I prefer to be about fifteen minutes early to bus terminals, half an hour at night or during an emergency. That's what it said in the Bus Book I found at the library when I bought my monthly pass, and I found it to be good advice. As I round the corner, the Red Line slows in front of the dusty yellow terminal and then starts to pick up speed again. I’m waving my hands and yelling, which feels out of place since it’s midnight and I’m the only person on the street. Only fifteen minutes ago I was talking to Annie."Tom," she said like she had some business screaming out of my past to interrupt scrambled egg night.
I clicked the heat off from under the frying pan. “Annie?”
"I'm at the airport,” she said.
I could hear voices behind her that confirmed the airport or some kind of public place, a mash of people talking, something being piped through loudspeakers. All of the noises pushed together and made Annie's voice sound foreign. I knew it was her right away. We've always been weird like that.
I had been holding a block of cheese when I picked up the phone. I put the cheese on the edge of the sink and after a few seconds on the brushed metal edge it tipped into the garbage disposal. When she said she was at the airport, I noticed that my faucet was leaking. A few drops slid under the plastic protecting the cheese. I wondered how Annie found my new phone number.
"I was about to start dinner," I said. It was about half a pound of cheddar cheese. I had bought the good kind because one of the secretaries from work had agreed to come to dinner on Friday and I was going to make my mother’s macaroni recipe.
"Oh," she said.
I breathed out, felt my heart beating and wondered if she had heard me breathing out. I waited for her to say anything more.
"Do you want me to come get you?" I said. I put my hand on the faucet and turned the knob, letting the water run over my wrist. "I'm not doing anything, I was about to have some eggs."
"It would be nice if you came," she said.
I've never owned a car but riding the bus has never been a problem. The driver tends to stop if you run alongside and bang on the side window, near the door. I had seen other people do this, anyway. I was always been early enough to catch the bus, but now I'm banging on the window until the driver turns his head. He’s moving at thirty miles an hour but turns his head like he’s underwater. When he looks at me I think he’s going to speed up, but he shifts his knees up and to the side and the bus grinds to a stop.
I apologize to him and my hands are shaking. I can't run my pass through the card reader. The thin plastic skips and tears, I apologize again and steady one hand with the other but the card is torn on its metallic strip and there is nothing I can do. The driver looks at me with no discernable emotion and hands me a transfer slip. I let my knees give out over the entire front row of seats.
I can feel my heart beating in my teeth. My whole face throbs, hollow. I'm not calling in sick to work again, although Annie will want to talk all night. The only guy in the bus besides the driver was chewing on brown strands of food—or something like food—from the corner of his mouth. He didn't notice me as I sat down to the left of him. If his mouth wasn't full, I'm sure he would've asked why I was running to catch a bus in the middle of the night for a girl I didn’t even know anymore. I'd have to tell him that I wasn’t sure why I was doing it, that the girl and I were just friends in middle school before she sort of disappeared. That's it. I knew her for three years and she was gone for five.
Annie and I lived down the street from each other from when I was the new kid in sixth grade. My family had just moved from Wisconsin and her mother sent her over with a Tupperware container of sugar cookies. We were shy around each other for two years and then sat together for the sake of familiarity in Biology, our freshman year.
School started too close to sunrise to be anything but a worthless, required venture. I was lucky to find my pants every day and Annie tended to wear her sweatpants without showering. I would have thought she was cute if she didn't keep slouching forward in her sleep and banging my shoulder with her forehead. She wore fuzzy slippers, a fad at the time. Her friend Melanie had a new pair every week. Annie and I would joke about that, but Annie would always slide around in her own pastel-pink spotted pair. I think Melanie's mom might have bought them for her but I never said anything about it.
We became fast friends over our mutual hatred of Biology. While Mr. Uyeda lectured on the rights of man in relation to cell structure, Annie and I traded secrets and sampled from the bags of food she liked to sneak into class.
“Mine used to do that too,” Annie said, crunching on a sweet pickle when Uyeda had his attention turned to the board. She was trying to pencil in as many horizontal lines as possible into a picture of mitochondria in her notes. Her nose was an inch away from the paper and she blew away pencil dust every five strokes.
“My mom wants you to come over after school,” I said.
“Rice Krispies or Chex Mix?” she said, turning her head from the paper to look at me. I put my palm to her temple and pushed her face to the desk. The mitochondrial lines printed themselves onto her cheek and she rubbed at them. She laughed. Her favorite food was sweet pickles and her breath always kind of smelled like vinegar.
After Biology we'd walk to second period together, and then sometimes we'd see each other in the lunch line. She ate lunch with a bunch of girls and I sat with my guy friends. She came by my house after school sometimes and then more often in the summer and we were together every day, doing stupid kid stuff like running around in the woods and climbing trees. It felt fun, and normal. When my dog died, I wouldn't talk to anyone but Annie, and only in the woods after the sun had set. Her mom found us the next morning, asleep in a pile of leaves. We both got into trouble because she thought we had been murdered.
The homecoming dance was one of those things that wasn't supposed to be a big deal but became a big deal a week or two before. Neither of us had a date and her other friends wanted her to go, so she lectured me on rites of passage and survival of the fittest and agreed to do my chores for a week; a month if I wore an actual suit instead of the tuxedo shirts the guys were passing around.
My mom kind of went nuts over getting me a nice suit and taking lots of pictures. I was all feet and zits. Annie was pretty, though, she had this slimy looking purple dress on that showed off each little curve of her body, which I had never noticed before because when she wasn’t in her pajamas she would wear pretty much what I wore. I was pinning the corsage on her and kept trying not to touch anything important and it must have taken half an hour before she did it herself.
The dance itself was a fog machine and twenty cheerleaders dancing to songs from the radio. They did a little choreographed number that seemed to impress all of the other girls. Annie watched in a daze the ornamental poms in the blond hair bouncing through another chorus of Stayin’ Alive. I watched Annie’s hips through the dress.
After the dance, we went to Melanie's house. It was five minutes into the woods and I was glad that my parents let me use their car for the night. Melanie's parents and her little brother Drew were at a fellowship weekend so five of us sat in the living room and tried to drink her father's whiskey. It stung and I sipped at it, pretending to gulp. There was a game of Truth or Dare, played with the dramatic flair of five high school kids pretending to be drunk. I told Annie that I loved her and she put her hand down my pants, which was enough of an invitation for me. We squeezed together in Drew's racecar bed and I pulled a muscle in my foot trying to get my pants off. Annie kept looking at me like she was about to laugh until I ripped her dress on accident. After that she kept her head firmly to the side, chin to shoulder, nose to racecar, until I was done.
Annie's mom knew what was going on when I dropped Annie off the next morning. She said she had been worried, but I found out later that when my parents had called the night before, she had said that I was sleeping on her couch.
Things started to get weird between Annie and I after that. She started ignoring me and I found myself talking more with some guys who were dating the cheerleader girls. I graduated from high school without even noticing that Annie had left months before. I did notice but I didn’t think about it because I was scared that I had something to do with it.
It happened like lots of things happen—an entire stack of moments and coincidences falling over each other and twisting around and not making any sense. Half of it was me hating her in a funny kind of way. It was only obvious after it was all over and I figured that I couldn’t take any of it bacK.
When we got back in my apartment I realized that I had forgotten about the cheese. It was stuck to the sink.
