The Monster on the Bus Read online

  *****

  The summer had disappeared like water down a drain, with me fighting, struggling, grasping for the edges trying to keep from being sucked down with it. It hadn't worked. Here I was, standing by the side of the highway waiting for the school bus for the first time in my life. I felt sick and empty. I didn't want to leave my mom. My brand new Lone Ranger lunch box was gripped in my hand as if it could anchor me to the last days of my childhood. My other hand had snatched on to my mom's hand and wouldn't let go. I know it's not part of the story, but I remember thinking how different her hand felt with her wedding ring gone. Memory is a funny thing.

  Mostly, I just wanted to cry. Instead, I stared down the highway.

  At first it was just noise. I couldn't see anything because the highway dipped and rose up a big hill about a quarter of a mile down. But it was there, and it was coming. The louder it got, the emptier I felt. My mom's hand squeezed tighter. Or maybe it was mine doing the squeezing. I kept my eyes pinned on the highway. I didn't want to look at her because I knew she was crying. And of course, how could I blame her? She was giving her little boy over to a monster….

  There was a deep growl as the bus geared down for enough power to climb the hill. The big, yellow nose of the bus popped up over the hill like sunrise on the last day of the world. The engine roar smoothed out as the giant county vehicle coasted down the hill toward my driveway. The bus was quiet now, like a predator stalking its prey. The closer it got, the more the rusty grill looked like teeth dripping with blood.

  The bus was so close now I could hear the windows rattling in their frames. As it edged to the shoulder, gravel caught in the tire's treads broke loose and pinged off the belly of the beast. The driver maneuvered so that the double-hinged door was aligned perfectly with my mom and me. The air brakes hissed like a prehistoric lizard. Eastern sunlight bounced off the grimy windows turning them into mirrors of orange and gold. It was impossible to see inside.

  Like the wing of a dying bat, the door folded open with two nerve rattling bangs.

  I was frozen, couldn't have moved even if the devil himself was poking me in the butt with a pitchfork. My mom said something to the driver, and I suspect the driver answered back. Their words sounded vague and far away but loud at the same time. My mom pushed me gently up the bus steps. Her hand rested for just a second on the back of my neck as I levered myself up the steep steps.

  "Bye, baby," she said softly. "I'll be waiting right here after school."

  I nodded, but I didn't trust myself to say anything out loud.

  "All the way to the back, honey," the driver said. "We fill up pretty fast." A cigarette bobbed up and down in her lips as she spoke. Smoke spiraled around her face then was blown away by a little fan over her head. She coughed, the sound sharp and wet like something was tearing loose inside her. The bat wing shuttered and slammed closed.

  I stumbled down the aisle as the bus lurched forward. All the seats were empty except for one all the way at the back.

  That's where the monster was sitting.

  I stopped in the aisle. My hand clutched at the back of a seat. The thing sitting back there on the last seat had a head shaped like a giant pear. Patchy clumps of black hair stuck up from its fleshy skull at irregular intervals. Its eyes stuck so far out of its head they looked like something out of one of those 3-D movies they showed down at Rialto Theater on Fright Fridays. Its ears clung to the side of its head like the handles on a tiny teacup. When the monster's mouth opened up, the steel encased teeth glistened with saliva. It was smiling.

  "Hi," it said. "My name's Tommy. What's yours?"

  I don't think I made any actual sound, but my bottom lip was trembling like a dying butterfly. This was no monster. It was something much more terrible. It was a deformed human being. It was some sort of hideous natural mistake that all my years of reading "Ripley's Believe-it-or Not" had definitely NOT prepared me for. I was scared in a way I'd never been before or since.

  That small, smiling, sweet-voiced boy named Tommy was the most horrifying creature I ever could have imagined. I just turned away, sat in the nearest seat, ignoring the driver's command to move "all the way to the back." As other students boarded the bus, I saw everyone else do just what I had done. Pretty soon there was a pocket of emptiness around the monster, like someone had built an invisible box around him. But he kept on smiling.

  The first day of school was pretty much what you'd expect. It was filled with strangers telling you where to go and where to sit, grownups not quite yelling at you but making you feel yelled at anyway. The new first graders were walking around in a blur, eyes sort of dazed looking. I was one of them, of course, and I don't remember much...just a general feeling of loss and sadness and panic.

  Sometime during the day the principal, Mr. Bush, came into our classroom. He made us stand straight up tall at our desks like soldiers when he came in. That was something we had to do until two years later when Mr. Bush left the school under what my mom called "unfortunate circumstances."

  He cleared his throat so loud I jerked like a puppet. "Children," he said, "I want to talk to you about a young man named Tommy..." Mr. Bush told us that Tommy had Hydrocephalus. Water on the brain. It was something he had been born with and would just keep getting worse. He told us that except for the way he looked, he was just like the rest of us. There was a whole lot of silence in the classroom because no one, probably not even Mr. Bush, believed that one. "So," he said in conclusion, "I don't want anyone treating him impolitely. Just leave the boy alone. You may take your seats." He turned and walked from the classroom.

  No one said anything after he left. Back in those days students didn't speak unless spoken to. But you could almost hear what people were thinking. Just like the rest of us. Yeah, right!

  As I sat there listening to the first graders think, I told myself that tomorrow I would say hello to Tommy. Tomorrow I would do the right thing.

  But I didn't.

  One day about three months later, Tommy wasn't on the bus. And he never was again.

  *****

  I could see the Hominy Cemetery from my bedroom window, out across the south forty and past the pond where I'd watched a horse fall through thin ice once. As more people died, the new graves got closer and closer to our fence line. Those dead people were our only neighbors. After we'd moved away, the city bought a piece of our property so that they could expand the cemetery. I've got family of my own there now.

  I watched from my window the day they buried Tommy. I could see the puffs of cold air coming out of the Baptist preacher's mouth when he said his words over the grave. The bare branches on the trees were covered in frost, like they'd been dipped in white chocolate. Blowing snow swirled and danced around some of the taller monuments with each gust of November wind. I counted six other people standing around the hole.

  I started thinking about it that day, and I've been thinking about it ever since. If I could go back and do it all again, I'd sit down by Tommy on the bus. I'd smile back at him that first day and tell him my name. If I could live it all over, I'd reach out to him so that he could have known what it was like to have a friend and not be lonely all the time. If I could...

  But I can't.

  The Monster on the Bus

  Written Response Questions

  1. What is the genre of this story? How do you know?

  2. Who really is the “monster on the bus?” Explain your answer.

  3. When does this story take place? I don't mean the time of the day or the season, but rather the era or approximate year. How do you know? Give at least two examples to support your response.

  4. What is the theme of this story? Remember, theme is the lesson the author wants you to learn by reading the story. Sometimes it is called the moral of the story.

  5. Find at least two similes in the story.

  6. Think of a time when you had to make a decision on what was right and what was wrong. Which did you choose and why? How did it make you
feel?

  7. Write a brief summary of the story. Be sure to include the setting, the main characters and their relationship to each other, and all the important events in the beginning, middle, and end. Remember, a summary should not include your opinion, just the facts of the story.

  Adult Fiction by Sean Benjamin Dexter

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  Dark Artist (A Jackson Burke Thriller)

  Maggie's Drawers (A Jackson Burke Thriller)

  Oklahoma Justice: A Novella

  The Patriot (A Short Story)

  These books are available on Amazon Kindle, Barnes and Noble, and other major retailers.

  Please visit my website at www.sdexter.com, and I would happy to send you a word file of The Monster on the Bus for you to use in your classroom. Just send in your request via my contact page.