Blue Collar

The day is warm and dry, for the moment, and I am sitting with my shins tucked underneath me on the side of the road—close enough that I can watch for the bus, far away enough that I don’t get crushed by a car. I have run the last few blocks to the bus stop to make sure I didn’t miss it.

Suddenly there is a girl on the other side of the street. She leans forward for a moment, checks for cars, then jogs on her toes to my side. If I was a dog, my ears would be pricked up and my fur standing on end.

(Which is ridiculous, because this is a public bus stop. Loosen up, I tell myself.) I sing, but softly, so that she can’t make out the words.

She speaks; the silence is fractured like eggshells. “Excuse me?” My head turns. I smile. “Are you taking the 346? Do you know if it’s coming?” Yes, it should be here in a few minutes. “Ok, good, thanks. I was afraid I’d missed it.”

I notice that she has hair like crow’s feathers; and a thick, stiff, blue leather necklace around her throat, like a collar. The cut that we made in the silence has already had about five seconds to heal.

I angle my head cautiously so that I can see her in the farthest corner of my eye; and she is my age, technically speaking; but she is wearing parched, close-fitting jeans
(I can’t see a designer label anywhere) and carrying a black bag with small indistinct white words; and moreover, she is rocking on her heels and gazing aimlessly at the dirt in a way that I cannot imagine someone doing at the school from which I have just walked five blocks.

How enticing.

I should say something to her.

What if she said something back?

What if, in these who-knows-how-many minutes before the 346 comes, we started a conversation? What if years from now I’ll smile and shake my head and think, “If I hadn’t said anything at that bus stop, today ____ and I wouldn’t even be friends!” Or what if years from now, when I am rich and famous, ____ will say to her friend/boyfriend/mom/unspecified, “I didn’t know it at the time, but I was standing right next to her!”

What if we meet at the bus stop every Tuesday from now on as friends, and we talk about great new bands and evil teachers and the horror of finals and that hot guy she or I saw at Northgate and her best friend who she’s having problems with and my exercise regimen which is failing predictably, and she won’t have to ask if I’m waiting for the 346? And what if she throws an end-of-the-year party and invites me to come meet her friends, and we all have a blast and one weekend she and I meet up downtown and go to a concert by a band which she’s recommended to me? What if she starts getting depressed and is on the brink of suicide, but I pull her through it and convince her to take up the drums, as emotional therapy, you know; so she takes some lessons down on Fremont Avenue and we end up playing in a band together—and years later, once the band’s released a couple of hit albums, an interview with the two of us is featured on a double-page spread of People Magazine in which the anecdote of our purely-fate first meeting is highlighted in bold font, after which it says in parentheses (both laugh)?

But when I look over at her, leaning against the metal post with the bus times (although the buses are always late) and flipping her cell phone open and shut with one hand, and with the other, mechanically fingering the leather collar, I do not even open my mouth.

What would I say, anyhow? It seems dangerous to reopen the silence when it has just mended its last rip. “So, you going home too?”/“Where do you go to school?” What if she thought I was a hippie (after all, I had been singing/mumbling when she came up to me) or a dork? What if—I almost shudder—she thought I was a creeper? However she responded, it would be awkward, and conversations between strangers are more like tennis matches, and I have never been good at tennis. I tend to miss the ball, or swing the wrong way entirely, or even hit myself on the head with the racquet. And what was I thinking before anyway? Bus friends don’t invite bus friends to meet school friends. And they definitely don’t go to concerts together downtown. And there is no way that I could keep her from killing herself if we only saw each other every Tuesday, and if she really wanted to die. And even if she did pull through it, why the hell would she take up the drums? And how could we ever be in a band together, much less release a hit album, or even a single song? But it’s more likely that we would never become friends at all, and our conversation would end with separate seats on the bus and neither of us saying goodbye.

Oh, look, here comes the 346.

It is now that I catch sight of a third person, standing a ways away from the two of us: a middle-aged woman; heavy set, with blond, wavy hair that is receding over her pale face. I notice her because of the clinking sound, rather like a ball and chain, that is made when she kicks a flat aluminum can across the gravel and follows it in circles.

A school bus pulls up right before the 346 does and a small child stumbles out, a skinny blond girl with a big purple backpack and a smile. She trots over to the woman, her mother, who squeezes her tight against her ample midriff and the two of them walk off together.

Decidedly, I throw my books into my backpack, zip it up, scoop up my jacket, and dig in my pocket for the bus fare. When the 346 slows to a halt and the driver opens his doors for me, I go inside and drop my coins in the slot. Blue collar girl and I have made the bus.