Remember Alice

Based on a true story.

She is a quiet little girl. Most second graders would be screaming with laughter or talking noisily with their friends on the bus. But this little girl sits quietly, her pretty blue eyes hidden behind dull round glasses that glare when the light hits them. Her long honey-blonde hair hangs limply around her face, and she lets it fall - to hide her face from anyone who might look.

It’s a quiet morning on the little school bus, and for that, she is grateful. Her normally lowered eyes and folded down shoulders perk a little bit, as she allows her head to raise hesitantly, and her eyes to dart quietly to the window beside her. The morning clouds are lit with what the girl considers to be peace itself. The only spoil of the spring morning are the dirty streets of Milwaukee and the dark gutters that collect the trash sweeping down-hill like the people who threw them. The bus driver is singing an off-pitched song the little girl doesn’t recognize, and doesn’t want to hear. She quietly reaches up under her hair, and turns down her hearing aid. She turns her focus instead to the gutters that she calls home; not yet old enough to be wondering if there isn’t something more to life. The girl begins to mentally name the street signs, the bill boards, and the stores as she passes them.

Jerry’s… Martin’s Martinizer… McDonalds…

A thought flashes into her head.

I wonder what today will be like.

She quickly looks down, feeling sudden distress at that thought, and focuses instead on the vibration of the bus under her feet, the cold sticky feel of the leather seat under her knees, anything but the fears she can’t face.

The driver was saying something. She was close enough to the front to see the two-day stubble on his chin. She could see the jaw moving, and his head moving to look back at her. His narrowed eyes caught her surprised ones, and she fumbled to turn her hearing-aid back up.
“-ing to Hartfield?”

The little girl nodded, even though she didn’t know what he said. She felt her hands beginning to shake like they always did when people talked to her. Her eyes darted down to look at them.
“Hey, kid!”, the man shouted over the engine as they approached a corner, “Kind of in a hurry here!”. She could see his impatient red eyes bugging at her from the rearview mirror, and she shrunk from them. Her eyes darted to look behind her - something she hadn’t bothered to do until now. She was alone.

He was shouting at her again, and she could tell he wasn’t wearing his seat belt, because he reached extra far to grab a cigarette. He was apparently ignoring the ‘No Smoking’ sign that was pasted next to the ‘Stay in Your Seat’ sign above him. She could see his lips were moving, but she couldn’t hear him over the engine of the bus.

He was approaching the corner swiftly, and he spoke forcefully, causing the girl’s eyes widened. She began to frantically examine her chewed nails, repeating the name of the street she knew they were on, thinking about Greg’s Jewels coming up on her right, anything but the man who was turning to look at her.

“Are you deaf? Do you go to Hartfield or Milwaukee?”

Her eyes shifted nervously toward him, and plastered themselves to the still morning beyond his window. She didn’t have time to reply. She could see it all as she stared out his window. Her eyes were wide, and her finger began to clench and unclench.

Hoosier street. Greg’s Jewels. Bus stop. Stop sign. Car. Stop. Her mind was frantically racing.
Car. Stop. Stop.

The bus hit. The sick crunch of metal was loud in the little girl’s ears. She just remembers the man’s surprise, the lurch of his neck as he flew forward. She heard shattering glass, and numbly saw the blue car in front of her spinning uncontrollably. She could see the terror stricken eyes of the gray-haired woman at the wheel. She could smell the burning rubber as the tires screeched. The stop-sign bended as it grated against the car.

To the little girl, it felt as though she wasn’t really there, but was merely observing everything that was happening. It seemed unreal - like a scene from a TV show that she could turn off at any moment. But then, the bus lurched again, and her head cracked against the seat in front of her, dragging her down into a scene that, with sharp pain and sudden darkness, became very real.

Tuesday Morning, the bus accident was featured on the fourth page of a small-town newspaper. The incident contained no deaths, and only involved the injury’s of a sixty-three year old grandmother on her way home from dropping off her grandkids at school, a despairing middle-aged bus driver who was to lose his third job of the year, and a little girl whose home was just as silent as her bus rides to school.