The Other Way Around (6 page)

It's pretty quiet, even for a holiday. There are just a few people in the seats waiting for the bus: an old lady with an enormous pink scarf wrapped and rewrapped around her head, and a fidgety guy wearing a mechanic's uniform and tapping on his leg with a rolled-up newspaper.

In the corner there's a group of kids who look about my age. They're kind of clumped up, sitting on their sleeping bags and backpacks even though there are plenty of chairs free.

The man behind the glass at the bus station window has mahogany skin flecked with lighter brown birthmarks. He has a double chin and a couple rolls where the base of his skull meets his neck. He's eating a tuna fish sandwich; I can smell it through the glass, and he has a tiny bit of mayo smeared on his upper lip. His eyes are glued to a tiny color TV and what looks to me like a Mexican soap opera.

“Can I help you?” he says, still watching his show.

“Yeah,” I say nervously, “I need a ticket to Bloomington,” I pause, “Indiana.”

“Can't do it,” he says. My heart sinks a little bit. “Furthest I can get you tonight is Cleveland. Bus leaves in an hour. You can catch the first bus to Bloomington in the morning.”

“That's fine,” I say, relieved that there is a bus at all. “I'll take a ticket, round-trip, I guess.”

For the first time the man looks up at me. He takes a bite of his tuna sandwich and chews it carefully as though considering both. “How old are you?” he asks.

“Sixteen,” I answer, too quickly to lie.

“Your parents know where you are?”

“Of course they do, silly!” A girl has suddenly appeared beside me and links her arm through mine. She's much shorter than I am and has short, spiky black hair and an upturned nose with a little bump on the bridge. She reaches up and ruffles my hair.

“Please don't do that,” I say.

She ignores me and looks up at me with dark brown eyes. “You don't think we'd let him get on the bus all alone, do you?” She smiles winningly at the man behind the counter, who looks as confused as I do. “Mom's in the car.” She holds her hand up to her head mimicking a phone and tosses her head back and forth in fake conversation. “On the phone again. She wants you to come out and say good-bye once you get your ticket.”

I nod bewildered. “Okay?”

“Okay,” she says and pinches my cheek the way the old ladies at Mima's place always like to do. I pull away, annoyed. She smiles, winks at the man behind the counter, and saunters away.

This bizarre display is enough to convince the man behind the counter to print out the ticket. I push sixty-four dollars underneath the glass partition and get back a bus ticket and thirty cents in change. This, along with a few crumpled dollar bills, will have to last me until Mima's.

I have an hour to kill until the bus leaves, so I pick a chair in the corner near one of the snack machines and settle in to wait. I pull my copy of
Into the Wild
out of my backpack and open up to the page where I left off. But I'm not reading. I'm watching the bus-ticket girl and her friends in the corner.

There are five of them hunkered down in the corner of the bus station, sitting on backpacks and rolled-up sleeping bags. In addition to the bus-ticket girl, there's another girl with long blonde dreadlocks facing away and lying across the lap of a kid wearing an army vest with an enormous anarchy symbol drawn on the back. An Asian-looking kid wearing a giant pair of headphones over his fauxhawk is talking too loudly to a tall guy with a short, scraggly beard as he makes peanut butter sandwiches.

My stomach growls as I watch him dip a pocket knife into this jar of peanut butter and then drip gobs of it onto the bread. Every once in a while he stops to lick the excess off the top of the knife where it swivels and folds in. I ignore the obvious hygienic problems here as I watch him distribute the sandwiches. He's sitting cross-legged as he does this—a way I've only ever seen girls sit. He's also smiling so sweetly—like one of those naked babies that fly around in those giant Italian paintings. He just keeps smiling and handing out sandwiches. I'm so busy watching him that I don't notice when the bus-ticket girl reappears at my side.

She slams herself down into the seat next to me, rocking
the entire row of interconnected plastic chairs. She has two sandwiches in her hands.

“You want one?” Her voice is deeper and scratchier than before.

I shake my head. “No, thanks, I just ate at home.”

“Okay,” she says, almost smirking. “Suit yourself. I just know that when I first ran away, I learned pretty quickly that you should take food whenever it's offered. You don't know where your next meal is coming from.”

“I thought I wasn't supposed to take candy from strangers.”

She gives an appreciative chin nod and takes a bite of her sandwich. “Good one. How about a puppy?”

“Anyway,” I say, “I'm not running away.”

“Sure, traveling alone on Thanksgiving is just more convenient and hassle-free because everyone else is sitting down and eating with their families. Plus there's nothing more pleasant than an empty bus station on a cold night. I get it.”

I ignore her sarcasm. “It was a last-minute decision … to go to my grandmother's house.”

“Does anyone know where you are?” she lifts the softened paper American Airlines tag still looped around my backpack strap, left over from Mom's and my last trip to see Mima, and reads it. “Andrew?”

I shake my head again. What was the point in lying?

“Then you, my friend,” she says as she jerks the tag off the strap and crumples it in her hand, “are running away.”

She shoots the crumpled tag at the nearest waste can. “You're old enough that most people won't bother you about being on your own. But until you get where you're going, it's better to avoid being identified if you don't want to be. If you
don't give the police or anyone your name, the worst they can do is throw you into state or foster care. And that sucks, but it's not that hard to get out of.”

“Your area of expertise?”

“It used to be.” Her voice hardens slightly. “I'm nineteen now, so I'm pretty much free to go wherever I want and do whatever I want. I'm G, by the way,” she says and sticks her hand out for me to shake.

“Andrew,” I say as I accept her firm handshake. She's small but solid. And I can't decide if she's pretty or not. She's not unattractive, but there's something about her looks that's kind of serious, almost severe. “Just G?”

“Yeah, Maria Regina actually. It's terrible isn't it? Sounds like a nun or a pasta sauce. So I'm just G. What about you? Do you go by Andrew? Andy? Drew?”

“It doesn't matter, whatever is fine.”

“What do you mean it doesn't matter?”

“I really don't care.” And it's true. Well, up until this moment it's always been true. Andrew, Andy, Drew, whatever. It's all the same to me. Moving so many times, I kind of got to the point where it was enough if someone remembered the basic gist of my name.

“Whoa. This is your name we're talking about here, not the condiments you put on a sandwich. This is how people greet you in the world. How they form their first impressions of you. How they decide if they're going to walk all over you or not.”

I just shrug the way I always do when I want uncomfortable conversations to end. But G isn't going to let me off the hook that easily.

“Okay,” she says. “We're going to decide this right now. I'm going to introduce myself to you again, and whatever you say this time, that's your name. Okay? I'm G,” she repeats and sticks out her hand.

“Andrew,” I say and shake it again. She seems satisfied with this.

“Good. Drew's okay, but Andy's a little weird. It always reminds me of those dolls. Remember Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy?” I don't really, so I just shrug my shoulders again.

Over in the corner, the girl with the long blonde dreadlocks gets up from the floor and walks out of the bus station. She comes back carrying an enormous Hula-Hoop covered in black and white stripes.

She sets the Hula-Hoop down and proceeds to remove several layers of clothing. Off comes a rather large, black hooded sweatshirt. Underneath is a brown cardigan sweater that Mima might wear. That sweater comes off and underneath that is a smaller sweater; that only comes halfway down her stomach. She's wearing a short skirt, like the field hockey girls wear, a pair of red-and-white-striped tights, and black combat boots.

Altogether she looks like a grungy version of Pippi Long-stocking. G and I watch as she picks up the Hula-Hoop and begins to swing it around her stomach. Everyone in the bus station is staring as she gets the thing going faster and faster. It's hard not to. Even the guy behind the glass is temporarily distracted from his show. He looks like he's trying to think of a reason to tell her to stop but can't come up with one. This girl has the most amazing stomach muscles I've ever seen, not that I'm an expert. I try not to stare at her midsection but it's next to impossible. I focus instead on her face, her brow furrowed
in concentration. Her eyes are focused on the floor and the spinning hoop on her hips. Underneath her dreadlocks, which I've always thought were pretty tacky and gross on white people, she's really pretty. She has sharp cheekbones and perfectly shaped pink lips. She's like a hot girl in disguise!

“That's Emily,” says G, sounding a little annoyed. “I guess she's just practicing. It's not like we're going to make anything here.”

“Is that what you do?” I ask without ever taking my eyes off Emily and her undulating midsection.

“Sort of. That's Lyle over there,” she points at the boy with the anarchy vest. He has light brown hair that looks like it's on the verge of thinning and enormous sideburns as if to compensate. “He and I do a trapeze and ropes act. Jesse made these.” She holds up the peanut butter sandwiches and offers me one again. This time I take it and bite into the squishy wheat bread. The peanut butter sticks to the roof of my mouth, and I shovel it off with my tongue. Jesse's hands are stretched over his head, and the sole of one foot is pressed into the opposite leg in what looks like some kind of yoga pose. “Jesse's kind of like the MC. He's a storyteller. He's just kind of got a way with the audience. You'll see what I mean.”

I cock my head to the side, wondering if they're actually going to perform here in the bus station. With my mouth full of peanut butter I gesture at the ruddy-cheeked Asian kid in the headphones.

“That's Tim Lin. He's kind of new. So far he's just along for the ride. He's been recording us for some college project he's doing. He seems all right. And you're pretty much seeing what Emily can do.” There's that hint of annoyance again.

Emily has the hoop up around her neck. Her dreadlocks are flying out in back of her like a janitor's mop. She wiggles a little bit, and the hoop drops down over her shoulder and out onto one arm. She keeps it going there for a little while, but then grabs it suddenly and stops. She sets the hoop down next to Lyle and grabs a sandwich, which she rips into two uneven chunks. With part of the sandwich in her hand, she walks over to me and G. Yup, she's a hot girl all right; she even eats with confidence.

I sit up in my chair and brush the crumbs off the front of my jacket.

“Hi,” says Emily. She squats down in front of us, balancing with one hand on my knee and one hand on G's knee. A girl has never touched my knee like that before—intentionally, I mean. Her nails have chipped purple polish on them. I try really hard not to notice that her tights are the kind that stop at mid-thigh. Maybe that makes them socks? I'm no expert. “I'm Emily,” she says, grinning in my direction. There is a smudge of peanut butter on her teeth, and she has a single freckle exactly above the middle of her top lip.

“This is Andrew,” G says, but I can hardly hear her over the crackle of electricity that seems to be coming from the place where her hand touches my leg.

“So is he coming with us or what?” Emily asks.

G rolls her eyes. “I hadn't really gotten that far.”

“Come with you where?” I say, my heart suddenly racing.

Emily takes her hand off G's knee and crosses her arms, leaning forward on both my knees. I can see straight down the front of her shirt. I stare up at her eyes. I try really hard to stare at her eyes. They are warm and blue. “You should come with us, Andrew. It's going to be crazy, a crazy good time.”

If my phone hadn't rung at exactly that second, I think I probably would have gotten up and gone wherever with Emily. But the buzzing in my pocket breaks the spell.

I look at the phone. It's Mom. “I should take this,” I say, but Emily doesn't move. “I gotta stand up.” I move to get on my feet. She hops back gracefully and walks back over to the others. I shake my head clear and answer the phone.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Andrew, where the hell are you?”

“Yeah, about that. I needed to leave.” I look at my watch and calculate the time it would take her to get out of the house and drive to the bus station. It's not quite long enough to tell her where I am.

“Andrew, you didn't answer my question. Kris and Barry and I were about to sit down to dinner. I sent Barry to get you in your room, but you were gone. Now where the hell are you? This is incredibly rude and awkward for me, Andrew.”

“As rude and awkward as someone pissing in your bed? Or telling you every five minutes that you're gay?” I walk a little farther away so that G and Emily can't hear every word of our conversation.

“Look, Andrew.” Mom's tone is conciliatory now, but I've heard her talk to enough parents on the phone to know an act when I hear one. “I know this has been a difficult weekend for you. I know Barry is not exactly your cup of tea.” I resist the urge to shout
More like a cup of pee
. “But this is family time. So I need you to tell me where you are so I can come get you.”