Ten Miles Past Normal

Chapter Four


The Bus Ride of Doom





The bus picks me up Monday at the end of our driveway, the same way it does every morning, only on this particular Monday morning I have triple-checked my shoes for problem odors. I’m the first passenger and have my pick of seats. In my opinion, row six is the optimal spot. You’re not so far up front as to be noticed by every single person who gets on the bus, but not so far back that the two stoner guys try to engage you in philosophical discussions about Fudgsicles.

The long morning bus ride is essential to my mental and psychological well-being. For one thing, Manneville High School is huge, collecting students from middle schools across the county, and it isn’t hard to feel completely beside the point once you walk through its heavily alarmed front doors and merge into the hallway traffic. So it’s important to have some time in the morning to remind yourself your life isn’t totally insignificant, even if chances are slim you’ll see anybody in the next seven hours who realizes it.

Monday bus rides are especially important. After a weekend of being around people who know my name, act as if what I say is reasonably interesting, and appreciate the contributions I make to the general welfare of the collective, it’s a shock to find myself at school, where no one seems to have ever heard of me. Or if they have, it’s because of that morning I spent walking around with a clump of straw in my hair until I ran into Sarah, who quickly plucked it out, or the week of the worm castings rash, or else the time—oh well, why dwell?

And you wonder why I eat lunch in the library.

“Today I’m going to eat in the cafeteria,” I whisper into my notebook, the way I do every Monday, and then I slump down in my seat because I know I won’t. If Sarah had B lunch, that would be one thing. Or if any of my old friends from Wheeler Middle, or just one single solitary person I recognized as a compadre, a sympathetic soul, a friendly face, a non-serial-killer type, were there to eat lunch with, I’d be fine. I’m not picky.

Unfortunately, B lunch is filled with football stars, prom queens, and ex-convicts, all of them total strangers and intimidating beyond belief. I lasted through two days of eating my egg salad sandwich and carrot sticks by myself, feeling small and exposed, like a fawn surrounded by hunters in pickup trucks with their headlights on high beam. I knew that no one was actually looking at me, and it soon became obvious that the only reason anyone would ever look at me was if I’d unwittingly come to school with, say, goat cheese smeared all over the back of my jeans. Feeling exposed and invisible at the same time was too much. I fled.

What made my loneliness even harder during those early days of my freshman year was my mother’s assumption that I would love high school just as much as she had. She practically plowed me down the minute I got home to hear about my day. “High school is where it all begins, Janie,” she’d enthused as she handed me a brownie and a glass of milk. “Now sit down and tell me everything that happened today.”

My mumbled, unenthusiastic replies marked a change in our relationship. Up until my freshman year, I’d been happy to tell my mother the tiniest details of my day. I was famous among local mothers of middle school daughters for being the one who still confided in her mother, who still liked to go shopping with her mother, who still spoke in polysyllabic sentences to her mother. I’d read enough books and seen enough movies to recognize the weirdness of this for myself, but I honestly thought that things would never change between us. You know how some people never get acne? I thought I’d never get tired of my mother greeting me at the door every afternoon with milk and cookies.

I did.

In fact, it didn’t take long before I could feel my chest tightening as I walked down the gravel driveway toward the house after the bus dropped me off. By the time I got through the door, I thought it was possible I might actually punch my mother if she said one more positive word to me about the wonders of freshman year. I started coming into the house through the screen porch so I could take the back staircase to my room and avoid her altogether.

Now, six weeks later, my mom no longer makes a big deal out of me being in high school. She has turned her energy and enthusiasm toward Avery, who loves the bejeebers out of third grade and the farm and doing stuff my mom loves to do, like baking and going to the flea market to buy hand-cranked grain mills and quilts so old that their original colors have faded into patches of gray and more gray. I lie on my bed upstairs and listen to them chirp together like birds, and I can’t decide if what I’m feeling is sort of weirdly jealous or totally disdainful. It’s a feeling that gets stuck in my throat, whatever it is.

The bus bounces over a series of potholes that bloomed last spring and are now enjoying the nice fall weather. The potholes mark ten more minutes until we reach Manneville High School, which means I have ten minutes to think cheerful, positive thoughts that will get me through the rest of my day. I remind myself that Sarah promised to leave a note in my locker before first period, a note that will be typed on an old manual typewriter that has become Sarah’s trademark style, will run several single-spaced, hilarious pages, and will definitely include details from her older sister Emma’s weekend escapades.

“We really ought to do Emma for our project,” Sarah had said on Saturday, and I could see her point. Emma was not yet a historic figure, but undoubtedly would be one day, at least in the annals of Manneville High School. She’s a straight-A student, honor roll every semester, and completely wild. No one has ever actually seen her crack a textbook, but pretty much everyone has seen her show up at school on the back of a Harley-Davidson, her hands wrapped around an authentic, very scary-looking biker named Todd, who works at the Harley shop in Rocky Mount and attends Renaissance fairs in his spare time, which is where Emma met him last fall.

It’s the Renaissance fair detail that kills me. Emma is Harvard smart, cute, and has a sarcastic remark for every occasion. Girls like her don’t do Renaissance fairs. But then Emma doesn’t do anything girls like her are supposed to do. In fact, aside from making stellar grades, she mostly does the exact opposite.

Joking about choosing Emma as our project topic led us to come up with a list of bad girls of American history: Lizzie Borden, Bonnie of Bonnie and Clyde, Zelda Fitzgerald, Ma Barker, Madonna—

“And Emma Goldman,” Sarah added, as though it were obvious. She likes to do that, throw out names of people or places that no one else has ever heard of and make it sound like common knowledge.

“Who’s Emma Goldman?” I asked. I was years past pretending like I knew all of Sarah’s little-known facts and figures when I actually didn’t. I’d been burned too many times acting like I was as well informed as Sarah-pedia.

Sarah leaned back in her seat, an old-fashioned heavy desk chair on wheels. “Emma Goldman was your basic proto-feminist, radical socialist freethinker. She’s who Emma was named after.”

“Your parents named Emma after a radical socialist freethinker?”

“Well, actually, my parents named Emma after my grandmother,” Sarah admitted. “My grandmother was the one who was named after Emma Goldman.”

“So how’d your dad end up such a total Republican?”

Sarah grimaced. “Bad seed. Every family’s got one.”

We discussed the possibility of doing our project on Emma Goldman, but Sarah was afraid it might get her grounded. Her parents were well aware of Emma Goldman’s thoughts on free love, and it could be safely assumed the Lymans didn’t share them. So that left us . . . nowhere.

“But all kidding aside,” I said after a few minutes of both of us looking glumly around the room as if our project topic would suddenly pop out of Sarah’s overstuffed closet along with her tennis racket and the purple platform sandals she’d found last summer at One More Time, our favorite thrift shop. “Wouldn’t it be cool if we actually could do Emma? I mean Emma, your sister.”

Sarah nodded. “Or at least someone who’s interesting, but not everybody knows about. Somebody who has a story that needs to be told, somebody whose story has been kept a secret for a long time—”

Sarah was starting to ramp up the rhetoric, which had been happening with alarming frequency since her decision to enter international politics. I quickly cut her off. “Yeah, maybe someone local. Like that woman who started the community garden over near the homeless shelter.”

“Yeah, okay, maybe,” Sarah said in a super-supportive tone that meant no way was she doing the community gardening lady, but she was willing to humor me until she figured something else out. “Well, this is a good start. Why don’t we each come up with a list and go over it on Monday in class, discuss the pros and cons of our ideas, and see what’s going to work best in the long run?”

Sarah lives and dies by the pro/con list. Every major decision she’s made in her life—whether to play flute or trumpet in band, whether to accept Clark Merritt’s invitation to the eighth-grade dance, whether to buy a bikini or a one-piece—has been made by considering the pros (flutes are lighter and involve less spit) and the cons (going to the dance with Clark Merritt could quite possibly mark her as a dweeb forever) of a situation. Once the pros and cons are added and subtracted and a decision is reached, Sarah never looks back.

The bus passes what I’ve come to think of as the “one mile away from school, and it’s time to panic” mark—an oak tree split in half by lightning that I swear looks like an old man standing with his arms wide open like he’s asking, “What? What did I do that was so wrong?” I open my notebook and look over my uninspired list. Community garden lady. Jennifer Phillips, a reporter my mom used to work with, who uncovered a major nursing-home scandal three years ago and won a ton of journalism prizes for it. Marie Murray, a professor in my dad’s department who teaches blind kids to play violin.

I lean my head back and close my eyes, which is what I usually do when we hit the dreaded one-mile mark. By this time, the bus has filled up with competing scents—serious applications of spicy aftershaves and citrusy body mists, the minty smell of toothpaste, wintergreen gum, Altoids, the slight whiff of a recently smoked joint, and the unfortunate odor of gym shoes long past their prime, all mixed up with lung-crushing exhaust fumes (but thankfully no goat poop)—and I feel sort of sick, a feeling that will most likely stay with me for the rest of the day.

I wish I could come up with a great project topic, if only to impress the twelve girls and one guy who take Great Girls and Women of American History. Just once this year, I want someone to look at me and think, Huh, she seems kind of neat instead of Huh, I wonder why she smells like manure. Just once I want someone to think, What a nice, normal human being with totally good ideas. Just one single time I want someone to think, Hey, that Janie Gorman’s pretty interesting.

Because I am, you know. And not just because I talk to goats.