Left in the Dust: The True Cost of Following a Fool novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Doors Open
Eleven classmates walk off the stopped bus into the dust storm; Keira films the driver's order, calls 911 with their names, and sees Keeley's chat post claiming Keira approved the walk.
The bus doors hissed open, and eleven of my classmates walked out into the dust.
They went one at a time with their sleeves pulled over their mouths.
Past the steps there was only brown air and the white edge of the guardrail.
I stayed in my seat, third from the back, with my backpack on my knees.
It was the morning of the state entrance exam, and our charter bus had been parked on the highway shoulder for twenty minutes.
The driver had told us to wait for rescue.
The testing center was a mile away.
Keeley Satterlee, our class president, had already decided a mile was nothing.
I had been in this exact seat once before.
Last time I had stood in the aisle, blocked the door, and talked everyone into staying.
Hours later the rescue team drove us to a makeup exam, and Keeley missed the cutoff by three points.
The night the scores came out, she shoved me into the stone edge of the flower bed outside our school gates.
The last thing I saw was my whole class in the lamplight, watching.
Then I woke up on the bus, and the doors were still closed, and Keeley was reaching for her backpack.
This time I had not said a word.
Tegan Clayson, my best friend since fifth grade, stopped beside my seat with her bag already on her shoulders.
"Keira, come on," she said. "It's one mile. We'll be there in twenty minutes."
"The driver said wait."
"The driver's just scared of getting in trouble."
"Tegan, you can't see the road."
"Keeley has the map on her phone."
I looked up at her and said it plainly. "I'm staying."
Tegan's face went tight. She turned and followed the others down the steps.
Keeley came last.
She stopped at my seat and crouched so we were eye level, smiling.
"Come with us," she said. "You're the smartest person on this bus, and we need you in the middle where the wind can't get you."
"I'm staying, Keeley."
"Nobody gets left behind. I mean that."
Her phone was in her hand with the class group chat open and her thumb over the screen.
I noticed it, and I did not think anything of it yet.
"Take care of Tegan," I said.
"Always."
She stood up, patted my armrest twice, and walked out.
The driver watched her go and rubbed her face.
"I can't physically stop them," she said to the whole bus. "I'm not carrying anybody back, either."
Nobody answered her.
Then I did the only useful thing I could think of.
I lifted my phone, switched it to video, and held it up toward the open door.
"It's seven forty-one," I said, clearly, so the microphone would catch it. "Our driver has told every student to stay on the bus and wait for rescue. These students are leaving anyway."
I named all eleven, one by one, as they went out of sight.
Then I stopped recording and dialed 911.
The dispatcher sounded tired and very far away. She told me the highway patrol had no units moving yet.
"Ma'am, are you safe on the bus?"
"I'm safe. Eleven students just left on foot. They're heading east along the shoulder, toward the university exit. They have no masks."
I gave her the mile marker off the sign by our window.
I gave her every name.
She repeated them back to me, slowly, and said she was sending them to every unit that could move.
So I stayed in my seat, and I kept the phone on my knee.
Across the aisle, Drew Colburn had not stood up either.
In three years of school he had never said more than a word to me.
He unscrewed his water bottle and held it out across the aisle.
My hand was shaking so hard I only noticed when I took it.
He did not look at the door.
He looked at the back of my head for a moment, and then he looked at the floor.
"Drink," he said.
I drank.
The dust rattled against the windows.
My phone showed three texts from my mother, Bernice, asking if I was all right.
I typed back that I was safe and would call her soon.
Then every phone on the bus buzzed at once.
It was the class group chat, forty-one members.
Keeley had posted a photo of herself at the head of the line, squinting into the brown wind, with her boyfriend, Brent MacIntyre, and the rest behind her.
Under it she had written: "Thank you Keira for telling us it's safe to go! We'll tell everyone it was your call."
Thirty faces turned around in their seats and looked at me.
The message was stamped 7:43, two minutes after I started recording, and the photo in it had been taken from the bus steps.
I had said no to her face, and she had written it down as a yes.
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