Growing up, my family didn't get along very well with our neighbors. I'm not sure if they didn't like us, or we didn't like them. It was probably a little of both.
"That bitch next door is waving at us again," my mom said, under her breath, while a rather pleasant-looking woman who lived across the street gave us a rather pleasant wave. "Don't look at her."
Inevitably I looked at her and offered a half-hearted wave when my mother's back was turned.
"She always seemed nice to me," I replied. I didn't actually have a basis for thinking the next-door neighbor was nice, except that she had lots of those ceramic gnomes on her lawn, which I thought made her yard appear warm and inviting. We didn't have ceramic gnomes on our lawn, and as far I as I was concerned, our yard was all the poorer for it.
"Don't be so naive, Jonah. She thinks who she is."
According to my mother, everyone in our neighborhood thought who they were, which was my mother's way of saying they were snobs. Even the elderly couple who lived across the street thought who they were. I didn't think that people who drove Yugos could be snobs, but I guess I was wrong.
"Never become like them, Jonah," my mom said, in her best second-grade teacher tone. "You're nothing special. Don't forget that."
For the most part, though, we didn't fight with our neighbors. We just went our way, and they went theirs. When they had block parties or yard sales, they carefully cordoned off our house from the festivities, for everyone's protection. And though we did put out a pumpkin at Halloween and even bought some bags of candy, trick-or-treaters rarely knocked on our door; in fact, our house never even got egged, it was just perpetually ignored, as if we were a bunch of serial killers and not just a harmless mess. I would have rather gotten egged, at least then we would have been part of the community. Instead we were just outsiders, the flotsam and jetsam of Lincoln Park Road.
But generally, the arrangement worked well for everyone concerned. Even if I didn't agree with my mother's assessment of the neighborhood, I at least appreciated her honesty. The only thing I found more uncomfortable than open hostility was superficial pleasantries. Fortunately, my family was highly proficient at the former and spectacularly inept at the latter, even when it came to our own internal communication.
"Good morning? What's so fucking good about it?" my father replied once when I made the mistake of saying good morning on a not particularly good morning. "No, really, I'm asking. What's fucking good about today?"
I didn't know what to say, so I asked if I could have one of the donuts he was jamming behind the radiator in his office/bedroom/secret lair. He passed me one under his jacket and instructed me not to tell my mother, while he stuffed four more in his briefcase. To this day, instead of saying good morning to my co-workers, I just shove a box of Munchkins in their faces and shut my door.
Eventually, I grew accustomed to being the neighborhood lepers. No one liked the Addams Family or the Munsters in their respective neighborhoods either, but they got along just fine. In fact, they seemed to be the happiest family on the block; while the other cookie-cutters were attending school plays and having church picnics, the Addamses and the Munsters were partying like it was 1999. I'd rather be a Munster than a Cleaver any day.
Unfortunately, we were not quite as self-sufficient as the Munsters, who appeared to have endless financial resources even though none of them actually worked. When I graduated from elementary school, we quickly realized that the junior high school that I was about to attend was far enough from our house to make walking impractical (especially as it called for walking through the "bad" part of town, i.e., the only block in our town with an apartment building), but not far enough to qualify for free busing. And while this did not cause much of a problem for the other kids in the neighborhood, whose families quickly formed that great stalwart of suburban America -- the "car pool" -- given that my parents had alienated most families within a 10-block radius, it left me without an available mode of transportation.
"I can just quit school," I suggested to my parents. "I think I've gotten everything I'm going to get out of it."
"You think I'm going to let you make a mess of the house while we're at work?" my mother replied, expressing more concern for the cleanliness of the bathroom than my future education. "We'll figure something out."
Their first solution was to drop me off at a friend's house who lived close to the school, where we could hang out and then walk to school together. My friend Scott Feinbush lived right behind the school, so he was the ideal choice. The arrangement worked out well for a few weeks; I would sit quietly in the basement while Scott got ready for school, and eventually he would join me downstairs and we would play Nintendo until it was time for school. In fact, given Scott's seemingly normal family -- they actually said good morning to each other, and no one secretly stuffed donuts in their briefcases -- it was the first time I ever actually enjoyed my mornings. Until one morning, when Scott's father found me staring out of the living room window, steadily glaring at the ninth-grade football players doing stomach crunches in the field behind the school.
"So, Jonah, do you have a girlfriend?" He was fishing for something, but I was too young to understand what. All I knew was that there was something interesting going on outside, and something inside was telling me to keep an eye on it.
"No, girls are totally gross," I replied, not taking my eyes off of the football players. It was an innocent answer, considering I was only twelve years old, but an incriminating one nonetheless. Of course, had it been a dozen fourteen-year-old cheerleaders doing stomach crunches, Scott's father probably would have chuckled, and maybe even pulled up a chair. Instead, the next day, he informed my father that they couldn't drop me off at Scott's house anymore.
"It's just too hectic here in the morning." His tone was polite, but his eyes were locked on mine, sending me a subtle message -- we don't want no sissies here. Sissies have no place in a normal home. Go back to your serial killer parents and gnome-free lawn. "Have you thought about a taxi?"
My mother used to make me walk seven blocks to the closest pay phone when we needed to call 411 ("quarters don't grow on trees, Jonah"); there wasn't a chance in hell she was going to spring for a cab twice a day for the next three years. Even if we had somehow hit the lottery, I doubt she would have gone in for such reckless spending.
"That money is for your college education," she would have said. "Million dollar bills don't grow on trees, Jonah."
So for a few days after being banished from Scott's happy, homophobic home, my parents actually drove me to school themselves.
"I hope you appreciate this, Jonah," my father said, as if getting his twelve-year-old son to school was a generous favor and not a legal responsibility. "Your mother isn't the most pleasant person in the mornings." Or afternoons, evenings, nights, weekdays, weekends, federal and state holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, or basically any day that ended in "day."
Still, his warning was enough to give me pause, so the next morning I offered to jog to school.
"Look, I've got my sweatpants on already!" I noted enthusiastically while stretching my legs in the driveway. It was pouring rain outside, but it felt invigorating, especially considering the alternative. "I really could use the exercise, I'm feeling somewhat flabby these days."
My enthusiasm was not contagious.
"Get in the fucking car!"
Fortunately, over the years I had trained myself to leave my body whenever necessary, so while my parents bickered on Sunrise Highway about an overly expensive electric bill, I was enjoying a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice with my grandparents in Fort Lauderdale. By the time I got to school, I was half-way to the beach.
"We'll pick you up at four-thirty," my father said while I generously applied SPF-45 in my mind. "Don't be late."
I pointed out, as politely as possible, that school ends at three.
"Well, Jonah, the world doesn't revolve around you, you know," my mother replied. "Your father and I have jobs and can't get here until then. Unless you want us to lose our jobs. Is that what you want? Is it? You want us to move into a shack?"
Considering that my mother often referred to our current house as a "tenement," "shack" actually sounded like an improvement. Unfortunately, I never got the chance to find out how much of an improvement it would have been.
"The bus is going to pick you up at 7:45 tomorrow, Jonah," my father said, nonchalantly, later that evening at the dinner table. I was too busy hiding what I believed to be criminally undercooked chicken in my napkin to fully register his comment.
"Did you say the bus?" I asked, wrestling with one particularly pesky piece of half-chewed chicken that did not want to stay in my napkin. For a moment I thought that maybe my parents had successfully blackmailed some school administrator into bending the rules for them. I was sure that I'd recently seen Mr. D'Amato, my happily married vice-principal, sharing a Reese's peanut butter cup sundae at Friendly's with someone who looked a lot like Mrs. Crespo, my happily married homeroom teacher. Maybe my parents had put that information to good use. For a moment, I was actually proud of them.
"Yeah," he replied. "It's some kind of special bus for kids with...special needs."
There are some, technically legal, but ultimately cruel and debilitating, decisions that parents can make which affect their children's lives forever. Naming a boy "Jeeves" or a girl "Chastity." Choosing to raise your boy as a girl, or vice versa. Forcing an unwilling pre-pubescent boy to play team sports. But more so than any of those nightmare scenarios, there is one choice that no parent should ever make, not even if it means the difference between life and death for their kid. And my parents made that choice without a moment's hesitation.
They had put me on the short bus.
Apparently, they had convinced my pediatrician to write a letter to the school board, explaining that I had such severe asthma that I could not possibly walk to school. Since asthma is technically a physical handicap, his letter bought me a one-way ticket to junior high school hell. To this day I'm not sure where he came up with that diagnosis, especially considering only the day before I was fully prepared to jog to school in the pouring rain.
"You can't!" I cried out, arms flailing, in a rare moment of spontaneous emotion. In my shock, I had completely forgotten about the half-eaten chicken that currently occupied my napkin. A piece of dark meat landed on my mother's plate.
"Oh, I forgot, Jerry," my mother replied, putting the chicken back on my plate clearly intending for me to eat it. "We're supposed to run every decision we make by Jonah. Hey Jonah, your father is having a hernia operation next week, is that ok with you?"
After politely excusing myself from the table ("I hate you both! I hope I die in my sleep! I'm going to jump off the roof!"), I locked myself in my room to ponder how I could get out of this mess. I was already pretty much the lowest man on the seventh-grade totem pole; this new revelation would shove me off the pole altogether, only to land in that abyss occupied by the mentally and/or physically handicapped, pre-pubescent petty criminals, and kids who eat paste. Personally, I didn't judge any of them (except maybe the kids who eat paste, and only for gastrointestinal reasons), but I knew that I'd surely be judged along with them. Amazingly enough, I had managed to get through the first few weeks of junior high without any lasting scars, and I was beginning to hope that maybe I'd be lucky and fade into the background for the next three years. My parents had just killed that hope with their callous nature and a fraudulent doctor's note.
By bedtime, I had completely convinced myself that there were only two ways out -- death, or kidnapping. I wasn't quite unstable enough to consider the former, though the latter held interesting possibilities. Surely no kidnappers in the world were evil enough to put me through what my parents had in store for me. And what if forcing me to ride the short bus was only the first step? What if they next planned to dress me in short skirts and feather boas as some kind of political statement, or just for their own selfish amusement? What if they decided to distribute baby pictures of me on the toilet to my classmates? Or, worst of all, what if they both got jobs in my school, and I could never escape them again? With kidnapping sounding more and more like a viable option, I drifted in and out of sleep, dreaming alternatively of carnivorous school buses and carnivorous parents.
The night was endless, and ended too soon. Before I knew it, it was 7:45, and I was sitting on the stairs, waiting for my big yellow hearse.
"I won't go," I said to myself while I paced around the house. Since my parents had already left for work and my sister for school, I had free reign to throw a complete and total hissy fit in every room in the house. "I won't go, dammit! And you can't make me!" I screamed at their picture on the mantle. In a spastic, partially involuntary move, I swung my arms across the mantle and knocked their picture half-way across the living room where it shattered on the floor.
"Shit!"
I rushed the broken frame over to the kitchen and swept the broken pieces of glass into the garbage can, cutting my finger in the interim. I hastily wrapped the finger in a paper towel. My mother didn't take kindly to broken things in her house, and she definitely didn't take kindly to blood, or any other foreign substance, on her floor. In my house it was perfectly appropriate to cry over spilled milk.
Just as the blood started to clot, I heard a soft honk in the driveway. My chariot had arrived.
I always assumed that it was called the "short bus" because the kids who rode on it were "short" on something -- intelligence, physical ability, social standing -- but I now realized that "short bus" was actually a descriptive title. Willy Wonka could have used it to transport the oompa-loompas from oompa-loompa land. The passengers seated inside were eye-level with my kitchen window, in all of their paste-eating glory. They stared inside at me, while I stared out at them; one of us was in a cage, but I wasn't sure which one.
Suddenly I realized that I was not at all ready to go. After replacing the picture on the mantle, sans glass frame (I hoped my mother wouldn't notice until she dusted the picture again, which bought me approximately 12 hours), I motioned to the bus driver to wait, all the while knowing that he would not wait for me. The elementary school bus driver never waited more than five seconds. In fact, if I wasn't outside my house at exactly 7:05AM, the driver wouldn't even stop, even if he saw me running outside and attempting to chase him down with my underdeveloped chicken legs. One time I swear he gave me the finger as I ran after the bus; I considered filing a complaint, but decided against it when I realized that he was purposefully aiming for squirrels in the road. I wasn't much bigger than a squirrel, and probably an easier target.
Of course, missing the short bus would have bought me one more day on the totem-pole, but the costs of missing the bus -- primarily, my mother's inevitably hostile reaction -- outweighed the benefits. So I hastily choked down my waffles, while mouthing the words "hold on" to the bus driver, who I expected to mouth back "up yours." To my surprise, though, the bus didn't honk repeatedly or pull away, nor did the bus driver make improper hand gestures at me. He just sat there, patiently waiting, as the bus idled away happily in our driveway.
Finally, I managed to adequately organize myself, cleverly shifting the living room couch an inch to cover up the glaring red spot in the carpet, and made my way out to the bus, where I expected, at best, a surly cold shoulder and circus-like environment full of budding serial killers and social outcasts.
"Jonah! We're so glad to have you!"
A short, middle-aged woman with curly hair and a huge smile greeted me at the bottom of the stairs. She was wearing a bright yellow, "Don't Worry, Be Happy" t-shirt, a phrase that always lost its meaning on me, and a name-tag that said, "Hi! My name is Doreen! How are you today?"
I stopped dead in my tracks, as I often do when confronted with blatant enthusiasm.
"Can I get a hug?"
I moved forward very slowly, as if approaching a rabid doberman. She didn't seem to notice my reluctance, or if she did, she chose to ignore it. Within moments she was pressing her large Happy bosom into my face, and I was choking for air.
"Now, do you have everything you need? Have you forgotten anything? We can wait, don't worry!"
I shook my head no, suddenly feeling very conspicuous standing in the driveway with Doreen and the short bus, especially since Doreen's bosom was still only a few inches from my forehead.
"Well, then, let's be off!" Every word out of Doreen's mouth was like a wonderful announcement. She could have been a television news reporter, if she had been more attractive.
I stepped onto the bus, with Doreen right behind me, carefully following each of my steps. Her hands were directly under my arms, apparently ready to catch me if I fell backwards. Maybe they hadn't told her the reason I was on the short bus -- maybe she thought I was a some sort of quasi-paraplegic. It seemed unlikely that Doreen wasn't fully informed about the nature of her charges before the year began, though. Otherwise, she could have been in for some unpleasant surprises.
"Guess what's wrong with this one, Doreen!" a malicious school administrator might have said, pointing at her list of passengers. "I'll give you a hint. He's missing an organ, but it's not the one you think!"
I shuffled past the driver, looking at my feet the whole time, but a hand reached out and grabbed my jacket.
"Hey man!" a rough voice called out.
Here we go, I thought. The school compensated for Doreen's enthusiasm by hiring a former prison guard -- or inmate -- as the bus driver. Doreen would sing us lullabies while the driver hacked us into mulch with the pick axe.
When I looked up, though, I saw, not a hardened, ex-convict, but a man that could have been Mr. Rogers' stunt double, had Mr. Rogers' show involved any stunts more dangerous than the occasional trip to the foyer closet.
"I'm Ernie," he said, with a smile that rivaled Doreen's in substance and sincerity. "Welcome to our little family."
Family? I was still in the dark. Was Doreen about to chastise Ernie about his weight, while Ernie embezzled Doreen's life savings? I already had one family, and I wasn't sure I could handle another.
"Everyone, this is Jonah!" I quickly took a seat behind Ernie, which was the closest to the door. I always tried to sit as close to a door as possible, in case of emergency. Of course, I defined "emergency" rather broadly, to include terrorist attack, anaphylaxis, and random, unidentifiable insects buzzing around my head.
"So Jonah, we have a tradition on our little bus," Doreen continued, while munching on a carrot stick and temporarily piquing my curiosity. The only "traditions" on my last bus consisted of making spitballs, and shielding oneself from incoming spitballs. "On your first day, you tell everyone one thing that makes you special, and the name of your favorite pet."
It seemed like an odd combination of questions to me -- give us a glimpse into your secret innermost life, oh, and do you have a dog? But more importantly, I currently did not, nor had ever, had a pet. But I didn't want to ruin Doreen's Happy day.
"I've never sneezed in my life," I said -- truthfully -- "and um . . . my favorite pet's name is . . . Barney." There are two kinds of lies -- ones you tell to make yourself happy, and ones you tell to make other people happy. The latter is really just a form of verbal charity.
"Never sneezed before, eh?" Doreen said.
"Nope," I replied, prepared for an argument. People often expressed skepticism about my sneeze-free existence. Even my own grandparents didn't believe it, and if you can't sell something to your grandparents, you generally can't sell it at all.
"Well that's just wonderful!" Doreen exclaimed, as if I had just told her I won the lottery. "Imagine! Not having to sneeze! The money you'd save on Kleenex alone!"
I settled back in my seat, glad to have pleased Doreen, and judging from the rear-view mirror, Ernie as well. For the first time, I surveyed my fellow passengers. Except for one boy who kept banging his head on the back of his seat in a steady, rhythmic motion, I didn't see any difference between the kids on this bus and the kids on the last one. There was an even amount of boys and girls, no one was acting out or consuming anything unappetizing, and no one seemed to be missing any limbs -- at least, none that I could see. I could have been riding on any big yellow school bus on Main Street, U.S.A., even if this particular bus was four feet smaller.
And then I realized, there was one significant difference between this bus and the last one. The kids on this bus didn't appear to be in a constant state of war. Apparently the good-will Doreen and Ernie fostered was infectious -- I even spotted a smile or two. No one seemed out of place, there were no spitballs flying, and squirrels moved in front of the bus's path with impunity. Even the head-banger was bouncing in such a steady manner, he could have been dancing along to his favorite song, even if he wasn't actually listening to music.
I was apparently the last pick-up for the bus, because we were already lumbering towards the school. Ernie didn't appear to be in much of a hurry; if there was even a glimmer of a possibility that a traffic light was about to turn red, he would slow down to a crawl, the result of which was that we basically stopped at every traffic light between my house and the school. At one point, some kids on bikes passed us, shouting some offensive epitaphs at the bus, but no one seemed to notice. Everyone just went on smiling and bouncing. It seemed that nothing could possibly disturb the Short Bus Family.
All the while, Doreen -- who I decided would have made a better flight attendant than television reporter -- made the rounds up and down the aisles, munching on carrot sticks and occasionally offering one to the kids. Most of them declined, though the head bouncer had already had three. All that bouncing must have worked up an appetite.
"Oh dear," Doreen said, approaching my seat. "What happened to your finger, Jonah?"
During the course of my short bus initiation, I had forgotten all about my bloody finger, which was still wrapped in a paper towel.
"I cut myself."
"On what?" Doreen reached out to examine the cut, which was deeper than I had thought.
"A picture frame."
"Oh dear," she repeated. "That doesn't look good at all." Doreen reached under her seat and pulled out a large first-aid kit. She began gently dabbing the cut with an alcohol swab.
"You know, I have a son about your age," she said, trying to take my mind off of the burning sensation that was now running up my hand. "He cuts himself on things all the time."
But when your son cuts himself, I doubt your first concern is whether he bled on the rug,
"Oh."
"He never took care of his cuts either," she said, already unwrapping a bandage. "But then I bought a box of Bart Simpson band-aids, and now I think he cuts himself on purpose just to get one!"
Suddenly, I was jealous of Doreen's son, even if he was mutilating himself just to paste a cartoon image to his body.
"Maybe I'll bring some of those band-aids on the bus tomorrow," she said, apparently picking up on my growing envy. "Just in case." She winked at me, as if I was about to join her son in self-mutilation for personal gain. But still, the offer was sweet, sweet enough to make me wonder what it would be like to have a mother who didn't fly off the handle because of spilled milk and broken picture frames. Doreen offered me another carrot. This time around, I took one.
We approached the school at our customary snail's pace. A bunch of kids were congregated outside the main entrance. It seemed like they were just waiting for us, waiting to pounce on the fresh, tender, socially unaccepted meat that the Short Bus always provided. And even though nothing about my physical appearance screamed "Short Bus" -- except perhaps for my non-matching red sweatsuit that my mother had laid out for me that morning -- I knew it didn't matter to them whether I looked like I belonged on the Short Bus; the fact was, I was on the Short Bus, and that was enough for them. Gimpiness is in the eye of the beholder.
I watched as each of my fellow passengers disembarked the bus, fearing for their, and my own, safety. But despite the throngs of juvenile delinquents anxiously anticipating their arrival, they didn't seem phased at all. They walked off the bus with their heads held high (well, except for the kid whose head was still bouncing up and down), oblivious to their impending doom. They were either totally courageous, or totally stupid -- or perhaps an unhealthy mix of both. And sure enough, one by one they were quickly surrounded by the future of the American penal system, and as far as I could tell, swallowed whole.
Suddenly I tasted remnants of burnt waffle make their way back up to my mouth. Maybe I could stay on the bus all day. Maybe we could set up a makeshift classroom in between the seats. I was sure I could learn more from Ernie and Doreen in one day than I would learn from my bitter, frumpy math teacher all year.
"Doreen..." There was wisdom in those eyes, for sure. I was about to propose my plan to her -- perhaps selling her with an offer to cut myself with her cuticle scissors -- when she kneeled down next to my seat and whispered:
"You want us to drop you off at the back entrance, don't you?"
I nodded, almost imperceptibly. I didn't want Doreen to think I was looking down on her, or on the Short Bus family; and in fact, I wasn't. I just didn't want to get stuffed in my locker. I was getting too tall to fit, and another afternoon in there could have stunted my growth.
"Sure," she said, ruffling my hair. "Ernie, shake a tail feather."
Thirty seconds later, Ernie let me off at the school's back entrance.
"We'll pick you up here after school, too," Doreen said, anticipating my next question. As the bus pulled away, I gave an enthusiastic wave, and Doreen waved back, with both hands.
"Have a great day, Jonah!" A great day. An adult hadn't told me to have a great day since my last visit to the dental hygienist.
Another thirty seconds later, I joined Scott in the main foyer.
"Hey, sorry you can't come over in the mornings anymore," Scott said. I had wondered what excuse Scott's parents had given him for banishing me from their home -- I figured it must have included a lot of subtle innuendo and Liberace references -- but I didn't care anymore. I had my own family now. The Short Bus family. And any fears I had that my first morning was merely an anomaly were immediately put to rest that afternoon, when Ernie and Doreen led the bus in a spirited game of I Spy.
"I spy a mailbox!"
"I spy a fire hydrant!"
I spy a satisfied customer.
That night after dinner, my mother noticed an appreciable spring my step as I swept the floor with unprecedented enthusiasm.
"You're doing that too fast, Jonah," she said, eyeing me curiously. "You're going to scrape the enamel."
But I didn't care. If she kicked me out of the house, I would just go live with Doreen and Ernie. I doubted that they were married -- they got along too well for that -- but they could share custody. Because really, it wasn't such a big leap between shuttling me to and from school and being a full-time parent. In fact, it was a step further than my parents were ever willing to go.
The next few weeks flew by. I spent my nights looking forward to the mornings, and my days looking forward to the afternoons. Riding on the short bus became the highlight of my day. But curiously, the other passengers didn't seem to appreciate their unique, enviable transportation situation; in fact, none of them seemed particularly interested in getting to know Doreen or Ernie at all, except for the occasional sharing of a carrot and I Spy game.
No matter. That just left more of their attention for me.
"So my parents had the biggest fight last night," I told Doreen one morning -- probably lots of mornings -- while munching on a carrot stick. "I had to go to my special hiding place in the basement to get away. Luckily, I left cookies there from the last fight, so I had a snack waiting for me."
"My mother told me that I have to play a sport this year," I told Ernie, ignoring a brewing argument between the paraplegics in the back seats that Doreen had gone to referee. "I told her I'd rather eat a dung beetle. She said that could be arranged. I don't think she was joking, either."
"I saw my dad packing a bunch of boxes in his office yesterday," I told them both, admiring Ernie's #1 Dad coffee mug on the dashboard. "He didn't see me, though. I don't know why he's packing. Maybe he's giving stuff to the homeless, but I don't think the homeless need a fax machine."
Doreen and Ernie didn't usually say much in response, nor did I expect or need them to. They just sat and listened to the problem of the day, as loved ones do for each other, because they are loved ones, and that's enough for them. Occasionally, after I relayed some traumatic event that had occurred the evening or weekend before, Ernie had to pull the bus over while I caught my breath outside the bus. But no one seemed to mind. Families understand.
It wasn't all complaints, though. Sometimes I just sought some much-needed parental advice.
"Do these sweatpants match this sweatshirt?"
"What gets chocolate milk out of suede?"
"Will I go blind if I sit too close to the television?"
Not that I spent all my time talking about me. I was also very interested in Doreen and Ernie's lives.
"Wow, so your daughter is a lawyer?" I asked Ernie, who had just shared that proud fact with me. "I want to be a lawyer, too. Actually, my mom wants me to be a lawyer. I'd rather be an actor, or a statistician, or maybe a telemarketer. Then I'd get to work from home. Except I'd want my own home, with my own telephone line. I asked my dad for a telephone line, but he said no, and he got really mad when I called him at work to rehearse my telemarketing technique. Hey, can I practice on you? What are your phone numbers, by the way?"
"Um, we don't share our phone numbers with students, Jonah," Ernie replied, with a sidelong glance to Doreen. "School policy."
"Oh, of course," I replied, nodding knowingly. "Well, I also thought about being a tree doctor. What are your home addresses? Do you have any sick ficuses?"
As I grew closer to my short bus family, the already tenuous relationships I had with my actual family became even more strained. I simply had no need for them anymore, except for shelter and the occasional meal (and even Doreen's carrots were starting to fill that void). It was only logical; they never seemed to have much need for me, either. They were too busy stuffing donuts in their briefcases and cleaning blood out of the rug and shouting about who forgot to vacuum the carpet and tearing each other's hair out to notice.
"I saw my dad packing more boxes today," I said to Doreen one morning. The boxes were really piling up in his office, and he didn't even seem to be hiding them anymore. "What do you think it means?"
"Jonah, I'm tired today." So I turned to Ernie, who shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "Ernie's tired today, too," Doreen continued.
"Oh, ok." I settled back into my seat, determined to keep quiet for the rest of the ride. Everyone can be tired once in a while. Even good parents like Doreen and Ernie. Still, I thought that they might benefit from a little distraction, so after a few minutes I found myself describing my family's latest trip to Niagara Falls, an excursion that almost saw my father go over the falls without a barrel. Half-way through the story, Doreen closed her eyes and laid her head against the window.
Doreen and Ernie only seemed to get more and more tired as the days went by. The I Spy games and afternoon snacks quickly dwindled, as did their traditional morning greetings. In fact, the whole short bus atmosphere changed. The head-banger, who so often had provided a calm rhythmic undertone to our rides, began sitting motionless. The paraplegics neither fought nor talked, and the autistic kids talked even less than they already did. Doreen even stopped wearing her Don't Worry, Be Happy t-shirt. Which, to me, meant that she was either worried, or unhappy. I grew concerned at Doreen and Ernie's apparently deteriorating physical state. I decided to be proactive, and siphoned some of my parents' coffee one morning into a styrofoam cup in an attempt to reenergize them.
"Oh, thanks," Doreen said, as I handed her a lukewarm cup of black coffee. "I don't drink coffee though," she said, tossing the cup into the trash bag at the front of the bus. Ernie's cup followed soon thereafter.
"But you need coffee to start your day right," I protested. "At least, that's what my mom says, although my dad says she's crazy, he always says she's crazy, sometimes he yells it really loud and I'm sure the neighbors can hear, last month one of them called the police . . ."
"Jonah, I have a horrible headache today," Doreen almost shouted. "Can we just sit in peace, please? In fact, I think we need to be quieter from here on out. I just can't . . . we can't . . . It's too much . . ." Doreen placed her head in her hands, and the carrot sticks in her lap fell to the floor. Ernie and I stooped to help Doreen pick up them up.
"I'll pick them up," she snapped at us.
"I'm sorry," Ernie replied, sheepishly.
"I'm sorry, too," I added. It seemed, though, that it was too late for apologies. Somewhere along the way, I had single-handedly transformed the short bus family into my real family. I had always thought that my parents were the cause of all my problems, but maybe I was the cause of theirs.
Determined to undo whatever harm I had already done, I begged Scott to ask his parents if I could come over in the mornings again. A few days later, Scott's mother called mine, and said I was welcome back in their house. My mother was hesitant to send me back to Scott's house again -- "I think those Feinbushes might think who they are" -- but she eventually relented.
"I didn't like you riding that bus anyways," she said. "It's full of retards."
I never said good-bye to Doreen or Ernie, or any of the other short bus passengers. It seemed better that way. I missed the carrot sticks and I Spy games for a while, but then I rediscovered the varsity soccer team practicing outside of Scott's house, and those memories quickly took a backseat to repeated abdominal exercises and mesh shorts. Still, when my parents fought, or my sister cried herself to sleep, or the cops swung by on a Saturday night for coffee and a restraining order, I noticed an absence where I had never noticed one before.
And by the time my father moved out the following summer, I knew, finally, that both of my families had been just an illusion.



