Lucid, Page 2

  The UFO was the standard UFO disc shape, the command center encased by a transparent bulb.

  The UFO controls were under the direction of a man and woman. They wore unitards. Each unitard featured an uppercase ‘L’ on the chest.

  The man said, “Ok. But remember this time I get to do the anal probe.”

  The man grinned a semblance of Jack Ford’s worldwide famous grin. The woman didn’t really resemble my sister, but who else would be flying a UFO with Jack other than Maddy McCall?

  Both of them had antennae. Behind them stood an alien with a potato-shaped head and antennae. The alien held a copy of Forward, the guidebook for practicing Lucentologists like Jack and Maddy.

  I crumpled the drawing up. The hallway was full of between-class activity.

  Every day for a week straight someone had put drawings up. Someones. Too prolific to be one person. The art styles seemed too different for it to be one artist, too.

  I glanced around, but no one looked at me and then looked away, blushing, indicating guilt.

  Whoever was doing this was just going to keep doing it until all the hubbub died down.

  “Another one?”

  Sherman Blackwell looked at the balled up paper in my hand.

  I nodded.

  “Only be a couple more days, Lucy, and then it’ll stop. Probably.”

  I glared at him. He shrugged.

  “I’m not saying it doesn’t suck.” He pushed his glasses up his nose. Held out his hand. “Let me see.”

  I handed it to him. He uncrinkled it and laughed and quickly put up a hand to still my anger.

  “Now, not Jack or Maddy. I’m laughing at the cow. See?” He pointed. “The one still on the ground. It’s looking up at the one going to the spaceship and it’s got its head tilted like-“ he tilted his head to the side, “'Duhr?'”

  He waited for me to smile. It used to come automatically almost. But then earlier this year Sherman had made out with SharDi Leasey at a party. He hadn’t even meant to go, but his pal Neal had talked him into going. Sherman had downed a beer out of boredom. Just wanted the party to end so he could go home and it wouldn’t end so he had another beer and then another beer and the next thing he knew…

  He was sorry. He didn’t know what he’d been thinking. All that happened was some kissing and some light groping. He tried to convince me that the fact that he came to me with the admission before someone else told me counted in his favor.

  We hadn’t kissed or hugged since. He’d written a song called ‘The Makeup Song’ and put it up on his Facebook and YouTube. It was kind of good, in a bad-American-Idol-audition-kind-of-way.

  “You know when you get pissed you look almost like your dad.”

  “That’s what I’ve heard. That’s what my mom used to say.”

  That shut him up. Sherman tiptoed ultra-carefully around the subject of Mom. Especially since he’d pledged to take care of me before she died. He pledges to her and the next thing you know he’s got his hand up SharDi Leasey’s tank top.

  Sherman’s face went white. Even before I turned to follow his look I could guess SharDi Leasey was walking down the hall. I’d developed an ability to tell which Eaton High beauty was in the vicinity just based on Sherman’s bulging eyeballs and gaping mouth.

  There hadn’t been drama between SharDi and I. I barely knew her. She hadn’t tried to steal my guy. My guy had just been kind of dumb and drunk and she had a weakness for nerdy looking guys.

  Walking past, she smiled at me and nodded at Sherman. Then went right on along with her business - being pretty and built and enjoying all the benefits therein.

  Sherman stared at the floor. He looked hopeful some sort of exit would appear. Maybe a slide all the way to China.

  Blushing he said, “I looked. I tried not to.”

  “It’s okay. I’m used to it,” I said. “You’re really weak and her shirt was really tight.”

  At the start of 4th period, I got to tear another cartoon off my locker.

  Chapter 4

  We lived outside of town, but we didn’t live on a farm. The house was a white two-story Victorian without much flair. There was a small amount of lawn that needed mowing, but most of the property consisted of a dirt driveway that easily transformed to a muddy, shoe-eating mess.

  The remnants of a little barn sat on the edge of our backyard. It’d served as a kind of workroom for Mom when she started to get into sculpture. She didn’t get very far. She got sick more or less at the same time. A couple of her works were still out in the barn, unfinished.

  Dad’s brother Bob had a farm about a half-mile from our place. Bob had a couple hands that helped him work it, and every summer harvest I drove a truck loaded with his grain into town to the grain elevators. Uncle Bob never had married, but the way they talked about their youth, he’d had any number of possibilities before settling on the bachelor’s life.

  Except for the odd occasion of getting a lift from a car, I rode the school bus most every day. For a time Sherman had been giving me lifts, but that had come to a halt, post-cheating incident.

  The bus riders’ pattern was more or less the same as it’d always been. Little kids in front. Boyfriends sat with girlfriends. The kids who read hunched down and pressed their legs into the seatbacks in front of them. The coolest kids had the seats at the very back. At least one in the back - blond as sun fed hay - thought he was African-American, baggy everything, do-rag, lips pursed, rural Washington’s very own Eminem.

  Nick Verney and Geoff Tyco sat together two rows up from the very back. They were in my class. Nick still wiped boogers on people and found gags like pushing his behind into a girl’s leg and farting the height of entertainment. His older brother Tyler had practically stalked Maddy when she was in high school. Tyler lived in Oregon now. Balding and married last I heard.

  Eaton was a small community. Total the town and the immediately outlying community, and the population added up to a whopping 2433.

  Any town with a prodigal daughter coming home for a visit and movie premiere would be hubbubbing. Given the rural scale of Eaton, Maddy and Jack’s Thursday to Saturday visit was like royalty plus the president stopping in.

  Two middle school aged girls sat across the aisle from me. One was a McKean. All the McKean kids looked the same. Solid, healthy, with wide faces and bright eyes. The other looked like a Betsy.

  My mom would name people.

  A guy in glasses was a Dilton. A girl with long blond hair was a Betty. Any girl with short hair was a Betsy.

  They kept looking at me, talking under their hands, giggling.

  “Ask her,” said Betsy.

  “No.”

  “Ask her.”

  “No!”

  “LUCY!”

  “Ohmigod!” The McKean girl covered her blushing face. She cried out as Betsy tried to pull her hands away from the blush.

  “Is Jack Ford really going to stay with you?” asked Betsy.

  I nodded.

  “Really?”

  “Far as I know,” I said.

  “Is he nice?” asked Betsy.

  “Yeah, hey Lucy,” yelled Nick Verney. “Will you have to give him and your sister a special bed to fit their antennae in? So they can talk to the mothership and shit?”

  “Shut up!” yelled the McKean girl.

  Nick made antennae with his fingers. Geoff picked up the gimmick and while waggling antennae they made noises like babbling monkeys. Nick looked toward the back and babbled. In reply, the would-be Eminem summoned up a look even sourer than the one already on his face.

  “I don’t know what he’s talking about,” sulked Betsy. “I love Jack Ford. I love your sister, too, Lucy. Madeline McCall? Ohmigod. She’s just…“

  “She’s so-“ said the McKean girl.

  “Pretty.”

  “Pretty, right-“


  “Die to have her hair-“

  “I know! Her hair is-“

  “And she’s SO skinny.”

  “I know! SO skinny. Ohmigod! I wish I was that skinny. I’m so fat.”

  “Me, too.”

  The girls started discussing in detail all the other fat girls in their class.

  In the seat in front of the girls sat Kitty.

  When I got off the bus every day, Kitty was the last rider. East Jennings continued past her place, and looped, turned into West Jennings, and then headed right back into the west side of Eaton, passing a few houses, including Uncle Bob’s place.

  A spit wad shot over the back of Kitty’s seat and splattered against the seat back in front of her.

  Kitty looked up and looked over her left shoulder toward the back of the bus. A port-wine stain tattooed her forehead, slipping out above her right eyebrow just from beneath her hairline. Another splotch coated the skin beneath her right ear.

  Nick laughed. He’d put his antennae away and picked up his spit wad straw. Geoff looked like he wasn’t too happy with his seatmate, but not to the point of telling Nick to cut it out.

  Kitty and I made eye contact. She gave me a look like I was partially to blame for the spit wad. Then she turned and sunk back down, out of my view except for her black jeans and her sneakers.

  Nick was prepping the next spit wad when the bus came to a stop.

  I don’t mean the driver signaled and pulled over. I don’t mean he hit the brakes and threw us all for a violent rattling around in our seats. The bus came to a gradual halt. The driver shut the engine off. Then he stood up, straightened the kneebrace over his left knee, and walked down the aisle to the back of the bus.

  Pat Corley stopped alongside Kitty’s seat and took a sidelong glance at the spit wad fallen onto the floor.

  Pat scratched his chin. He had a perpetual five o’clock shadow. Done scratching, he inspected his fingernails as if expecting to have collected residue. He mumbled something to himself and straightened the Seattle Mariners cap on his head. He put a hand on top of each of the seats closest to him and patted them.

  “I don’t know if you guys know,” he said, “but all the bus drivers touch whatever is left behind on their buses. I drive this bus. I clean this bus. Part of the deal. Your personal effects and my skin can share intimate moments. Your candy wrappers, your pieces of paper.”

  He looked at Kitty and smiled.

  “How you doing today, Kitty? No problems? No? Huh.” He looked around and rolled his eyes toward the bus ceiling. “Where was I? Oh. That’s right. Cleanliness.”

  He squatted down with a groan and he groaned as he stood back up. Pinched between his index finger and thumb was the still fresh spit wad. He held it like a science teacher would hold a specimen mid-lecture.

  “I don’t do bodily fluids.” He looked at the spit wad. “Spit especially.”

  He looks directly at Nick and Geoff.

  “Anybody back here want to walk the rest of the way home?”

  The chorus was a meandering “No.”

  “Wow,” he said. “You guys really left the enthusiasm in the classroom, didn’t you?”

  He raised an eyebrow and shook his head and turned and started walking back toward the front of the bus.

  Nick lifted his hand and gave Corley the bird. Geoff looked shocked. But in a heartbeat he got over it and tried to laugh at the same moment he tried not to laugh. What came out of him was a squeak sounding like something an inmate at a mental hospital might let out.

  Corley stopped walking. His back straightened.

  Nick’s hand descended with assistance from Geoff, but from the look on the bus driver’s face as he turned and took the two boys in, it was clear no amount of denial would change the facts of what had occurred.

  As the bus left them behind, Geoff punched Nick’s shoulder as though he could’ve expected leniency for keeping company with an idiot. Corley wasn’t really making the boys suffer. They were faced with all of a 15-minute walk to their respective homes.

  Strangely, Kitty looked a little sad at what had happened, almost like if you spun it a certain way it was all her fault.

  I didn’t know much about Pat Corley. Sherman’s grandpa owned a bar in town. Pat frequented it and several times had acted as an impromptu bouncer. He had some military tattoos on his arms. Today's ESP exhibition wasn't the first time Corley had displayed knowing all and everything that happened on the bus. Only a dummy like Nick would mess with him.

  By the time everyone had been let off the bus except Kitty and me, I got up from my seat and moved into the seat right across from Kitty’s.

  “You shouldn’t pay attention to those guys. They’re jerks to everyone, not just you.”

  She turned her head a little towards me, but not so much I could see any of the port-wine stain.

  “If you need any help with them or anything, just let me know. Nick has been scared of me since 6th grade. He knows I can make him cry. Easy.”

  Staring at her knees the side of her mouth curled in a smile.

  I hadn’t expected her to say anything. She was super quiet and shy.

  We went down and up the dip and started around the corner. I held onto the seat through the turn. The road sloped a little towards the ditch and the turn always seemed dramatic on the bus, even though you wouldn’t notice it riding in a car.

  Out the window I could see a news van parked on the road at the head of the driveway. I didn’t see any sign of Ruth Arnett or her blue sedan. Maybe the news crew had run her off. Maybe she was fetching them doughnuts.

  I stood and hefted my backpack closer to my right shoulder and started walking towards the front of the bus.

  Pat said, “You realize you’re not supposed to be walking while the bus is moving, right?”

  Stopped behind his seat I said, “I’m trying to figure out if I need to run when I get off the bus.”

  “Oh.”

  Corley slowed the bus down as it approached the mouth of our driveway. A cameraman and a brunette took a step away from the E! news van towards the bus.

  Corley dipped his head and squinted, taking in the brunette.

  “If it were me, I’d be running towards a woman looked like that, but it ain’t me, now is it?”

  “No.”

  He turned on the flicking lights and the STOP sign hinged out from the side of the bus.

  “It’s like the philosopher says, isn’t it?” He yanked the handle and the door at the bottom of the steps opened. “Hell is other people, or, other people that want to bug you because your sister is a movie star.”

  Out on the road, the reporter was positioned to swoop and cut me off from making a clean break down the driveway.

  Grinning, Corley looked at me like I was a friend of his, but a friend he always looked forward to seeing get taken down a peg or so.

  “Have a lovely afternoon, Lucy.”

  Chapter 5

  The bus pulled away and I stood in the wake, watching the pretty dark-haired woman smile and wave her hand all over, feigning gagging on the smell of exhaust. When we’d been to L.A. for Maddy’s wedding I’d never gotten used to the smell of 8 million people commuting and living so near one another.

  “Lucy? Hey. Thanks for stopping. I’m Jamie. Jamie Jane.”

  “I know.”

  She smiled. “You watch E!?”

  “My dad does. I mean…We have a TV. We come across the channel now and then.”

  “Well color me flattered.”

  The big bear of a cameraman mumbled something about the ‘world famous Jamie Jane’ and she laughed like it was an ongoing joke between the two of them.

  “Look. I don’t want to pressure you, all right? In fact…” The gravel crunched under her heel and she turned and faced the cameraman, sliding her index finger under her throat, makin
g a ‘kill’ sign. The big bear grunted and lowered his tool.

  “No mic, no camera, right? I don’t want to make you feel like you’re under the microscope or anything.”

  I nodded.

  She smiled and wiped stray hairs off her forehead, bright pink fingernails flashing. Her makeup seemed out of place so near ruts in the road and dried out cow flops.

  “E! has a good relationship with most celebrities. We’re fair. We’re not going to focus on personal lives of the stars if that’s not ok with them. Ok? We don’t do that. I don’t do that.”

  I nodded.

  “Look, I’m not one to judge anyone’s personal beliefs, but the fact is Lucentology has a bad rap. Some people say it’s the best thing ever, but then factor in the negatives like that poor lady that died last winter and…You know who I’m talking about, right?”

  I nodded. I didn’t bring up Ruth. I wanted to get away and to the safety of the house.

  Jamie shook her head.

  “Stuff like that is harsh and we won’t blatantly ignore it, but we want to make Madeline and Jack look good. Jack is great. The best, easiest interviews I have are always with him. And Maddy is great. Or seems great.” She laughed. “I don’t know. I only talked to her once on the red carpet for one of her movies, but you know, for 30 seconds she was pretty nice. And see, Lucy, you could help them. You’re a nice looking kid. Clean cut. You want to help your sister, right?”

  “Look, I’ve got chores. I’m sorry.”

  “That’d actually be awesome B-roll. Milking cows, chickens—“ She laughed. “Oh my god. ‘Milking chickens’. I’m a city girl, if you couldn’t tell.”

  I didn’t correct her assumption that the single ramshackle outbuilding housed a Noah’s ark worth of livestock.

  “Look,” I said. “I can’t. I can’t talk right now. I’m sorry.” I started down the driveway, head down, trying not to break into a sprint.

  “Ok,” called Jamie. “But think about it. We just want to help.” After a moment she added, “And thanks for watching!”

  Chapter 6

  Still agitated from talking to Jamie Jane, I was filling a cup with water when I looked out the window above the kitchen sink, and saw the vehicle parked beside the decrepit barn.