The Magic Lives On (MSB Story)

     It was something that really none of her class had ever expected. And really, even though neither of them had ever set foot in her class for the past nineteen years, they had always had secretly worried about this day. It all happened on the morning of September 12, 2012.

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     Arnold Pearlstein had just woken up from his deep sleep. The young red haired man had been away for the past month identifying the composition of lava flows in Hawaii, and had only arrived back in Walkerville the previous night.  He fumbled around blindly until he found his glasses. As he walked past his open closet, a small sentence ran through his head as he looked at a yellow and white horizontal striped sweater hanging from an old coat hanger.
“I should stay home today,” he thought.
     For a moment, he honestly didn’t know why he thought that, and then he remembered his fourth grade class. Arnold allowed himself a small smile. He had used to regret going to school for that entire year because of his teacher. Not because his teacher was mean, or gave out too much homework, or graded unfairly. It was the field trips that always got him nervous.
     Now most children in school take field trips. Mostly to planetariums, the zoo, plays and the like. But if you had been in Ms. Frizzle’s class, you’d be going places no one had ever gone before. Such as to Pluto, to a star, even inside another classmate. Arnold shivered at the memory of his entire class walking about inside his digestive system, and the time they had done so again to figure out what had turned his skin briefly orange. But the field trips were not the only thing that made him nervous. Ms. Frizzle was undoubtedly the oddest teacher in the school. Her dresses were just strange looking, along with her earrings, and she always seemed to be unnaturally cheerful. Nothing anyone said ever made her lose her temper.
     But despite his fear over the constant field trips, Arnold did like Ms. Frizzle. She was a one of a kind teacher, and even though he hated to admit it, she was the best teacher in the world. Once when his cousin Janet had belittled her for a minor slip-up, he felt insulted. Even though he initiated one of his dreaded field trips, he wasn’t going to let his rude cousin insult his teacher. At the end of that school year, Arnold had been both excited and saddened to be leaving her class. Though every year after that, whenever he heard the Bus beep its horn or pass by the high school, or the college dorm, he’d always look out the window and watch the Bus pass by, filled with seven or ten students and Ms. Frizzle behind the wheel.
     After getting dressed, Arnold walked downstairs and fetched his morning paper off the door mat. He walked back to the kitchen, dropped the paper on the table, and poured his usual cup of morning coffee. Same as he had always done, but this morning would be different. As he read through the articles, his eye suddenly fell on a name in the obituaries.
     “Valerie Frizzle,” read in black and white.
     Arnold slowly sat his cup back down on the table, but sat it down on the edge of his bowl of oatmeal so it tipped over and spilled across the table. He didn’t clean it up, he just read the article. His glasses fogged up and he had to remove them so he could dry his eyes with the corner of his sleeve. He sat the newspaper back down, and stared out the window for a while. In the distance, past the trees of the neighbor’s backyards, he could see the flag of Walkerville Elementary School hanging at halfway, limply flapping in the weak breeze.
     “I…..think I’ll stay home today,” he said to himself. Suddenly, his cell rang. He picked it up and looked at the caller ID. He could barely read it with his glasses off. He dried his glasses quickly and put them on.
     The caller ID said, “Call Incoming: Phoebe”
     Arnold accepted the call and brought the phone to his ear.
     “Hello?” he asked his voice cracking.
     “Hello, Arnold. I heard you got back today,” said a familiar voice on the other end of the line. It was Phoebe, another student from Frizz’s class.
     “Uh, yeah….I did get back,” Arnold said, trying to get his voice together.
     “Is something wrong, Arnold?” Phoebe asked.
     “Uh, yes. Something is wrong. Did you read the paper this morning?” Arnold asked, grabbing a towel to clean up the spilled coffee on his table.
     “Not yet. I had to get to work early today. But I did bring it with me.”
     “Turn to the Obituaries,” he sighed. This was followed by a long silence. Then Phoebe’s came through the speaker, in a shocked, sad tone.
     “Oh no,” she moaned.
     “I- I can’t believe she is gone either, Phoebe,” Arnold sighed, tossing the towel in the sink.
     “Should….should I call the others?” Phoebe asked. She meant the other six students that had also shared the Frizz’s class that school year.
     “Sure. After all, they wouldn’t want to be left out. I’ll call some of them too. Good bye, Phoebe. Talk to you in a bit,” Arnold sighed.
     
     
     “I wonder where they are. They always seem to be late,” Tim groaned.
     “This is bad. If they don’t arrive soon, we’ll just have to cancel our lunch,” Keesha sighed.
     Suddenly, a man wearing a dark blue shirt, and a woman with a big pink book bag walked into the restaurant.
     “There they are. Hey, Carlos, D.A.! Over here!” Tim called to them.
     “Where have you two been? Your two minutes late,” Keesha demanded as they sat down across them.
     “Blame Carlos, because was the one who was late picking me up,” Dorothy Ann sighed.
     “Hey, it’s not like I did it on purpose or anything. My cars muffler fell off this morning,” Carlos sighed.
     “According to my research,” Dorothy Ann said, in her as-a-matter-of-fact way,” The likelihood of that happening is a million to one.” D.A. had always read a lot in school, and always had some witty retort or tidbit of information for whatever the conversation was about.
     “Is it also according to your research that mechanics short change their customers?” Carlos retorted, a grin on his face.
     “Hey, it’s good that you two are here now,” Tim said, breaking into the argument before D.A. could react.
     “Trust me, Tim. It would be bad if we were here yesterday,” Carlos chuckled.
     “Carlos!” the three said in unison. Carlos had always been the class clown in Ms. Frizzle’s class and the class always groaned whenever he made a bad joke or pun. Only the Frizz seemed bemused by his jokes, which was probably because she sometimes made the same jokes as well.
     “Do you stay up late at night just thinking of new bad puns?” Keesha asked.
     “If I did, you’d be stuck listening to them for a whole day,” Carlos chuckled.
     “Anyway, can we please order something to eat? I’m starving,” D.A. sighed. As they ordered their food, D.A. could feel her cell phone ringing in her book bag. She decided to let it go to voicemail and answer it later.
     A little while later when their food came, Carlos could hear D.A. begin to sob a little. He turned to see her with tears in her eyes.
     “What’s wrong, Dorothy Ann?” he asked. This got the attention of Keesha and Tim.
     “Yeah?” said Tim.
     “Is something wrong?” Keesha asked.
     “I just got a call from Phoebe, and….. Well, listen,” D.A. sighed, drying her tears. She sat her phone down on the table, turned on the speaker phone so all at the table could hear it. Soon, all four had tears in their eyes.
     “Oh bad. Oh bad. Oh bad bad bad. Got any bad jokes Carlos? Something to lighten the mood? Anything” asked Keesha, sniffling.
     Carlos just shook his head.
     
     
     “Ralphie steps up to the plate. He can see the determination of the pitcher to strike him out,” said Ralphie to himself as he stepped in front of the pitching machine.
     “The pitcher throws! Tennellie swings!” Ralphie swung with all his might and the aluminum bat sent the ball flying back in the direction it came, streaking until it hit the net.
     “And it’s another long, line drive to deep right field! The catcher fumbles the ball and it ends up over the wall. Tennellie rounds the bases and it’s another homerun! And the crowd goes wild!” Ralphie chuckled as he threw his fists in the air victoriously.
     “Another victory in the mind of the not-so-great Ralphie Tennellie, “called Wanda from the middle of the rock wall.
     Ralphie swung around and called back,” Is it just me, or have you managed to be stopped the overhanging rock face, for the millionth time?”
     Wanda just gave an angry moan and proceeded to try and figure out how she was going to get down. Ralphie sat his bat down, wiped the sweat off his face and sat down to watch Wanda as she managed to find her way down.
     “Sooner or later, I’m going to figure out how to get up there,” she sighed, dusting the chalk off her hands once she got to the ground
     Ralphie chuckled, he knew Wanda would most likely get up that rock wall in the next week or two. She rarely gave up on anything when she was younger. Why should she be any different now? Then, his cell phone started ringing in his gym bag.
     “Dirty socks….dirty shorts…shoe inserts…..ah, here it is,” he said to himself as he fished through his cluttered bag before finally pulling out his cell phone. He accepted the call and started to talk to the person on the other end of the line.
     “Hello?”
     “Hi, Ralphie,” said the caller. Ralphie immediately recognized the voice as Arnold’s.
     “Hey, Arn. What’s up?”
     This was followed by a long silence as Arnold talked to Ralphie and told him about the sad news. Wanda came over when she noticed that Ralphie had taken a silent, ashen appearance.
     “What’s wrong Ralphie?” she asked.
     “Well…..I just got a call from Arnold. You remember The Frizz, right?”
     “Of course. How could I forget her?”
     “Well…..she passed away recently.”
     Wanda soon gained the same ashen color Ralphie now had as the realization of the news started to sink in.
     “I…..I can’t believe she’s gone,” she sighed.
     “Me neither, Wanda. It…just doesn’t seem real,” Ralphie sighed sadly, some tears rolling down his cheek.
     
     It was a quiet, dark night in Walkerville. Outside the elementary school, six cars pulled up outside, and the eight students got out and walked over to the flag pole where they stood in silence.
     “It’s been a while,” Carlos said, looking at the faces of his former classmates.
     “Yeah. It sure has been a while,” Tim sighed.
     “Too long,” Phoebe said quietly.
     The class of 93’ soon began to quietly mingle. Most questions of ‘how you doing’, ‘ you got a career’ among others. Soon, Wanda broke the quiet conversation.
     “Look, over there,” Wanda said, pointing across the lawn, toward the parking lot.
     The Bus still sat in the parking lot, like it had always been there. The eight adults circled around it, like the old yellow machine was a sacred place. And in their minds, that’s exactly what the Bus was.
     “Looks like it hasn’t moved for a while,” Tim said.
     “I think the last field trip was a week ago. I remember the bus going past my house before I left,” said Arnold.
     “But I thought you hated the Frizz’s field trips,” Keesha said.
     “I did. Well, some of them. But what does it really matter? She’s gone, and she was a really wonderful teacher,” Arnold sighed.
     The class now understood that even though Arnold hadn’t always liked the field trips they had taken, he had come to like the Frizz like the rest of them.
     “Heh, remember the very short career of Weatherman?” Ralphie said, breaking the silence.
     “Yeah, I was such a stuck up little brat during that field trip,” Keesha sighed, smiling a little.
     “Remember when our old class garden got in ‘Plant It’ magazine?” Phoebe said.
     “Yeah, and I remember how you were embarrassed by having the Frizz meet Mr. Seedplot,” Wanda said, chuckling softly.
     “Yeah, it was silly of me to be so embarrassed. Ms. Frizzle was the best teacher,” Phoebe said, blushing a little.
     “Remember the time we got locked in the Sound Museum?” Carlos said.
     “How could anyone forget? Your instrument made the worst racket before you fixed it,” DA sighed.
     “Hey, it sounded good after a little tuning,” Carlos smirked softly. Soon, the eight were reminiscing about their exploits with their former teacher. Wanda remembered the time they had taken a journey to the Arctic Circle, and Arnold remembered the time their principle had lost his prize rooster, and they had gone to get a chick to replace it. They talked for quite some time, all in silence, as if the bus would hear them. The bus shifted slightly on its suspension springs to the right, as if listening in on the conversation.
     “Uh, excuse me. Who are you people?” said a voice suddenly. The eight turned to see a young woman who looked almost like The Frizz. Her hair was just as frizzy, and she wore the oddest looking dress, that had stars, planets, and other space objects on it. But she was much younger, and her hair wasn’t styled in a beehive.
     “Uh….”Ralphie said, trying desperately to think of an explanation.
     “We are Ms. Frizzle’s class from ’92,” Tim said. The young woman gave a slight nod and a smile.
     “Mom told me all about you eight. Says you were one of her best classes,” she said.
     “Mom?” Arnold asked, a puzzled look crossing his face.
     “Oh, well my name is Vanessa Valerie Frizzle. Valerie Frizzle was my mom,” said the young woman. It suddenly became clear; this young woman was their teacher’s daughter. The thought had never occurred to any of the students that Ms. Frizzle had ever been married, let alone have a daughter.
     “I’m going to be teaching here tomorrow, and I just thought I would come over and bring the bus back to my house,” Vanessa said, cheerfully.
     “You mean you’re going to teach class here? Like your mom?” Wanda asked.
     “Yes. I love teaching children. I get it from my mom. She would be really proud of you eight, seeing that you have all grown up and done so much with your lives,” Vanessa said.
     She walked past the eight and the doors of the bus opened by themselves. When the headlights came on, all eight former students noticed the right headlight squeeze shut, winking at them and the bumper to twist in a soft smile. Vanessa stopped at the door, and turned back to the class.
     “As my mom used to say,’ the magic shall live on through my children and my students,’” Vanessa said brightly, before climbing into the bus, and driving it home. As the eight former students watched the bus slowly disappear around the corner, they all smiled. They knew that even though their beloved teacher was now among the heavens above, the magic she brought to their lives would not perish with her. It would remain alive in their memories, and in the minds of her past, present and future students.