Getting Worse

Mom’s Nissan wasn’t just beat up. Rust was eating away at the paint on the back. Its frame was bent, so it drove as if it was sliding sideways. Its engine sounded like an old man’s cough, the kind that came from smoking for sixty years. Half the time, whenever Mom accelerated, it would jerk and burp and then rumble as if it was contemplating dying. So far it hadn’t totally died, but it was going to. When it did, they wouldn’t be able to take it in to a shop like most families. Other families struggling with bad cars had credit cards to buy them a little time until they could get all the money for repairs, but Thomas’s family didn’t.

This was one reason Thomas took the school bus, even though he hated it. It was a choice between a long bus ride or a short but uncertain car ride. But on this Monday morning, since he’d overslept and nobody had woken him up, Thomas had to either skip school or be driven there by his mother. And he had already gotten in trouble once for skipping school when this happened, so he couldn’t do it again.

“You didn’t wake me up.”

“You have an alarm by your bed,” Mom said.

“It went off when the power went out sometime last night.”

“I heard your sister calling you.”

“I ignore her when she calls my name,” Thomas said, tying the frayed laces on his basketball shoes. “She’s usually complaining about something.”

“Are you ready to go?” Mom looked on the kitchen counter for the car keys.

Thomas scratched his head. “I’ll never be ready to go back to school.”

“That bad?”

“It ain’t good.”

Mom looked like she was going to say something but she stopped herself. He grabbed the backpack and went to the car. The beast.

Maybe there wouldn’t be many kids noticing him being dropped off. Maybe he could even figure out a way to get his mother to drop him off before they reached school.

On the way, Thomas noticed something new about the car.

It now roared . . . but not in a good way.

The engine made a racket that Thomas was sure echoed for miles and miles.

“When did the muffler go?”

“It’s been gone a few weeks.”

He hadn’t noticed it, not even when they went to get breakfast on Sunday morning.

Now there was no way he could go unnoticed driving up to school.

Surely she can drop me off a few blocks before the school, right?

But he couldn’t bring himself to ask.

So when the car pulled up in the busy parking lot of the busy high school, Thomas wanted to wear a bag over his head. Half the students around him didn’t care, but it didn’t matter because the other half of them noticed and stared.

This was the part of the whole experience of being a new kid he hated. Being noticed. Being studied and scrutinized. Being judged. Because he had a pretty good idea what kind of picture the other kids were drawing in their heads when it came to Thomas Brandt.