It took a few seconds for Angel, who had been lost in the stars, to realize that Megan was talking to her. “Huh?”
“It isn’t true that your father is the Wayne Morgan who robbed the Cumberland Farms in Barre a few years ago?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Angel wasn’t faking. She really didn’t know what Wayne had or had not done. Nobody had ever said.
Megan gave a twisted smile and sniffed. “Just wondering,” she said. “It was in the papers a while back. The guy was sent to jail...for a long time.” She studied Angel’s face, which Angel willed to be blank. Finally, Megan turned away. Angel watched her go back to her usual table to report.
So the word was out. Somebody’s mom or dad or grandparent had a long memory. Vermont was a small state. Morgans were known around here, for good or bad. It had taken just three weeks. The girls were whispering and giggling and stealing glances at her. She stared back. She wasn’t going to let them think they could humiliate her. How many of them knew that the star Rigel was 545 light-years from earth? They probably didn’t even know what a light-year was. Or that to the stars at the farthest rim of the universe they weren’t even going to be born for billions of years. They weren’t anything more than she was. Less than pond scum, less than dust, less than nothing at all.
Still, she wished they hadn’t found out quite so soon. Before, she was nothing in their eyes, but now, though still less than nothing, she was as visible as the sun. Which she bet they didn’t know was 93 million miles away—the closest star. Which was a fiery ball that would burn you up if you got too close. She put all of Megan’s gang into a spaceship and shot them straight at the sun.
Somehow she got through the day, trying hard to ignore the fact that all conversations stopped abruptly when she walked past, as eyes sidled toward her. It wasn’t as if it hadn’t happened before. She ought to be used to it by now, shouldn’t she? If she just weren’t so tired. But she couldn’t both sleep and see the stars, and she couldn’t stand the days without the nights of stars.
The afternoon dragged through to the final bell. She hunched into a corner of her bus seat, willing herself not to look or listen to the other kids on the bus, yet unable to ignore the buzz and the stares.
At her stop, she hopped off and ran up the driveway, the sob that had choked her throat since lunchtime threatening to explode. She wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t. They weren’t worth crying about.
Grandma was sitting rocking in the kitchen. Angel wanted to run past her, go upstairs and throw herself down on her bed, but something in Grandma’s face stopped her.
“What’s the matter, Grandma?”
“I don’t know. Something.”
“What do you mean?”
“If I knowed, I could tell you, couldn’t I? I just said I don’t know.”
Angel could feel her flesh crawl. She caught Grandma’s fear. Something was happening, but she didn’t know what it was. Dread was hanging over the house like dense fog on a mountain road.
“Where’s Bernie?” she blurted out.
“At school.” There was a pause. “I reckon.”
Angel focused her mind on the elementary school. She willed herself to see Bernie there, straightening up his desk, saying goodbye to his teacher, walking out of the building, getting on the bus. In her heart she knew that wasn’t the real Bernie, who would have resisted doing whatever every other kid did, but a different Bernie, a kind of robot Bernie, the kind that she could control in her imagination and make do the right things, the kind of Bernie she could make come home safe and happy.
“I guess I’ll go wait for the bus.” It was another forty-five minutes before it was due, but she needed to keep mental watch over the bus through its whole route, from the school door to Grandma’s mailbox.
Grandma leaned back in the rocker and shut her eyes. She looked like something was paining her. That was it. The bad thing. Grandma felt sickly. She was an old lady. That was natural for old people, wasn’t it? They had so many parts that didn’t work so well anymore.
“Okay, Grandma?” she asked softly. “I’m just going out to the mailbox and wait for Bernie, okay?”
The old woman nodded without opening her eyes.
In light-years it was nothing, but in feeling time it was forever before she heard the shifting gears and saw the yellow bus coming over the brow of the hill. She waited, hardly breathing. If a doctor had put a stethoscope to her chest, he probably wouldn’t even have detected a heartbeat. The bus rumbled past where she stood. It didn’t slow, much less stop.
“Bernie!” she yelled at the back of it. She ran a few steps down the road behind it. “Bernie!” Unbelieving, she watched it bumping and rattling out of sight, heading for the corner, turning onto the paved road.
She raced back to the house.
Grandma sat up, eyes wide. “Where’s Bernie?”
Angel was fumbling through the phone book. Why hadn’t she kept the school number? You always do that. Keep the number by the phone in case of emergency. She was breathless now. The line was busy, of Course. She slammed down the phone. Oh Lord, I’ve forgotten the number. Another fumble through the phone book. Another dial. At last that impatient voice of the secretary. “Chesterville Union Elementary School.”
“Where’s Bernie?” she blurted out, realizing too late that it was the wrong thing to say.
“Excuse me? Who did you want to speak to?”
She forced herself to be quiet a minute and took a deep breath. “This is Mrs. Verna Morgan. My son, Bernie, didn’t get off the school bus just now—”