Won’t you get on the bus? He holds the door open for you. You should thank him by accepting the invitation. You shouldn’t trust him. But you don’t take enough risks.

Which one is it, mother?

No one tells you what to do so you grin back like a dog. You ask, you’re nervous. She makes you. Mother is there even when she isn’t. She has to learn to stay at home. You mean, you have to learn to leave her there. Be more crustacean. Grow a shell no one else can steal into.

In the meantime you will. You will get on the bus but avoid eye contact with the driver. He means well. He knows too much. You must sit directly behind him so he won’t see you in the rearview. You check. The mirror reflects his khaki lap. No eyes is good. Though it’s strange hiding like this behind his back where both of you can hear and smell each other. But you get used to it. You were friends the moment he saw you on the sidewalk.

There were others on the bus that you might have looked at if you were curious. You were very much, but you didn’t look. You wanted to see the destination yourself. The others’ faces might spoil the surprise. You knew only that more and more buses drove past you each day as if school had started again. In March.

No one asked why they began to prowl the cul-de-sacs, why here, why now, because everybody knew. They thought they knew. They talked of a program. That much was obvious because the buses came at eight and three and invited kids only. But the consensus ended there. What kind of program? Educational seemed like an educated guess because most buses go to and from schools. Rehabilitative was also fair because the kids go on without backpacks and get off happy. Either way no one cared to know the certainties of the arrangement. It worked. What mattered was it worked. And it’s only when you probe something that you see the problems.

Not even the kids talk amongst each other. That’s probably why you have little trouble ignoring them. The seats teem in squirming silence like upturned rocks, so nothing demands your attention. Only the talk you think up. Only mother.

She sticks out from the other parents because she suspects the buses of something. She taught you the word nefarious when she came back inside with the mail one morning and spoke of a white school bus stopping at every single house. Any children today? Nefarious she said. It sounded accurate then. But you checked the dictionary and couldn’t help finding her a bit superstitious. There was nothing frightening or unearthly about buses. Excepting their brakes. But the white buses would stop without even a squeak. They would pause silently beside the kid pedestrians and invite them aboard.

Mother tells you not to go near them. That’s fine. Only one of you wanted to know where they went. That’s one reason you finally decided to board this morning. Mother will berate you when you get home but she will listen openmouthed and awed to what you have to say. For once you will talk and she will have to listen. If only she were thirty years younger she might have been invited too and had her own story to tell. But you were the young one. You were chosen. You and not your siblings.

The buses stopped only for kids aged ten and under. Your grin relaxes when you think how you just made the cutoff and how long you have waited to have a story people want to hear.

When the last seat fills the bus noses down Center Street at a whalish pace. The radio comes on. The volume is low but the program resonates. It crackles like tissue with many voices at once. You register the human sounds but not the meanings. There are syllables and half-words you hear but the narratives slip. You would be frustrated but no one is taking notes. As long as there isn’t a quiz. You glance sidelong at the reflections of kids in the sunshined windows and notice that there is only one window. A single pane of glass stretches from your row in front to the one-seater at the end. Both sides of the bus have a single undivided view. Odd you think but unimportant. What you look for is the reflections. The kids stare blank and tranquil out their seatly plot of window and absorb the radio noise if not through their ears then through their open mouths. Their tongues must be fuzzy but they don’t take care. They look beyond.

The bus leaves town and chugs down the highway. You know the road because your parents take it on New Year’s Day to get to that restaurant downtown. You recognize the dandelioned grass strip between the in and outbound roads. But the one the bus takes now is not the one that goes to the city. You haven’t been this way before. Outbound. It shocks your neck hairs on end to be going somewhere new and mysterious.

Outbound.