All Adults Here(31)
August had told her that his stop was before hers on the bus, and that he’d probably be on it, depending on his parents. Cecelia was trying hard to play down her attachment to the idea of their being friends. He might not even be on the bus, she kept telling herself, and if he wasn’t, she’d be okay, she’d just choose an empty seat, or sit next to a girl who smiled, literally any girl who smiled. The girl didn’t even need to offer teeth, just lips in the shape of a shallow crescent. It didn’t mean anything. It was just a bus ride.
Her old school didn’t start for another week, and Cecelia was keeping abreast of her former friends’ lives on Snapchat and Instagram. There were the Finstas and the Rinstas—the fake and the real, the accounts that your parents could see, where every kid posted things about school and new haircuts and cute dogs on the street, and the accounts where you could see more bare skin and authentic teen misery. Katherine had blocked her on both, but some of the peripheral friends in their group hadn’t, and so Cecelia could catch glimpses of what was going on in her old life. Sonya had cut her hair and dyed it pink. Maddy had been posting more pouty selfies than usual, which probably meant that she’d broken up with her boyfriend, a friendly toucher who offered to give everyone back rubs in the hallway but then always put his hands just a half-inch too close to your boobs. Cecelia wanted to comment but was afraid that Katherine would respond and then a hole in the earth would open up and Cecelia would have to jump in. She already felt bad enough about the whole thing, sort of, even though she knew what she’d done (tell her parents, tell Katherine’s parents, tell their teacher) was the objective Right Thing to Do. Sometimes doing the right thing sucked.
Gammy had agreed to wait inside the house, and not watch her get on the bus, but Cecelia saw her face in the window, though Astrid had quickly disappeared behind the curtain. The bus had clearly been serviced since the accident—it had a gleaming new paint job, bright yellow with black letters so glossy they looked wet. The door folded open, revealing a skinny woman with pale skin and hair dyed as dark and wet as the black painted letters. She looked nervous, which Cecelia could understand. It probably wasn’t easy to step into a job recently vacated by a vehicular manslaughter, even if it meant the bar for surpassing the previous standard was rock bottom.
“All aboard,” she said.
“It’s my first day,” Cecelia said.
“Me too,” the driver said, her face screwing into a facsimile of a smile. Could she sit there, right next to the driver? Could she operate the shifter knob, the way every kid at a train museum gets a turn to be the conductor?
Cecelia ran up the steps as lightly as possible, trying to project an air of easy self-confidence. This was the plan: pretend to be the person you’d like to be. No one knew any better, and so Cecelia could be confident and cool if she said she was. It wasn’t that she wanted to lie, or to be fake—she didn’t want to do either of those things. Cecelia just knew how things worked and knew that projecting confidence was her only hope for survival, the way some harmless snakes had almost identical markings to very deadly ones. The bus was about half full, and she immediately felt every eyeball on her. Cecelia quickly scanned the rows—scowls, to a person. The girls looked her up and down, inspecting her outfit’s every detail, the boys inspected her face and body with the same x-ray vision, and Cecelia felt the weight of every stare—until she saw August waving in the back.
“Oh, thank god,” she said, when she’d finally reached his row. The cool exterior she’d been holding in place melted into a genuinely relieved puddle.
“Yes, well, welcome to hell. It’s lovely here, isn’t it?” He handed her a muffin. “My dad baked.”
Cecelia slung her backpack around her body and collapsed onto the bench seat next to him. “My parents don’t bake. For a while, they were into making their own almond milk, and then their own sourdough bread, using this space alien they kept in the fridge, but not normal baking, like with butter and sugar.”
“That’s too bad,” August said. “Butter and sugar are two objectively good things in the world. Maybe your parents just don’t like carbohydrates.”
“Or thoughtfulness,” Cecelia said, taking a bite. The muffin was still warm. “If my grandmother loses it, I’m moving in with you.”
“I always wanted a sister,” August said.
“Me too,” Cecelia said, and took another bite. “Do you ever feel your parents forget that they’re your parents and not just, like, your buddies? Mine are major buddies. Not so great on the discipline. Not that I want discipline, just . . .”
“Rules. I get it.” August nodded.
The bus bounced over a bump in the road, sending Cecelia and August an inch into the air. They rounded a corner and slowed to a stop. A clump of long-haired girls got on, an optical illusion of homogeny. It took Cecelia a few moments to realize it wasn’t three copies of the same girl, but three different girls in identical clothing, down to the holes in the knees of their jeans and the visible belly buttons poking out from beneath their cropped tank tops, with identical expressions of boredom on their dour faces.
“Are they sisters?” Cecelia asked, pointing with her chin.
“No, they wish. Just spiritually. And by that I mean, they have given their souls to their same succubus.”
The girls piled into a row near the front of the bus, the only empty seat left, two on the seat and the third on their lap like a baby doll.