CHAPTER 03 - AVERY
The bus ride was slow, and it barely felt like we were making progress. Occasionally I’d pull out my phone to check the map and see how much further we had to go, but even when I got service up in the winding hills, I couldn’t really get a sense that we were actually getting anywhere.
The snow was coming down harder now, and I could hear distant thunder — it was too grey out to see any arcs of lightning. The inside of the bus had heated up almost immediately, and several times the driver had asked if I was warm enough. We’d made one stop along the way, for snacks, and I’d taken the opportunity to get my bag back from the luggage compartment. I didn’t really need anything from it, I just liked having it close to me. The driver seemed to understand.
I spent most of the early part of the trip with my forehead pressed against the window, looking out at the murkiness and glad that I was safe and warm in the bus. I tried pulling out my phone to read, but the rocking back and forth and the changing speeds made my head hurt after a few minutes, so back to the window it was.
It was amazing to me how the landscape changed when you gave it a fresh coat of white paint. What had been distinct colors all merged into various shades of grey, indistinct shapes that all kinda meshed together.
It was beautiful in a different way, even if it was a little tough to enjoy as a storm bore down on us. It was something I wished I could share with someone, but the driver was off in his own world.
Someone closer to my own age, I meant. I looked around the bus for the hundredth time, and still there was no one else in any of the other seats — as if by looking one more time I could conjure up someone to talk to, someone to look out the window with.
“Everything’s gonna be OK,” I heard the driver’s voice from the front of the bus. I looked forward and saw his smiling face in the mirror. “Looks like the storm’s gonna get worse, but we’re gonna push on. You all good?”
“Yup,” I smiled back, giving a thumbs up. “All good back here. Holding it together.”
“Great. Warm enough still?”
“Still warm enough.”
“Good to hear. We’re getting to the hills soon. It’s a bit of a windy trip even on a regular day, but this time it’ll be a little rougher. If you, uh, need a bag to, uh…” He trailed off and then held up a small brown paper bag. “I got them right up here if you need one. No shame in it, I’ve used them before myself.”
“Thanks,” I said, weakly, and waved back, settling back against the rough cushion of my seat.
There was a sense of dread that felt like it was pooling all around me, and only some of it was coming from the storm raging outside. I knew that every mile we drove got us closer to Meridian, which I was looking forward to, but I also knew that it got me closer to my family.
Any strength and resolve I’d had about confronting them while I was still at school had started to evaporate as we got closer and closer to home, and I could already tell that by the time I got there I’d be wavering. Hopefully not enough for them to be able to influence whether I came back to school for my last semester, but I couldn’t be sure.
Of course they had the right intentions for their daughter, but it was the way they expressed those intentions that drove me up the wall. Sure, they wanted me to be, above all else, safe, and happy ran a distant second to that. On a parental level I could totally understand that, especially after what had happened to Naomi.
But this settling down and getting married thing…I mean, really? I was just about to turn 23, who got married at 23 in 2017? Almost Unheard of!
I’d needed my space, needed to get out of there. Seeing my parents, knowing their history together, it was all just too much. I understood that back in their day, it made sense for high school sweethearts to get married right after graduating and begin their lives together, but that just didn’t happen now, at least not nearly as often as it used to.
We’d moved on from that. Sometimes people never got married! I laughed, remembering the looks of shock and horror on my parents’ faces when I’d said that to them. The thought of not getting married! Gasp!
“What about children, Avery? What about settling down and having children?” My mother fumed. “You can’t have children without getting married!”
“First off, who says I even want to have children? I’m 19!” Their jaws had already hit the floor by the time I closed my mouth.
My mother gasped, trying to form the words, but no sound came out. “I had your sister when I was 22, young lady.”
“And that made sense for you at the time. Things have changed, Mom. People don’t settle down that quickly anymore. Some do, of course, but it’s not expected like it was before.”
She sat back and processed this, and I could tell she decided to file that conversation away for another day and turn to another angle. “But why do you want to go to college?”
I looked at her like she’d sprouted another head. “Because that’s what you do after high school, Mom! You get a job or join the military or travel, but mainly people go to college! That’s how they get ready for a career!”
“I just don’t really see the purpose in all that. I mean, once you get married you won’t need to…”
I laughed. “It all comes around to that, doesn’t it? ‘Once I get married.’ It’s the same thing over and over around here.” I leaned in. “Look, Mom, Naomi’s gone. She’s gone and she’s not coming back. I know you want to keep me safe, but keeping me here and not letting me experience things for myself isn’t the way to do it, OK?”
Right around then was when my mother threw up her hands and got up from the table. My father tried to ‘talk some sense’ into me, but clearly, it hadn’t worked. I left the house for New Hampshire State University a couple weeks later, and our relationship was never the same.
They resented me for not letting them ‘take care’ of me, and I resented them for trying to pigeonhole me into their outdated sense of how girls should live their lives. We weren’t about to see eye to eye on it any time soon.
Which made this trip all the more baffling to me now that I had had some time to think about it a little more, turn it over in my head. In the moment, back in Professor Stevens’ office, this had seemed like a good idea, but now the harsh light of the storm had changed that.
I needed to sit them down and explain to them that I was not Naomi, and that I was going to live my life the way I wanted to. I was so close to finishing school, and after that a whole realm of doors would open up for me. These days getting a bachelor’s degree was pretty much the minimum required to start a professional career, and I was even thinking about grad school.
Of course I’d like it if there was a guy in my life, but that wasn’t the goal. I was the goal — finding what I want, building a life for myself. And while I had dated around in school, none of it had stuck.
I was OK with that — it would have been a little scary to fall deeply and madly in love at such a young age — like I would never be sure if what I was feeling was real or just a complex mix of hormones and freedom getting together for the first time.
I just couldn’t imagine how something like love could work between people my age. It’s like…weren’t we just a little too young and immature for all that? Feelings changed, life changed, people came in and out of our lives so fast…how was anyone supposed to build a connection with someone if whatever you had could just disappear, when someone didn’t come home one night?
There was no way I could be sure of any of that right now. Luckily, I didn’t have to make decisions like that any time soon — people waited till their 30s to get married these days!
I couldn’t even imagine what being in my 30s would look like.
To be fair, considering all I could see around me was the dimly light interior of a bus and the storm billowing outside around me, my powers of imagination weren’t exactly getting much help right now.
Even so, I had plenty of time, and I wasn’t in any kind of rush. I had to make that clear to my parents, but at the same time, try and rebuild some kind of connection to them beyond a hollow and obligatory phone call or email every now or then. As much as we didn’t get long, I missed them deeply. It felt hollow, not having a link to my own family, or what was left of it.
The bus wrenched around a corner just then, shaking me out of my thoughts and forcing me to sit up in my seat instead of banging my head on the window. The driver waved from the front. “Sorry about that, took that turn a little too fast. I’ll be more careful. Don’t know the old lady’s strength!” He chuckled.
I nodded and pulled my jacket tighter around me.
Suddenly it felt even colder than the outside in here.