The snow started the night before, yet the superintendent refused to cancel school. Oakbridge never failed to hire school officials from a pool of near-retired candidates who stayed for only a year or two to pad their pensions. This superintendent, Rachel Hines, refused to delay or cancel school on account of snow, even if the three neighboring towns had done so twelve hours earlier. Her stubbornness led to my standing at the head of Linton Street, bundled head to toe, and shivering. With the rate of snowfall—fat flakes plummeting to the ground—I doubted the bus would make it to Oakbridge High School in one piece.
Olivia Daly stood next to me at the bus stop. Though she was a senior and thus should have been able to drive to school instead of relying on the trundling yellow smell-box, her eyes worked so poorly that no eye doctor in America would have cleared her to drive. Her glasses, as thick as prison plexiglass, didn’t magnify her eyes, but they gave her the appearance of a twentieth-century cliché. Her ginger hair and freckled face didn’t help matters.
“You’d think we’d have no school,” I said, gesturing about. At least, I tried to say those words, but my jaw was starting to numb along with my fingertips. I tried again, and the words tumbled out more clearly.
Olivia shrugged. “If they can get us there, why not have it?”
“Because nobody actually likes going?”
“Maybe you don’t, but I don’t mind.” She looked me in the eye. Not even her glasses tempered the intensity of her gaze.
I never saw Olivia at school, since I was a sophomore and she was a senior. On occasion we passed each other in the hallway, but we never so much as nodded to each other.
The snow was falling harder now. Despite the plows having run by not too long ago, a layer was building on 38A, the road Linton Street branched from.
“Pardon me if this is rude,” I said, “but don’t people, err—”
“Make fun of my appearance?”
“Yes, that.”
“They used to.” She cocked her head to the side. “But if you project confidence, they stop. It’s not easy. Most people can’t manage it. Just hold your head up even when you feel small, and people start treating you like you’re not. After a while, it becomes habit.” She paused. “Or, when people make fun, you can just say ‘that’s rather horrible of you. Do you get off on making fun of people?’ That alone is enough to shock most assholes into shutting up. Anyway, I think I hear the bus coming.”
As she finished, the rumble of an engine sounded in the distance. Through the whirling snowflakes a patch of yellow drew closer. With it came the acrid scent of the bus’s ancient diesel engine.
“You coming?” she asked, edging toward the end of the road?
I stood, frozen, for a moment, unsure whether I should move. Something told me to stay where I was. Call it gut instinct. The bus screeched to a halt on 38A. The stop sign swung out from its side. Olivia looked at me one last time and waved at me to follow. I shook my head.
“You’re the one in trouble then, not me.” She shrugged, darted across the road, and vanished into the bus.
As it pulled away from Linton Street, I couldn’t shake the feeling that avoiding that bus had been the best decision I ever made. Had the sight of a bus in a snowstorm looked too strange to be real? Had the bus looked packed full of students on a day like this struck me as unlikely? Or had that instinct that kept ancient man alive when conscious thought failed him kicked into gear and told me to avoid something that I couldn’t see?
These thoughts raced through my head in a second, then I gasped. What in God’s name had I done? I needed to go to school. I turned and hurried down the road. Maybe I could catch my mother before she left for work. The high school was on the way. But no, she might not head into work today, not during a snowstorm.
I burst into the kitchen, my cheeks numb and red from the cold. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee.
“There you are,” she said. “I was just about to come out and tell you that the school just called. They’re closed today. Enjoy the day off.”
“But—but…” I trailed off and looked out the kitchen window. “I’ll be right back.”
Before she could reply I darted to the end of Linton Street and stared at the layer of snow covering 38A. The tire marks of a few cars marked the road, though they had already mostly filled with fresh snow. Nowhere, however, did I see the heavy tire marks of a school bus.