5
I DIDN’T SEE MATTHEW BARBER again until the first day of kindergarten, and then only at the very end of the day, on the school bus.
It had been an exciting day, and each of us on the bus had a handful of drawings to show mom and dad and a headful of strange events to tell about. Each of us was in his or her own sort of daze: puzzled, overwhelmed.
I rode along, sitting beside a window, on one of the seats toward the back of the bus. I was looking out the window, but I wasn’t really noticing anything. I was letting the things I’d seen and heard and done during the day drift through my mind, re-experiencing them and rehearsing the way I would tell about them when I got home. Time passed. From time to time the bus stopped. Each time it did, there was a group of mothers waiting for it. Some children would recognize their mothers and get off at once. Others would remain sitting much as I was, mouths open, eyes blank. Some, I suppose, were rehearsing their stories as I was. Others, I suppose, were just baffled.
A scene often repeated went something like this: a girl sitting staring at nothing suddenly started when a woman who had come onto the bus touched her on the shoulder. She looked up, blinked, and said “Mommy!” Mother and daughter laughed, and the girl began talking as fast as she could, spilling out snippets of the day at random, and pushing papers at her mother, who, beaming, was guiding the child down the aisle toward the door of the bus.
More time passed. The bus emptied. I looked around. There were only two children left, two boys. One was a boy I recognized from the classroom. His name was Mort Grumbacher. He was sitting directly across the aisle from me. The other was Matthew Barber. He was sitting in the seat behind Mort, his head down, staring at the floor.
Mort was looking around wildly, and he had crumpled his papers into a tight ball in his hands.
“They’re all gone,” he said to me.
“Yeah,” I said.
“They all went home,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
His eyes were wide, but he wasn’t really looking at me, he was looking far beyond me, at his future.
“We’re going to die on this bus,” he said, “I’m never going to see my mother again.”
“What?” I said. “What?” I looked around the bus again. There really were no other kids left. I looked under the seat, along the floor. There were plenty of drawings left behind, but I didn’t see any little feet dangling down from the seats.
“You’re probably right,” said Matthew. “The rest of them are all at home right now,” he said. “They’re sitting on their mothers’ laps.”
“Uh, yeah,” I said, “probably.”
“But we’re not going to get home,” said Matthew. Mort’s eyes were bulging. His mouth hung open in stupefied horror.
“Sure we are,” I said. “We’re going to get home. It’s just a longer ride for us.”
Matthew gave me his twisted grin, pursed his lips and rolled his eyes, dismissing me as a ridiculous naïf.
“Nah,” he said. “We’re lost.”
“Lost?” I said. “Lost?” I turned back toward the window. We were passing houses that I didn’t recognize. We were lost.
“I knew this was going to happen,” Matthew said. “As soon as we drove up to the school, I had a feeling. I felt sick.”
So did I, I remembered. “So did I,” I said.
“Me too,” said Mort. He swallowed hard. It looked to me as if there was a good chance he would be sick right then.
“I knew that if my mother left me there I’d never see her again,” said Matthew. “I screamed, I cried, I kicked. But she left anyway.” He sighed and stared out the window, wistfully, remembering his mother. As I remember him now, he seems so drooped, so sagging and world-weary that I’m surprised he didn’t pull a half pint of Jack Daniel’s out of his pocket and light up a Lucky.
“Yeah,” I said, but I didn’t admit having done anything similar. Mort just kept looking wildly back and forth at Matthew and me, swallowing hard and nodding his head.
“And now,” Matthew said, “the other kids are showing their mothers the drawings they made—”
Mort looked down at the tight, sweaty ball of drawings in his hand. Matthew gave another of those twisted grins, shook his head slowly, and sighed. He crumpled his own drawings into a ball and tossed the ball over his shoulder. Mort looked at him and moaned. He looked at his ball of papers again and then let it fall to the floor. It was the most hopeless gesture I’d ever seen.
“—and they’re eating cookies too,” Matthew added.
Then he laughed a mad, desperate laugh. My heart nearly broke. My mother had told me that she’d make chocolate chip cookies for me to have when I got home. When I got home! When I got home!
Mort and I burst into tears at the same time. A voice boomed from the front of the bus, “Hey kids! What are you doing here? Did you miss your stop?”
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🎧 107: I didn’t see Matthew Barber ...