‘No, you’re just the one who got him delivering Bibles for your cousin Larry instead of taking that job selling coffee at the bus station. Coffee’s something people will buy.’
‘And Bibles ain’t?
‘Not pink ones!’
My head swam with the voices that seemed to belong to no one. Still sitting on the sofa, I held my head in my hands, wondering what was wrong with me. I remembered going into the church kitchen and seeing Bobbi’s tattoo. Seeing Bobbi’s tattoo move. Hearing Bobbi’s tattoo speak. What had it said?
‘She’s really very lonely, you know…’
I tried to think over the noise of so many bickering voices both inside and outside of my head. I couldn’t understand any of it. Nothing about what was happening felt right. What had happened to my savvy? Grandpa was asleep and I was hearing voices. With rising panic, I stared hard at Grandpa Bomba dozing in the preacher’s chair. With every ounce of concentration I willed my grandpa to wake up. But the noise in the room was too much for me and I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t think. Maybe if everyone would just shut up, I might be able to make my savvy work.
I covered my ears, trying uselessly to block out all the noise. I needed to get away. I needed to get to Salina Hope Hospital. I needed to go find my poppa so that my savvy would clock in and start working right. Poppa needed me.
No one in the room had noticed that I was awake. Pastor Meeks had his back to me. He was throwing pink Bibles into cardboard boxes and shoving them across the floor towards the deliveryman. Miss Rosemary and Fish were going round and round the preacher’s desk, still fighting over the telephone. And the women’s voices in my head were playing an endless tennis match of blame, blame, blame that pounded like blood in my ears.
Will Junior peeked through the crack in the door. When he saw that I was awake, he smiled, looking relieved. All I wanted to do was to get out of that room. To run away.
I waited for just the right moment for my escape, waited until I was positive no one would see me jump up quick and duck out of the pastor’s office, leaving all of the arguing behind me. As I fled the room, I was thankful to find the voices of Carlene and Rhonda, the two invisible ladies, fading away. Whoever they were – whatever they were – they weren’t following me. Outside the door, Will Junior put his hand on my shoulder again; but this time it didn’t feel so strange. He’d unbuttoned the topmost button of his shirt, which made him look less grown up and more like a fourteen-year-old boy. He was holding the wrapped-up happy-birthday pen set I’d dropped when I fainted.
“You okay, Mibs?’ he said, his dark eyes filled with worry.
‘I have to get out of here,’ I said, desperate. ‘You have to help me get out of here.’
8
‘I have to get to Salina, Will.’
‘Are you sure you’re all right, Mibs?’ he asked again, his hand still resting on my shoulder. ‘You just fainted, you know? You might be a little mixed up.’
I looked Will Junior in the eye. ‘Please, Will. I’m not mixed up. Just help me get out of here. I need to get down to Salina.’
Will Junior looked at me sadly and squeezed my shoulder. ‘You must miss your mom and dad a lot today, since it’s your birthday and all.’
I pushed his hand away and turned in the direction of the door. ‘I have to get to Salina,’ I repeated.
‘Maybe Mother will drive you –’ Will Junior started to offer, chasing after me.
‘No siree. I have to get there myself.’ I knew I was talking crazy. I had only just turned thirteen years old and already I thought I could somehow travel the ninety miles to Salina, Kansas, all by myself. But I’d hitchhike if I had to. I’d walk. There was no other way around it. I couldn’t see myself going anywhere with a preacher’s wife if I was hearing voices in my head. It was like Fish had said, the church was no place for me to be. I had to leave and I had to do it right then and there. I had to find Poppa and I had to use my savvy to wake him up. That was all there was to it.
I headed straight for the open double doors of the church. I could hear a fuss and a rumpus behind me in the fellowship hall and was certain I heard Ashley Bing’s sniggering laugh, followed by Emma Flint’s own copycat chortle. I watched as two boys from Samson’s Sunday-school class ran past me, their mouths smeared with cake. The party had started without me. I guessed it was just going to have to finish the same way.
I stepped out of the church, ready to run all the way to Salina if that was the only way to get there. Will Junior followed, nearly stepping on my heels.
‘Hey, slow down, Mibs! Wait for me.’
When we reached the parking lot, I looked around. A few kids were playing in the grass, but everyone else was now inside the church. Fish’s storm cloud hovered over the building, threatening rain.
I started walking past car after car, heading for the road. As I neared the pink Heartland Bible Supply bus, I stopped. Hearing that singsong whisper again, quiet, quiet in the backs of my ears, I saw Bobbi leaning up against the bus, all alone and chewing and snapping her gum like some kind of stand-offish rebel. I supposed she was rather rebellious at that, what with the pierced eyebrow and the tattoo, and I guessed that that little angel with the devil’s tail might’ve been right: at that moment, Bobbi looked lonelier than I would have ever imagined someone like her to be.
The lettering on the bus caught my eye as I tried to ignore the whispering in my head. The big letters that spelled out Heartland Bible Supply Company were black and peeling, past pink, down to the original school bus orange. Below that, there were smaller black letters with the address and phone number of the company. I stopped short, dumbstruck by my good fortune. The Heartland Bible Supply truck had come from no place in the world other than Salina, Kansas; it said so right there on the side in stark black paint for all the world to see. And, heeding that, I figured that if the bus had come from Salina, it was bound to be going back to Salina. Maybe God had His eye on me after all.
With a quick ‘thank you’ to heaven, I stepped past Bobbi and her big pink gum bubble, and ran my finger along the cool pink steel of the bus, underlining the word Salina in the address, clearing the dust away and leaving a clean line below the word like I had just sealed a deal.
Will Junior, still following close, raised his eyebrows high when he saw the underlined lettering on the bus. Yet he said nothing as I walked past Bobbi and climbed on to the first step just inside the open door.
Thinking about how wrong I’d been about yesterday’s bus ride being my last for a while, I ignored my momma’s voice in my head telling me to never ride with strangers, ignored my poppa’s voice telling me to always let an adult know where I was so that I could stay safe. I tried, tried, tried to ignore the voice of Bobbi’s angel talking in my head. But that proved far more difficult.
‘She wonders if you’re feeling all right.’
‘Hey, birthday-brat, what do you think you’re doing?’ said Bobbi, without a trace of concern bobbing up in her voice. That angel didn’t really seem to know Bobbi that well.
‘Get frittered, Bobbi,’ Will Junior said, surprising both his sister and me. ‘Leave us alone, or I’ll tell Mother and Father about the D you got in your chemistry test.’ He had his hands on either side of the door to the bus and one foot resting on the first step like he planned to follow me right in.
Bobbi rolled her eyes as though she’d just been threatened by an amateur. ‘They’ll find out about that anyway,’ she snorted. ‘And it certainly won’t surprise them.’
‘Okay,’ continued Will. ‘Then I’ll tell them about how you hoodwink the school secretary by pretending to be Mother on the phone to excuse yourself whenever you ditch.’
‘You think I care?’ Bobbi dared him.
‘She cares,’ said the wily voice, and I imagined that angel tattoo twirling its devil’s tail. ‘She’d hate to lose her secret weapon.’
‘What are you two up to, anyway?’ Bobbi pulled the wad of pink gum from out of
her mouth and pressed it against the side of the bus, dotting the i in Bible with the sticky blob. Then she moved to take Will’s place in the doorway as he and I climbed up into the bus. Through the front windscreen, I saw Fish coming out of the church, dark and stormy, looking for me.
‘Mibs has to get to Salina and I’m going along to see that she makes it there safe,’ Will Junior said to Bobbi as though God Almighty and the Great State of Nebraska had set him the task, and as though Pastor Meeks and Miss Rosemary wouldn’t tan his hide for taking off without a word.
‘Who do you think you are? Do you think you’re Mibs’s own personal safety officer?’ Bobbi shouted up at her brother. ‘Don’t you think one police officer in the family’s enough?’
For a moment, Will looked ready to explode. If the top button of his shirt hadn’t already come undone, it might have popped right off from the way that Will puffed himself up.
‘Shut up, Bobbi,’ he said. ‘It’s only ninety miles to Salina. We’ll be there in no time.’
Across the parking lot, Fish had seen us and was now headed towards the pink bus, the grass next to the pavement waving and flattening around him as if it were under the whirling blades of a helicopter. Fish was furious.
‘You’re not going to Salina,’ Bobbi and I both said to Will Junior at the exact same time. Then she and I exchanged a long, squinting glare – Bobbi still standing on the ground in front of the steps, me at the top by the driver’s seat, Will Junior halfway up between us, and Fish closing in fast.
Most of the tatty seats inside the bus were stacked with crates and boxes, and it looked as though several of the backseats had been removed to make room for more storage. Ignoring Bobbi and Will Junior, I headed towards the back of the bus, thinking I could hide pretty well back there until the bus got down to Kansas. Will Junior followed me in, Bobbi on his tail.
‘Well, you’re not going anywhere without me,’ she said, stomping her own way up the steps into the bus, bringing all of her sixteen-year-old attitude with her. ‘If you two disappear, guess who’ll be held responsible? Guess who’ll get in trouble? Me, that’s who. And if I’m going to get in trouble, it had better be for something really good. I’m going with you.’
‘No way, Bobbi,’ Will began to argue. But Bobbi held one finger up in front of her brother’s face to silence him.
‘Someone’s got to look after you kids. Mom and Dad would kill me if I let you go alone.’
‘They’ll kill you anyway,’ said Will. ‘They’re going to kill us both.’
‘What’s going on in here?’ Fish demanded as he too clambered up into the bus.
‘I’m not going home, Fish,’ I shouted over my shoulder to my brother, climbing over boxes stacked in the aisle. ‘I’m going to Salina Hope. I’m going to Kansas and I’m going to find Poppa.’
‘On this bus?’ Fish snorted.
‘Yeah,’ said Bobbi, her sneer sounding almost cheery in its rebellion, making it seem now as though she were on my side. ‘We’re all going to Salina, Fish-boy. If you’re too scared to swim upstream with the rest of us, you may as well just hop off.’ Bobbi cast a sudden, swift look over Fish’s shoulder and out of the front window of the bus. ‘But make your mind up quick because I think the driver of this bus is on his way out of the church right now.’
We all spun round to see that Bobbi was telling the truth. The sad-faced deliveryman was coming out of the church, carrying two heavy crates of pink Bibles and looking downcast. Me and Will Junior and Bobbi and Fish looked at each other, waiting to see who might be first to bolt from the bus or who had the nerve to take the dare and stay on.
The deliveryman was almost at the bus when Miss Rosemary appeared in the open double doors of the church, surveying the parking lot like a prison guard.
‘Quick! Hide!’ shouted Bobbi. ‘We can’t let her see us!’
In a panic, the others scrambled after me to get to the back of the old bus, tripping and slipping and bumping boxes and spilling Bibles out like pink stepping-stones across the floor. I was suddenly none too sure about this plan. Maybe I’d been too hasty. Maybe it would have been better to walk all the way down to Salina.
‘She’s scared,’ whispered the angel in my ears.
At that moment I didn’t need that little tattoo telling me how Bobbi was feeling. We were all feeling the same and nobody had time to pretend any different. Without thinking it through, I’d got us all hedged in on that big pink bus. We were stowaways now, unless one of us got brave enough – or crazy enough – to climb down off that bus right in front of both the deliveryman and Miss Rosemary and ruin it for everyone. But nobody made a move to flee, and I was grateful for it.
Hiding behind crates of pink Bibles, all wondering if we were awake or if we were dreaming, we dived deeper behind the stack of boxes at the back of the bus as the deliveryman climbed aboard. At the very end of the bus, we were surprised to find an army cot and a sleeping bag wedged between the boxes, along with a battered suitcase spilling out mismatched socks and extra overalls. On the floor beside those, there was a half-eaten bag of crisps, a couple of Peperami and a toppled stack of National Geographic magazines – some bent and faded, others crisp and new.
The biggest surprise though was Samson.
Samson had pulled himself into a tight ball underneath the cot, like his turtle in its shell. He’d been looking at the pictures in one of the old, old magazines, with his wide dark eyes open to an article titled ‘Strange Habits of Familiar Moths’ when we invaded his hiding space. But Samson didn’t even bother to look up until the big noisy rattle of the bus’s engine set the bus to vibrating.
I held my finger to my lips, warning Samson unnecessarily to keep quiet, forgetting for a second that my broody, moody brother was always quiet and that it would take more than a bit of volume to be heard over the grind and growl of that old bus. As the wheels started turning, we all grabbed on to whatever we could to keep ourselves from bumping and bouncing all around as the bus rolled out of the church parking lot and out towards the highway. But then that big pink Bible bus reached Highway 81 and turned left instead of right, north instead of south – and we were suddenly headed away from Kansas, not towards it.
9
Realizing that we were headed further and further up into Nebraska, Fish and I scrambled to our knees to peer out of the window. Fish gave me a bug-eyed, hard-faced look that said: Now What? with a This-Was-a-Stupid-Idea tang to it.
Apparently not caring which way we were headed, Bobbi settled down like Cleopatra on the cot, propped up on one elbow and pressing her weight down on to Samson, who was still curled up quiet underneath. Bobbi pulled a large roll of Bubble Tape from her pocket, tore off a good-sized strip, and jammed it into her mouth. Then she picked up one of the newer issues of National Geographic from the top of the pile and started casually flipping through its pages. The magazine had a picture of a human heart on the cover, looking like nothing more than a big ball of watermelon threaded through with pale roots. I thought that picture made a person’s heart look like a fragile, fragile thing rather than the powerful muscle that I’d learned it to be in school. I looked at Bobbi then and realized that she might just be the same way – tough and soft at the same time. She was stretched out on that cot like she was back home on her very own sofa. If that angel hadn’t been whispering in my head, telling me how Bobbi was just as nervous as the rest of us, I would’ve thought that she had no cares at all, that she was just a powerful sixteen-year-old muscle.
Fish perched himself, elbows on knees, as far from Bobbi on the cot as he could get, which put him down on the end by her feet. As he balanced on the edge of the canvas and metal bed, I could feel Fish’s older-brother eyes burning through me. I knew he was mad. I knew he was worried. I knew he was hearing Momma and Poppa in his head too and feeling like he had to be the responsible one. Mostly, I knew he was remembering his own hurricane and all the damage that got done just because he turned thirteen in the wrong place.
I
sat down on the floor, still sure as sure that this bus would turn around and head back towards Salina, Kansas, in no time flat. I pulled my knees up tight to my chest and pulled my soft yellow skirt down all the way to my ankles; that big purple flower tickled my cheek like it was trying to make me smile. Will Junior sat on the floor next to me, even though it was dirtying his trousers. He sat, not quite touching my hand with his, the happy-birthday pen set resting in his lap, still wrapped up in birthday paper.
As the bus rattled on and on, away from Kansas and Poppa in his hospital bed and Momma and Rocket in their motel with white soaps and towels, I could hear the hush-hush tattletale of Bobbi’s angel in my head. I tried to ignore it, to pretend I didn’t hear it.
I remembered seeing a crazy man once when we lived down south, a man who was weaving and wandering along a downtown pavement talking to no one but himself; talking and smacking himself on the side of the head like he was trying to get something to pop out the other side. Like he had a bug in his ear – or like he was hearing voices. I wondered if that was where I might be headed. It was the stress, I told myself, the stress of all my worry for Poppa, the stress of trying to figure out my new savvy and make it work right. Stress made people’s minds do funny, funny things.
I tried to ignore the angel’s humming, crooning voice the same way I’d ignored the hissing whispers of Ashley and Emma and all the other kids at Hebron Middle School only yesterday and every day before that, every day since we’d come to live in Kansaska-Nebransas. But as I pushed that voice to the back of my head the way I swept crumbs under the stove when Momma wasn’t looking, I realized that beneath the sound of the angel, beneath the racket of the bus and the rustle of the boxes, the squabbling ladies from Pastor Meeks’s office were back in my head as well. Carlene and Rhonda were back – and they were still quarrelling.