Free Lippman, Laura by What The Dead Know (V1.1)(Html) Page B

stop on the lower part of Forest Park Avenue for Sunny. Or, as they called her, “Just the one.” As in, “Just the one student.” Or, “Why should just the one student inconvenience so many?” They threatened to find another bus service, leaving the company with “just the one,” which would never cover the cost of the route. Sunny’s parents were appalled, but there was nothing they could do. If they wanted to continue using the bus service—essential, given that they both worked—they had to agree to a compromise: The route would be reversed in the afternoon. So every afternoon Sunny watched her own block fly past as the bus headed to the beginning of its route and dropped students off in reverse order, backtracking to Forest Park Avenue. Given that their families had won, the other students should have been gracious, but Sunny discovered it didn’t work that way. They disliked her more than ever because her parents had all but called their parents racists. “N.L.,” one of the larger boys hissed at her. “You and your parents are N.L.ers.” She had no idea what it meant, but it sounded terrifying.
    The mass-transit system, unlike Mercer Transportation, could not be bullied. If it took twenty-five minutes to get to Security Square, with stops, then it took twenty-five minutes to get home again. The MTA was
egalitarian
, a word that she picked up from her father and particularly liked because it reminded her of
The Three Musketeers
with Michael York. When Sunny started Western High School next year, the plan was for her to take the MTA, using the free coupons distributed to students in monthly packs. To prepare for this, her parents had started allowing her to take practice runs—trips downtown, to Howard Street and the big department stores. That’s how she had come to reason that she could take the bus to Security Square and not tell anyone. Sunny was practically blasé about taking the bus places.
    But Heather, who had never taken a public bus anywhere, bounced with excitement on the wooden bench, one hand clutching her fare, the other wrapped around the handle of her new purse. Sunny also had a purse from her father’s store, a macramé one, but they didn’t get such things for free despite what the other kids assumed. If the item wasn’t a gift, like Heather’s purse, then they were expected to pay the wholesale price, because their father said his “margins” wouldn’t allow for freebies. Margins always made Sunny think of her typing class, which she was failing, although not because of margins. Her problem was that she performed horribly at the timed trials, making so many mistakes that she ended up with a negative word-per-minute score. When she wasn’t being timed, she typed very well.
    Sunny wondered why her parents had insisted that she take the typing elective in junior high, if they thought she was going to have to type for a living. Ever since sixth grade, when most of her friends were placed in the “enriched” track at Rock Glen, while she was merely “high regular,” she couldn’t help worrying that her future had been derailed while she wasn’t paying attention, that she’d lost options she never knew she had. When she was little, Grandpoppa and Grandmama had given her a nurse’s kit, while Heather had gotten a doctor’s kit. At the time the nurse’s kit was the better thing to have, because it had a pretty girl on its plastic cover and the doctor’s kit had a boy. How Sunny had lorded that over Heather. “You’re a
boy
.” But maybe it would have been better to be the doctor? Or at least to have people tell you that you
could be
the doctor? Their father said they could be anything they wanted to be, but Sunny wasn’t convinced that he really believed this.
    Heather, of course, was going to be enriched when she entered Rock Glen next year, not that the placements had been announced yet. Heather would be enriched and then, most likely, in the A course at Western,