Now I blink back into reality, realizing the boy is still looking at me.
“What about you?” I ask, embarrassed by my lapse in attention. “Where are you coming from?”
He looks out the dark window then and tugs on his hat. “Long story, but my piece-of-shit car wouldn’t start.”
He grins again as he speaks, and I wonder if “piece-of-shit” is actually code for a Lamborghini and why blood rushes to my face every time he smiles.
“That sucks,” I say.
He shrugs. The kids at the back of the bus are arguing over something while their mom threatens to confiscate it. It feels awkward to keep talking across three rows, so the boy turns back to face the front and I finally force myself to pull outGreat Expectations,the book we’re discussing in English class.
We stop for gas at Riverton, and the boy gets off behind the driver. The mom, a short woman with light brown hair to the middle of her back, shepherds her kids down the aisle.
“I don’t waaaanna go to the bathroom,” the little girl whines, her brother following her, skipping between the seats. The girl’s hair is almost identical in length and color to her mother’s. The mother gives me this look I can’t explain when she walks past me, then hurries her kids along.
When I squint out the window, I see the boy standing next to the bus driver, smoking. Both of them march in place, trying to stay warm, tufts of cigarette smoke intermingling with the clouds of their breath. It’s judgmental of me, but the discovery of Smiling Boy’s nicotine problem makes it easier to dismiss any connection we might have shared. He’s a random boy on a bus in the middle of January.
The family comes back on first, and I feel the mother’s gaze on me again, but this time she jerks her eyes away when I look up. As if she’s embarrassed to have been caught staring. She walks to the back of the bus and retrieves a sweater and backpack, then the three of them relocate to the very front of the bus, opposite the couple.
I wonder what her problem is. I self-consciously check the cover of my book. DoesGreat Expectationshave some reputation for being super racy that I’m not aware of?
My face is back in my book when the boy and bus driver get on again, but the letters quickly blur into meaningless squiggles, and I doze on and off for the next hour.
I wake up to the spinning.
The bus sliding out of control, careening off the road. The other passengers screaming. Underneath it: the sound of sharp things breaking and blunt things—heads, elbows, backs—slamming.
Then I’m flying forward, falling. A sharp, hard pain pierces the side of my head.
Everything goes black.
I wake up to a light so blue and harsh its mere force seems to pry my eyelids apart. The air smells like antiseptic, and I’m lying in a bed that isn’t my own. Wires extend from a machine beside me like thin plastic tentacles.
I’m in a hospital room.
When I try to sit up, it feels as if someone is plucking the inside of my skull like a string instrument, but without the relief of music. I lie back down and groan to make it stop.
“You’re okay, hon,” someone with a thick Southern accent says, rubbing my shoulder. “How are you feeling?”
The assault of murky, too-bright light slowly shifts into the image of a middle-aged woman in green scrubs standing by my bed.
I make an incoherent sound, but the nurse seems to be fluent in those because she nods and says, “Yes, I know. You hit your head during the crash. Do you remember that, Addison?”
My mind drifts back to the bus.
The spinning.
The boy a few rows ahead.
It takes three tries before I manage to get any words out. “Y-y-yes. Is everyone okay?”
The nurse nods. “You were all extremely lucky. Some minor injuries here and there, but everyone’s going to be just fine. With how slick those roads are tonight, it could have been a lot worse. Maine in winter is no joke.”
She keeps talking, explaining that we’re in Greenvale Hospital, forty minutes from Lyndale, and about ten minutes from the crash site. That we were brought here by ambulance.
“Can you sit up for me?” the nurse—a tag on her shirt saysMEGAN—asks a few minutes later. Her voice is soothing and maternal, and it makes me feel small and safe. The way I did in elementary school, when my mom would look after me on days I was home sick. I slide up in bed, and she adjusts the pillows behind me, then lets me lean back. It turns out I’m not connected to any of the wires by the machine, so my movement is not restricted. But there’s a bandage on the top of my right arm—a cut, the nurse explains, but nothing too serious.
Nurse Megan hands me two white tablets and a small paper cup half full of water. “Those will help with your head.”
