A Long Trip

As if it wasn’t hard enough to fall asleep in bus after bus of smelly tourists and their abundance of bad BO, it just seemed like every time I closed my eyes the memory of him loomed over me like his flushed and sweaty face did that night. Ugh!
“Are you cold?” Jackie, my friend and traveling companion, asked me as I shuddered, lazily turning her chin to rest on a spaghetti strapped shoulder.
“Yeah, right. How could I possibly be cold?”
“You shivered.”
“Oh. No, I think I was shaking with disgust.”
“Oh. Greg?”
“You bet.”
I sighed and tugged at the cloth from my shirt, pulling it away from my moist stomach, hoping to air out a bit. I definitely did not want to think about Greg. Actually, I didn’t want to think about Greg or Connor. It was too bad that so far on this trip there was not a lot to do but think. My iced coffee sat between my thighs and felt fabulously cool. I took another sip. I figured that since my tries with sleep in the past twelve hours had been so unpleasant I might as well just try to stay awake, hence my large cup of cold caffeine. Besides, now that the sun was out I could read a book and distract myself without having half a dozen people ask me to turn off my light.
“This is so lame. I can’t believe I don’t have service,” Jackie said, flipping open her cell phone and looking at it. “I haven’t had service for hours.”
“Yeah.” I tasted my coffee, thinking about how I didn’t have service either and that it wasn’t a big deal. Then I remembered I didn’t have anyone to call.
“I feel so bad though. I haven’t been able to talk to John since outside St. Louis or wherever we were.”
“I think it was Kansas City.”
“Either way, this sucks.”
“Oh,” I muttered. “That’s too bad.”
“Yeah, seriously. I hope he’s not mad at me.” Jackie sighed and shut her phone.
“I’m sure he’ll understand.”
“Yeah, but still. This sucks. It’s just that –“
“Hold on, I have to pee. I’ll be right back.” I put my coffee down on the floor. “Watch my luggage?”
“Sure.” Jackie shrugged and snapped open her phone again to peer at the screen in misery.
I could tell that another John fest was coming on. I had seriously spent the last two days hearing his name in every other sentence and it was starting to take quite a lot of teeth gnashing self-restraint to not rip her head off. Finally we had to stop to transfer and I could just walk away to the rest room without having to wait for the little sign to switch to “Vacant”.
The bus station was small and seemed more crowded than it actually was. Most people were packed in the main room onto banana yellow plastic seats and eating over priced, high cholesterol food from the refreshment stand or drinking Styrofoam cups of iced or hot coffee. I headed over to the ladies room with long, leg stretching strides and marveling in how good it felt to walk. Before when we had been on the bus my body hurt and ached as if I had just run a marathon, when in reality I couldn’t remember the last time I had even stood.
On my way to the restroom, a boy at the soda machine smiled at me. He looked quite young, maybe seventeen, and had blonde hair and red face that looked like it had been recently scrubbed. He held a bottle of Sprite, and it reminded me of the time Connor had got a Sprite from a vending machine on our way back from a fancy restaurant in Boston. He opened it right after it fell out of the machine and it fizzed over, getting soda on both of us. My dress got sticky and disgusting and I dug some tissues from the bottom of my purse out to clean it. We stood there trying to wipe off the sugary soda but it only caused bits of tissue to stick to the fabric, and the more we tried the more tissue that got stuck. He ruined my outfit but we had laughed about it. I smiled back at the boy.
The bathroom was a peeling mint green and yellowish, though rather clean. I got into the one available stall and locked the door. As I got myself situated I couldn’t help but listen to the conversation the girls in the other two stalls were having.
“You know Billy, right?”
“No, who’s Billy?” the second girl asked, pulling some sheets of toilet paper.
“You don’t know Billy Brickford?”
“No, who is he?”
“I can’t believe you don’t know Billy!”
“Why, who is he?”
“He’s only the most popular guy in church!”
I snorted and tried to hold back a giggle. I couldn’t wait to tell Jackie. Most popular kid in church?
When I got out of the stall I washed my hands at the sink I sneaked a look at the two girls at the sink. They seemed rather preppy and about my age, so there was nothing funny about their physical appearance I could tell Jackie. One of them made eye contact with me while I stared so I blushed and hurried to dry my hands.
Outside in the main room I noticed people were beginning to stand and gather their bags, so I figured this meant our bus had arrived. My theory was confirmed by a woman announcing over a microphone, “Number one-three-five-seven-four to Santa Fe has arrived and will be boarding in the front.”
I squeezed out, trying to avoid brushing against the fleshy girth of a heavy, sweating man in the doorway, and headed over the bench where Jackie sat. Her eyelids were heavy and her chin was nodding on her chest.
“Hey, our bus is here,” I told her, grinning and nudging her leg with my flip-flopped foot.
She blinked a few times and nodded lazily. “I’m so tired.”
“I can tell,” I laughed and pulled up the handle on my rolling suitcase and slid my backpack over my sweaty shoulders. The bag was warm from sitting in the sun and the heat did not feel great on my back. I grabbed my coffee and waited while Jackie got her things together.
We trudged to the line of mostly elderly or heavyset assumed Midwesterners and began to fumble through our things for the bus tickets.
“Wouldn’t it suck if we lost our tickets?” Jackie asked, digging through her canvas tote bag.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “We could always get new ones, though.”
“True. But imagine if the bus was sold out and we had to stay here over night?”
I looked around the street we stood which consisted of the bus station, a post office, a grocery store and long stretch of loneliness and laughed. “That would really suck,” I agreed as I found my ticket in the front pocket of my suitcase.
“I heard the funniest thing in the bathroom,” I told Jackie as the line slowly boarded the aluminum vessel after we had dropped our large pieces of luggage with a man who was stacking the suitcases and duffel bags under the bus. “These two girls—“
“Speaking of funny things, you know what’s not funny?” Jackie interrupted me, pulling her ticket out of where she had placed it between the pages of a book. “That I can’t call John! I miss him so much!”
“Yeah,” I replied. “I guess.” I turned away from her to face the line. I didn’t feel like sharing my story anymore.
“He’s working today from ten to seven and just wait, I’ll probably have service then and only then,” she fumed, brushing her dark hair away from her sticky forehead. “This sucks. You owe me big time.”
“I know, I know,” I told her. “Don’t forget I’m paying for our room in Vegas.” That had been my incentive to drag her across the country with me for a job interview in LA. “We’ll have fun there.”
“We better,” she muttered.
I couldn’t help but feel sort of like a fool for going all the way to California for a job interview. I didn’t even know if I wanted the job. My reason for applying consisted of my hope that if I told Connor I was moving to California he would beg me to stay on the east coast. I thought of all this and I thought of how he actually replied when I said, “I’m probably going to move to Los Angeles soon. I probably have a job there.” He just nodded and said, “That’s cool.”
I stared at him with my mouth open, searching my mind for a perfect snappy reply. I stood there like that so long that he changed the subject. He didn’t ask when I was leaving, he didn’t ask when I would be back and he didn’t ask if he would ever see me again.
Later I had told Jackie, “He didn’t even care. We were together almost two years and I am about to leave, possibly forever, and didn’t give a shit. Why didn’t he try to stop me?”
Of course, she had replied with some stupid anecdote about John that only succeeded in making me feel worse, but when she saw how upset I was her best friend skills pulled through and she agreed to be by my side in my trek to the Pacific. “We’ll be like pioneers heading out west to see if life there is any good,” she said. Then added, “Can John come, too?” Thankfully, he couldn’t get the time off from work.
Back in the present, another thing I felt thankful for is that the bus was air conditioned. I stepped up the steep three stairs and felt a cool blast hit my face and blow my limp air (which was grossing me out because it hadn’t been washed in almost three days) up around my head. We moved down the aisle and I sat in a sun-baked soft leather window seat and took in the bright sunlight shining directly in my face the stench of other people’s lack of deodorant. The seat burned the skin of my thighs and I shifted uncomfortably around trying to get accustomed to it. Jackie sat next to me and she immediately yawned and laid her head back. She wore sunglasses, but I could see her eyes out of the side and they were closed with intentions of sleep. Like me, she hadn’t slept much on the trip so far either and I was longing for her to pass out and shut up.
Out the window I saw the bus depot and watched as a family of matching Hawaiian shirts boarded. The father wore a hat that looked like Goofy, though we were about as far from Disney World as you could get, or at least it seemed that way. One of the kids looked at least fifteen and had tried to make his outfit cooler by leaving the shirt unbuttoned with a concert t-shirt underneath. When I adjusted in the seat yet again I peered up at the road in the front of us, bright and hazy the way asphalt gets when it’s really warm out.
I leaned back in my seat and shut my eyes against the sun and I thought I might try sleeping again. However, my fingers began to tap on my legs and my feet were shifting around from my coffee, so I took another sip of my drink and sat up. That wasn’t the only thing keeping me from sleep though – my stomach churned and I remembered the night before Jackie and I left on our trip.
Okay, so I wasn’t even interested in Greg. I just met him that night, a friend of my friend Shawn from Boston University who was visiting for awhile. I didn’t understand and still don’t understand how someone as good looking as him could have possibly been such a bad kisser. I would have thought he had tons of experience but apparently he didn’t, or if he did, no one ever told him you aren’t supposed to eat the person you’re kissing’s face and that your tongue should not go anywhere near their nose.
Maybe that wasn’t the only reason it was so bad. It probably also had something to do with how different it was. How he held my hand like he was trying to cup some water, not interlacing my fingers with his like Connor would. How he smelled like beer and Old Spice instead of soap and how the inside of his mouth tasted the way my sweaters smelled when they had been stored under my bed for half the year. How when we did what we did it was awkward and uncomfortable, sweaty and embarrassing and nothing like the laughing and tickling, poking and smiling, giggling and comfort I had had with Connor.
Ugh! I had only done it so that maybe Connor would find out and be jealous but how was I supposed to tell him? And when I did, what if he didn’t care? He didn’t care that I was leaving forever, so like it would matter if I had a crappy one night stand. I had originally imagined a situation where I would tell him I slept with some hot guy I met at a party and how he would be so sad. He would realize how hard it was for him to actually imagine me with someone else. He would realize that he still loved me. We could work through our problems! Grown apart? Us? No way! Now I just don’t think I could bear the indifference he might offer me, especially after the way he didn’t care that I might leave and move across the country. He didn’t even care that he might never see me again.
I felt so crappy about the whole Greg thing. Every time I thought of it and every time I thought of myself back in that situation I felt blushing heat creep up my neck and a stinging in my sinuses, tears I knew would come out if I thought about it all a little longer. It wasn’t so much that Greg was gross, or that the whole situation was embarrassingly awkward. Every time I pictured myself back in the situation I just felt so aware that it wasn’t Connor. It was some strange guy with strange hands, a strange voice and a strange and disgusting mouth. Then a feeling like a cross between butterflies and the urge to puke would start and before I knew it I was curled up on a bus seat wishing I had a cure for this pain.
But the only cure was back in the northeast and it would never, ever be mine again.
“Do you think this is it?” I blurted out. “Are we ever going to get back together?”
“Uhh?” Jackie replied, barely opening her mouth and not even bothering with her eyes.
“Is this it for me and Connor?”
Jackie shrugged and yawned. “Probably. Stop talking about it.”
“Stop talking about it? I just started talking about it!” I glared at her. “I need some advice!”
Jackie yawned. “Oh,” she muttered, turning her head in the other direction. “Sorry.”
Frustrated, I threw my shoulders back in my seat and I crossed my arms over my chest. My stomach felt nauseas and I took a long gulp of my coffee. Stupid Jackie, I thought. And stupid Greg. And stupid Connor. Very, very stupid Connor. At that moment I would have given anything for Connor to be there. Jackie could leave, go back to her stupid boyfriend, and Connor could be here with me. He and I would have had such a great time. We could have stayed in sleazy hotels and eaten at Denny’s everyday and it would have been awesome. We would have taken rolls of pictures, made fun of the people on the bus and I could have rested my head on his shoulder. He never would tell me “stop talking” about anything. He would have always wanted to listen.
I sat there, fuming, as the bus finally began to move. The yellow line in the middle of the road moved faster and faster and soon the few buildings turned to rows of wheat, or maybe it was corn. I wasn’t exactly sure what the two different fields looked like. The sky was blue and clear and the only clouds in the sky looked like perfectly white cotton balls. Connor and I could have enjoyed a day like this.
“I miss Connor,” I told Jackie, tensing up for the biting reply she might give me.
She didn’t answer, but when I glanced at her profile her eyes were open.
“Jackie, I miss him,” I repeated.
She sighed. “Look,” she turned to face me. “I feel bad for you. It’s been – what? A month?”
“A month and a half. It will be seven weeks on Friday.”
“Okay, seven weeks. I feel bad. You guys were together, like, two years or something. But the thing is, its over.”
“Yeah, but you don’t necessarily know that,” I told her.
“Do you honestly think you are going to get back together?” she asked. “What evidence do you have?”
I really didn’t have any evidence. I knew that. It’s so much easier to deal with loss when you can pretend it didn’t happen. It was so much easier to deal with losing Connor to imagine him kissing me instead of Greg, to imagine him here on the bus with me instead of Jackie, to imagine him actually caring when I said I was moving to LA. Maybe even imagine him trying to stop me. I was only leaving so he could stop me!
“Like,” Jackie began. “Like, with me and John –“
I opened my mouth, about to finally tell her off about talking nonstop about John, but she seemed to have caught herself. “I mean,” she continued, and paused. “Whatever. Don’t worry. You’ll get over it.”
“I know,” I replied. I knew she was right. It’s so much easier to just say “get over it” than it is to actually do that. I didn’t even know where to start.
“Where are we headed, anyway?” Jackie asked.
“Santa Fe,” I replied. But, honestly, I really didn’t have an idea where my destination was or how I was going to get there. I sat back in my seat and sipped my coffee. It was going to be a long trip.