Monga Drove the Half-Circle

My best friend Tami and I stood at the bus stop ruing our lame academic destiny. It was totally bogus to have to go to school: most of the teachers were clueless, and most of the kids were assholes. So, we decided to ditch our books under some bushes down the block and skip school.

Tami and I strolled silently for a few minutes before we realized that we had nowhere to go, nothing to do. We lived up in the orchards--all the shopping and stuff was downtown. Walking by the back of McGhee Elementary School, we were discussing this dilemma when a familiar brown van manifested in the horizon. It was Monga dropping my sister Jessi off at school! Why hadn't I thought of that?!

"Shit, it's my grandma!"
"Whadda we do?"
"Let's run. Maybe she didn't see us."

We took off, blindly running to away-from-Monga. Monga honked her horn, but Tami and I kept on running. We ran our way into a culdesac. Trapped.

Monga screeched her brakes beside us, leaned across the passenger seat and flung open the door.

"Get in you two." We climbed into the van. "Just what do you think you're doing?"

"We missed the bus," I lied. "We ran cuz we thought you'd think we were skipping school."

Monga drove the half circle it took to exit the culdesac and re-routed the van toward Sacajawea Jr. High. There was total silence in the van. My baby sister Dani wasn't even kicking the back of my seat. After a few minutes, Monga told Tami and I that we had to tell our parents that we'd tried to skip school, and that if we didn't say something, she would. She dropped us off at school. We earned our unexcused absences.

That evening, I sat in Monga's living room waiting for Mom to get off work and take me and my sisters home. There wasn't enough noise or activity on the TV to drown out my racing thoughts of "How am I gonna tell Mom".

When Mom came in, Jessi and Dani ran to greet her, talking a mile a minute about their days. I stood watching them while Monga stood watching me. "Tell her. Now.", her piercing eyes and tightened lips told me. I pleaded with all the pleading my teen eyes could muster.

Somewhere in there, Mom and the kids had gotten all belongings gathered and were headed out the door. "I can't tell her", I whispered to Monga before I left.

15 years or so later, at Christmas, I told my Mom this story, sure that she'd known all along.

Monga had never told her.