Elizabeth Massie: Wire Mesh Mothers

Mistie said nothing.

“Leave her alone,” said the seventh grade girlfriend.

“Where your books, girl? You never take books to school. You lose ’em or what? Don’t you want to learn nothing?” The boy laughed, nudged his girlfriend who popped a large bubble of gum, and shook his head. “What’s that bruise on your neck? How’d you get a bruise on your neck?”

Mistie touched her neck but felt nothing. Did she have a bruise? Maybe. She fell asleep watching T.V. last night and rolled off the couch. Maybe she got a bruise when she hit the floor.

“You screwed up, you know that?” the boy continued. “Fucked up in the head. It’s from your daddy playing that loud music at night. Mrs. Colvin’s gonna get you all kicked out of the court. She told us. We gonna have us a party when you gone.”

Mistie looked down the paved road to where she couldn’t see anymore because of the curve in the road and the trees clustered by the road. She listened for the rumbling of the school bus, but couldn’t hear it over the shouting and fighting of the kids around her.

“Fucked up in the head,” the boy was saying beside her. “Really fucked up, your whole family is fucked up and they ought to be taken out back someday….”

It trailed. The voices of the other kids closed in on themselves; faded. The road and trees narrowed and vanished, the light swallowed up in grayness. Comfortable, cottony nothingness cushioned her; a familiar humming pulse played behind her eyes. She rocked in its arms.

Something heavy slammed her in the back. Sights raced in like water over the rim of a flooded bathtub. Sunlight stabbed her; noises jammed their picks into her ears.

“Bus is here, you retard,” said the high school boy. Mistie blinked and looked at him. He’d already finished his cigarette and was stubbing it out on the gravel with the toe of his cowboy boot. The girl friend was tugging on his arm and tossing Mistie a look of tempered tolerance. Other kids were pushing around Mistie, swinging book bags and purses, climbing up the steel steps and into the big yellow vehicle.

Mistie took the handrail and pulled herself up the steps. The bus smelled of mildew and cleanser and stinky feet. The bus driver, a man whose name she didn’t know but who was always the bus driver, gave her a scowl. Then he said to the high school boy behind her, “Lose the cigarettes, Ricky, or you’re off the bus for the next two weeks.”

Ricky planted the heel of his hand between Mistie’s shoulder blades and shoved her around the bar and into the aisle. Her breath went out with a whoosh, but she choked and caught it back, saying nothing.

“Ain’t got no smoke,” said Ricky. “Want to search me? Want to strip search me?” He winked at the high school girls on the bus. “You a queer or what?”

“Talk like that’ll get you off the bus for a month,” said the bus driver.

“Like I really care,” said Ricky. He pushed past Mistie and strode to the back of the bus where he dropped onto a vinyl-covered seat. Other high schoolers, sitting nearby, turned around drew together, heads going down, talking loudly but incoherently.

Mistie found a seat by herself halfway back. There was a pencil stub on the seat. She flicked it to the floor. “Mama had a baby and its head popped off.”

This was the only bus in the county that had a cross-grade population. It transported kids from all three schools, Pippins Elementary, Curtis Middle School, and Patterson High. The high school kids who rode this bus hated it, and let everyone know. At least they had the shortest ride, only three miles, and then they were gone, leaving the younger kids catching their breaths and rolling their eyes at each other.

A little ways down the road, the bus shuddered to a stop in front of a row of small, once-colorful box houses. A lot of these houses had kids. Bent bikes and up-turned plastic wading pools littered yards. Some of the chain link fences were torn down and most of the grass in most of the yards was gone, leaving cold-packed dirt and ruts. Five cars and two pickups in various stages of disrepair sat in the driveway of the pink house. In the side yard of the gray house, frozen sheets swayed stiffly on the line.

There was a girl who lived in the purple house who Mistie liked. Her name was Tessa Kessler. Tessa and Mistie were in the same second grade class at Pippins Elementary. Tessa was pretty, with bouncy blonde hair and a lot of new clothes. She wore makeup sometimes, and she missed a lot of school because she had to baby-sit her little brother when her mama ran down to Roanoke Rapids in North Carolina to shop. Tessa got to be in pageants on weekends. She looked like Princess Silverlace on that show on Nick.

Kids from the box houses filed onto the bus. Mistie pulled her foot clear of the aisle as they came, and watched for Tessa. A first-grader sat down by Mistie, bearing a blue plastic lunch box and a scowl. He looked as though he’d been crying. Sooty rivulets zigzagged down his face. Mistie was disappointed, because if Tessa were coming to school, maybe she would have sat with Mistie.

But Mistie didn’t ask the boy to move. She shifted in her seat, slouched against the side of the bus, and stared out the window at the green house. From the front of the bus, she could hear the door hissing closed, and the grinding of the bus gears as the bus driver settled in for the remainder of the trip.

Then the front door of the purple house opened with a jerk, and Tessa was jumping from the stoop to the narrow concrete sidewalk, a denim book bag dangling from her elbow. Mistie sat straight, watching.

The bus driver said something over the din of students, and the bus door clanked open. Tessa rushed through the open chain-link gate, past her sagging mailbox, and jumped onto the bus steps. Mistie clenched one fist; the other went inside her coat and stroked the satiny nightgown.

“Mama had a baby.”

The boy by Mistie farted and scooted his butt around to let the smell escape.

Tessa dropped into a seat near the front, beside another little girl. The bus honked its horn at a passing car, then pulled onto the road. The boy beside Mistie pulled a set of Pokemon cards from his pocket and began to shuffle through them, mumbling to himself that his brother had bent up the best ones. Mistie found a tear on the back of the seat in front of her. She watched it, bouncing up and down and sideways, making her pleasantly dizzy, until the bus was at Pippins Elementary, and it was time to get off.

Tony’s crotch burned from the tug of last year’s too-tight jeans, but the sensation wasn’t sexual. It was irritating, and something that a sifting of position could put temporarily past notice. Her head itched under her hat, but she didn’t reach up to scratch it. It could be sweat or excitement or maybe even head lice — her little sister was home today with a case of the nits — but right now in the grander scheme of things it didn’t matter. Her dark brown hair was already a short crew cut, with half-inch bangs in the front, so if it was lice making her itch, the idea of shaving the rest of it off later wasn’t a big deal. But, regardless, sweat or cooties, she kept her hands down and away from her head. A test of willpower.

She was in the back seat of the car, against the door on the right. Buddy was in the front. He was driving, sort of. Buddy didn’t have a license, and he didn’t know much past how to push the accelerator and that you had to stay on the right side of the road. Buddy was fourteen with thin blonde hair that reached his shoulders. His hat was a Redskins ball cap he got from the Exxon Convenience Mart on Route 58.

On the passenger’s side up front was Leroy. Leroy was sixteen and the oldest so he thought he was too good to drive. Let baby boys do that, he’d say. He also thought since he was oldest, he was smartest. That was a crock of shit. Leroy wore a really old tattered knit hat that said, “I’m a Pepper,” whatever the hell that was supposed to mean. He also sported bent sunglasses. Around Leroy’s neck were old dog tags that belonged to someone in his family, but he didn’t know who. They had been flattened on a railroad track years before he was born and the letters were way past legible. Looking at Leroy was like looking at a scrawny snowman with big black coal eyes jabbed into his forehead.