I get off of work at noon. It’s only six hours, but it seems like the longest shift ever, maybe because it starts at 6:00 a.m. I’ve been smelling and serving coffee all morning, and I’m thinking I may never drink coffee again. Which is all right; I’ve never liked it that much—I mostly just drink it at IHOP because of the refillable pitcher. And a certain waiter.
“There comes a time when everyone has to make sacrifices,” my dad said when we talked about me taking the Espress-Oh-Yes job. “And you have reached that time, P. F.”
Other sacrifices in my life: I look after my siblings a couple of mornings a week, the days I’m not working at Gas ’n Git, while my mom’s at the radio station and my dad’s figure skating. That’s just the scheduled summer baby-sitting. That doesn’t count the other times I know I’ll be called on to help. And I have to turn over almost all of the money I’m making to my parents because I owe them for the car repairs.
I’m taking the bus to French class, starting today, because of that certain IHOP waiter and because I can graduate early if I get ahead on my credits. I want to travel for a while before going away to college. I’d love to go to France and actually use my French, but since I probably won’t be able to afford it, I’ll start out just cruising around the States, checking out places I’ve been before and places I haven’t. My parents and I used to travel a lot, before we settled here. I was a world traveler, or at least a U.S. traveler, until I turned six. It’s very sad to contemplate that my life was more exciting as a toddler than it is now. I try not to think about it. I try to focus on getting out of debt and hitting the road.
Of course, for that I’ll need a car. Which is also why I’m here, this summer, not working as a camp counselor like my best friend, Suzanne. It’s all about paying my parents back.
I look up at the bus-stop sign, which has our town’s motto on it: LINDVILLE IS KINDVILLE—BE A GOOD NEIGHBOR! DON’T LITTER. There should be a garbage can next to the sign, but there isn’t. That figures.
At school we have different versions of the town slogan carved into the desks and written on lockers, including: Lindville is Kind-a-lame-ville, Lindville is Stinkville, and Lindville Sucks.
All I know is that it will be a happy day when I see that “Lindville is Kindville” sign in my rearview mirror.
Because it will mean two things: one, I am actually driving a car again, and two, I am leaving Lindville for greener pastures. Which won’t be difficult to find, because we mostly just have brown pastures here.
At 12:06 I see the Lindvillager, precisely on schedule, coming down the street. Lindville’s not big enough to have actual bus-size buses—we have the short kind, the type that you ride on at an airport when you catch a car-rental shuttle.
The town had a contest to come up with a cute name for the bus system when they started it a few years ago. “Lindvillager” is the best they could do. The bus has fake wood trim, like it’s an old-fashioned station wagon. Unfortunately, the paintings of the cute little village on the side got obscured by giant ads for radio stations and restaurants, and just recently those got removed and replaced by a huge ad for July’s big annual event, the Lindville Rodeo Roundup Days—as if we could forget they’re coming in July.
The pseudo-bus pulls up in front of me with a screech. When the door opens, I see it’s Kamikaze Bus Driver again. This guy has this route nearly every day, which worries me.
He has no sense of speed limits. He constantly cuts in front of cars. He merges without even glancing in his side mirror. He takes off when a passenger’s foot is barely off the bottom step. He’s a Driver’s Ed Don’t. You know those “How Am I Driving?” stickers they put on trucks? Now I know why they don’t put them on Lindville’s buses.
If my parents knew this was the person driving me around town, they would give me back my license and a car so fast it would make even Kamikaze Bus Driver’s head spin. Only I’m not sure if it could spin, because he has so much gray hair on his face and neck and such a long beard that it might choke him. He wears a peace-sign button on his lapel every day, and occasionally adds another sixties memento to his outfit via wristband or headband. The back of his uniform shirt constantly has this wet trail of sweat down the middle of it, which, unfortunately, is something you notice when you sit behind a person.
There’s this sign over his head that says, YOUR DRIVER: ______. PROFESSIONAL & COURTEOUS. Kamikaze Bus Driver won’t fill in his name, because if we don’t know his name, we can’t complain about things, like how two days ago he raced across a railroad crossing to beat an oncoming freight train, right as the bar was lowering.
But the really sad part is, that’s probably the most exciting thing that’s happened to me so far this summer.
I have hope, though. For some strange reason, I have hope.
I take a seat behind an elderly woman with a laundry bag, and in front of a guy with brown hair and a mustache, tight Wrangler jeans, and a T-shirt that says, FORGET THE WHALES, SAVE THE COWBOYS!
I always sort of wonder how other people end up on the bus. Not that it’s a bad thing; just a curious thing around here, because most people seem to have their 2.7 cars per household, no matter what shape they or the cars are in. People just drive, and if they can’t, they get someone else to drive them. I think there are more gas stations per capita here than in any other town or city in the country. Hence the fact that I can get employed at Gas ’n Git. People need gas; gas stations need warm bodies to run them.
Me? I’m on the bus because a week after I got my license in November, I crashed while turning into the Happy Hamburger parking lot. Happy Hamburger is the most popular lunch place for our school. You would think we wouldn’t want to eat burgers, since we drive past so many cattle in feedlots every day, but no, it’s like there’s something in the air that makes you want beef, because you don’t want to let the town down or something. We have to make sure the meat business thrives, because that’s where our parents’ jobs are, and if it dies, we all die with it.
Anyway, that day freezing rain was falling and the streets were icy and I turned left while accelerating, which I found out later you’re not supposed to do, and the car started to skid. I couldn’t remember which direction to steer, whether to brake or not, so the car just kept sliding sideways. First we knocked over the giant brown plastic steer out front. Then we skidded right up to the Happy Hamburger and fishtailed right into the building.
Everyone from school was inside, either in line or eating. Everyone saw us. It was so embarrassing.
But then this amazing thing happened. Steve Gropher, who I didn’t even know then, came running outside to see if I was okay. Well, technically he could have been coming to check on Suzanne and her ex-boyfriend Rick, who were in the car with me at the time, but he ran right over to me. He was there in about two seconds and he said he’d seen it happening because he looked up from the ketchup pump dispenser just in time.
I wasn’t hurt, but I was in shock, and I kept saying, “Oh, God, I can’t believe I just did that. Did I just do that? I can’t believe I just did that,” over and over, while he sat there next to me and someone called an ambulance and a tow truck and my parents. We were all fine—just some cuts and bruises—but everyone thought I was bleeding profusely because Steve had been clutching those little paper cups of ketchup when he ran outside and they’d gotten crushed in his hand and spilled all over both of us when he hugged me and tried to calm me down.
I didn’t know Steve then, because he had only moved to Lindville that fall. All I knew about him was that he was a junior like me, he was a waiter at IHOP, and that he was very good-looking. So that was my happy accident, if there is such a thing.
As far as my vehicular career goes, things went downhill after that. Of course, my parents wanted me to get a job so I could pay them back for the one-thousand-dollar deductible they had to spend to get the car fixed up. All the good jobs were taken, but I got this Christmas-season job working for Mr. Stinson at Western Wear Bonanza. He was trying to drum up business, so he rented this mechanical bull called “Rudy the Red-Nosed Rein-Steer.” If people could stay on the bull for fifteen seconds, then they got to choose a “Bonanza Bonus,” which was a cheesy free gift, like a bumper sticker or a bandana.
It turned out that no one could stay on the bull very long. There are plenty of real, authentic, hardworking cowboys around here who could have stayed on for hours, and had enough left afterward to kick Mr. Stinson all the way to the food court. But most of them don’t shop at the Sunset Mall, so instead we got a lot of suburban customers with no skill.
I was working the night shift one Saturday when Suzanne and some other friends from school came by. We were joking around, and I thought it would be funny if I put the store’s Santa Claus mannequin on the bull and let Santa ride for a while.
It was funny. Very, very funny.
Until I turned the speed on the mechanical bull up too high, and Santa went flying off the rein-steer and into the left-side front window of the store. The glass cracked and Santa landed facedown on Mr. Stinson’s “A Proper English Christmas” display, wrecking the plum pudding.
Needless to say, Mr. Stinson fired me. “You are a retailer’s nightmare,” he said. “Have you no concept of responsibility? Move on, Miss Farrell, move on. I never want to see you again. Not even as a customer. You are a bad seed,” Mr. Stinson said. “A very, very bad seed.”
Needless to say, Mr. Stinson is a little over the top. I didn’t like working for him and I was actually okay with losing the job.
A couple of weeks later, I went to work for Bob’s Pizza. They didn’t care about my retail history, but they maybe should have checked into my driving record. I’m not sure I need to really go into it. Let’s just say that it involved a desperate attempt to match the competition and deliver pizza in thirty minutes or less.
I totaled the car that had just been repaired. My father gave me some lecture about making the same mistake twice. My parents donated the banged-up station wagon to charity. And now I take the bus.
So, I guess you could say that I don’t do well with steering—or steers. Part of the reason I took the job inside Gas ’n Git is that I thought it might bring me good karma, spending time around gas pumps and helping people in cars. If there’s a fuel god, I’ll pray to him or her. It can’t hurt.
The Lindvillager pulls up in front of the school. As I start to get off the bus, Kamikaze Bus Driver puts his hand on my arm. “Excuse me, miss,” he says. His voice sounds like tires on a gravel road. In the rain.
“Um, hi,” I say, pulling my arm away from him.
“Next time you work at the gas station—tomorrow?” he asks in a gruff voice, his words emerging from the curly beard in a muffle. He doesn’t take off his octagon-shaped sunglasses.
“No, not until next Monday.”
“Okay, then. Monday. Bring me a large coffee.” He shoves a couple of dollars at me.
The last thing this man needs is more caffeine, I think. But okay, whatever he says. My life can’t get weird enough. Now I’m taking coffee orders from insane bus drivers.
I have to get out of this town.