Luke let out a long breath. “We’d better tell him the truth about this.”
“No!” She could imagine his response. He’d be livid. “No, we can’t.”
“It’ll be okay,” Luke said. “You want me to talk to him?”
“Oh, God, no, you can’t. Let me think.” But her mind was blank. Luke had erased everything. It wasn’t that she wanted to maintain her relationship with Michael. After what had just happened, she couldn’t imagine going back to him. She just didn’t want to end it in an explosion of jealousy and accusation. “If it looks like I ran off with his best friend, it will humiliate him.”
“Look, I’ll just tell him I made a pass at you,” Luke said, before she had the chance to tell him what she was thinking. His voice had cooled. “But that nothing really happened. That’s the truth, after all. Nothing much really happened. It’s not like we did it all.”
Nothing had happened? She had been intimate with him in a way she’d never been intimate with anyone, in a way she’d intended to save for her wedding night, but Luke thought nothing had happened?
Shame burned in her cheeks. “That’s right. Nothing happened. So why get Michael involved? He’ll just be mad at both of us, and for no real reason.”
The Ferris wheel jerked to life, easily lowering them to the ground.
“Perfect timing,” Luke noted. “I guess it’s a sign. Come on, I’ll take you home.”
In the end, neither one of them had to tell Michael. Susan Howard, who lived across the street from Grace and who had a massive crush on Michael, told him she’d seen Luke drop Grace off very late one night. It was all he needed to hear. He’d immediately jumped to the wrong—or maybe really the right—conclusion.
It had ended his friendship with Luke and nearly ended his relationship with Grace. She’d jumped through hoops to preserve it. As much as it embarrassed her to recall it now, she had apologized profusely and promised never to talk to Luke again. And she hadn’t.
Not until the day she’d walked into his office asking for a job.
It was still muggy outside at 7:00 p.m. A milky haze of mist hung over the soccer field, with a great orange ball of sun dipping lower behind the goalposts. The buzz of locusts filled the evening air.
Luke waited for her by the barn. He was grinding out the stub of a cigarette with his toe when she walked up.
“Thought you stopped that years ago,” she said to him.
“Did,” he said, with a puff of smoke. “Just every once in a while…”
She shrugged, thinking of the entire box of chocolate marshmallow cookies she’d consumed during a marathon viewing of Pride and Prejudice after Michael had left. She was hardly one to point fingers. “I guess we all do things that aren’t good for us once in a while.”
He looked at her for a moment. “Yeah, well, I won’t tell if you won’t.”
She hesitated. Was he talking about smoking or…? Or nothing. Of course he meant smoking. “I’m not going to tell,” she said flippantly. “The kids don’t need to know what a dubious role model you really are.”
He raised an eyebrow, resting his gaze on hers for a moment. “Think you’re a better one?”
She straightened. “I’ll be an excellent influence, Luke. You know I was a great student. You used to make fun of me for it all the time.”
He gave a laugh and started off toward the bus, like the Pied Piper, so sure she would follow him that he didn’t even look back.
She did.
“I don’t think I made fun of you for being a good student,” he said lazily. “As I recall, it was for sucking up to the teachers.”
“I did not suck up to the teachers!”
“Geez, Grace, you needed an extra locker just for all the polished red apples you brought in for Mrs. MacGonagle.”
“Once,” Grace said, her face going hot immediately. She had taken so much grief for that. “Once I brought in apples for Mrs. MacGonagle, and it was only because my mother told her we had such a huge harvest from the apple tree that she was going to have to throw them away if no one wanted them. And they weren’t polished.”
“Okay,” Luke said, splaying his arms as he walked. “If you say so.”
“What about you? As I recall you were an all-A student, even while you were doing your broody James Dean thing. You even got that big scholarship.”
“I never sucked up.” He smiled, but it was a smile that said he didn’t want to talk about anything personal if it had to do with himself. He kept walking until he got to the bus. “Okay,” he said, leaning on the yellow vehicle. “Go to it.”
“Okay.” If he didn’t want to talk about it, they wouldn’t talk about it.
She walked past him and into the bus. He followed this time.
It was as hot as a sauna inside. “Comfortable?” Grace asked with a wan smile. “If not, I can turn on the air conditioner. Oh, wait, there isn’t an air conditioner.”
“I’m fine,” Luke said. “But if you’re hot, go ahead and turn on the fan. That should help.”
She gave him a look. “You’ve never driven this bus in the summer, have you?”
“Sure I have. Now get going so you can pass the test and drive it yourself this summer.”
“All right, all right.” She proceeded to complete the safety check she’d have to perform for the final portion of the test on Friday. She checked the windows, the locks, the lights and signals, gauges, seat belts, mats, steering wheel and everything else that moved, lit, opened, closed, signaled or stuck out.
Including the Bodily Fluid Clean-up Kit.
“Which looks fine,” Grace pronounced, sitting in the driver’s seat backward, facing Luke. “Now. Did I forget anything?”
He shook his head. “Just remember to take the keys out of the ignition when you’re finished. Carol Borden forgot that twice.”
Was he ever, even once, going to admit she’d done a good job? She doubted it. To Luke, it seemed, complimenting Grace would mean a huge compromise of his principles. If she drove the bus through a flood and around a tornado, saving scores of children in her charge, he’d probably only comment on whether or not she fully depressed the parking brake afterward.
She leaned back against the steering wheel and crossed her arms in front of her. “So why do you know all this, Luke? Is it a prerequisite for becoming the headmaster?”
“I was the driver here for five years.”
“Right,” she scoffed, picking idly at some duct tape that was covering a hole on the back of the seat. “After that football scholarship to Stanford, you decided to come back home and drive a bus.”
“I didn’t go to Stanford,” he said quietly.
Grace was about to toss off a joke when she noticed how still his expression was and realized he wasn’t kidding. “You’re serious! You didn’t go at all?”
“Nope.”
Suddenly the buzz of the locusts outside seemed very loud.
“Why not?” she asked. “I thought it was a done deal.”
He shrugged. “Nothing’s ever