Lunch boxes slid beneath the seats.

A window cracked into a spiderweb.

Small voices rose all around me, frightened children calling out for their parents in the sudden strange stillness after the noise.

I had both arms around Leo before I had finished understanding what was happening.

He was all right — shaken, wide-eyed, but all right, pressed against me.

And above us, I saw the thing that would matter: a section of the overhead storage rack had torn partway loose from the ceiling and now hung at an angle over the seats, held by I could not tell what, swaying slightly with the settling of the bus.