Light as a Feather, Cold as Marble

Chapter 31

"I can live with that," Henry said. "Come on, we don't have much time." He flipped a switch on the dashboard of the car and Trey and I both heard pops from the doors on either side of us. Henry hopped out of the car and opened my door from outside, and then dashed around the back of the car to let Trey out. Trey and I both unfastened our seatbelts and stood, uncertain, in the freezing cold afternoon, not sure of whether to help our classmates or make a run for it.

Unable to even process what I was seeing quickly enough to make sense of any of it, I watched as Cheryl climbed out the back door of the overturned bus. Mr. Dean followed her, moving slowly, carefully, and then I saw that he was assisting Jason Arkadian. As Jason dragged himself through the back door of the bus and across the snow, I saw that his left leg was bent in a gruesome position. With uncharacteristic patience, Mr. Dean assisted him up to his feet, and helped him up the slope of the ravine as he hopped on his right foot, wincing all the way. Other kids stood at the crest of the hill facing the highway holding each other and crying. Some, like Liam Lapham, one of the guys on the basketball team with Pete, just stood there, emotionless. Stunned.

The site of Jason and Mr. Dean ascending the incline brought the bitter taste of bile to my mouth. The sense of déjà vu was so strong that I felt certain I was going to be sick; the site before me was like a frame-by-frame replay of the vision I'd had when Bachitar had led us through a meditation at the Preet Wellness Center. As I watched in awe, Mr. Dean's eyes met mine, and instead of gratitude, I saw confusion and fear. Whether he was realizing that he should have believed us, or was insinuating with his eyes that I had brought these accidents on the buses, I couldn't tell.

"C'mon!" Henry was motioning for us to follow him. "We have to go! Now!"

We hurried through the slush toward Henry's truck, which was abandoned a good hundred feet in front of the blazing bus. Flames were pouring out from underneath the hood of the bus, so tall and high and spewing such thick black smoke that I couldn't even see through them to determine whether or not the bus driver had ever made his way to safety. I felt Trey's arm on my bag as he gently urged me around; it was no time to dawdle. Although the police had both slid on their backsides into the ravine to assist students evacuating the turned-over bus, if they glanced up at the highway, they'd see us, and no doubt we were in much more trouble at that point than we were when they'd originally locked us in the back of their car.

As we slipped and slid our way toward Henry's truck, I remembered the latter half of the vision I'd had in Bachitar's meditation studio. In my vision, I'd seen a white car... and Violet had been tied up in the back seat. But in reality there wasn't a white car, there was only the silver pick-up—

BOOM!

An explosion blew the aluminum hood clean off the front of the bus and sent it flying over our heads. Trey pushed me to the ground and shielded me from flying glass with his own body, both of us soaking the knees of our pants and sleeves of our coats in the melting snow. One peek stolen over my shoulder informed me that there was no way anyone who'd been knocked unconscious or still at the front of the bus had survived; tongues of flame leapt through broken windows and poured through the frame where the windshield had just been.

"Hailey," I mumbled to myself, knowing that my childhood friend had just died in that instant exactly as Violet had told her she would. Probably twenty feet away from the blazing bus, Abby Johanssen's body was being carried out of the other bus and set in the snow.

"Come on!"

Henry's voice cut through the billowing smoke just as I saw the dark silhouette of one of the police officers attempting to approach the fiery bus. There would be more cops, a fire department, and paramedics at any moment; we needed to make ourselves scarce.