The Best School Year Ever by Barbara Robinson Read Free Book Online

them on him and that’s what she charged him. And let me tell you, that kid better never try to get on my bus! Or any other Herdmans either!”
    Getting thrown off the bus was almost the worst thing that could happen to you. You had to go to school anyway, no matter what, so if you got thrown off the bus it meant that your father had to hang around and take you, or your mother had to stop whatever she was doing and take you, so you got yelled at right and left. You even got yelled at when it happened to someone else—“Don’t you get thrown off the bus!” your mother would say.
    Mrs. Herdman probably never said this, but she didn’t have to worry about it anyway. The Herdmans never got thrown off a bus because nobody ever let them on one. Sometimes, though, they would hang around what would have been their bus stop if they had one, smoking cigars and starting fights and telling little kids that the bus was full of bugs.
    “Big bugs,” Gladys told Maxine Cooper’s little brother, Donald. “Didn’t you ever hear them? They chomp through anything to get food. You better give me your lunch, Donald. I’ll take it to school for you.”
    Of course that was the end of Donald’s lunch, but at least, Maxine said, it was just a day-old bologna sandwich and some carrot sticks so they probably wouldn’t do that again.
    “They’re just jealous,” Alice told her, “because they have to walk while everybody else gets to ride and be warm and comfortable.”
    “Come on, Alice,” I said. “If you think the schoolbus is warm and comfortable, you must be out of your mind.”
    But Imogene Herdman was standing right behind us, so Alice ignored me and said again how wonderful it was to ride the schoolbus, and how she would hate to be the Herdmans who couldn’t ride the schoolbus because they were so awful.
    After that they began to show up every morning at Maxine’s bus stop, looking sneaky and dangerous, like some outlaw gang about to hold up the stagecoach.
    “But they don’t do anything,” Maxine said, looking worried. “They just stand around. It’s scary.”
    It scared Donald, all right, and after three or four days he wouldn’t even come out the door, so Maxine stood on her front porch and yelled, “My mother says for you to go home!”
    “We can’t go home!” Imogene yelled back. “We have to go to school.”
    Then they all nodded at each other, Maxine said, just as if they were this big normal family of ordinary kids who got up and brushed their teeth and combed their hair and marched out ready to learn something.
    Maxine felt pretty safe on her own porch, so she said, “Then why don’t you just get on the bus and go!”
    “Get on your bus?” Imogene said. “Get on Bus Six?” And Gladys hollered that she wouldn’t get on Bus 6 if it was the last bus in the world, and Leroy said, “Me neither.”
    “And then when the bus came,” Maxine told us, “they all ran behind the McCarthys’ front hedge and just stood there, staring at us.”
    “What did Mrs. Yeagle do?” I asked.
    “She yelled at them, ‘Don’t you kids even think about getting on my bus!’ and Ollie said, ‘I’ll never get on Bus Six!’ He said it twice. Listen . . .” Maxine leaned forward and lowered her voice. “I think the Herdmans are scared of the bus.”
    This was the craziest thing I’d ever heard. “It’s just a bus,” I said.
    “I know that,” Maxine said, “but it’s my bus and I have to ride on it, and I don’t want to ride on a doomed bus!”
    This sounded crazy too, but nobody laughed, because if the Herdmans were scared of Bus 6, it was the only thing in the world they were scared of, so you had to figure they must know something no one else knew.
    Whatever it was, they weren’t telling, but every day there they were at the bus stop, whispering and shaking their heads.
    Charlie thought they were stealing pieces of the bus, one little piece at a time, and someday the whole bus would just fall apart and