old for the fad, surely?  But he knew that, once at St. Dymphna's, the popular pocket monsters would be a source of delight, and he felt a sudden fierce love for his father for giving him that one small joy, even if he couldn't provide any of the larger ones.

         Peanut butter (creamy) and jelly (grape), on wheat, no crusts.  A juice box, chips, and an orange, already peeled and sectioned, as Art's fingers would not have the deftness come lunchtime to manage that task himself.

         And the note.  Always the note.

                 

Artemis –

 

Have a good day at school.  Remember to try your best and to laugh when you make mistakes.  And then try again.  That's what makes a smart, brave boy.  I'm very proud of you.

        

                                    Love,

                                    Dad

        

        

         Artemis.  Only his father and the old bus driver ever called him that.  And his mother, too, he guessed, when he was growing in her womb, never knowing that sticky chromosomes would rob her of her dreams of a famous pianist for a son, or a renowned doctor.

         An overabundance of his 21^st chromosome and he was doomed to ride the short bus, when he knew he could have been a prodigy.  Did God laugh when He made Art?  Laugh, then try again?  Not in Art's family, surely—his mother had died straining to push her large, special son through hips never meant to bear a child his size.  Internal hemorrhaging had taken her away from him before she'd gotten the chance to clarify whether she'd named him for a virgin moon goddess or for James West's clever but under-appreciated sidekick.  Art's father had never remarried, so there was no trying again.  Which was just as well, Art thought.  Let God find some other family to piously laud His mysterious ways after cursing them with Downs.  As far as Art was concerned, his birth was just one more piece of evidence proving what he already knew—that the Almighty really was just another hack.

         Art snapped his lunchbox shut as the bus lurched to a stop.  Tandy was next on the route, and Art straightened his preppy Catholic school tie in anticipation.  He knew it would be hanging loose and unkempt over a wrinkled, probably stained, shirt by the end of the day, but he wanted Tandy's first impression of him to be of a neat, normal schoolboy—the boy he could have been, if God had been a bit less generous in distributing his DNA.

         Tandy wouldn't remember once she got off the bus—neither would he—but it would be enough.  It would have to be.

         "Up you go, Tandy Ferguson.  I have other stops, y'know."

         Art heard her giggle before he saw her.  To someone who'd never ridden the short bus, he knew that giggle would sound vacuous and too loud, the laugh of a retard who didn't know that the joke was, and always would be, on her.

         But to Art, it was a beautiful sound, full of warmth and merriment.  It made the bus worth riding.

         Then her blonde head came into view, and Art's heart beat a little faster.  Her thick glasses magnified the golden brown of her elven eyes and her plump, rosy cheeks were the perfect setting for a smile every bit as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa's.

         Tandy came and sat beside him, not bothering to wave to her parents, who had already turned their backs on the bus in any case.

         "Hey, Art," she said, and pecked him quickly on the cheek.

         "Hey, Tandy," he replied in what he hoped was a nonchalant tone.  The slight squeak on the last syllable of her name might have given him away, though.

         She got straight to the point, with the characteristic bluntness of a Down's child that not even the short bus could take away.

         "We're moving."

         Art blinked at her, uncomprehending.  He suddenly felt every bit as stupid as his IQ of 55 said he must be.

         "What?"

         "We're moving.  In a week.  My dad got a new job in Twin Falls—better pay, better benefits."

         Twin Falls.  The slightly more metropolitan town was only thirty miles away, but it might as well have been on the other side of the planet for a couple of retards like him and Tandy.

         "I'll be going to St. Thomas Aquinas.  On the regular bus.  I start there tomorrow, to get acclimated."

         There was a silence between them, the words hanging in the air like the acrid smoke from a cannon blast.  Neither of them spoke as the driver stopped to admit the Nash twins, boys who would have been an astrophysicist and a geneticist if God had only laughed before their births, and not after.

         "The...." He couldn't say it.  The implications were too vast, too full of pain.

         "STA is a good school. Their program for the ‘developmentally disabled' is every bit as good as the one at St. D's."  Which wasn't very, as they both knew, but the school wasn't the problem.

         "But...the regular bus?"  It hurt to even form the words.  "Don't they have a short bus?"

         "Even if they did, it wouldn't be the same.  It wouldn't be this bus."

         Art looked up and met the driver's eyes in the big mirror, and he knew Tandy was right. 

         Suddenly, he understood why his father always counseled him to laugh in the face of error—it was the only way to keep from crying.

         "It's no big deal," Tandy said, thick lips set, her caramel-colored eyes trained on the world outside the bus windows.  "I mean, really.  This bus is no favor, no consolation gift from a God who lost count when passing out our chromosomes.  What good is it to have this—" she gestured with a nail-bitten hand at the bus' interior and its passengers, who'd grown in number from four to seven without their noticing—"when we can't remember any of it two seconds after our feet hit the pavement?  I'd rather not be reminded of what I could have been, to have it in my grasp for a few short minutes every single day, and to be able to do nothing with it."  She looked at him then, and her tears were made diamonds by the thickness of her lenses.  "Mike Nash's story about the man who exists in three dimensions at once, Kelly's sketches, the concertos you've composed—they'll never leave this bus.  None of our hopes or dreams ever will, so what's the point?"

         "So it's better not to have them?  No hopes, no dreams?"

         "Yes!"  Tandy spit the word at him.

         He tried again.  "Better to have loved and lost—"

         "Don't even."

         Art didn't reply.  Couldn't, really.  How could he say she was wrong?  What was the point of being normal, even exceptional, on the way to school if, when he got there, he was relegated to Special Ed classes to sit staring vapidly at picture books?  Of being normal on the way home, only to have it fade away moments before being hugged fiercely by his father, to whom that normalcy would have been a gift beyond price?

         As the bus pulled into the parking lot at St. Dymphna's, Art watched the students milling about in their blue and green plaids, their pleats, their ties, with their braces and bruises, their skinned knees and scraped hearts.  And he wondered...who among them, after all, was normal?

         Art sat in Sister Perpetua's "Slow Learners" class, grinning widely as he flipped through an illustrated, Early Reader's edition of The Wizard of Oz.  He had watched the movie a few weeks ago with his father; the colorized version.  The witch had frightened him badly, with her green face and cruel cackles, and he'd had to hide his face in his father's shoulder until she was gone.  The wizard had scared him, too, until his father had explained that the big head and flames were just a trick being played by the silly little bald man hiding behind the curtain.  Then Art had laughed and laughed, making his father smile one of his rare, toothy smiles.  Remembering, Art laughed again.

         "Shhhh!"  Sister Perpetua scolded from behind her desk.  Art glanced up from the poppy fields in surprise, but the nun wasn't looking at him.  Her sympathetic gaze was fixed on his only other classmate for this period, Bobby Briggs, who was sleeping soundly, his copper-topped head pillowed in scarecrow arms.  "We don't want to wake Mr. Briggs, now do we?"

         Art shook his head vigorously.  He definitely didn't want to wake Bobby up; Art's father had told him that Mrs. Briggs often drank too much, and that Bobby had to take care of her when she did.  Art knew what that was like—whenever he drank too much, he wound up wetting the bed, and his father would have to get up in the middle of the night to change his sheets.  He wondered suddenly if his father fell asleep at his desk on those days, like Bobby, and if his boss was as nice about it as Sister Perpetua was.

         "Bobby's not dumb or lazy, like most of the kids who stop off here on their way to becoming drop-outs and delinquents," Sister said to herself softly, her voice thick with tears.  Unaccountably dismayed at the prospect of the black-clad nun crying, Art was quick to reassure her.

         "No, Bobby just sleeps too much," he said, oblivious to Sister Perpetua's look of surprise.  "It's hard to learn things when your eyes are closed."

         When all Sister did was gape, Art went back to his book, satisfied that he'd averted her weeping and eager to see where the yellow brick road would take him next.  When Sister Perpetua spoke again, quoting Scripture, Art paid her no heed.

         "I thank Thee, Lord, that Thou hast hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes."

         Art took his place beside Mike Nash at the 'Tard Table.  The twins were busy dividing their lunches into two identical piles, carefully counting and recounting pretzels and potato chips so that each boy would have exactly the same amount of food as the other.  Two tuna sandwiches and a bunch of grapes sat in the no-man's-land between them on the table, waiting to play their part in the complicated lunchtime ritual.

         Art didn't bother to say hello, knowing that the twins were too intent on the equal division of assets to respond.  Instead, he took his own sandwich out of his Pokemon lunchbox and began to devour it in large, open-mouthed bites as he scanned the cafeteria for Tandy.

         Tandy was his girlfriend—everybody said so.  They always sat together at lunch, and on the bus, and sometimes she even shared her cookies with him, so he knew it must be true.

         He was stuffing a few slices of orange in with the last bite of his sandwich when he finally saw her.  She was standing in the lunch line in front of some football players, carefully balancing a mostly empty tray before her as she tried to select items from the dizzying array of choices:  pizza today, and burritos, or tuna surprise.  The fruit salad that was made with little colored marshmallows.  Three kinds of pudding, a garden of vegetables, and then there were crackers, or breadsticks, or muffins.  Art could understand her confusion—he was glad his father always packed his lunch, sparing Art from the daunting task of having to make a decision.

         As he watched, one of the football players, a big green "D" emblazoned on his blue jacket, shoved Tandy forward.  Art couldn't hear what he said over the din, but he recognized the boy's impatient look, even from this distance.

         Tandy, never graceful even under the best of circumstances and made even less so by her nervousness in the face of so many choices, lost her balance.  Art shot up out of his seat reflexively, trying to shout a warning, but he only succeeded in spraying bits of orange pulp and partly-chewed bread across the table and banging his shin—hard—on a crossbar.  He could only watch, helpless, as Tandy stumbled and fell, landing face down on her tray in the middle of the floor.

         There was a brief, stunned silence.  Then the cafeteria erupted into raucous laughter and applause as Tandy lay there, unmoving, her careful pleats flipped up across her back, exposing heavy thighs and stained underwear to the world.

         As Art struggled to free himself from the table's metal grasp, Kevin Thomson, St. Dymphna's star quarterback, pushed his way through the lunch line and knelt beside Tandy.  Art was much too far away to hear what the burly boy said to Tandy as he helped her up, but he instantly relaxed.  Kevin would take care of Tandy.  He was a nice guy—he wrote poetry.

         It was their secret, his and Art's.  Art had come across the older boy one day when he'd gone to search the back dumpster for the retainer he'd mistakenly thrown away—again—with his lunch.  Kevin had been there, smoking a cigarette and burning sheets of paper with his lighter.

         "Whachadoin?" Art had asked, startling the quarterback and causing him to drop the last of the sheets before hungry flames could do more than taste its edges.

         Art had bent down and snatched the paper up, surprising them both with unaccustomed speed.  He'd read the three short lines before Kevin could reclaim the little poem he'd called a "high-coo" and complete its cremation:

          

         HUNTING WITH DAD

        

         A crack of gunfire;

         the bird falls dead and you smile,

         proud of me at last.

        

         Art hadn't really understood the words, but he'd sensed the longing behind them.  "That's pretty," he'd said uncertainly.

         Kevin had grimaced.  "Don't say that!  If my old man heard that, he'd think I was gay for sure!  Bad enough I write poetry—you go around telling people it's pretty, and I'm doomed."

         Art had had trouble following the conversation.  He was pretty sure "gay" meant happy, and couldn't comprehend why Kevin's father would be upset about Kevin being that way, but he understood well enough to know that Kevin was doing something he didn't want people to know about.

         "I won't tell anyone, Kevin," Art had promised eagerly, not wanting the other boy to look so worried.

         Kevin had studied him for a moment, taking a deep drag on his cigarette and exhaling thin blue plumes before nodding.  "You're a good kid, Art.  Don't know what you're always smiling about, but you're okay by me."  And then he'd helped Art dig through the dumpster to find his retainer—and it had been spaghetti day.

         Art sat back down.  He could trust Kevin to take care of his girl, just like Kevin had trusted Art with his secret.  He ate another slice of orange as Kevin escorted Tandy back to the 'Tard Table, helping her to wipe the worst of the pudding—chocolate, the one thing she'd been able to decide on—from the front of her plaid jumper.

         "Sorry about that, buddy," he said, holding Tandy's arm as she clambered into the seat beside Art.  "That guy's a jerk.  I'll take care of him.  And I'll bring your girl some more pudding."

         "Thanks, buddy!" Art said, grinning up gratefully at the other boy and impulsively holding out a chubby palm for a high five.  Kevin laughed in amazement and slapped the proffered hand, though not too hard.

         "You're something else, man.  Somebody pulled that with my girl and I'd..." Kevin trailed off ominously, then shook his head.  "You're a good kid, Art," he said again, tousling Art's hair affectionately before taking his leave.

         Art turned his attention back to Tandy.  Despite Kevin's rescue, her eyes were shiny with unshed tears.

         "You look good in brown," was all he could think to say as he handed her the last of his orange slices.  Tandy took it, but she didn't smile.  Fat tears rolled down her cheeks as she swallowed the fruit without chewing.

         The Nash twins looked up from their piles, having finally divvied everything up evenly.  Mike took one look at Tandy's flat, tear-tracked face and pushed an unmeasured portion of his pile towards her.  Then he turned back to his brother without a word and the two boys began to redistribute their food into two new piles.

         Tandy wiped her nose with the back of her hand and eyed the assortment of pretzels, chips, grapes and ragged squares of sandwich, considering.  She was no longer crying.

         In an effort to sweeten the pot, Art hesitantly added his own unopened juice box to the pile.  He watched Tandy hopefully.  The orange hadn't been enough to make her smile (even though he didn't normally share his food with her—he was usually much too hungry to be chivalrous), but wild cherry was her favorite.  It might work.  You never could tell with girls.

         The corners of Tandy's mouth twitched upwards, then dimpled into a full-blown smile as Kevin arrived and placed a heaping bowl of chocolate pudding next to the mound of food, bowing and offering her a plastic spork with a knightly flourish.

         Tandy began to giggle, then to laugh outright as a plump grape, precariously balanced near the top of the food cairn, suddenly rolled down the snack food slope and landed in the middle of the pudding with a loud plop.

         Art laughed too, and Kevin, and even the Nash twins looked up briefly from their counting.  One of the nuns, finally attracted by the commotion, came and stood by Kevin, giving the older boy a curious look.

         Kevin's laughter faded as he watched Tandy mix the rest of the grapes into her pudding with the spork he had given her.  Art caught his eye for a moment and saw that the older boy's eyes sparkled with an emotion he was pretty sure wasn't mirth.

         "...so forgiving," the quarterback murmured.

         "That's not forgiveness," the sister corrected sharply.  "That's meekness."

         "Meekness," Kevin repeated, then nodded.  "Blessed are the meek.  Yes," he said, locking gazes with Art, his eyes swimming. 

         Art smiled back joyfully, glad of Tandy's laughter and the older boy's friendship.  "Yes, I believe that."

        

         Art didn't see Tandy again until the end of the school day.  By that time, he'd nearly forgotten about the incident at lunch.  And so had she, by the way she was joking loudly with the Nash twins as they waited at the blue curb.  She was still laughing when she stepped up onto the short bus, but her smile had dissolved into grim accusation by the time Art had settled in next to her.

         The bus had barely lurched away from the curb before she rounded on him.

         "You still think Tennyson was right?  Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?  How do you suppose Lord Alfred would choose to immortalize this?" Tandy snarled, jabbing a finger at the hardened brown stain on her ruined jumper.  "Better to remember humiliation and impotence than to remember nothing at all?"

         Art had an answer for her this time.  Kevin had given it to him today, all unwitting.  Kevin and Bobby Briggs.

         "If there were nothing else besides humiliation, then, yes, maybe so.  But what about Kevin?  Half the girls in school would give any body part you asked for to get that kind of attention from him."

         "Pity," Tandy scoffed, "or brownie points with the Sister.  Maybe Father Doyle gave him ‘be nice to a retard' as penance.  You honestly think that makes it better, somehow lessens the sting, knowing that the only reason he helped me was because he felt sorry for me?"  She looked at him incredulously.  "Then you really are an idiot."

         "What about kindness, Tandy?  Or compassion?  Or don't those motivations register on your radar?"  Art's vehemence took them both by surprise and Tandy's eyes welled with sudden tears, as though she had been slapped.  But here, on the short bus, where she had some semblance of control at last, she was too proud to let those tears fall.

         "And the guy who pushed me?" she retorted, flipping her blonde hair over her shoulder in a gesture that reminded Art that, whatever else she might be, on or off this bus, she was first and foremost, a teenager.  Like him.  "What was his altruistic motive?  Oh, wait, I forgot... idiots don't practice altruism."

         But Art had a rejoinder for that as well.  "And Mike?  What was his motive, then?"

         Tandy cast a disparaging glance at the Nash twins, who were even now disembarking.

         "He just wanted to shut me up."

         Understandable, Art thought, then immediately felt guilty.  He knew the bigger part of Tandy's anger stemmed from fear, fear of losing the gift of the short bus, no matter how vigorously she claimed otherwise.  Maybe even fear of losing him.

         He tried again.

         "It's all in your perspective, Tandy.  You asked me before, what's the point of this bus, these moments of lucidity?  I don't know the answer to that—you'd have to ask God, and, last I checked, He was behind on His correspondence by a century or two.

         "But one thing I do know is this: if I didn't have these few minutes with you and Mike and Kelly and our nameless, taciturn driver, I'd never appreciate all the things that are waiting for me on the other side of the curb."  Tandy's mouth compressed into a thin, stubborn line and he knew he was losing her.  He barreled on, regardless, suddenly needing to speak the words even more than she needed to hear them.

         "Why do you think people always want to know why Downs kids smile so much?  What do we have to smile about, they wonder?  When God's cheated us out of a normal life?

         "But you know what I realized today?  Nobody's normal.  Not Kevin Thomson, or Bobby Briggs, not you, not me.  And everybody has dreams that will never come true, whether they walk to school, or ride in cars, or take the regular bus...or the short one.  Everyone has a story or a performance or a work of art inside, most of which will never see the light of day.  Not because God gave them one too many chromosomes, or one too few, but because that's just the way life happens sometimes.  That's normal.

         "And you know what else I realized?  If I didn't get on this bus every day, I'd never know that what people count as Bobby's failure is really his triumph.  Or how brave Kevin is to want to be his own person.  Or the depth of my father's love for me.  He could have put me in a home, or encouraged my mom to have an abortion, but he didn't.  He loves me, not because he has to, but because he chooses to.  And he's proud of me, not for the concertos I'll never write anywhere but on this bus, but because I'm his son.  And I may forget that the minute I step off this bus, because it's too much for my deficient mind to retain, but my heart will remember.

         "That's what we have to smile about.  That's the point, Tandy."

         She shook her head, implacable.  Then she pushed up her thick glasses and stepped into the aisle.  It was only then that Art realized that the bus had stopped.  At Tandy's house. 

         "Goodbye, Art," she said flatly and walked down the double row of seats, off the bus and out of his life, without looking back.

         "Goodbye, Tandy," he whispered, watching her go.

         The scenery blurred by without his seeing it as the bus lumbered on towards Art's own stop.  For the first time, he wished he rode the regular bus to school.  At least then he wouldn't have to think about how much he was going to miss Tandy.  He wouldn't have to think at all.

         And then the bus was pulling up to yet another curb, and Art could see his father waiting for him on the sidewalk, straining to catch a glimpse of his son through the bus's darkened windows.  With a sigh, Art gathered up his Pokemon lunchbox and trudged slowly to the front of the bus.  The driver watched him in the mirror.

         "Good job, son," the old man said, and smiled.

         Art stopped, surprised.  He opened his mouth to reply, but the driver shook his head and pointed to the sign.  Art laughed in spite of himself, then stepped off the bus.

         The old man pulled the door closed behind Art and watched as the husky boy's father swallowed him in a crushing embrace before drawing back slightly and asking how his day at school had been.

         Art's voice drifted towards the driver.  "...I laughed a lot today, Dad.  I was smart and brave."

         As father and son moved towards the normalcy of their lives together, the bus driver watched them go.

         "Not so behind as all that.  And maybe not such a hack after all, eh, Art?" he said, then pulled away from the curb.

 

 

Copyright 2006, Marsheila Rockwell

Marsheila (Marcy) Rockwell is an author, Rhysling-nominated poet, engineer, Navy wife and mother of two wonderful boys. Her work has appeared in such publications as Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine, Space & Time, Aoife’s Kiss, NFG and numerous anthologies.  She a member of both the SFWA and the SFPA, and her first novel, set in the shared world of Eberron, is due out from Wizards of the Coast in 2007.  Check out her current projects at < biodegradable.blogspot.com >.

 

 

Cover: "The Lady Returns"

Copyright 2006, Melinda S Reynolds 

Self-taught artist and writer; drawing came first, writing second.  My favorite genres are fantasy and sci-fi because of the depth of imagination.