Week one. Monday.
The bus ride is twenty five minutes long, Dad said. He also said what the name of the stop was, but I was otherwise occupied. Namely, Being Depressed.
The doctors said it was understandable, considering what happened and everything, but it didn’t make it any better. Being Depressed was rather time consuming, and now that it’s official it’s even harder not to think about it.
I fiddle around with the green-and-red tie around my neck for a few seconds, feeling like an idiot. In Thorntree High there wasn’t a school uniform. It also had boys in it. Then again, it wasn’t a posh, private, £20,000-a-term school like the one I was going to. Dad had offered to get his chauffeur to drive me, or at least a cab or something, but I refused to be primped any more than I already was. I’ll take the bus, I said, then sold him some bullshit story about getting socially integrated or something.
The bus arrives two minutes earlier than it should and I sigh. To say that I’m not looking forward to the day would be an understatement, and it’s not even to do with the fact that all I want to do lately is sleep (which is Completely Normal, the doctors reassured me, considering, well) but because the notion of spending seven hours in Saint Agnes’ School for Girls with around a thousand posh, snobby bitches is, to say the least, unappealing to me.
I step onto the bus. My hand fiddles with the travel card my dad gave me, encased in a plastic holder unsure what to do with it; I eventually decide on flashing the driver my picture and hurry past him, but it’s apparently the wrong thing to do because I hear a chorus of sniggers coming from the group of schoolgirls behind me. “You need to put it down on the yellow circle,” the bus driver says monotonously, his boredom apparent.
I ignore the chortling girls behind me – their opinion, like everything else, matters little to me – and do it right this time, then advance towards the narrow, steep staircase of the double decker bus.
I’ve been on a double decker bus before – with Mom when we came to visit my father, and again earlier this week, when Katelyn insisted on taking me shopping in Oxford Street. She rushed me to the front, to the seats on the right of the aisle. “You get more leg space on this side,” she explains. “You can even put your legs up on that shelf. Nice, isn’t it?”
I didn’t see how it was nice, and I didn’t see how Katelyn thought it was nice. Katelyn wore skirts, the short, floaty kind that fanned out when you twirled. She couldn’t put her legs on the little shelf or she would flash her panties to every second floor office in central London.
Right now, I don’t want leg space or the luxury of resting my feet on some meek, linoleum-lined shelf. I want quiet. So I head to the back of the bus and choose a seat by the window, three rows from the back. I rest my head against the window. My warm breath fogs up the glass; then the mist disappears, the obscured part of the window becoming clear again.
Time passes, I don’t know how long. People come and go, the streets of suburban London flying by. I think about Idaho, which I suppose is an improvement; the doctors told me that it’s better not to Suppress the Memories but be Open and Share Them. It’s a stupid statement. It’s not like I don’t see the Memories every day in my head and every night in my dreams, because I do.
Idaho is different to London. Back in Boise, Mom and I lived on the fifth floor of a tall, ugly building with no lift. Our flat was small, dingy, and smelled of piss no matter how much Febreeze you sprayed. Mom hated it – not just the piss thing, but the whole place in general. She said it reminded her of old people and death.
I guess in the end it reminded her of death so much that she killed herself.
a/n surprise! i posted a thing.
i've started this months and months ago when i was still screwgravity (nostalgic sigh). i hope you guys like it.
