Chapter eight:

 

 

I want to run after the cab, but I know I won’t catch up to it.

I want to hail my own cab, but I don’t have enough money. Damn me for always bringing the correct change for the fucking bus.

Each moment that passes, she moves further and further away from me, a bigger divide splitting us up once more.

She didn’t see me—of course she didn’t.

I’m invisible. I am a ghost.

Always.

I’m her ghost, and she is mine.

I’m forgotten and discarded, and she is very much alive.

I feel sick. My skin is slimy and wet from the rain, my clothes sticking to me like a second skin that I want to peel off.

My head hurts. I can’t think. It’s too much.

Carrie.

My Carrie.

Golden hair and pretty lips. Smiles she doesn’t think I see, but I do, I did, I always will. Her smiles are burned on my eyelids, burned into my head.

Carrie.

Carrie.

Carrie.

My bus pulls up and I stand, gasping breath burning in my lungs. I let out my air at the same time the bus’s doors open. They make a whooshing sound, and I panic for a split second, thinking I made that sound.

“You getting on, kid?” the driver says. “I gotta get goin’ if not.”

I look up into the light of the bus, from my place in the dark, and I nod.

The cab has gone and it’s taken Carrie with it.

But she was here!

My Carrie was here!

But she’s gone now.

Again.

She’s always going when I need her to stay.

When I need her the most.

I climb the steps, my hesitation betraying me, but there’s no point standing around in the rain all night because she isn’t here now.

My skin feels alive, my mind in a frenzy. Everything is fucked up inside me. I climb the bus’s steps, noting their slipperiness due to the wet weather, and I fumble in my pocket for my money to pay the driver.

My body feels strange, like I’m in a dream, like I’m in a daze. My limbs aren’t attached, they move on their own. I’m not controlling them. I’m floating above everything, looking down. And the whole time my mind screams for her.

Carrie.

Carrie.

Carrie.

Maybe I’m still at the bus stop, and Carrie has seen me. Maybe she’s come over to hug me, and tell me how much she has missed me. She’ll throw her hands around me and hug me, and kiss me, and everything will be okay again.

Because she is here.

And we’re together again.

And this time I’ll never let her go.

Not ever.

“Onwards and onwards,” he says as I put my money down.

And just like that I want to scream at him to shut up. To tell him that it’s a stupid thing to say. I think it every time he says it, every night he says it, but tonight I think I might actually say it to him. The words are lodged in my throat, and my palms are itching.

Pitter patter, pitter patter, pitter patter…

The rain is relentless, and I turn around and see the doors are still open.

“Can’t move until you sit, son,” the driver says, and I can see he’s getting irritated with me now.

“Sorry,” I reply, my voice not quite my own.

I sound drunk, my words slurred. I’m drunk on Carrie. I’m drunk on memories of the Carrie I once knew and the one I just saw. She’s both the same and not.

I take small steps toward the seats, the words I want to say to him still in my throat, on my tongue, wanting to spew from my lips. “Excuse me,” I say to an elderly man who’s resting his shopping bag on the seat I need to sit in.

The bus is full of watchful people, all wanting to get home. All tired from work. None of them alive like I am right now.

Because that’s how I feel.

Alive! I’m fucking alive for the first time in too many years.

The old guy looks at me with a frown and tuts, as if I’m the asshole blocking the only seat here. He picks up his bag and begins to move it, all the while shaking his head in irritation at me. And I want to shake my head at him. And tut at him. Maybe even ram my fist into his face and break that wrinkled old face of his.

But I’m not an asshole like him, so I don’t.

And I’m angry and frantic and excited, and fucking alive because…Carrie!

Carrie.

Carrie.

Carrie.

But I also feel like my insides might contort, pulling everything forcibly outside myself until I’m wearing my organs like a coat for all of the world to see. I’m a churning, yearning mass of self-destruction. I’m on fire with indecision.

I sit down, and he’s still tutting, and the driver has started whistling, and the rain is still coming down. And it’s too much. It’s too fucking much.

I stand back up and head to the front of the bus again, despite the fact that it’s moving now.

“Need you to sit down, please,” the driver says.

And at least he said please, I think.

“I need to get off,” I say, and I tug at the doors to get them open, but the bus is still moving so of course they won’t. “I want to get off.”

“Have to wait until the next stop then,” he replies. “Now sit down, son, please.”

“You don’t understand. I need to get off now. I saw someone. I need to find them. I’ve been looking for them. They’ve been looking for me.” I’m panicked now. Because what if she’s gone forever this time. What if that was my final glimpse of her…for real this time.

I’m angry and panicked.

And the driver must see the anger and panic in my face, because he looks angry too. “Son, you need to sit down right now, before I call the cops.”

And I know he means it. And even though I haven’t really done anything wrong, I don’t want him to call the cops. So I go back to my seat, and the fucking old man has put his bag back on the seat again.

“Can you move your bag?” I ask, and I don’t say please this time, because fuck him, that’s why.

And that’s bad of me, I know. But he can see what’s just been said, I think, so he should have moved his bag before I got here.

He mutters under his breath and moves his bag again. And I’m shocked that he could be so rude and I want to tell him so, but I don’t want the driver to be angry at me anymore, so I don’t say anything and I step past the guy because he wants the aisle seat, and I sit down, and then I turn away from him, and I think I’m breathing so hard I might pass out.

I’m shocked that the driver wouldn’t let me off.

I’m shocked at the prick next to me.

And I’m shocked that I just saw Carrie. After all these years.

I think of all the perhapses of today. And yes, I know that’s not a real word, but the realness of words doesn’t matter right now. All that matters is Carrie and the fact that she is here and she’s alive. All that matters is that I have found her when I thought she was lost to me forever.

I shake my head in wonder, thinking through my day one caption at a time, like a snapshot of my life, and how it’s all played out.

Perhaps if I hadn’t agreed to lock up for Charlie.

And perhaps if he’d won instead of lost.

And perhaps if I wouldn’t have stayed so late cleaning and I would have clocked out at five like everyone else.

And then, the biggest perhaps of all. The most important one, if you will.

Perhaps I wouldn’t have seen Carrie again if all the other perhapses hadn’t have ever happened.

I turn to look out the window, smudging a steamy square away so I can see out. The streets are dark, barring the lights on the sidewalk. The rain is still thundering down. But I smile, despite the gloom of it all.

I choose to see the good in today. In tonight. The happy perhaps of my day. The glass is half full, because Carrie is here.

I squeeze my eyes closed and I think of her face. The soft curve of her jawline. The quirk of her smile as she’d turned to him, Mister Fancy Asshole with his too-good-to-get-wet hairstyle and his expensive suit.

Her hair was like I remembered: golden. I wonder if she’ll let me touch it, now that we’re fully grown and her head lice are gone. I bet her hair feels like silk, like I always imagined it would.

It will run through my hands like dry sand.

Like water.

Like air passing over my fingers.

I wonder how much different her body will be. She was a girl back then—a young woman, she had said. But she wasn’t fully grown. Her breasts were small and pert, pink rosebuds blushing at the tip of each peak. Her hips not fully developed, even at sixteen. The curve of her ass fitted neatly into the palm of my hand.

I wonder if it still will.

My body tingles with hope and anticipation. With delirious excitement at seeing her again. At the perhaps of touching her once again.

I think of how happy she’ll be to see me again. Despite the fact that she ran away and hid herself.

From me?

I still wonder.

Did she run from me?

Or did she run from the memories?