The bus ride home

I and another classmate of mine never spoke during the entirety of our lives in school. Even though our houses were only a few blocks apart, yet we never spoke. We used to take the same school bus back home. I remember I would always be the last to board, just as the bus would start moving and there she would be, staring out of the window, sitting on the first seat. I bet she never uttered a word during the trip home. My place was at the back of the bus. We stood on the floorboard near the rear entry to the bus, which was permanently shut, its hinges welded shut to the jamb of the door. The window had no panes; I guess they just got tired of replacing them after a while. I remember the bus ride home was a crazy destresser. We would all be stuffed at the back. No place to move. The hot summer sun would pour through the windows. I remember the humid sweaty air inside the bus, the loud, boisterous dares, the not-so-much as whispered dirty joke of the day, the geek of the day being picked on endlessly again, the pride of place near the pane-less window, even though all you got was a face full of smoke at best, the rare lic-lolly ice cream that a poor unfortunate soul had made the mistake of buying, and not finishing it before being spotted, and the subsequent demolition of the same ice cream, in 5 seconds flat, no one cared whose saliva they had just swallowed. Then we tumbled out of the bus, as we got to our home stop. I remember the sights, and sounds and smells as if it was yesterday. That coloured my experience of the ride home. For me it will always be that, maybe it colours the way I look at the world now, maybe it will colour my worldview in the future. But I always wonder what the experience of the ride home would have been, to that unspoken-to classmate of mine. How did she see the bus ride home…?

~ by slopintheocean on April 19, 2008.