7/25/16

I’m going to go crazy unless I say it- taking the bus home is always a bore until you have someone to experience it with.  Usually when I took the bus home in high school, I sat in the front or the middle, and propped my knees up against the seat in front of me, something that I adapted from the other kids that I took the bus with, and tried to sleep.  I would lean against the window or my book bag uncomfortably and drifted off, even when my bag was filled with textbooks and notebooks, protruding in jagged angles beneath the surface.  Taking the activities bus was something that I started to do once I realized I could and no one would notice.  The only time my parents cared was when I accidently missed the activities bus. It was one of those days when I did anything I wanted after school because I had nothing better to do.  This happened one time when I couldn’t get back to school on one occasion after visiting my friend’s house for the first time.  She made me take the bus with her for some reason that I still don’t understand, because I ended up having to take the bus back to school afterwards also, after I saw her house.  The ride from school to her house only took a little while, since her house was in the same neighborhood as school.  I remember her telling me her new favorite movie was A Wonderful Life as we looked out the window at the world passing us and the bus by.  When we got inside of her house I saw her little sister sitting in the kitchen, a quiet girl that reminded me of her sister because of her eyes and dark hair.  When we finally got into her room, I was surrounded by bright walls and bright lights.  She showed me her grammar school yearbook, something that amazed me because before I had met her I had never heard of her grammar school, as she had probably had never heard of mine.  Music played in the background and she danced from the right to the left, moving her arm through the air, and I laughed.

I took public transportation back to school, where I was planning on taking the activities bus home late.  I sat in the back.  A guy with brownish skin who looked about my age made eye contact with me and walked slowly down the aisle.  When the bus shifted the weight of everything inside of it, he grabbed hold of the two poles besides him and smiled at me.  He introduced himself and asked me what school I went to.  I told him Loyola.  He asked if I knew two of his friends, a short red-haired boy and a blonde girl that played soccer.  I said no so that I wouldn’t have to say that I wasn’t friends with them.  Looking back, I wonder if he knew I was lying.  I got off of the bus with him and we started to walk.  He asked me something about going to an all-girls school, and I joked with him that I wouldn’t ever go to one because that would mean being without boys.  He laughed.  He asked if I wanted to go to his house to hang out, and I said no, because I had to get back to school to take the activities bus home.  We parted ways, and I tried to figure out how to get home by taking another bus.  I was confused because I wasn’t familiar with the neighborhood.  I finally figured out that I didn’t have to take the bus, that I could walk home, once I recognized the busy street that I stood next to.  It was one of those times where I felt like I had come to a great epiphany, when I recognized myself as adult enough to find my way back to school from a place I wasn’t familiar with. 

When I got back to school I realized it was late and that I had missed the activities bus.  I called my Mom from the pay phone, and she was mad.  She yelled at me to the point where if it had been my dad I would have been in tears.  She picked me up a while later.  It was late at night.  She yelled at me some more.  It was one of those memories that I don’t regret despite the consequences, and that is why it is something very memorable of my adolescence.

I have another memory of taking the bus, the activities bus, early in sophomore year.  It was with two freshmen, one of who I knew from grammar school, and another of whom I met that day.  The girl I went to grammar school with had blonde hair and the girl I just met had black hair.  The black haired girl wore Abercrombie khakis with zippered back pockets.  I remember seeing her for the first time, and her pants are one of the things that I associate her with in my memory because I had never seen those type of pants with zippers before.  She told me she went to a grammars school I had never heard of.  She told me she liked to dance.  The girl with the blonde hair acted like a dinosaur and the black haired girl keeled over laughing, hugging her sides in a way I had only seen when I shadowed as an eighth grader and the girl I shadowed did the same thing when she laughed with her friends in the cafeteria.  The blonde haired girl plopped her foot on the black haired girl’s lap at my failed attempt to flirt with a boy on the bus that I had also just met.  When the most recent Backstreet Boys song played on the radio, the black haired girl watched, fascinated, as I sung along.  I felt so happy when we did the thing fish-out-of- water thing from Saturday Night Live thing together.  These events didn’t necessarily happen in this order. 

The one memory of that late afternoon that will always stick out to me in my memory is the thing that the two girls did in front of me that was one of my first understandings/perceptions of sex.  They didn’t actually do it in front of me to the point where they stripped down and had sex, but they did the girl-sex thing, the thing girls do together because they want to have a good time but can’t actually have sex like a boy and a girl can.  I remember watching them and kind of feeling like a freak because I couldn’t do the same thing at the same time.  This happened while they (and me at different times) antagonized the people that drove by through the bus windows.  One of these groups was a van/ pickup truck (can’t remember which) of Mexican lawn-mower men.  I remember being fascinated as they girl-did-it- almost falling on the floor (the black haired girl’s exact words were “We are on the floor.”)

After this experience I realized I wanted to be like the black haired girl.  The way she froze happiness in time, in a short bus ride home, intrigued me.  I wanted to be best friends with her.  We talked a few times before I transferred to Resurrection.  She jumped in front of me when I was collecting my books from my locker.  When I was sitting in the hall next to some lockers that weren’t mine, she passed me with her friend that I had went to grammar school with, turned around and said, “I always see you… by lockers….”  When I got bored one lunch period I went up to her while she played basketball in the gym with a boy that I wanted to be friends with because she was friends with him, and I asked her if she had change for a phone call that I didn’t need to make.  She looked up to me with wide, concerned, sad eyes, and gave me 35 cents, since I already had fifteen (these numbers are what best serve my memory).  One of the last memories I have of her is her sitting in a classroom looking like she was thinking hard while holding a pen against her face.  I later wonder if she knew I saw her through the classroom window when I was standing in the hall.  It was one of those things that a kindergartener would get sprung about, because she was in a classroom, and I was outside of it, and I saw her through glass, but we had that connection that went passed energy but served it well.  If I had known that she knew I saw her, I still couldn’t have been so amazed- it was like everyone around us knew it too but didn’t say anything.  She was one of the girls that I missed the most once I transferred.

These are some memories I have of the first high school I went to.  These memories are what I have of my adolescence, and this is why I’ll never lose them.  When you are young some things just stick out in your memory a little more than others, as extraordinary, as dangerous, as magic.  I am lucky enough to have lived like this as a teenager, so that I am the person I am today.