Just Wreck It All Read online

  “And you”—Eddie stabbed a finger at Mutt’s reflection in the rearview mirror—“you, I have had it with, with your insubordination and insults. What kind of damn kid are you?” He opened his window, twisted in his seat, and, in one forceful arc, grabbed the phone from Mutt and flung it out the window. It landed in one of the dug-out basement holes that lined the side of the road across from the river. All this empty land used to be people’s farms but had been sold off to become developments. COYOTE ACRES, the sign to this one said, but this development had stalled out at its beginning stages, leaving a long line of identical basement holes with stacks of planks piled in rows between them.

  “HEY! That’s my PHONE!” Mutt roared. “All my music is on that phone!”

  Across the aisle, Dan opened and closed his mouth.

  “Sue him!” yelled Ranger.

  “The hell you will,” said Eddie, and started up the bus again.

  “That cost me a ton of money!” Mutt yelped.

  “Then you should’ve kept it where it belonged,” said Eddie, and the bus strained against its gears as it picked up speed. Bett couldn’t help but be relieved that Eddie hadn’t seen her with her phone just minutes before.

  “You can’t just do that!”

  “No. YOU”—Eddie stabbed into the rearview mirror again—“can’t just be an ass to people and break the damn rules whenever you want. Learn that.”

  They drove on. Then the bus stopped short again.

  “Jesus!” Dan shouted.

  Ranger’s head bobbled back and forth like a doll’s.

  “What now?” Mutt yelped.

  Eddie eyed him in the mirror. “Go get your damn phone.”

  “It’s way back there!” said Mutt.

  “Run, then.” Eddie turned off the bus.

  The silence was sudden, and Mutt stood up. Eddie wrenched the door open and gestured. “Be my guest. Go.”

  “You can still sue him if it’s busted up or wrecked from the rain,” said Ranger eagerly. “Sue himcakes!”

  “Shut up,” Eddie, Mutt, and Dan said in unison.

  Mutt swore and leaped out the door and pegged it down the road.

  We’ll be late, thought Bett, half fascinated, half scared.

  “Hope he knows which pit,” muttered Dan. But Bett’s eyes were on Mutt. She couldn’t believe how fast he’d gotten. Salt River was so small most teams were co-ed, and when they had been in elementary and junior high soccer and basketball, Mutt had been a very middling runner, definitely not your first choice to pass to. But now he’d already disappeared down the long dirt road. And just as quickly, he reared back into sight and onto the bus, damp with dirt all over and panting, but clutching his phone.

  “Got it?” Eddie asked.

  Mutt snorted.

  “Good,” said Eddie.

  They waited. The bus was still.

  “Are you going to take us to school?” asked Ranger. “Or are we, like, bus dwellers now?”

  “Shut up, you,” said Eddie. He crossed his arms over his steering wheel and his head dropped.

  Why does every single person I know have to be completely weird? thought Bett. Mom, Aunt Jeanette, now this bus driver.

  Eddie sat back up. “Okay,” he said. Then, “Okay!” and he turned on the bus and threw it in gear.

  “Never a dull moment in this vehicle,” muttered Dan.

  “Batshit,” Mutt muttered as he dropped into the seat in front of Bett, still breathing hard. “What is wrong with him? Who does that?”

  “Eddie,” answered Ranger.

  I want to go home, thought Bett, but that wasn’t it. She wanted to go nowhere and noplace. All this time, taking so long, and she was tired of living through all its minutes.

  4

  TWO YEARS AGO . . . Up until the end of Bett’s eighth-grade year, if you lived under some particular distance from the school, say like a mile, you had to walk to school instead of taking the bus. Bett didn’t mind at all. In fact, she ran the whole way, her backpack full of a big night of eighth-grade homework making the run even better because it was harder, harder to take off, harder to fly down the dirt roads. Bett reveled in the difficulty of it, her muscles begging her to stop her flight, but . . .

  You will not walk. You will run even faster.

  And Bett did run even faster, loving the feeling of a too-hard run at the same time as hating the feeling of a too-hard run. The hate part of her run made the love part even better somehow. And the victory of having done that run before school even began, before other people were even up, or were just sitting voluntarily, doing nothing, made Bett feel completely badass, so badass she would have flown to that school with two backpacks on her back and one over each shoulder if she could have gotten away with it.

  Speed, she wrote carefully on the bottom of her sneaker. Or Strong, or Light, or whatever quality she wanted in her running, so each step pounded the wishes into her body until the word was erased by the pebbles of the road shoulder and the idea was in Bett’s feet forever. And there was no better feeling than after these runs. Which was good while it lasted because, she had found, expressions of pent-up body energy in school often made teachers, and, ultimately, principals, mad.

  “You can’t just run down these halls like they’re your personal track, Bett,” said the principal to her more than once.

  “But they were empty,” Bett pointed out.

  “How do you know they would have stayed that way? How do you know that someone wouldn’t have flung a classroom door open and smashed you in the face by mistake?”

  That could happen if I were walking, too, head down like some stupid grackle eating pebbles. And I am not so dumb that I run along the walls where the doorways are. But she already had so many warning slips she knew she was just going to have to keep her mouth shut and eat this one, as she did the others.

  But just as Bett was about to enter ninth grade, two things happened: 1) the school board read an article about how adolescents needed to sleep more, so they changed the time school started from seven thirty to eight for the junior high and high school kids, and 2) they lowered the distance that the bus would pick you up from one mile to a half mile. So now Bett was eligible to take the bus and her parents were making her take it.

  “What? Why?!” cried Bett.

  “You know why,” said her mother, flipping the music from the seventies Simon and Garfunkel that Bett’s dad had been playing to Led Zeppelin, her own favorite.

  “We were home before, when you walked to school,” said her father, watching her mother change the music as he leaned his skinny self against the sink to eat his cereal. “I was listening to that, Marianne.”

  “I can’t stand that folksy shit,” said Bett’s mother. “And you used to love Zeppelin.”

  But Bett was too concerned with this bus thing to get involved in the music war. “I didn’t walk to school,” she said.

  Her dad smiled at her. “When you ran to school. But with school starting later, we can’t be home the whole time until you get there, and—”

  “I’m not about to deal with a body-snatching,” Bett’s mother, a policewoman, finished the sentence. “Especially of my own kid. Before, you could call me if any weirdass tried to get you, and I could be there in under a minute. But now I’ll already be at the station house when you leave and so I’ll be too far away to help. Forget it, honey. You’re riding that bus.”

  “She could call either of us, Marianne,” said her father, his spoon halfway to his mouth, his eyes still on Bett’s mother.

  Her mother snorted and rolled her eyes.

  Bett broke the silence.

  “I can outrun any weirdasses,” she said.

  “Don’t you use language like that.”

  “It’s what you just said!”

  “I am an adult,” said Bett’s mother. “You can swear your face off when you hit eighteen, but not before.”

  This was so patently unreasonable that Bett said nothing.

  In any case,
this forced bus thing was no gift to Bett. Could she hold herself together until lunch break? In the eighth grade, in the junior high part of the school, she had been a force to be reckoned with in any of the softball or baseball or basketball games that sprang up at lunch or break time. And she needed that this year, too, she knew, but there was no way—ninth grade spelled the end of break time and lunch was just lunch, and you weren’t allowed to go outside, not unless you were an upperclassman. And Bett knew there was even more sitting once you got to the high school wing of the Salt River K–12 School. It was going to drive her nuts.

  She’d have to use her old elementary school tricks. Ask to go to the bathroom, where she could swing on the door of the toilet stall, or jump and try to reach the rectangle of lights overhead, no fair starting the jump from the sink. Anything to get some of the pent-up feeling out before it built in her so much that if it burst, she’d shoot from the floor through the roof of the school like a ninth-grader-shaped rocket.

  It was no wonder more of her friends had been boys than girls in elementary and junior high school since, face it, up to then there had been more boys than girls with her in those lunch-period games.

  “Tell me about it,” Bett’s mother had said, more than once. “This is a man’s, man’s world.” As a cop she knew what it was like to be one of the few female humans stuck in a confederacy of males.

  But Bett didn’t really care who she was playing with or against as long as she got to play, to run a puck down the ice with a hockey stick and whack it into a goal or to dribble dribble layup fly on the basketball court.

  Bett was a beast.

  Even for reasons not to do with being forced to sit instead of run to school, Bett wasn’t crazy about buses. Field trips on a bus always smelled like a rubberized goods factory somehow and made her sick to her stomach.

  I’ve got to distract myself from this, Bett thought on the bus the third day of ninth grade, holding her morning soda in her hand. Okay. Divide this ride into three parts. The first part of the ride to school was the way from Bett’s driveway to a small horse farm. Not a farm for small horses—though how cute would that be?—but a farm that was small and had a few horses on it. Once the bus hit the end of that first stretch, Bett decided she was free to open the soda and slug a thirdsworth of the can down her throat. Then she’d wait until the second part of the ride, from that horse farm to a road crossing closer to the heart of town, to take her next thirdsworth of a swig. On one corner of that crossing there was a store sagging with flaky green paint where you could buy things like Cheetos and beef sticks and lottery tickets but also liquor in the back. The store was called Fancy Jim’s. Bett had no idea why. She’d asked her dad (“Who knows?” he’d answered. “Maybe he named the store to reflect who he felt like he truly was.”). Her father was always talking about things like reflecting who you felt like you truly were. What else would you do? thought Bett.

  Opposite Fancy Jim’s there was another farmhouse. That farmhouse was a mystery to Bett, and not only because she didn’t know the people who lived in it—weird what with the town population being so small she could name practically everyone in it if you gave her five minutes—but because this farm was different: a Christmas tree farm. And it did have adorable baby trees growing up in some of its fields, trees waiting to be old and tall enough to be in someone’s house come some December. This house was also unusual in that it had three gas pumps in its front lawn, the middle one rusted and leaning to one side, and Bett had no idea why those pumps were there. The gas certainly didn’t seem to be for sale—no high signs with prices per gallon, no car ever stopped in front of them that she had ever seen riding past to and from school. So she was free to make up her own explanations, which were:

  The house used to be a gas station, and the people who lived in the house now as a house couldn’t be bothered to get rid of the pumps, or

  The house used to be a gas station, and the people who lived in the house didn’t know how to get rid of the gas pumps, so the pumps just stood there in a row, like people waiting to be chosen for a softball team, or

  The people who lived in the house had put them there themselves as some kind of art project.

  The last one occurred to her because more and more people from the city were moving up here and buying houses and coming on weekends. Bett and her mom saw them when they went into town. You could pick out the city people a mile away, with their carefully chosen country clothes and boots that had never seen mud. Or they were in athletic wear made out of complex fabrics, racing through the town in expensive sneakers. The city people walking on Main Street all beamed at the Salt River people as they passed and Bett knew this was because people like Bett and her mom and the actual citizens of the town were only background characters in the city people’s life movie, this section of which was probably called something like Country Livin’. They would leave off the g in “living” because they would think that mimicked the rural accent of Salt River when they finally drove their huge, unneeded SUVs back into the city, where they’d come from, and Bett and the rest of the town relaxed, knowing they were no longer characters but belonged to themselves again, for better or worse, at last.

  Anyway, the city people were also forever putting sculptures in their yards and trying to start events with names like ArtBeat! (“We want to bring culture to this town!” they cried on Town Meeting day, without caring that Salt River already had a lot of great stuff going on all year. Like the Agricultural Fair up at the school, so much fun in the fall with games and animals and treats in booths run by each class grade six and up, as well as the Winter Festival in December and then all the maple sugaring parties in the spring, with cider doughnuts and pickles to cut the sweet. Bett loved it all.) And you couldn’t last through the long winter up here with no hobby to do in the dark hours in a snowbound house, so people who painted often had their pictures up in the coffee shop in town, which doubled as a deli, and in the insurance office and in the banks and even in the Veteran Services Center building, where Eddie and Bett’s dad worked.

  And when Salt River people wanted to have friends over, they just did, with minimal fuss and no discussion about the food beyond the organizational. Bett and her friends always left the adults immediately and went off and played Xbox until it got boring and then they went outside to talk down by the river, where they made piles of stones, sometimes, largest to smallest, or went toe-dipping into the freezing waters. Once they built a lean-to over one of the cairns but it didn’t stay up. Not enough twine to tie it together. But that didn’t matter. It was the making of it that was fun.

  Sometimes they just sat by the shore, toying with Kelley’s dad’s cigarette lighter to see who was brave enough to palm the flame. Or they took turns sweeping a finger through the flame to see who came out unharmed. (Everybody. No one was stupid enough to let a finger rest in the path of the flame, except Mutt that one time, but that was only to show off in front of one of the girls, Hester or somebody, who he had a crush on.)

  But Bett and her mother and her mother’s friends didn’t really care about the city people. This year was different at school, though, at least among the girls. Now, in ninth grade, some girls were considered to be the ones you were supposed to want to be like, and then there were the rest of them, like Bett, who were supposed to be ashamed of being the way they were. The first group leaned toward being more like the city people, while Bett and her friends were mostly in the Stay group.

  Bett didn’t know why “Stay” fit the feel of the group so exactly, only that it was mostly made up of people who somehow lived all the way in Salt River, in the farms and stores and the cop house, like her mother. Stay was brown and gray and green like tree bark and dirt roots and cow poo, and Salt River was all those things. But the other girls were making a new group that, like the city people, felt like it visited Salt River on feet that twinkled like stars, moving toward some life that Bett didn’t get wanting. The Twinkler girls all seemed so confident. They wore make
up and the kind of clothes you were meant to wear like movie people and had hair that was done in A Way. And now some of the Stay group girls were baldly turning their backs on the other Stays, and the mud and dirt and animals of Salt River, and were forcing their way into the group of Twinkler girls, first by hanging out at the periphery of that group at their lockers and then by doing their own hair in The Way and using their babysitting money to buy Twinkler kind of clothes and then, finally, boldly, setting their lunches down at the Twinklers’ table, where they would sip one juice and eat just one item on their lunch tray and throw away the rest. All the while they talked like the Twinklers, as if they were trying to speak French or something. From her own lunch table, Bett wondered if the new, previously Stay Twinklers were as valued as the Twinklers-from-the-start, and thought it unlikely. Because if she was honest, even the Stay people had a weird hierarchy to them.

  Like we never talk to that girl with the dippy bangs cut way back past her ears, and we don’t talk to that boy who reeks like his pig farm and doesn’t notice he has so much dirt under his fingernails it looks like he has some kind of permanent reverse French manicure.

  So, if you thought about it, Bett and the Stays, many of whom also took care of pigs and cows, were no better than the Twinkler group, whose always-Twinkler group believed they were better than the previous-Stays. But even if there were subgroups in both the Stays and the Twinklers, it mattered less than the separation between the two.

  Wait, why was she thinking about the Stays and Twinklers now, on this bus ride? Oh, right. Bett was waiting to take her second thirdsworth of a swig of her soda, which she’d do when the bus turned right at Fancy Jim’s and the gas tank Christmas tree farm toward the center of town and Salt River K–12, completing the semicircle that described Bett’s ride to school. But they had been stopped at the road crossing forever. The third and last part of the ride was the longest and dullest one, but even so, if school was inevitable, why was Pat, the bus driver, stopping here? And delaying Bett’s soda?