“a bus falling from the sky”
The phrase “like a bus falling from the sky” is a motif repeated in every chapter, though in a different context each time. The first reaction to the phrase may be that it symbolizes something disastrous as that would be the literal result of a bus falling from the sky, but the actual intent is associated with the concept of dropping a school bus into neighborhood in America and the same basic thematic idea of the novel would play out with just the specific details changed.
Pia’s Skateboard
Pia Foster is a skater girl, capable of doing wild things at fast momentum on a skateboard. It is her preferred mode of transportation through school and out. In fact, it is her preferred method of transportation through life as it gives her power, strength, dignity and control. Only when it is ripped from her and destroyed by a car does Pia seem to lose all those things which also makes the skateboard a symbol for the significance of having mobility in society.
Brutus
If the skateboard is a symbol of the power of being able to moved through society on your own terms, then Brutus is exactly the opposite: a symbol of the power others can inflict upon you by limiting your autonomy of movement. Brutus is a rottweiler who bites Satchmo one day and immediately engenders a heretofore unmanifested profound fear of dogs. When a neighbor on a street Satchmo uses to walk home from school gets a dog, Satchmo sets about creating a highly complex and utterly convoluted “master plan” that, if everything falls perfectly into place, will allow him to get home without getting eaten. Satchmo’s plan comprises the entire text of a few pages that takes into account almost every possibility of obstruction.
The Low Cuts
Although this could apply equally to any number of other characters, it is the defining theme of the chapter about this clique of thieves that everybody knows to keep their distance from. The Low Cuts are painted as hooligans certainly headed for juvenile delinquency in a few short years, but ultimately are revealed to have motivations for their criminal behavior that is utterly unexpected and ironic. They are the central symbolic incarnations of the book’s gentle admonition reminding people to look both ways of seeing before making a judgment.
“Call of Duty”
Call of Duty is, of course, one of the most popular video game franchises of all time, working almost as a training video developed by the Pentagon to identify potential soldiers to be sent to foreign lands to die. The particular version played here is set in World War Two against the most pestilential enemy of our time, the Nazis. The game becomes a symbolic parallel to the story of Bryson and his best friend Ty who bond together to answer the call of duty and fight best they can against the pestilential petty prejudices which can transform school into a hellish battlefield where one is lucky if they merely survive to attend another day.
