A/N: Keesha has been my favorite character on MSB ever since I started watching it as a kid. Rewatching the series on DVD got me to thinking about her again, and how there really are no limits to what that bus can do. So I started writing this.
Disclaimer: No profit is being made from this story and it is for entertainment purposes only. I do not own 'The Magic School Bus' or any of its characters.
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CHAPTER ONE: Keesha Franklin Buys a Loaf of Bread
Keesha Franklin could do things.
This in itself was not remarkable. Anybody could do certain things. It was the sheer amount of things she could do, and how well she could do them, that made her truly exceptional. She wasn't about to go out and show it off all over Walkerville. It was something that should be handled delicately. If someone were to tell her "Keesha, you are truly exceptional," she would only smile and say, "thanks, but enough about me...how was your day?" Before discovering this, she had seen herself as a pretty normal ten-year-old with a taste for science and dance. Though she still enjoyed dancing and learning about science, she no longer felt normal.
Life, as short as it is, offers one the opportunity to attempt many things. Hundreds, thousands, millions. Going to the gas station to buy bread is not a very flashy accomplishment, nor did it directly involve Ms. Valerie Frizzle's magical school bus like many other things in this story. But when chronicling the vast catalogue of things Keesha Franklin attempted and succeeded in, one must begin somewhere, and we will begin with the last thing she did before realizing her true potential.
It was exactly 3:10 PM on a mild Sunday in September. Downtown Walkerville went about its business, blissfully unaware of the future greatness residing in an old first-floor apartment on 2074 Alton Drive.
"Keesha," said Ophelia Franklin, her maternal grandmother and guardian who had raised her since age three. "I'm making chicken salad sandwiches for dinner tonight and we're fresh out of bread. Would you pick some up at the corner store?"
At that moment, Keesha was busy practicing the steps she had learned at her latest dance lesson. She had gone to some trouble to lay out a large foam mat in the living room and find some decent workout music on the radio. But because she was nice and didn't at all mind doing a favor for her grandma she said, "sure."
Mrs. Franklin gave her a dollar. Keesha pulled on her usual magenta sweater over her blue tank top and proceeded across the living room out the sliding glass door, still practicing dance steps as she went. She retrieved her bike, which was also blue and magenta, from the garage and rode south down Alton Drive. Had the neighbors known what she would soon become, they would have stood up from their porches to throw roses in her path or bowed in admiration. But they knew her only as a nice girl from the apartments, so they simply waved.
This was perfectly fine with Keesha, because she did not understand her own excellence yet either; and besides, it is very difficult to ride a bicycle through mounds of roses.
Turning east on Rockford Avenue took her past Lavare Cleaners and Sunberg and Son's Hardware, straight to the Short Stop gas station on the corner of Rockford and 12th. She left her bike in the rack and walked inside. Grabbing a loaf of white bread from the end of the aisle was a simple matter, as was paying the bored thirty-something cashier who had no clue that his store had just been touched by awesome. The bread would know, but a loaf of bread never tells, and if you have ever tried to interrogate one you will no doubt agree.
Keesha left the store and was a few steps from the bike rack when suddenly she realized two things. The first was that her bike was gone. (This wasn't a very good part of town anymore.) The second was that she was on good terms with a kooky science teacher who owned a magic school bus and therefore she was potentially a stupendous, brilliant, awesome person capable of anything.
Absolutely. Any. Thing.
Female, African-American, middle class, fourth-grader...all of the ideas that previously defined her were reduced to incidental labels. It was a staggering revelation. Merely considering the possibilities made her dizzy. The bus could go anywhere and take any shape. To have access to the bus was to have access to absolute power, and all the dazzling benefits and grave responsibilities that might come with it. If one was game.
Oh, she was game. Game was her middle name. Or it could have been if her mother hadn't named her Keesha Marie Franklin. A lost opportunity, but there was nothing she could do about it now. She must look ahead, she thought, to the countless things she could do and the limitless future awaiting her.
First, she was going to get her bike back.