Covetous

Covetous- Chapter Two

First days of school are always an ordeal. They also happen to be the only day of school that you will find a student willing to say that they are grateful for their uniform. It completely takes the pressure off the first day, especially for a grade 12. You already know all the people, so unless you’re new (in which case, you better hope for a miracle), there are no surprises, and nobody to impress. Every impression that you might make has already been made, and the only thing that you worry about is which classes you have with friends.

I live on the outskirts of Walkerton, out in the country, as people say. This means that I have to be ready by 7:10 to catch my bus when school doesn’t start until 8:05. The only good part of this is that it gives time to finish assignments, eat breakfast, and catch up with the rest of the middle-of-nowhere kids. There’s a certain type of bond that comes with being on a bus 40 minutes every morning and afternoon with the same people. You just can’t help but become friends with each other, and with the bus driver.

When the bus pulled up at my house, I was actually ready. First day syndrome; Franny didn’t even have to honk the horn to tell me to move my ass and get outside. Kaitlyn was also ready early, but for a different reason. While I woke up on time because I had enough sleep stored from summer to last me through September, she woke up at about 5 because she was too wired to sleep. It was her first day of school, and I thought that she was going to soil her kilt.

I walked to the back of the bus. Kaitlyn, the perpetual puppy, tried to follow.

“I don’t think so. The back is a well-earned right for seniors. Minor niner’s are at the front,” I told her. She gave me a death stare before she turned around.

When I got to the last seat, I found Gerald slumped against the window. His backpack had slid under the seat in front of him, but he hadn’t noticed. He was staring blankly out the window, his deep blue eyes glazed over with a lack of concentration. He could sit like that for hours- lost in his own mind, oblivious to the conscious world. His brown hair hadn’t been cut since the end of school, which had been the last time I’d seen him. I plonked down into the seat and startled him from his daydreaming.

“Morning friend,” I said, falsely chipper.          

He nodded in reply. Gerald was a boy of few words. My friendship with him was strange. He was my best bus friend; we had been close ever since a grade nine incident involving sitting in a grade eleven’s seat. Yet, outside of the bus, we hardly ever spoke. In the real world, we had different friends and different lives. But for 80 minutes a day, we were inseparable.

“I saw your dad the other day, walking Kyra,” he said after a few minutes.

His voice was steady and calm, and I could tell that he hadn’t been planning how he would bring up my father. It was honestly the first thing that had come to his mind. It was something that I appreciated about Gerald. He didn’t plan his words, and he didn’t hold back. He wasn’t fake.

“He likes walking her. The doctor says it’s good exercise for the both of them.” I tried to keep my voice light. No need to tell him that it took my dad 20 minutes to stop wheezing when he got home.

We filled each other in on the best parts of summer. I was a lifeguard, and had plenty of stories about the dumb things that people do at the pool. Gerald went with his older brother to the States for two weeks and went to a different concert every night.

Eventually, the bus started filling up. The rest of the regulars filed in and took their seats. Brandon, Emily, Corrie, and the twins, Julian and Gillian, whose parents never realized what hell they were putting their children through when they named them. They, along with Gerald and Franny, were my bus family. We all had two identities; the person that we left on the bus, and the person that went out into the rest of the world.