Chapter 1: Welcome Home! 1 Welcome Home! You can't unsmell a smell. Once it's there, it's there for life. And every bus smells the same--sickly sweet gas and smoke-choky exhaust. It sends me right back to elementary school and waiting for the wheelchair lift to take its fine time cranking down so I could roll on up. The bus depot in McAlester is no different, but this time I'm sucking it in like sweet, sweet Christmas pine, because Bert is coming home. "You got the sign?" "No, Ellie, I left it in the trailer," Coralee deadpans. "You're hilarious." I glance over at her, bundled in a silver puffer coat and white earmuffs. I see no sign. "Wait... you do have it, right?" "It's in the Caddy. Chill." She jerks a mittened thumb back toward where Susie, Coralee's step-grandma, waits in the car. "Well, go get it!" "You go get it!" She shoves me, so I pivot and roll toward the car. Susie passes me the sign through the window, which was already down despite the subzero temps, because she's back on the Camels. She says she'll quit again for Lent. We'll see. "Here, darlin'. Birds got at the corner a bit, but the rest is fine." Susie winks. She says the trailer full of cockatoos is more hazardous to her health than the smokes. A bus screeches to a halt behind me and the doors are already whooshing open by the time I get back to Coralee, who shakes her head. "Always be prepared. That's what I say. You almost missed the big welcome home." "Shut it and help me hold up this sign." She takes one end and I take the bird-nibbled corner and raise it high. I clock Bert as he's jogging down the steps with a duffel bag larger than he is slung over his shoulder. He looks... different. His dark hair, usually so neat and combed, is a big mess of whirls and spikes, and is he taller? Maybe it's just the sweatpants. Wait, Bert is in sweatpants? Where are the ironed jeans? What is happening ? "Girl, higher!" Coralee hip-checks my shoulder and lifts the sign so he can get a clear view. One thing you've got to know about Bert. He's never in a hurry. So when he eventually nudges his way around the other tired passengers hunting for their family and friends on this cold January morning, I am jumping up and down in my seat to keep the blood flowing to my extremities. I would like to take my toes back home with me, thank you very much. He spots us on the sidewalk, eyes the sign, and tilts his head. No grin. No wave. Just a nod and then a slow jog over to us. "Who's Robert?" he asks. "What?" I say. I'm trying to wriggle my toes, make sure they're intact. Also, I'm busy studying him. It's like my memory has laid a picture of Bert side by side with this new one and I'm trying to spot the differences. He points to the sign. "It says 'Welcome home, Robert.'?" "In glitter," Coralee adds with a grin. That girl would do anything for a tube full of glitter glue. "It's your name, Bert," I explain. He blinks at me like I'm the one not in on the joke. "I know that." "Jeez, man." Coralee punches him on the shoulder. Between his navy fleece and her mittened hand, I doubt he even feels it. "We were trying to be funny." He looks at me. "You never call me Robert." He's only been gone two weeks, but with the two weeks before that when I went home to Nashville to visit my dad and his wife, Meg, and my half brothers, this is the longest I've ever gone without seeing him. I clear my throat. "Well, things change," I say. He nods at both of us. Then, finally, he smiles--a real Bert smile that crinkles the corners of his eyes, and something in me flutters, like the fin of a fish brushing past you in the murky dark of a lake. It's not bad, just... weird. I pretend it isn't there, like you do with all the things you can't see underwater. "Come on," Coralee says, making Bert carry his own sign. "Your parents'll think you never came home from this fancy-pants science camp of yours. We promised we'd drop you off at the Food & Co. so they could see you right away." "I think they've already scheduled you for a shift," I joke, but not really, because Bert's parents' grocery store is a family business and everyone pitches in when they can. Now that all his siblings have gone back home after the holidays, they need all the help they can get. "It wasn't science camp," Bert says as we make our way through the frosty morning light. "It was the Kentucky Young Environmentalists Consortium, and we were required to complete rigorous academic courses as well as individual capstone projects in order to receive the certificate of achievement at the end." Coralee opens the back door for me and asks him while I'm transferring in, "And did you complete this capstone-y thing and get your certificate, Roberto?" "I did." He points to my chair. At my nod, he folds it up and loads it along with his duffel in the trunk. Then he hops in the back with me, and his cheeks and the tip of his nose are pink and the collar of his jacket is tucked inside his sweatshirt, and for one crazy second I want to reach over and straighten it. What is wrong with me? Bert talks for the entire thirty-two-minute drive from McAlester to Eufaula. But I do not hear one word about the Kentucky Young Environmentalists Consortium or his project or the dorm rooms at the boarding school where it was held. Instead, I watch the light sparkling on the frosted grass along the highway and I count the tar-covered lines on the concrete road that are taking us home and I do not think about the fish-swishy feeling I got when Bert, one of my best friends, smiled at me. Excerpted from Rolling On by Jamie Sumner All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. 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