Ms. Bixby's Last Day (5 page)

“God bless her,” Mr. Mattison sighed. “I just can't imagine. I feel so bad. And for the kids too.”

Then he turned and saw the three of us just standing there, eavesdropping. Normally Mr. Mattison would as soon rip your head off as pat you on it, but this time he just gave us an awkward look that I can only assume was supposed to be a smile, except his muscles didn't know the pattern. He didn't say anything.

Brand turned to me. “Do you think?” he whispered.

“Yeah.”

“Saturday morning?
This
Saturday?”

“I know.”

“So now what?” he asked, reinstating me to my rightful place as the Games Maker of our little group.

“Now,” I said, “we'll have to accelerate the plan.”

Date: Friday, May 7. Time: 0738.

The raisins are all gone.

Over at the Ridge, the last of the buses spits out a handful of students. I can see Mrs. Thornburg, the assistant principal, ushering them inside, face set in her morning scowl. She looks my way, and I duck back down behind the bushes.

Still no sign of Agent Walker.

“He's a loose cannon,” I say. “He's jeopardizing the mission.”

Steve shakes his head. “Cool it with this secret agent act, all right?”

“Fine,” I say, a little annoyed. Steve usually goes along with
whatever scene's playing in my head. He's been a paralyzed soldier, a stranded astronaut, a captured sidekick, a flaxen-haired princess, a zombie shoe salesman, and a raging Wookie. Of course, he's probably right. Skipping school for the first time ever is exciting enough without me having to pretend. I just can't help it. Comes with having to entertain yourself all the time.

I shut up and scan the parking lot, looking for any sign of Brand, while Steve fidgets with the Velcro on his shoe, doing and undoing the same strap over and over.
Scritch.
Fasten.
Scritch.
Fasten. I've never known him to wear shoes with laces.

“Did you know that kids with perfect attendance throughout their primary school years are three times more likely to go on to college than those students who have missed a day or more of school?” he tells me.

I'm sure he just looked that up this morning. Either that or it's something his parents told him. Or it's written on his sister's bedroom wall. “You already missed three days this year with the flu,” I remind him.

“I'm just saying. If we go through with this, we dramatically decrease our chances of growing up to be successful, educated adults.”

I start to say something about all three of those things being overrated, especially the adults, when I feel a tap on my shoulder. I spin around, striking what I'm hoping is an intimidating,
kung-fu action hero pose. I've never taken karate, but I've seen enough movies to know how my hands should go. Brand looks at me like I'm nuts.

“Don't hurt yourself,” he says. He's wearing faded blue jeans and a T-shirt with a picture of a scarf-wearing cartoon tiger telling me how great
they
are. Whoever they are. He crouches down next to us so we are all hidden behind the bushes.

“You're late,” I tell him. “And what's with this?” I point to his outfit and then to the camouflage pants and green T-shirts that Steve and I are both wearing, looking like twins whose parents dress them alike, except Steve is Japanese and I'm white as a wedding cake. “I thought we decided on a uniform.”

“I got out of the house late,” Brand says, shrugging. “And I don't own any camo.”

“Loose cannon,” Steve mutters. I can't tell if he's mocking me or not. Steve's sarcasm sounds exactly like his normal voice.

“Well, did you at least bring your supplies?”

Brand sets his backpack down and opens it up, pulling out a large picnic blanket, red-checkered felt on one side and slick vinyl on the other. There is something wrapped up inside it, something small and delicate, judging by the care he takes in the unfolding. With a magician's flourish, he pulls it free. “Check it out.”

He holds up the long-stemmed glass, clear as a raindrop.
The morning sun glints off the edge.

“Oooh,” I say, and Steve finishes with an “Ahhh.” Again, fifty-fifty chance he's being sarcastic.

“We're going to need one, right?” Brand asks.

I nod. Obviously I hadn't thought of everything. Brand carefully wraps the glass back up in the blanket and stuffs it in his bag. “So. We ready to make the call?”

I take another glance over the hedge. The parking lot is starting to empty out. There's probably still time. We could easily make it to our lockers and then to room 213 and sweet, oblivious Mrs. Brownlee before the second bell rings. I look at Steve, who shrugs, though I have a guess what he's thinking. He's thinking that things that look good on somebody's marked-up arm don't always turn out good when you put them into practice. He's having second thoughts, or, by this point, probably thirds or fourths.

I get it. I'm nervous too. But then I think about Ms. Bixby and her magic tricks, and her looks, and her quotes. And that day I found her rooting through the trash. The day she showed me what was in her bottom drawer and told me she'd hang on to it forever.

“All right. Let's do this,” I say. “Communicator?”

I snap my fingers, and Steve reluctantly reaches into his pocket and pulls out his phone, handing it to Brand. Steve is the
only one of us who has a cell phone. I technically
have
one—it's sitting on top of my dresser at home—except it stopped working the moment it accidentally fell in the toilet. I learned an important lesson about trying to pee and play Five Nights at Freddy's at the same time. My parents said I could have another one as soon as I save up a hundred dollars in allowance.

I currently have fifteen bucks, all of it sitting in the front flap of my backpack.

Steve recites the number for the school's front office. Brand dials and clears his throat, but then Steve reaches over and grabs the phone, ending the call.

“Wait. What about caller ID?”

“Have you seen the phones they use in the front office? Those things are, like, thirty years old. Trust me.” I take the phone from Steve and hand it back to Brand, who takes a deep breath and hits redial.

This time, though,
I
snatch the phone away, frantically fumbling for the end call button.

“What now?” Brand says.

“Let me hear your voice,” I say. “Your grown-up-mom-with-two-kids voice.”

“Let me hear your voice,” Brand echoes, sounding whiny and irritating, “your mehmehmeh with mehmehmeh meh.”

“That sounds nothing like my mother,” I tell him.

“So?”

“So. My mother's on the PTA. She knows everybody in the school. You have to sound like her.”

“How am I supposed to imitate your mother? I don't even remember what she sounds like.”

“She's got, like, a squeakier voice. Higher pitched.”

Brand takes the phone back and clears his throat. Pretends like he's talking. “Hello, this is Mrs. Renn, and I just wanted to let you know that my annoying and paranoid son, Topher, won't be coming to school today. He has to spend the day giving his good friend Brand a hard time, as usual.” He gives me a challenging look.

“Now you just sound like a mad Mickey Mouse.”

“Forget it then. You make the call.” Brand tries to hand the phone over, but I push it back to him.

“No,” I say, impressed. “It's perfect. I just never realized that my mom sounded like that.”

Brand dials the number again and this time we actually let him talk. He lets the front desk know that I won't be coming in today. Stomach bug. Then he waits three minutes and thirty-seven seconds, which Steve says is just random enough, and calls again, this time as Steve's dad, which is easier for him because the voice is lower. Brand hands the phone back to Steve. “Done.”

“What about you?”

“I called from home.” He says it like it's no big deal, like he's done it before. Sometimes I get the impression that there are lots of things Brand doesn't tell us.

From across the parking lot, we hear the first bell ring. The last stragglers shuffle inside for seven hours of menial-worksheet completing and sweaty-gym-sock smelling. But not us. We are on a mission. A pilgrimage. A quest.

“This is it. We are officially skipping school,” Steve says. Now he looks like he really might spew. I'm sure he's thinking about what will happen if his parents find out. They can be a little hard core when it comes to school stuff. They won't really kill him, but they
will
torture him. That I'm certain of.

“Don't worry, Agent,” I tell him. “I promise I won't let them take you alive.”

He has reason to worry. Mr. and Mrs. Sakata are helicopter parents, except they're more like military-grade helicopters—complete with chain guns and antitank missiles. Hovering. Waiting to strike. Then there's his sister, who I'm pretty sure hates me. Maybe because that's how she is, or maybe because I'm always making faces at her and calling her Chris-mean-a Psycho-ta. I don't think she's really psycho. I know her parents give her just as hard a time as they do Steve, maybe even harder, but she kind
of asks for it. His parents are always holding her up as some holy golden model of behavior, but Steve and I both know better. We've been spying on her since we were eight.

I don't have Steve's parent problem, or his sister problem. My sister Jess is only three, almost four, and it's hard to hold someone up as a model of behavior when she still pees her pants from time to time. My parents aren't helicopters either. They don't hover. They skim. They're flitters, darting from one thing to the next, from work to meetings to after-school events, never settling anywhere for long—like those water striders you find jumping across the pond—they drop a kiss hurriedly on the top of my head on their way out and blow extras as they walk out the door. My parents sometimes talk like those guys at the end of prescription drug commercials, so fast you can hardly hear them:
Sorry I gotta split your dad will be home in an hour don't eat too much before dinner and keep an eye on your sister love you so much be home late love you love you
.

It wasn't always that way. For a while I was the center of the universe, and everything I did was incredible. Every picture I ever made went in the scrapbook and every Play-Doh pot went on the shelf. We spent whole weekends together, the three of us, Friday to Sunday, having picnics at the playground and sitting in the third row at the movies, stuffing our cheeks with popcorn like squirrels storing for winter. They used one of my drawings
once as the front of our Christmas card—a sketch of the three of us entrenched in a free-for-all snowball fight. I think I was six years old.

Then they had my sister and time suddenly got scarce. Mom went back to working nights at the clinic so that we would still have enough money for our three-story house and our annual vacation to the Outer Banks. We bought a minivan and put up baby gates. My father got a promotion requiring him to work extra hours at the office. Mom would sleep during the day, and I would sit and read stories to Jess.

Still, every now and then, when my mother has the night off and after my sister is in bed, the three of us will sit down on the couch together with our microwaved popcorn and a movie on demand, though my mother always falls asleep about halfway through, and we have to turn it up to drown out her snoring. Most nights I just watch TV by myself.

Some days I wonder if they have the slightest clue what's going on in my life. Steve says maybe it's because I live in my own little world and they aren't invited, so it's easy for them to just assume everything's okay. There's probably something to that. But there are days I wish I got half the attention from my folks that Steve gets from his. The good half, of course.

I still show them my drawings sometimes, but the responses are all pretty much the same. “That's great, T. Why don't you
put it on the fridge?” “Cool, man. Leave it on the table and I'll take it to work.” “I love it. Do me a favor and take the trash out, will you?” It's not that they don't look. They always look—for three seconds, every time, as if they were counting in their heads—but I'm never sure they really see what I want them to.

I guess it happens to everyone. You get pushed off to the side, or you just learn to blend in, stay out of the way, merge with the crowd. And you start to think that maybe you're not the center of the universe anymore. Maybe you're not as awesome or creative or talented or worthy of attention as you originally thought.

But in your head, at least, you can still be all those things. You can be the hero at the center of it all. The man with the plan.

The one who leads the way.

We saddle up and head away from the school toward the bus stop, me out in front.

“It's about twenty clicks from here,” I say, though to be honest, I have no idea what a
click
is. It could be a yard. Could be a mile. I just heard it in a movie. For once, Steve doesn't know either, so he doesn't bother to correct me. Brand just laughs.

“What must it be like?” he asks.

“What?”

“Living inside your head?”

“It's pretty frawesome,” I tell him.

Brand blinks, working through the combination. “Freaking awesome?” he asks. I nod. He doesn't have a lock on being Shakespeare. “Frawesome,” Brand mumbles, as if he's chewing on the word. “I like it.” He repeats the word to himself as the three of us make our way across Talbot Street, ignoring the looks of the drivers, who are probably all wondering why three boys are walking
away
from school on a Friday morning.
It's all right,
I want to tell them.
We're on a top secret mission for our teacher. Go about your mundane little lives.
Still, all those glances make me nervous. Adults have a way of making you think you're doing something wrong even if you aren't . . . though technically, we are, which makes it even worse.