I should not have been on that bus. I would not have been had I graduated the year before like everyone else my age. But I got held back a year because of injuries suffered during a car wreck in 10
th
grade, and had to repeat. I'd never hated the fact more than I did that afternoon.
It was the middle of January. The temperature was arctic (even before the snow), and I'd already seen more snow than an Atlanta girl would see in a lifetime. The problem was, I was no longer in Georgia.
"Minnesota sucks," I grumbled.
The boy sitting beside me, Paul, my defacto boyfriend, laughed condescendingly. "Wus. You haven't lived until you do it on the side of a ten foot snow-drift."
I showed my disapproval by elbowing him in the ribs. "Asshole," I added, when he laughed again. The truth was, I was utterly miserable being cold.
The snow had begun as a gentle flurry around ten o'clock, and had grown into a howling monster by the time school let out early at two-thirty. I was totally miffed that they would even have school on a day where a foot or more of snow was predicted by three o'clock. Only in Minnesota, I thought.
"Actually," he said, gazing out the window at the brutal white out. "This is pretty radical, even for Minnesota."
A lake-effect storm gone psycho; they were now predicting up to four feet with snow-drifts eight feet high by midnight. Unbelievable.
Twenty minutes later, Paul got off the bus half a block from his house—reluctantly; he liked leaving me on the bus no more than I liked being left—waited in the whirlwind until the bus pulled away, waving at me unhappily, and then trudged toward home with his shoulders hunched and his hands jammed in the pockets of his parka. It bothered me seeing him so miserable; I was really getting to like Paul.
For the next hour and forty-five minutes, the bus crept forward a foot at a time, discharging students lucky enough not to live in Mesaba Estates, while I ran my battery down to a flashing rectangular outline relentlessly texting Paul and my other friends. I barely paid attention as the ridership of Bus 9899 dwindled to fewer than a handful of students. Scowling out the window into the now perfect darkness, I clamped my arms across my chest, pressed my lips into a straight line, balled my fists against my ribs and tried to keep my nostrils from flaring unattractively. Not that anyone would look at me and see. The driver was too wrapped up in driving to look anywhere but out the icy front windshield. Twenty minutes later, the only other passenger on the bus beside myself was Agnes Ahlberg, the one person on the route who lived farther away than I did. As she always did, Agnes sat alone by the window, five rows from the back, on the opposite side of the bus.
Agnes was peculiar. She wasn't pretty, but neither was she ugly. The truth was, Agnes could be cute if she wanted to be. However, she always wore her dark hair parted in the middle, chose drab, out of fashion clothes, and looked totally devoid of makeup, even when she had some on. She was a seriously blah girl that boys either ignored or ridiculed, and which girls made fun of. In the half-year I'd been at school, I'd talked to her maybe twice, three times at the most. We'd never had a conversation.
Looking at her reflection in the glass, I felt guiltily sorry for her. Like me, she had her arms crossed over her chest, and was staring out the window, unseeing, by the look of her reflected face. I watched her from the corner of my eye, afraid to be caught looking.
Two things happened at once. The driver, a string bean balding man in his late fifties yelled "Shit!" and then suddenly the bus was sliding sideways, the front end going right and the rear end going left, the tires on the locked wheels making a grinding sound as they plowed through the built-up snow and ice. The noise became twice as loud and frightening as the bus, going nearly perpendicular to the road now, extended both sets of wheels into the gravel shoulders. I grabbed the top of the seat ahead of me, sensed Agnes do the same thing behind me. I was too afraid to speak, too shocked to cry out. Looking back, I locked eyes with a terrified Agnes.
We hit something with a sickening jolt and suddenly the bus was no longer going sideways but backwards. Agnes and I screamed at the same time and so did the driver, though his scream was more an angry denial than an expression of fear. I watched as he twisted the wheel first one way and then the other, having no effect whatsoever on the attitude or direction of the bus. We slid off the road and headed down the embankment, which thankfully wasn't steep enough to pitch the bus over onto its side. It was steep enough, however, to pitch me off my seat into the isle and fling Agnes clear across the bus. I grimaced as I heard what could only be her head smacking the window pane. Being thrown around as I was, I was unable to look back and see if she was injured.
"No! No, goddammit!" The driver, still fighting the wheel as though it could make any possible difference, had finally found his voice. More profanities spewed from him as the bus took a particularly hard lurch crashing through a line of saplings planted on the hillside. The impact bounced him off the unforgiving wall, and halfway off his seat. He kept one hand on the wheel while planting the other on an outcrop of the dashboard. Nothing he did had the slightest effect on the bus's trajectory. And then suddenly it was over.
Oh, my God,
I thought frantically.
We've stopped
. I looked out the windows to make sure this assumption was in fact, correct. It was. To my amazement the bus had come to rest on almost perfectly level ground. How in the name of God we had remained upright I didn't know.
The driver coughed explosively. Pushing back into his seat, he twisted around to look back at us. Still coughing, he choked out: "Are you girls okay?"
I looked back at Agnes, who looked on the verge of hyperventilating. She was fingering the left side of her head, wincing at whatever it was her fingertips probed into. She looked at me and nodded.
"We're all right," I confirmed. "What about you?"
"Okay," he answered. His coughing fit had subsided. I wondered if it had been a reaction to fear, because I felt like I should be coughing too. In fact, I think I was seriously close to throwing up. I looked back at Agnes.
"Are you okay?" I asked. I asked this not in the way of a curious bystander, but as a friend. Peculiar or not, Agnes had just gone through the same horrible experience that I had. I felt an instant bond with her, if not of friendship, then at least of camaraderie. We had survived.
Carefully, I got off my butt and brushed off the back of my jeans. My elbow hurt, and so did both of my butt cheeks. So did the outside of my left thigh, where I must have whacked it against the opposite seat going down. My back also felt stiff, as though I'd almost thrown it out of whack.
"Where are we?" Agnes asked. "Do you know?"
I had to admit that I had no idea. Turning to the driver—his back was giving him problems too, from the looks of it—I asked the same question of him that Agnes had asked of me. He looked dubious.
"Well, I think, we're off Broad Neck Road."
Anxiety shot through my chest at the question mark in his voice. "You think? You don't know?"
Rather painfully, the driver shrugged. "I know we turned off Route 3. The trouble is, it was snowing so hard when we turned that I couldn't make out the street sign. There were no landmarks that I could identify either. It was a complete whiteout for God's sake. I was counting off distance by the odometer, and when I saw a road where Broad Neck was supposed to be, I turned. I wasn't positive, but the turns in the road seemed right. We must have been coming up on Wentworth when we went off."
He hesitated, unsure.
"How far did you go up?" I asked. Right after we had moved in, I idly checked the distance on Dad's odometer from the school to home. The distance from Route 3 to Wentworth was a mile and a half. Though I hadn't been paying close attention, I was sure that we had gone a mile and a half down Broad Neck, maybe even two miles. Oh, God. Were we lost?
"Relax," he said, smiling tightly. "Even if we're on the wrong road, it's not like were on the backside of the moon. We didn't slide that far, and anyone passing will see the headlights. They're pointing right at the road." We all looked through the front windshield at the whirling, driving snow. I wondered if the lights could be seen from twenty feet away, much less up that long hill to the top of the embankment. Seemed to me anyone up there would be concentrating hard as could be on the snow-covered pavement right before him or her; not sightseeing.
