Busy Bus
Noelle got on the bus, and immediately she tripped over a foot carelessly left out in the aisle, but righted herself at the at the moment that made all this the least embarrassing. She managed, in a teeny voice, to quickly say ‘sorry’, but nobody answered her back with anything. She didn’t know how many seconds had passed when she suddenly found herself in a seat and under the scrutiny of several students sitting across from her. Noelle would rather close her eyes than let herself accept those non-blank stares. It was too much for her mind, which was only accustomed to being ignored and made invisible. Finding nothing else to think about in the blankness of her own eyelids, she played a game with her face.
Noelle’s eyebrows arched down to the inner corners of her eyes, and arched back upwards a full ninety degrees before returning to indifferent horizontal lines. Her eyebrows were like her legs when she was standing up. Wobbly, unbalanced, and funny. They were also like her. Insignificant, unnoticed, and imperceptible. It was a single player game. She tried to imagine inside her head how funny it would be if the girl across from her taking up three seats with the plastic shopping bags encountered a woman who chose to sit on top of the bags instead of standing up. It would be like coming across her mother while she was kissing her boyfriend. Surprised, she would jump up and yell out one word, ‘Mother!’ while she would try to hide her boyfriend, or save the fruits inside the plastic bags, or…Nonsense. That could only happen if the woman was fat.
Then, Noelle’s imagination flew her elsewhere, into a room full of people that she had seen on the bus. They all came up and said to her, ‘I’m sorry.’ But it drove her crazy whenever people said sorry to her and she didn’t know why. Ill-meant apologies were like tasting salty soup from the dining hall. They made her eyes squint and her lips wrinkle. Her eyes squinted and her lips wrinkled. She peeked out from under her eyelids, and carefully observed each eyeball and measured the crookedness of the corners of each mouth. Nobody stared or laughed. Noelle got back onto her flying imagination and put on a yellow dress.
While she was up in the air, she flew over to a bee and said, ‘hello’, but the bee barely noticed her from being busy. (He was poking his nose in a flower’s business.) She thought it might be because she didn’t have any stripes, and so she tried to draw some onto her body with some paint…Nonsense. The bee would instantly recognize her, not as a bee, but as an intruder. Noelle felt a sting on her face and was thrown off her flying imagination.
‘I’m sorry!’, cried a voice from the jumbled crowd standing before her, taking up every square inch of the aisle of the bus. Noelle looked up and saw someone frantically trying to turn around but failing to do so because of his foot-thick backpack, which had been the source of the sting. While the tall boy was pushed off the bus through the insistence of the crowd, Noelle finally recognized her surroundings and realized that this was her stop. She scrambled with her bag and took her steps purposefully, but was again able to trip over a plastic bag of the girl sitting across her that had been laid on the floor. Outside on the sidewalk, she cradled her red face with her fingers and started to walk to class.
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