Window #13

It’s hard to miss the fat kid. Every bus has one. So, it seems a bit odd that we’ve only gotten to him now. Of course, the more accustomed you are to seeing something, the sooner you forget it’s there. No one knows how or when the fat kid got on the bus. It seems impossible that he would fit through the door. But he must have at some point. Perhaps they built the bus around him. Those in the front of the bus are sure he descends from giants, a race that predates humans, maybe even the Bus Driver. He doesn’t move. He just sits there looking out from tiny eyes buried in his fat face. At some point, someone throws a piece of their lunch at him, to try to get him to turn around. Soon it becomes a game. Three points if you can land it on his head. Two points for the shoulders, and one for everywhere else. It’s impossible to miss, so we don’t have rules for that. He doesn’t move, and soon, the pile of food—egg-salad sandwiches, carrots and hummus, green beans wrapped in salami, reheated meat loaf, chicken casserole, tuna casserole, you name it—rises to the top of the bus, spreads out to the side, blocking any passage between the front and the back. We don’t mind at first, but then reports come to us from the front, reports that make us wonder if they’re really the same over there. Tales circulate of how they no longer need legs because there’s no room to move on that side. They say that their arms have grown longer to compensate, that their fingers, too, have stretched and curled inward into hook-like attachments so they can hang from the top of the bus and move around above the garbage. It’s an abomination! Someone shouts. The Bus Driver wouldn’t stand for that. Then the thought we wish we would not have thought. What if it’s affected the Bus Driver, too? What if He’s no longer like us? Jesse runs to Bob for comfort but slips on a banana peel. Thomas confesses that he wants to be a girl. Nancy pounds the windows searching for a way out. Jimmy swears he’ll give up girls and enter the priesthood. Without glancing up from her biology book, Alison suggests we remove the barrier. Of course! It’s so simple. A committee is formed to determine the most effective way to remove “The Barrier,” as we now refer to it. Various ideas are tossed about: send an expedition to scale the peak looking for cracks, fault lines which might be exploited; plant explosives at the base (it occurs to no one that we have no explosives nor any way to build them, though Neil says he read how to do it once on the Internet.); cut a hole in the roof of the bus—or the floor—and build a tunnel. Threatened by the thought of confronting what lies on the other side, a small but vocal minority makes signs and surrounds the committee, shouting: “What the Bus Driver has made, no man shall alter!” The committee members resort to making their own signs reminding the demonstrators that we were the ones who made the mountain. A shouting match ensues until, like the fat boy, the origins of the mountain have been forgotten by all.