Ms. Bixby's Last Day (20 page)

Ms. Bixby rolls her eyes and then squeezes past us, reaching
behind and pulling me along by the front of my shirt as she heads for the front door. “Come on, boys,” she says, “Let's blow this Popsicle stand.”

We fall in line like ducklings, eyes straight, like we are filing through the halls at Fox Ridge Elementary. I try not to limp; I don't want to call any unnecessary attention to us. A few of the hospital's visitors look our direction but just as quickly look away. I assume it's Ms. Bixby's new hairdo that does it. It's impolite to stare.

We walk past the front desk and the one man standing between us and the exit. I'm positive we are home free when I hear a voice call out.

“Hey,” the guard says. He is holding a phone in one hand. I know who is on the other end of the line. It's Nurse Georgia, ratting us out. I'm sure of it.

Ms. Bixby freezes and we all nearly tumble into her, and I'm reminded of that one day on the playground when she told us there was no such thing as cooties, the day Rebecca Roudabush almost caught me. Behind me, Steve is dancing in place.
Whatever happens, don't search the backpacks,
I think.

The guard makes a gun with his free fingers and shoots Ms. Bixby in the chest.

“Go Pride,” he says.

Ms. B. looks down at her Hofstra sweatshirt and the two
fierce lions charging across it. Apparently that's what people who go to Hofstra are called. The Pride.

“Go Pride,” she echoes, pumping the fist holding the french fries. I turn and give two thumbs-up, then grab the tail of Ms. B's sweatshirt as she leads us out the door.

You know how, in movies, everything comes around full circle and you're back where you started? Like in
The Lion King
, where it kicks off with a monkey on a giant rock holding a baby lion and ends with the same monkey on the same giant rock holding another baby lion, and they sing a song that is literally about circles, in case you're a total idiot and missed the point? Or in
The Wizard of Oz
, where Dorothy wakes up right back on the farm and realizes it's all been a dream. Or in
High School Cheer Team Massacre 7
, when the killer passes on his evil ways to his daughter by entrusting her with the family machete after she's cut from the team?

Turns out real life isn't like the movies. Life doesn't come all the way back around again. It's not a straight line either. It angles and curves, shoots off a little, twists and turns, but it never gets right back to the place it started. Not that you would want it to. Then you wouldn't feel like you had gotten anywhere.

There are spots I'd like to come back to, though. Moments I wish I could capture, like in a snow globe, and when I'm feeling
down I could shake it or even smash it open and there I am, in that time and place. Not a do-over, exactly. Just a do-again, like in the movies.

Where everything usually turns out okay.

It's a real park this time, not the little Band-Aid-sized patch of grass that we crowded into after snatching the whiskey from George Hazel Flopsucker Nelson. A real park with a swath of trees and a three-tiered fountain and at least one decent-sized hill. Not sled-worthy, but certainly big enough to spread a blanket on.

Ms. Bixby is standing at the foot of the hill, bathed in sunlight, looking a little like a mermaid who's just bargained for a pair of legs and is seeing the surface for the first time, and I wonder how many days she's been in the hospital. She has the empty McDonald's bag scrunched in one hand, having scarfed down the fries on the walk over. She tried to share them, offering them to us through potato-stuffed cheeks, but we insisted they were all for her. “My lucky day,” she said finally, then licked the salt from the tips of her fingers. I remarked that I'd never seen anyone eat a large fries so fast. “Some things have a short shelf life,” Ms. Bixby said, and that made us all quiet for a while.

When we get to the park, we ask her to give us a moment, just so we can get everything set up. We beg her not to look. She
says she needs to catch her breath anyway, that the two blocks from the hospital are the most she's walked in three days. She puts a hand on my shoulder to steady herself, and I puff out my chest like that guy in Greek mythology who's got to hold up the whole world. I don't know why. Having her lean against me just made me feel stronger.

Halfway up the hill Brand unzips his pack and sets the bottle of Jack Daniel's in the grass. He pulls the blanket free and starts to unfold it. Then he shakes his head.

“Figures,” he says.

I look at what he's frowning at. There in the center of the blanket looks to be a fistful of diamonds. Somehow or another Brand has managed to shatter the wineglass that he had folded inside, probably when he whopped George Nelson over the head with his pack. The glass stem is intact, but the cup part is smashed to pieces.

“I broke it,” he says in disbelief. “I can't believe I broke it.”

“The flopsucker's face broke it,” I tell him. “It was a good swing. Besides, I'm not sure that's the kind of glass you use for that kind of drink.”

We gingerly pick out what pieces we can, sticking them back in Brand's pack. Then we shake out the blanket just to make sure none of us slices open a butt cheek when we sit. It doesn't take long to get the rest set up. There is no music to cue—Steve's
cell phone battery hasn't spontaneously recharged itself on the walk over, and a full symphony orchestra hasn't miraculously appeared by the fountain below us. I fish in my bag for the stack of bent paper plates. Steve slides the dilapidated cardboard box from his backpack and sets it in the center of the blanket. We don't bother to open it. I think we're all a little afraid of what we might find inside. When we are finished arranging (Steve adjusting and readjusting the placement of everything so that it looks “symmetrical”), Brand whistles and waves, and Ms. Bixby shakes her head as she starts up the hill toward us, moving slowly, hands on her legs, clearly straining with each step.

“Sorry about the music,” Steve mumbles.

“It's all right,” I say. “I don't really like Beethoven anyways.” But as Ms. Bixby slowly trudges up the hill, Steve does the strangest thing, something I don't think I've ever heard him do once in his life.

He starts to sing. Soft at first, as if he's just finding his voice, but then louder with each of Ms. Bixby's steps.

“‘And as we wind on down the road, our shadows taller than our soul.'”

I can't place the tune, maybe because Steve doesn't have it exactly right, but the lyrics sound familiar. I couldn't tell you the name of the song or the band, but Ms. B obviously recognizes it, because she laughs as soon as she hears him. Normally
that would be the end of it. Normally Steve would assume the laughter was directed at him and he would clam up, but if anything he just starts to sing louder, and I realize that he's actually got a pretty good voice, and that there are still things about him that surprise me. Brand and I look at each other and shrug, but Steve keeps serenading Ms. Bixby as she makes her way up the hill.

“‘There walks a lady we all know, who shines white light and wants to show how everything still turns to gold.'”

Ms. Bixby reaches the edge of the blanket and Steve suddenly stops. She gives him a round of applause.

“Not quite the song
I
would have chosen,” she says. “But a magnificent performance all the same. Thank you.”

“It was supposed to be classical,” Steve says.

“Instead it was classic,” she says. She scans the blanket, still smiling, when her jaw drops. “Is that
whiskey
?” Her voice goes up an octave, one finger pointing at the Jack Daniel's now propped against the bakery box. Steve takes a step behind me.

Brand picks up the bottle and hands it to her. “Um . . . so . . . yeah . . . it was supposed to be wine,” he starts to explain.

“Moscato,” Steve says over my shoulder. “Or Brachetto.”

“Bruschetta,” Brand corrects.

“That's a kind of cheese,” I whisper to him.

“It's toasted bread, not cheese,” Ms. Bixby corrects me, taking
the bottle of whiskey from Brand and holding it up to the sunlight. “And this is definitely not wine.”

“It's better than wine,” Steve says, repeating what he heard, and then instantly glances down at his feet when Ms. Bixby stares at him in disbelief. “Or so I'm told.”

Ms. Bixby shakes her head. “
Please
tell me you didn't steal this from your parents.”

I'm starting to think it would probably be best to just avoid this line of questioning entirely—no sense spoiling the mood—but Steve throws up his hands in protest. “No! Of course not! We got it off some stranger Topher picked up off the street.” Ms. Bixby looks even more horrified.

“No. It's all right,” I say. “Nobody stole anything. It's fine. We paid for it.
Trust
me.
Just please, don't worry about it. This is your day.”

She gives me a look, the same look she gave me when I told her that I couldn't do a math worksheet on the grounds that long division was a personal insult to calculators everywhere; then she points to the misshapen white cardboard mess that's no longer even square anymore. “That better not be a bottle of rum,” she says. We all look at each other uncertainly, then Steve clears his throat and warily opens the lid.

“Ta-da,” I say, pointing to the lump of dessert smashed nine
ways to Sunday, almost unrecognizable as anything edible. I was wrong. Somehow it had actually gotten even uglier. “It's—”

“I know what it is,” she says.

“It's from—” Steve starts to say.

“I know where it's from.”

Ms. Bixby reaches to the corner of her eye with a taped-up hand.

“It looked a whole lot better when we bought it,” I say.

Ms. Bixby sniffs. “It's still beautiful,” she says. She clasps the bottle of Jack Daniel's to her Hofstra sweatshirt, staring at the remains of Michelle's white-chocolate raspberry supreme cheesecake, and shakes her head. And I'm not sure what to do. What to say. Probably something deep and wise. Like a Bixbyism. I
want
to say something, but this time Brand beats me to it. He stands beside Ms. Bixby and lifts himself to his toes and whispers something in her ear. More than just a word. She drops the bottle into the grass and reaches for Brand's hand, clutching it fiercely in both of hers, nodding over and over and saying, “I know.”

And then she gathers Steve and me with both arms, drawing all three of us in. Huddled together. Ms. Bixby and us. And I know in that moment that this is as close as we will all ever be again.

When she finally lets go, we suck the snot back up and wipe our noses on our sleeves, and I'm reminded of the time Brand tried to pick Steve's nose and how, for a while, Steve couldn't really stand him. But you get used to things. Or you learn to get past them, I guess.

We sit in a circle on the blanket, surrounding the sorry excuse for a cheesecake. Brand hands out plates and we use plastic forks and our snotty hands to shovel heaps of soft, raspberry-colored goo onto them. It doesn't look appetizing at all, but when I take my first bite, I realize it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what it looks like or what kind of plate you put it on or how you eat it. It doesn't matter whether it was sold by some fancy French pastry chef named Michelle or some hulking Mexican guy named Eduardo. Doesn't matter that it cost a month's allowance or what you said or did to get it or that you never found the right bottle of wine to go with it. Because the man didn't lie: it really is heaven.

We eat in groans and grunts, long, drawn-out “mmmmms,” with crumbs tumbling from our mouths and raspberry topping on our lips. I finish third, savoring mine a little more than the others, I think, though I don't lick my plate like Brand does.

Only Ms. Bixby doesn't eat all of hers, saying that maybe the french fries were overkill and that her appetite's not quite what it used to be. I ask her if she wants a drink, nodding to
Mr. Daniel's, but she takes the unopened bottle and tucks it behind her, saying she's going to save it for later. Later, she says, she will probably need it. It's obvious from her look that we're not getting any either. Not that I wanted it.

I gather everyone's pink-smeared plates and take them to the trash bin at the very top of the hill, and when I get back I can see that Steve has already fished the book I got at Alexander's out of my bag, and Ms. Bixby is trying to find the place where we left off. She keeps brushing the sleeve of her sweatshirt against her cheek. I take the spot on the other side of her, Steve next to me, the four of us scrunched close, even though there are no pictures to look at. “Chapter nineteen,” Steve reminds her. “Page two hundred sixty-two. At least in the other copy.”

Ms. Bixby thumbs to her place and coughs once, getting into character. “The Last Stage,” she says.

And as she reads, I lean up against her, Steve beside me, and look to see Brand leaning on the other side. And I close my eyes and listen to the sound of Gandalf the Gray admonishing his favorite Halfling, of cars passing on the street behind us, and the sound of my own heartbeat keeping time to the rhythm of her words. And I totally forget what day it is.

When she's finished—and it takes a nice long while and her voice almost gives out more than once—I keep my eyes closed and we just sit there, the four of us, afraid to break the spell,
afraid to say the word that will bring us back from Middle-earth or wherever it is we've gone to. Until, finally, we hear someone calling Ms. Bixby's name, and I open my eyes to see Nurse Georgia, the Viking, standing at the bottom of the hill.

Telling us it's time to come down.

THIS IS HOW THE STORY ENDS: BILBO HANDS
Gandalf the jar of tobacco, and Ms. Bixby closes the book, and we sit there in silence, which isn't unusual for me but is strange for Topher, who usually has to say
something
.

It seems a little anticlimactic, the ending. Everyone seems content just sitting there, so I keep my mouth shut and study the grass and think about what it must be like to come home after such a grand adventure, like Bilbo's, and not have to listen to your parents yell at you for it.

There is no escaping it. They will find out somehow, but not from Christina. She told me she wouldn't and I know she won't, despite what Topher thinks—even us Sakatas get tired of following the rules
all
the time, and I think she was, secretly,
maybe even a little proud of me today, though she would never say it. More likely somebody from school will tell them, Mr. Mack or the sub. Or maybe they won't find out until they get my report card and cross-reference the number of absences against the calendars on their iPads. At the very least they will ask about my lip. I will tell them the truth. It just doesn't seem like a secret worth keeping, and I'm not that good a liar. Topher's tried to teach me, but he says I just don't have the gift. So they will ask and I will tell them and then suffer the consequences. I try not to think about what those might be. No sense spoiling the moment.

When the nurse from the fourth floor mysteriously appears at the bottom of the hill, Ms. B. hurriedly stashes her bottle of whiskey in her giant purse. “I'm not sharing with the nurses,” she jokes. Then she hands the book to Topher and puts her slippers back on, looking at them for a good while.

“‘If you want me again, look for me under your boot soles,'” she says. I don't know what that means, but it sounds a little morbid. I look down at my own shoes. I must look concerned, because Ms. Bixby reaches over and touches my knee. “It's from a poem,” she says. She knows how I feel about poetry, but I don't say anything. Probably some poems are all right.

She stands and we stand, facing her, like we're back in the
classroom. Then she gives Topher a giant hug. And me too, though she doesn't smell at all like she usually does and she squeezes harder than usual and makes it difficult to breathe. She doesn't hug Brand, which I think is strange, but the two of them stand face-to-face, Ms. Bixby standing just below him on the hill so he can look at her level.

“I almost forgot.” Brand bends down and opens the front pocket of his backpack and produces a pink-and-white flower. It's a little smooshed and bent at the stem, but he hands it to her anyway. It's a carnation. I know because my sister wears them all the time at her piano recitals. I have no idea where he got it from. I don't remember it being part of the plan. “Roses are quitters,” Brand says, which strikes me as an odd way to describe a flower, but Ms. Bixby laughs and cries all at once.

“Thanks, boys,” she says. “Today was so much better than I could have imagined it.” Then she turns and starts down the hill.

We stand at the top and watch her go, her purse under one arm and Brand's broken flower hanging down at her side, Nurse Georgia lecturing her all the way through the park and out to the street, the way Ms. Bixby sometimes lectured the lot of us. Just as she's about to turn the corner out of sight, she looks back at us up on the hill and waves, even though she wasn't supposed to. There weren't supposed to be any good-byes.

When she's gone, I pick up the extra plates and shove them in my bag while Topher carefully folds the blanket and holds it close to his chest.

“This place is nice,” Brand says, looking down the rolling slope of grass, hands in his pockets.

“It's perfect, actually,” Topher says.

I tug on Topher's shirt sleeve. “Time to go home?”

Topher nods but he doesn't move, so I just stand between him and Brand, all of us staring at the empty space where Ms. Bixby used to be.

We have to hurry to catch the two forty-five at the corner of Fourteenth and State, the bus that will take us back to the school in time for dismissal. The plan is to just sneak back onto our own school bus, number 17, and go home, just like if we had been at school the whole day. At least that's the plan for Topher and me. Brand will walk. He says it's okay; he's used to it.

The city bus deposits us a block and a half from school, not far from the apartment complex where Topher wanted to strangle Mr. Mackelroy with a shoelace. We will still have to deal with his wrath on Monday, but Topher says Monday is a long ways away and that a lot can happen between now and then. We walk back to the school grounds in silence and stand behind the bushes. Topher says we should wait for the bell, for the surge of
students to come erupting from the doors. Then we'll just merge with the crowd.

“Do you think we missed anything important?” I ask. I can't help it. Just looking at the school makes my stomach ache. Maybe I shouldn't have had cheesecake for lunch.

“Not today,” Brand says.

The buses start to file in, making a parade. I can almost hear the sound of a thousand kids packing up, primed for the weekend, ready for adventure of one sort or another. Brand sighs and adjusts his pack like he's ready to take off.

“Hang on,” Topher says. He unzips his backpack and roots around. I can hear the sound of torn paper, and his hand emerges with a thick sheet, edges frayed. “Here,” he says, holding it out to Brand.

“What? Are you serious?” Brand says. He seems afraid to take it, which is strange given how hard it was for him to let go of earlier.

Topher shrugs. “I can always draw another one. I'll make it the first picture in the new sketchbook you buy me.”

Brand takes the drawing of Ms. Bixby hesitantly. “Thanks, man,” he says.

In the parking lot the buses are idling, waiting for us. The parents who come to pick up their kids every afternoon pull into the circle. Thank God mine don't do that. I want to put that part
off as long as possible. The chimes of Fox Ridge Elementary's dismissal ring out, making me jump. Almost immediately the doors burst open and a crowd of kids spills out, jostling their way across the sidewalk.

“That's our cue,” Topher says. He gives Brand a fist bump. “All right. So. See ya?”

“Yeah. See ya.” Brand turns to me, points to my chin. “That lip is pretty frad, you know.”

I reach up and touch my busted lip tentatively. I'm not sure what frad is—freaking radical, maybe—but it sounds like a compliment. “It hurts when I smile,” I tell him. Then we bump fists too. Brand takes a few steps backward, like he's afraid to take his eyes off us, then gives a salute before disappearing down the street. I'm actually a little sorry to see him go.

“C'mon.”

Topher pulls me along by my backpack loop and we merge with the crowd, just like he planned. Mrs. Thornburg, the assistant principal, glares at us. “You two,” she snaps. Beside me, Topher tenses up. “Hurry up and get on your bus. It's Friday, for heaven's sake! Don't you want to go home?”

I shake my head, but Mrs. Thornburg doesn't notice.

We run to our bus—the sixth one I've been on today—climb aboard, and shuffle toward the back, ignoring the looks
from the other sixth graders, who probably wonder where we've been all day, because they know where we weren't. Sarah Tolsen actually has the nerve to ask, and Topher just tells her we were on a field trip and that it's none of her business and that if she gets any nosier, she'll be able to pick her boogers with a shovel. Sarah huffs and whispers about us to the girl sitting next to her. I don't really care, though. Sarah Tolsen is the least of my worries. I look over at Topher and point out that he has a little raspberry topping still in the corner of his mouth. He scrapes it off with his thumb. “No evidence,” he says.

“No evidence,” I say, then suck gingerly on my lower lip.

As the bus rumbles down the street, Topher points out the window to Brand walking half in the middle of the road. Topher pounds and calls his name, but he obviously can't hear. He still has Topher's sketch in his hand, though, and he's looking at it as he walks. Behind him you can see the cherry trees that the third and fourth graders planted outside the school last year are just starting to blossom. Topher keeps staring out the window.

“Hey, Topher?” I say.

“What?”

“I want you to know . . .”

I think about all the things I'd like to say, but there are still so many I'm uncertain of, so I say the one thing I'm sure about.
“I had a pretty good day, today.”

“Yeah,” Topher sighs. I glance behind us and look out the bus's back window at the redbrick building of our school and wave good-bye. Then I lean in and put my head on Topher's shoulder.

He doesn't shrug it off.