Back in the present moment, when Mom and BBB don’t return to Hello Yellow right away, I’m just about to get up and take care of business myself, making sure my best friend doesn’t get eaten by a rogue coyote or some other dastardly carnivorous mammal, but then Bobby Big Boy is tearing through Hello Yellow, jumping up into my shirts again, warming my belly and chest, and all is well under the comforter Mom had thrown over me before she left the bus, even though I had left it out on the adjacent seat for her, because we have only one comforter.
Bobby Big Boy’s pretty warm from running around and a little lighter without a bladder full of pee. I hear my mom lock up Hello Yellow and then walk toward me.
“This is only temporary, Amber,” Mom says.
“I like it. It’s like camping, only on a school bus, and without fattening marshmallows, a cancer-causing campfire, or the pesky Kum-Ba-Yah singing.”
“Did you get enough food today?”
This question pisses me off, especially since she probably blew what little dough she makes on cigarettes and vodka tonight, providing no dinner whatsoever for me or B Thrice. Mom only works four hours a day at nine dollars an hour, and she’d happily buy you a drink at some crappy bar before she’d buy a meal for herself or me. So depressing.
“Watching my figure,” I say, stealing Franks’ joke, “but Bobby Big Boy had a steak I swiped from Donna’s dinner table.”
“Ms. Roberts,” Mom corrects me, because the drunk has some sardonic notion of proper etiquette when it comes to surnames.
“Right,” I say, like a total bitch, because I can be a cat.
My mother kisses me on the forehead real nice, says, “Sweet dreams, my love,” and so I let go of the day’s frustrations, push my palms together into prayer position, and I silently hold up all the people and dogs in this world who I absolutely positively know need me to pray for them: Mom, 3B, Ricky, Donna, Franks, Chad, Jared, Ty, Door Woman Lucy, Old Man Linder (my manager), Old Man Thompson, Joan of Old and all of the old people down in the Methodist home, Father Chee, The Korean Divas for Christ, Mr. Doolin, Private Jackson, Ms. Jenny, Prince Tony, the Childress Public High School faculty, and the whole damn town of Childress, even the football team, even Lex Pinkston, EVEN my absentee biological father, Bob, who may or may not even be alive for all I know—I hold them all up to JC in my prayers, asking God to help everyone be who they need to be, and then I simply listen to Mom breathe across the aisle until Triple B and I find sleepy land together, and I dream of the real bed on which Bobby Big Boy and I will rest one day. My future bed’s going to be an ocean of mattress, maybe even a queen-size, sucka! Word.
CHAPTER 2
Waking up at a normal time in Hello Yellow isn’t all that bad, because of the many windows—warm sunlight cubes reach everywhere. This happens on the weekends. True. But on school days, we have to rise before the sun comes up so that none of the other early-rising bus drivers will catch us sleeping on Hello Yellow, which would surely cost Mom her job. So we get up super early—way before dawn. I’ve been doing this for a while; I usually wake up automatically sometime between four thirty and five. But no matter how much she drinks, Mom is always up before Triple B and me.
Today, Mom’s inhaling a Newport just outside of Hello Yellow, her dyed blond hair full of fading moonlight. (I keep my hair naturally black and I do dig the way it sometimes shines iridescent like crow feathers. True. I’m an inch or two shorter than Mom when she stands up tall, which is like never. While my skin is freakishly white, her skin is sort of yellow from smoking so much.) Mom’s orange cherry glows brighter with each pull.
Like always, she’s shivering mentholated smoke out of her nose and mouth.
BBB runs right past her, off the leash in the morning newness where there are no coyotes, local rapist-killers, or other unnamed monsters. He lifts his tiny leg and merrily pisses on the front driver’s side tire of school bus 260, marking his all-time favorite wheel.
“Hey, Mom,” I say.
“Good morning, sweetheart,” she says from within her dark smoky shadow.
Mom looks really thin.
Skeletal.
True?
True.
When did you last eat? I think but do not ask, because I don’t really want to know the answer, nor do I want to hear another one of Mom’s stupid lies.
She won’t even eat the food I bring her from Donna’s house.
Bobby Big Boy pushes out a few grape-size pellets of poo, squatting somehow regally with a seriously determined look on his face, as if he were a mini sphinx thinking up some kick-ass riddle. I learned all about sphinxes freshman year, when we read Oedipus Rex. If you don’t know this already, Oedipus had sex with his mom, which is very very whack—even more so than Billy Budd spilling soup on Claggart. We have to read crazy books in high school, let me tell you.