Upside Down in the Middle of Nowhere

For all of the storm-tossed children everywhere.

“The oak fought the wind and was broken, while the willow bent when it must and survived.”

— ROBERT JORDAN,
The Fires of Heaven

I was on my tippy-toes, bouncing up and down on the first step of the bus, stuck behind my second cousin, Danisha, and her melon-sized butt. My little sister, Sealy, was up in there sobbing, but there wasn't a dang thing I could do about it, 'cause I was all squished between the biggest fifth grader in the Lower Ninth Ward and a clump of sweaty kids all but killing each other behind me.

Danisha hit me square in the chest with a booty-bump and glared over her shoulder. “Girl, you best stop pushin' me!” Her bottom lip was rolled out so far, I couldn't help that my eyes went straight to the shiny bubblegum-pink underside.

“Hey, hey, hey, now, you girls stop all that messin' around,” my bus driver mumbled all slow in his old-man voice. Mr. Frank had drove my daddy to school when he was a kid, using the same old bus, except it was new and shiny back then, not all beat-down and rusted-out like it was for us. Daddy said he guessed Mr. Frank had to be close to a hundred and twenty years old.

“Sorry, Mr. Frank,” I said to Danisha's giant backside. The girl was standing on the step in front of me, so all I could see was how her
khaki school pants were stretched so tight, it was only a matter of time before they'd bust open at the seam right in my face. My nerves had wore down about as thin as the pants on my oversized cousin.

Sealy's crying had turned to blubbering. I was flat-out done waiting. I tried to push my way into the aisle so I could at least see her.

“Armani, what is your problem?” Danisha swung around and stomped her foot. She was at least six inches taller than me and everything about her was big, even her head. When she looked down at me, with her fat lips flapping and her big head rolling from side to side, I knew she could kill me easy if she set her mind to it. But I didn't care. Sealy was crying.

“Shut up, Danisha, an' get out the way.” I slipped past her before she had a chance to say something else stupid.

I knew where Sealy would be sitting, because we always sat in the same seat, right up front. I didn't like sitting in the back of the bus. Seemed to me, the further back you went, the crazier the kids were.

Danisha shoulder-bumped me when she passed me up heading to her seat—in the back where she
always
sat.

Sure enough, Sealy was doing the ugly cry. Her face was all puffed up, her eyes were pouring water, and her arms were folded up tight across her chest. “What's goin' on? Why are you cryin'?” I asked, all out of breath.

Sealy looked up at me with her head hiccupping up and down. She ran the back of her hand up under her nose, smearing all that wetness across her face. “Bugger took my book,” she sobbed. I ain't never seen no one look so pitiful.

“He took your book?
That's
why you're fussin'?” Sealy nodded about fifty times. I hated seeing her not smiling, but I couldn't believe all this drama was on account of a dumb book.

I looked around for Bugger. I don't know what his mama named him, but ever since that kid was born five years ago, he's been Bugger, simple as that. I don't even think he knew his real name. Then I seen him. He was standing on the very last seat in the back of the bus, jumping up and down like a fool, waving my sister's book in the air, just as proud as he could be.

I marched toward the back to pry it out of his grimy hands. Stupid Bugger seen me coming, and he squealed like a stuck hog. He threw the book. It almost went flying out an open window.

I kept heading straight for Bugger, never minding the book. At this point I just wanted to knock that boy upside his head. But I never got the chance. Danisha stepped in my way with both hands on her wide hips and her big head cocked to the side.

“Where you goin', Armani?” To
kill your little brother
, I wanted to say, but my good sense kept the words from leaving my mouth.

“Nowhere,” I lied.

Some little kid leaned over the seat next to us and handed Danisha my sister's book. As soon as I seen the swirly green and white cover, my hands squeezed shut—Sealy's journal. No wonder the girl was having such a fit.

Danisha started flipping through the pages. She opened her mouth to say something, but just then the oldest Boman kid reached in front of her and snatched the book out of her hands.

“Boy, you crazy!” she squawked.

The shaggy blond-headed Boman kid never even looked at my cousin or said a word. He just held the book out for me to take.

I grabbed the journal from the boy's smelly hand and whipped around. “You best tell your brother to leave Sealy alone,” I hollered over my shoulder at Danisha. My heart was about to jump out of my chest. I rubbed the book on the seat of my pants, hoping to wipe off any germs it might've picked up being passed around like gossip on the crazy side of the bus. I walked fast back to my seat.

“Whatever,” Danisha hollered back. “You need to tell your sister to stop bein' so triflin' and weird!” She started laughing, and lots of the other kids laughed with her, slapping high fives behind me, but I didn't care.

“Whatever,” I grumbled to myself.

I tossed the journal onto Sealy's lap. She went to hugging that book and looked up at me. The tears left in her eyes looked like specks of twinkles dancing around. “Oh, thank you, Armani! Thank you!”

“Just put it away,” I said. “Don't be takin' that thing out on the bus no more. Why can't you just keep it home, anyways?”

“Because I never know when I might need it, silly.” She was back to being her normal, strange self. I stood there watching her put the book into her small book sack. Not her regular book sack for carrying school stuff. This was her other book sack, the one she used for carrying her special books and whatever else she had stashed down in there. After she zipped it up, she went to hugging the dumb sack. Danisha was right. My sister was weird.

“Move over, girl, an' let me sit next to the window.”

After I sat down, Sealy laid her head on my shoulder and sighed. “I love you, Armani.”

I wiggled my shoulder to get her head off me. I looked at her with my lip curled up, praying that nobody else had heard her. “Shut up, Sealy.” Then, while I was staring out the window, I reached over and gave her hand a little squeeze.

Ol' Mr. Frank always had his soul music pumping out of the homemade speakers he'd rigged up with fishing line. They hung crooked up over the huge mirror he used for spying on us kids while he drove. Most times, I could barely hear the music on account of the kids hootin' and hollerin' about a whole lot of nothing, everyone talking at the same time. Some days it got so bad that by the time we finally made it to our stop, I'd used up all the nerves I'd been given to help me make it through the day. The noise wasn't the biggest problem, though.

Nope, it wasn't the ride, the noise, or even the tore-up seats and sticky floors that pulled the nice out of me. I didn't even care that they had us stuffed three or four kids to a seat.

What
did
bother me was the smell. The smell wasn't so bad in the morning. But by afternoon, the August sun had been beating down all day, cooking up the smells. By the time school let out and we loaded onto the bus, it was like stepping into a big stinky sock. It didn't help matters none when all the sweaty kids piled into the bus and
started spreading their smells around, especially the older kids coming straight from P.E.—and them white Boman kids.

There was four of them in that family, and they always walked together and sat together. Every day when they got on the bus, I'd keep all my fingers crossed that they wouldn't sit nowhere close to me. I ain't trying to be hurtful, but them kids smelled like their mama was bathing them in pure onion water. I don't know how anyone can smell that bad and not be bothered by their own stink. If they sat even kind of close to me, I'd bury my nose in my own armpit and suck in the scent of the lavender soap Mama made us bathe in twice a day. I was always grateful when they walked on by and headed to the back of the bus. I only had to hide my nose for a quick minute.

When Mr. Frank made his first stop, about twelve kids got off. That's when the rest of us shuffled around, jumping into open seats, so we wasn't all so squished up.

While the bus sputtered and bounced down the road, I looked out the window and counted things. Mostly I took to counting to keep my mind from noticing the canal. I hated the canal. I hated it because Mama hated it, and she hated it because Memaw hated it. Somewhere in that stinking canal was the bones of my two dead uncles, Mama's brothers—Memaw's sons. Story goes that one day when they were kids, one of them tried to save the other from drowning when the canal decided to take them both. My bus went by that liquid graveyard every day—so I took to counting.