Sucker's Luck

M&Ms are discovered

The bus was interesting it looked like a regular bus. School bus, I mean. There were people on it at least. The bus driver pressed a button and at the lower portion of the bottom of the bus opened up to be a storage place for my suit case. I threw it in there with the others and looked at them all stacked up.

It would have made a nice picture they all looked different. It could have been a suitcase collage, there were coach designs, taxi cab suit cases, well that one was mine but still.

I shut the thingymajiggy shut then picked up my backpack and walked on the bus. There weren’t many seats open. I would have to sit with someone else. I didn’t know any of these people since I was not in my regional unit.

In that moment I really wished that I could be in the same unit as my friends. But it no else had many friends here either. That made me feel a little bit better. No one else was doubling up on seats yet. Of course I couldn’t have a seat to myself because there were no more.

I decided the new Maria would sit where she pleased. I always figured that I would just sit in the middle because that was my favorite place on the bus. I wanted to fire escape windows because the handle blocked the view. Not that I would see much either way because of the person between me and the window. 

I sat down next to a girl with headphones in just like every other kid on the bus. I chose her though because her headphones had tiny stickers of hello kitty on them.

I said hello. She looked at me then the gummy bears I had taken out of my backpack. I offered some to her and said “gummy bear for a seat.”

Her name was Erica. She was from Delaware and this was her third bus ride. We talked about music and ended up sharing music since we had semi- similar tastes/ she had music and I was too lazy to get mine out of my bag. 

We were pretty much the only people on the bus talking.

“Have you been in a camp yet?”  I asked.

“No but I saw kids from my district get dropped off. Does that count?”

I laughed “close enough”

It was nice to have someone to talk to on the bus ride. Erica was a gymnast before so we talked about technique, me about twirling her about training.

 The bus ride was like four hours. When we entered Jersey I looked around. The sun was going to set soon. 

We reached a gated area. I felt like a delinquent with the school bus but the barbed wire was just unnecessary.

The bus driver typed a password while speaking to the guard. The guard laughed then looked at me and Erica and shook his head the stopped smiling and looked down.

He kind of looked sad. I wonder if he had a kid, who liked hello kitty and gummy bears.

I smiled at him and nudged Erica to do the same. Erica had a graceful kind of smile. It went along with her delicate features. She had the strawberry blonde hair thing going on with highlights of pink and red. She also had these soft emerald green eyes. She didn’t look like the kind of girl to be in the army. Too fragile. 

My smile on the other hand was like that of a shark’s. I showed way too many teeth. Sometimes my mom and friends used to tell me that I had a contagious smile. That smile that could make someone else smile.

The man smiled back at us finally. I felt proud of my accomplishment. I was kind of disappointed that my mom could not have witnessed it, she was supposed to drop me off at camp but then they called and said a bus would be picking me up instead. Something about keeping the place clandestine.