CHAPTERONE
Sometimes stories start with a bang, and sometimes stories start with a whisper, and sometimes stories start with a robbery or a car chase or a fistfight or someone being born or someone dying. Sometimes stories start with a kitten. I mean, the funny thing about stories is that they don’t really start or stop at all … It’s just the telling that starts or stops.
And this story, it could start when me and my dad finally settled down for a bit and got off the road and into a house; or it could begin when I started real school for the first time in five years; or, heck, it could start six years before that, when something terrible happened that tore a hole in the universe (or at least felt like it did). But, nah. I think this story starts with me on a bus, finding a box.
Now, the bus wasn’t moving at the time. And, no, the box wasn’t a buried memory box. That’s a whole different story. In this particular case, the bus was parked next to a house in Oregon that I happened to be living in. And the box held something almost as precious as memories.
So, there you go. Once upon a time, I was hanging out alone on an old bus and I was bored.
The bus was named Yager. It could be some folks don’t see the need to name a bus. Then again some folks haven’t had the chance to get to know a bus as well as I have.
Heck, me and my dad (who I’ll mostly just call Rodeo since that’s what he likes to be called) had lived on that old bus for five years after that hole got torn in the universe. We’d taken out all the seats except for the first couple of rows and bolted in a couch and some shelves and a big chair we called the Throne, and I even had a room in the back with a bed and a curtain for a door and everything. Yager was weird and Yager was funky and Yager got looks everywhere we went, but Yager was home.
Even though I was the one who’d really wanted to settle down and stop living on Yager in the first place, once we finally stopped rambling and had an actual house that didn’t have wheels, it turns out I still wanted to hang out on that bus a lot of the time. So I’d run an extension cord out to it and strung pretty white Christmas lights all up inside it, and it was kind of my home away from home (except it was parked right next to my home, so it wasn’t really all that away).
On the particular March Sunday when this story started, I was laying there on the couch in the bus, half reading a book. My cat, Ivan, was laying warm on my chest, purring when I scratched behind his ears.
I shook my head and let the book drop to the ground beside me and tsked my tongue.
“It’s no good, bud,” I said. Ivan opened his eyes and looked into mine. Ivan is perfect in nearly every way, but one of his best perfections is how good of a listener he is. “This book is perfectly fine. But there are way too many flat-out amazing books in the world to waste time reading a perfectly fine one. Right?”
Ivan yawned in agreement.
I sighed and looked around. It woulda been a great day to have a friend over. If, you know, I had any friends. Not counting cats. But I didn’t. Not counting cats.
I saw Rodeo’s bookshelf a little ways away. So I scooted Ivan down off me and ambled over to take a look.
I knelt down, squinting at the titles, hoping something would grab me. The Little Prince was pretty great, but I’d read that plenty already. Same with The Old Man and the Sea and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Ivan sidled up beside me, rubbing on my hip, tail held high. I eyed a tattered paperback book of poetry by Kahlil Gibran. I’d read some of it and dug it enough, but I wasn’t sure I was in the mood for poetry just right then.
I went to grab it anyway, but as I did, Ivan rubbed hard on my elbow with his chin and my hand went crooked, and instead of grabbing the book, I knocked it back. It fell with a muffled thump into the darkness between the shelf and the wall of the bus.
“Crud,” I said, leaning forward and turning sideways to reach blindly with one hand behind the shelf. Ivan came in close to my face, purring. “Stay out of this, cat,” I said, grunting.
My fingers brushed against what I was pretty sure was the spine of the book, and I stuck my tongue out and stretched farther and grabbed.
But my fingers didn’t close around a book; it was something else. It had corners and edges, but it was bigger and heavier than a paperback book. I gripped it harder and pulled it up just before it slipped from my fingers with a solid thud. I sat back on my knees and slid the thing toward me, into the light.
It was a box that looked like a briefcase without a handle. Made of dark wood, with tarnished metal at the corners. Just small enough to fit in that hidden space behind the shelf, but big enough that Ivan could’ve curled up inside it if it was open. Which, I’m sure, is one hundred percent what he would’ve tried to do.
I sat there for a second, looking at that box. It had a … a feeling to it. It felt secret. It felt hidden. It felt important. It felt, to be honest, like a once upon a time.
And there was this fact: Yager was not that big. And it had been my home for five years. I’d lived and breathed and slept and woke and eaten and laughed and cried in the cozy space between those four walls. And I’d never seen that box before. So, it was secret. It was hidden.
And it sure as heck wasn’t my secret. Which meant it had to be Rodeo’s. And Rodeo is a lot of things, but secret-keeper ain’t really one of ’em. He was the type to brag about how productive a trip to the bathroom had been. What kind of secret would a fella like that keep, from a girl like me?
Ivan rubbed his chin against the corner of the box, the way cats do.
“Shoo,” I said, but my heart wasn’t in it.
I spun that box around and found two latches, snapped shut.
I swallowed. Opening up those latches was surely a step there’d be no coming back from. Funny, how life does that sometimes. Gives you a little warning. Whispers a little promise.
“What do you think, Ivan?” I asked in a hushed voice.
“Mrawr,” Ivan said. He’s not a big talker.
Copyright © 2024 by Dan Gemeinhart