I'm sitting at the bus stop on Wilder, but I'm wishing I wasn't. It's that time of day when the sun shines so brightly between the Honolulu buildings, that you can see the dust floating in the air and the light blinds your line of sight.
Urghh, I thought to myself as I looked down at the speckled cement. The bus was late, again, like every other day in this entire school year that I had taken the bus. Seriously, I think it may have come on time on one wonderful day out of a hundred. At least today, Calla, Eimile, Tori and Veronica were all on my bus today. That could reduce the level of boredom to come, possibly.
In the distance, I saw a blue and rainbow streaked bus with a proud number four flashing from the screen above the windshield. Was it a mirage?
Veronica said, "There's the bus," confirming my state of not-insanity. We all pulled ourselves up from the block of stone they called a bus stop, and ambled over to where the bus loaded, right by the smelly trashcan. Yummmmy.
Usually, if we can claim a bunch of seats together, we're not tired from our long day of school, and the teachers haven't gone insane and assigned a million hours of homework, we'll have a pretty okay bus ride. We can just talk and be our normal, loud selves. But when there are no seats left for us? Then we stand, looking out the window in a defeated mood. If Tori is taking the bus with us, she tries her hardest to look tall and hold onto the more sturdy handles that hang down from the top, instead of the poles that are right next to where people are sitting.
Today was not a lucky day. As I stepped on to hear the bus's recorded welcome, I paid my dollar through the dollar-sucking slot and saw that elderly people were scattered throughout the long bus, leaving my friends and I with no seats. I sighed and trudged down the cheaply tiled isle right behind Veronica. Most of the bus cliques were there. The nurses that usually sit on the right side were all situated, dressed in brightly patterned scrubs, that didn't match the expressions on their faces. The Saint Louis junior boys, along with the Saint Francis sophomore girls who thought they were all that, were surprisingly not on this particular bus. That was a good thing; they prove themselves as troublemakers. They have pelted my friends and I with too many paper airplanes, spitballs, and the occasional condom if we're lucky to count in the past year to earn my trust.
In their normal two-seater sat the "Sleeping Couple." These two college students rarely are conscious on the bus. Assuming based on the little information that I have about them, they sleep away their entire lives. Actually, recently they've gotten more dedicated to their hourly nap at 4:05; they've started packing a small pillow or blanket in each of their backpacks daily.
There are also 'the two Chinese ladies' on the bus today. They sit in the same two-seater every day with their reading glasses on and read a Chinese newspaper. Wouldn't that get to be a boring daily commute?
At the next stop, Calla pulled the buzzer, pully-stoppy thing. (We usually just say, 'pull the thing,' because we frankly don't know what it's supposed to be called.) This was our transfer station, the YMCA somewhere in Honolulu. There were two benches, but they don't smell to great so we usually just sit on the stairs outside of the building.
"Those people way down there look a tad sketchy," Tori commented. I followed where she was looking and I saw them, and immediately agreed. One of the people had hair down to his butt, nappy and dreaded by pure neglect. His shirt was painted with an image of a huge marijuana leaf. The woman he was walking and talking with had similar features, except possibly a bit more feminine. She walked with her roller type backpack, taking bounding, yet low down steps. They were coming right towards us. The backpack was bobbing up and down, up and down, at the same intervals as her animated head was.
The bus has trained me well, in the way that usually I don't feel fear while noticing a person who doesn't look too socially, economically, or actually in any category, stable. But still, these people looked a tad bit more unstable that the normally unstable. Everything about their appearances added up to the reputation of a people whom I wouldn't want talking to me. We sat there in silence, on our claimed YMCA steps, while watching them pass. We looked solemn, until the woman's back was towards us, and we spotted the most peculiar, doubling as hilarious thing, in the entire world. The woman, who had her neon roller backpack, was also carting her pet cat. It was leashed to the handle, and was curled up on top, chilling and bobbing its head peacefully just as the woman and the man were doing while walking. A trio of head-bobbers, walking barefoot against the strong sunlight. Maybe it was one of those "you had to have been there" moments, but I can't even tell you how much I laughed and how much more this particular incident made me like riding the bus.
Other than the sporadic events that I wouldn’t experience anywhere else than the Hawaii public transportation services, the bus gets to be pretty boring. I take it so often, that it is just a routine now; I barely think about my awful bus fate. Next year, when I get my license, my friends' lives and mine are going to improve a whole lot. It's definitely something to look forward to during my high school life.
