That was it: puking in Vermont, a school trip to Mystic, and a drug deal in the Combat Zone in Boston, Aida looking the other way the whole time, keeping busy by deciding what she would order at the Chinese restaurant, Terry’s way of thanking her for driving. But now, here she was, alone, on a Greyhound bus leaving Pittsburgh. The city had a funny green tone and smelled like chemistry class.
The woman beside Aida also smelled sour. She kept muttering, “I’ll show him. Yes, I will. I will show that man. Hmmph.” In front of her sat two women wearing large hats. One hat was red and decorated with plastic cherries; the other one was yellow and covered with silk flowers. Even in the dark, Aida could see those cherries and flowers dipping and bobbing as the women wearing them bent their heads together, talking conspiratorially.
“I’m running away,” Aida whispered again, loving the way it sounded in the still bus.
“So am I,” came a voice from across the aisle.
Aida’s breath caught. She squinted to see who had said it. A boy, maybe nineteen years old, grinned back at her. He was smoking a cigarette. He had a dimple in his chin, like Kirk Douglas, and a good suntan.
“You weren’t supposed to hear that,” Aida said. If anyone knew she was only seventeen years old and running away from home, she would be hauled off this bus and sent back to Rhode Island.
“Then you shouldn’t keep saying it,” he said, smiling his white teeth at her.
“Hmmph,” Aida said, just like her seatmate. She folded her arms across her chest and focused straight ahead at the hats.
The boy leaned toward her. “I’m supposed to get married,” he whispered. “On Saturday.”
He smelled good. Like cigarettes and aftershave. Now that his head was in the aisle like that, she saw that he was as cleanshaven as a person could be and had short hair and no sideburns. She frowned. She hadn’t seen a guy with so little hair since her cousin Davy shipped off to Vietnam. She thought of Davy and made a quick sign of the cross, hoping the boy didn’t see her doing something so uncool. May he rest in peace, she thought, then dropped her hands.
“What are you?” Aida said, not bothering to whisper. “In the Army or something?”
“Not anymore,” the boy said, and sat back in his seat.
The Army? Aida thought. Ugh. She opened her book, The Tin Drum, by Günter Grass, and pretended to read. It was about a dwarf during World War II, and sad. Aida didn’t really like the book; she’d preferred To Kill a Mockingbird, which they’d read in tenth grade. And Lord of the Flies. Also from tenth grade. But books like that looked young, schoolgirlish, not the kind of books a person took with them to run away. In her overnight bag she had Siddhartha, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and Rod McKuen’s book of poetry, Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows. Stanyan Street was in San Francisco, and that was where she was headed.
“You ever read Lord of the Flies?” the boy asked. He was leaning toward her again, his head jutting out into the aisle, bouncing along with the movement of the bus.
“In high school,” Aida said, not taking her eyes from her book.
“That’s what Vietnam was like,” he said. “No shit.”
Aida swallowed hard. All spring, when she imagined this bus trip across the country, she always imagined meeting a boy. A boy with a guitar who sang Simon and Garfunkel songs as the bus rolled toward California. She and the boy would fall in love, and walk in meadows filled with wildflowers like in the Herbal Essences commercial. He would wear a flowing shirt, Guatemalan, or Mexican, kind of like Donovan. They would have their first kiss in a rainstorm. Aida sighed. Never, in any of her fantasies, was the boy she would fall in love with on a bus a Vietnam vet. Every day last year she had worn a black armband to school to protest the war. Baby killer, she thought, turning the page she had not read. Hawk.
“What are you running away from?” the boy asked her.
She glanced at him. His eyes were light, blue or maybe green; it was hard to tell in the dark. He had small ears. Usually, you didn’t see a boy’s ears because his hair covered them. This boy’s ears looked like seashells.
“Like I said,” he continued, “I’m running away from my wedding. How about you?”
“I’m moving to San Francisco,” she said matter-of-factly.
“No shit!” he said. “Me too. Guess we’re together for the long haul.”