Light as a Feather, Cold as Marble

Chapter 31

"This is Officer Jagusiak on Northbound Highway Thirty-One just past the exit at Old Dixie Highway. We've got a school bus overturned with possible injuries."

Frozen with fear, simmering with fury, Trey and I watched from the back seat of the police car. The officer behind the wheel had slammed on the brakes to call in the accident, and his partner burst through the passenger side door to run toward the bus. But Trey and I were helpless prisoners of that back seat; there weren't even handles on our doors. We were locked in, stuck in that stale-smelling, vinyl seated compartment.

"I saw this," I whispered to Trey. "When we were meditating with Bachitar. I saw the bus fall over. I saw Mr. Dean helping Jason Arkadian."

Trey's eyes, round like orbs, told me that he believed me, but when he looked through the windshield of the car toward one blazing bus and another on its side, smoke escaping from its hood, he shook his head. "So many people have got to be hurt. Why didn't they listen to us? We were trying to prevent this."

"You two just sit tight back there," Officer Jagusiak told us before he left us in the car alone, in such a rush that he left the driver side door wide open. Chilling wind rushed into the car and stole the heat from around us, causing a shiver to run through me.

Trey reached for my hand and squeezed it. "We have to get out of this car. That bus is going to blow," he said flatly.

I didn't respond; there was no conceivable way out of the car. We had nothing with us to cut through the mesh separating us from the front seat. Through the snow gathering on the windshield, I saw windows opening on the side of the overturned bus facing upward. It had fallen over on its right side, the door pressed to the ground submerged in snow, blocking any possible escape through the most obvious exit. Kids must have been standing on each other's shoulders in order to reach the windows, because the few that were able to climb out did so with difficulty. The big back door finally swung open and kids spilled out of the back of the bus into the snow in a jumble of flailing arms and legs. Red speckled the snow; I saw Erica Bloom clutching the broken frames of her glasses to her face, ignoring the blood that gushed from her nose as she followed the other kids back up the hill and onto the highway.

The back door of the blazing bus had also opened, and kids were jumping from it. Surprisingly, Roy Needham stood beside the open door helping other kids make the nearly four-foot leap down to the slushy pavement. It was perfectly ironic that a kid who hated school and who was loathed by teachers would be the only one to take to heart all of the emergency bus drills we'd been running through since elementary school. Emergencies tended to make heroes out of the most unlikely of people. Kids pouring out of the bus nearest to us covered their mouths with the sleeves of their winter coats as they choked on smoke.

Miss Kirkovic jumped out of the back of that bus, and joined Roy in assisting others down. Oliver Buras appeared at the back of the bus with a middle-aged woman who I assumed to be his mother, probably a volunteer chaperone on the trip. She must have been sitting toward the front of the bus near Miss Kirkovic at the moment it crashed into the back of the first bus because she had a long gash across her forehead and appeared to be in a daze as blood dripped into her left eye.

I jumped when suddenly Henry was climbing into the front seat of the police car.

"We need to get you guys out of here."

I wasn't sure how he'd managed to run past both of the buses, as he'd been driving ahead of them in the lane for well over an hour, but perhaps because Trey and I had been so fixated on which of our former classmates were clawing their way free, we hadn't noticed him making his way toward the police car.

" Henry, if you let us out of this car, the police are going to have to arrest you whenever they next find us," I warned. It wasn't that I wanted to be stuck in the police car; I just didn't want Henry to land himself in as much trouble as Trey and I were already in.