I park the suitcase in the seat across the aisle and sit with her next to the window and get a book out of my backpack. I always keep a book in my backpack for the long ride home. I’m kind of a history nerd. I should really be in Honors classes, but Foundations is much livelier and funnier, so I make sure I keep my average at a D so I can be in there with Grimshaw. Today’s book is called The Gulag Archipelago by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, which I took out of Mr. C.’s room. Reading a fat book guarantees that nobody will talk to me. Except for Prof, who usually has read it, too, and talks to me about what I’m reading. He’s the kind of guy, if he sees you reading a book, he wants to know what it is. My mother told me that way back when, Prof got a PhD but had too many controversial opinions, and so here he is, an old black man driving white kids home every day on the school bus. Grimshaw sits down in the front seat and starts filing her nails.

“Fight with your mom?” Prof asks Grimshaw, looking at the seventh graders in the rearview mirror. Then he lets off the air brake and we lurch away from the high school behind the other buses. “What happened this time?”

“Well,” she says. “First my brother gets busted.”

“Dale?”

“Who else?”

Prof whistles. “That’s too bad.”

“So then Lisa gets mad and leaves.”

Prof shakes his head. “She take the kids this time?”

“I wish.” Grimshaw decides her nails are fine, and then gets up and flips through Prof’s music collection, which he keeps in a cardboard shoe box under the dashboard. “Nope,” she says. “Those kids always get left behind. With me. Because it’s not like I have a life. So my mom wanted me to stay home and watch them today. But I told her I can’t, I have these two big tests, first English and then Western Civ, like, hello, finals? Like pass the year and come back as a senior? So she gets mad and tells me it’s time I get a job and help out with rent.”

“School’s important,” Prof says philosophically. “You gotta finish school.”

“So is Junior Davis after you now?” I ask her while Prof is exchanging good wishes for the summer. “You still have a lilac blossom in your hair.”

“Be serious,” she says, looking through the shoe box. “He’s owned.”

“His owner wasn’t very happy with you just now. She had a bad word for you.”