I hadn’t had a vacation for three years. This one was not exactly a planned one. On a sunny Monday morning I went to work at the ad agency I had been working at. Shortly after arriving, our departmental supervisor gathered all of us together and ten minutes later everyone in the company was packing their belongings and thinking about updating their resumes.
I had heard about the Green Tortoise bus service that takes people all over the country for almost no money. Although I could easily afford to fly, I decided that it would be a new and different experince to bus across the US from California to New York. I signed up and on Friday morning boarded the bus which was heading for New York. I brought with me a backpack, a sleeping bag and little else.
I guess that I should have investigated the Tortoise a little more before signing on so The bus appeared to be really old; it probably had left the service of Greyhound twenty five years ago. I was surprised to find that all of the seats had been removed from the bus and the entire floor of the bus was covered with mattresses. There were perhaps twenty people ranging in age from eighteen to fifty. All were sitting on the mattresses and had spread their sleeping bags out in order to claim a sleeping space once the trip began.
I went to the back of the bus, which was the only available space left, spread out my bag and lay down in order to catch some z’s. A few minutes later I heard a whimpering sound coming from behind me. I looked up and saw a girl, who appeared to be about eighteen. I noticed shw was crying and asked her whether she was ok. She told me that she was going to New York to spend the summer with her aunt. Her mother had dropped her off in front of the bus station and then drove around to look for parking. After about fifteen minutes mama drove by, honked, told her that it was rush hour and tow away was in force. She told her to get on the bus and said that her aunt would meet her at the bus station when it arrived on the east coast.
Apparently she had to go to the bathroom before boarding the bus. She left her bag on the platform near the bus and went to the rest room. When she returned she found that her luggage had been stolen. It contained her money, a change of clothes, a sleeping bag, and in fact everything she had brought with her. The only thing that she had was her bus ticket which was in the pocket of her jeans. Since she had no way to contact her mom who was driving back to their home three hundred miles to the north, she decided to get on the bus and hope that the trip went well.
She told me her name was Lacy, She asked if I would see that she arrive safely and also if I would be willing to lend her enough money for the trip and told me that her aunt would pay me back when she arrived in New York.
The trip began and about an hour later it began to get dark outside. I looked at Lacy and said that you are going to freeze to death sitting out there. I unzipped the sleeping bag, spread it out on the mattress and asked her if she wantd to get into the bag and go to sleep. She slid into the bag, moved to my left, and before I knew it I was sleeping.
I was not really sure how much time had elapsed when I felt a hand on my shoulder shaking me out of a deep sleep. “Mister,” she said, “ the bus has stopped for a dinner break. I had to clear up something immediately, I told her my name, Todd, and that only my dad was called Mr., so I was to be Todd. She smiled, and for the first time I noticed that she was a very pretty girl, at least eighteen but not more than twenty. Like all young women her age she was dressed in a pair of Jeans and a pull on shirt which exposed about six inches of midriff and a cute belly button. She had overly large breasts which looked as though they belonged on a girl much older than she. Her hair was inky black and her eyes blue. She obviously had evaded the curse of acne that seems to plague most kids her age. Her skin was flawless.
I noticed that she had a soft down of short black hair on her forearms, (a real turn on for me) and the entire picture was one of a knockout girl/woman. As we exited the bus I noticed that she shivered at the evening cold and I told her to wait a moment. I went back into the bus and brought out my ‘Members Only’ and I told her to put it on. “Wow”, she said, “this is a really cool jacket”. I guess that anything that kids like is ‘cool’.
At dinner she told me about herself. As I suspected she was eighteen, in fact she had just had her eighteenth birthday which was why she was going to see her aunt in New York. Her dad had died five years ago and she and her mother lived together in a small town in Oregon. She said that his was the first time she had ever been to California and that she hadn’t been able to fall asleep since she was so thoroughly angry at herself for being stupid and leaving her stuff on the bus platform so that it could be stolen. I told her that today was the day that she went to college on being naïve and she agreed, and we laughed about it.