Bus

Some stories just don’t have an ending. This one, for example. I like telling it every once in a while when I have a sort-of-eventful day, but I don’t know if it’s gonna keep going on and on and on forever. But like I said, sometimes it just doesn’t end. That’s life. There’s not one climax, there’s isn’t a lot of rising action, and rarely does everything get resolved.

It cycles. It gets better, it gets worse, it gets so crappy you just want to go insane and blow up the world. But those little lows are little climaxes in themselves and a lot of the time, things go back to normal. (Unless your parents died and you’re working a deadbeat job as a bus driver, which is different.)

Each day is kind of a story in itself, depending on just what goes on, how boring or eventful it is. So sometimes I’ll feeling like telling my story when other times I just don’t want to speak up. Most of the time, it has to do with whether or not anything remotely interesting happened in my day.

A lot of the time, nothing happens.

Sometimes, though, there are moments.

I complain a lot, but I really do like the brief little glimpses of happiness I sometimes get. And when I say “brief,” I mean terrifyingly miniscule compared to the crap I gotta deal with otherwise. I’m not trying to downgrade them. In fact, I hold little smiles higher on the totem pole than myself, even. I’m just the kind of person who can find negativity in anything.

In some chapters of my life, though, it’s hard to grimace at ‘em.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`

I’m not a friendly person. Though I’m gonna assume you’ve gathered that already, seeing as how you’ve most likely read for thirteen chapters about how I’m an evil bus driver. So that being said, observed, picked up, whatever – I don’t make friends easily. I don’t know when to call them a friend rather than just a peer or acquaintance, and I don’t “keep in touch” with people.

I don’t insist upon people because I’m just accustomed to them rejecting me and forcing me out of their lives. I was never one to call up a buddy and just ask “Wanna hang out?” out of the blue because I always knew that their default answer would be no. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have any friends like that right now. Well, I don’t really have friends, period. Boo hoo. Feel sorry for me, Internet. Or general public. Whoever’s being forced to read this.

But Mercedes has become an acquaintance of mine. A close acquaintance. I’m not an asshole to her – not that I know of – because I know her well enough, and she’s not a bitch to me so I don’t pull out the default Doug attitude of treating people like crap. I wouldn’t call her a friend yet. I’m always hesitant to do that. She probably doesn’t look at me like that anyway.

Well, as far as I know, people who hate each other don’t sit on benches with each other in the bus loop, talking to each other in the last few minutes of the last class of the day. So at least I know that she doesn’t hate me, since we’re doing that very thing right now.

It’s more of us sitting at opposite ends of a warped bench, sometimes looking over at each other and laughing nervously, though. She seems nice enough, so I decide not to bog her down with depressing stories of my childhood, but it doesn’t seem like anything’s going anywhere with the lack of a conversation that we’re having.

I don’t mind that, somehow.

Mercedes sighs and tucks a stray hair behind her ear, staring at the empty field. All of the kids went to the locker rooms and it’s deserted out here, and for the time being, it’s quiet. “Kids today are so mean. I’m just saying.”

“Tell me about it.”

She glances at me but then returns her gaze to the concrete bus loop in front of us. “Some of the most ridiculous crap, man. They blow everything outta proportion and they don’t even care who might get affected by it.”

Random subject she chooses to bring up. Nonetheless, I shrug along anyway. “I hear about it on the bus all the time. You’re preachin’ to the choir here.”

“Although kids were mean back when I was young, too, so I guess not a lot has changed,” she laughs airily.

“Nothing has changed,” I added. “Kids are still assholes. Well, to me at least.”

Mercedes snickers. She’s looking at me full-on now. “Same here. There are always a couple of bad apples.”

“A couple? Try having 75% of them being brats.” I’m smiling at her, something that I don’t normally do a lot.

“I hate the ones who act like they’re sucking up to you, and then they go behind your back and talk crap about you. Like, ‘Oh, she’s the coolest teacher ever!’ and then they talk to their friends and you can hear ‘em go, ‘Oh, she’s such a…’ you know.” She talks with her hands like she’s had way too much experience with this crap.

I put my hand on my chin, stroking my five-o’-clock shadow ponderously. “Personally, I hate the ones who just go up to you and straight-up say, ‘You’re an asshole and I hate you.’”

“You’ve had kids do that? I don’t believe that,” she says skeptically, smirking all cocky.

“Well, I’ve had one indirectly call me a fat douche before. He drew a picture of me and the caption was ‘Mr. Doug – fat douche bus driver.’” It was from that weird kid who calls me Geronimo.

She laughs, but covers her mouth. “That’s horrible!”

“Oh, that’s nothing. When I was in junior high, everybody discovered that I was fat and that my last name was Tater. So then they dubbed me Tater Tits.”

Mercedes snorted. Then she held a finger up and said, “I can top that, Doug. Sometimes the Latino students ‘accidentally’ call me Coach Pene.”

“What does ‘Pene’ mean?”

“Penis.”

I can’t help but laugh at her expense. I haven’t laughed in a long time like I’m doing, and it feels good. I don’t get the chance to very often, so when something is funny to me, I take it and run. Except when I look up at her and she’s shooting me a dirty look, I wipe my face clean of any happiness and instead keep my mouth shut.

But then she breaks down into die-hard laughter too, and it’s weird. I can’t even remember the last time something like this happened – probably when my parents were still alive and probably when Carrie was young, and probably when Carrie and I were raising ourselves and having a brief moment of youth. I can’t recall the last time I felt this floaty and free. Let alone the last time I laughed this much.

In fact, I laugh so hard I start to cough. I guess plain, sad old lungs just aren’t cut out for that much work, and thus I spin myself into a fit of hacks.

Mercedes smacks my back, still laughing along so hard that I can see tears forming in her eyes. “It wasn’t that funny, Tater! Calm down!”

I try to slow down and get off of my unusual laughing streak, but it’s hard. When you go so long without chuckling and something breaks the floodgates, it’s tough to stop.

“What is this, anyway? A contest to see who’s more pathetic and gets more names thrown at ‘em?” Mercedes smiles, still with her hand on my shoulder. I don’t think she knew it was there.

Coughing a few more times to get everything outta my system, I sit back and notice that she’s scooted closer to me. I ignore that for the moment since I don’t mind it, and I tell her, “Oh, I’d win that one for sure.”

“I beg to differ.”

“You wanna bet?”

“In junior high, they called me Vroom-Vroom.”

“In elementary school, they were already calling me Spud and Mr. Potato Head.”

“In high school, I was Mercedes-Butch.”

“Oh, in high school, I was Potato and Tots.”

“Right now, I’m either Black Gym Teacher, or The Mexican Lady Gym Teacher.”

“Right now I’m The Loser Bus Driver.”

She looks like she’s gonna say something else, but she pauses and squints at me. “Alright, I can’t top that. You win.”

I fold my arms across my chest triumphantly. Although I guess being pathetic isn’t something to be proud of. “Feel the loserness radiating in your direction and be scared,” I joke.

She giggles this time, a little laugh, and she pulls up her sleeves over her hands. “God, I wish I had you as a bus driver in school.”

“Hah.” It’s a little expression of humor that I wouldn’t call a laugh, but more of an exasperated expulsion of disbelief. “Ah, you’d hate me.”

“Well, I don’t hate you now, so I wouldn’t hate you then.”

“Yes you would. I would. I’d fight with myself all the time.”

She purses her lips. Then the bell rings and every damned kid in the school erupts from their torture chamber classrooms. But before she leaves to make sure they’re not killing each other on the way to the buses, she loops her arm around my elbow and gives me this weird little lopsided hug.

“You’re pretty great. Just so you know.” She stands up and waves at me a little before adding, “See you around, Doug.”

“Later,” I reply. My wave goodbye looks more like a muscle spasm.

So like I said before, when something is out of the ordinary, I write it down and tell it to you. And then you’ll read it and probably hate it or think it’s stupid and I won’t care since I don’t know you. I’ll just be satisfied with knowing that the memorable memories are put on something tangible, even if nobody else appreciates that. But what made that day special?

It was the first time in a long time that I’d been able to laugh and mean it. I don’t know how much that means to anybody else, but to me, it means volumes.