Tuesday, 6:00, route 31
When Drake sees Willow with wavy twin ponytails instead of her usual prim, straight style, he can’t help but comment. Of course, Willow only cringes and touches her hair, self-consciousness oozing through her heavy coat.
“Ma-ma made me braid it last night,” she mumbles, sliding into a seat, “and I was texting Divinity and forgot to take the ties out.”
Drake eases into the cushion next to her and offers a smile. “It doesn’t look that bad. You should try new hairstyles more often.” He pulls his backpack onto his lap and fiddles with the straps while he waits for a response. On his other side, he can hear an electric thrum. Someone’s music is playing too loud for their headphones.
“That takes effort,” Willow replies, sticking out her lower lip, almost in a pout. Her backpack she squeezes closer to her chest, and she leans her head against the window, clearly avoiding conversation. Just as her head connects with the cold glass, she jumps in her seat and scrambles to dig through her coat pockets. A fuzzy piano sonata echoes in the space between her and Drake, and she flushes.
Willow tugs her phone from her pocket and shivers when she looks at the screen. With only the dim blue bus lights for ambient lighting, her face is cast into stark shadows by the phone screen, and her furrowed brow makes a line of grey on her forehead. She taps something and presses the phone against her ear. “Divinity?” she tries. “What are you doing? You usually aren’t even up yet.”
Garbled cackling buzzes from the speakers, and Divinity’s voice pumps out a stream of excitement.
“Um, okay then,” Willow says. “Let me just get out my earbuds.” She offers Drake her phone, slow with hesitation, and when he takes it, she pounces on her backpack’s zippers.
“Hey Divinity. What’s up?”
“You know,” Divinity replies, “just a bit of sleuthing.”
Oh dear. Drake takes a second to think of a response, but Divinity continues just as he inhales.
“What about you? Told the police about your suspicions yet?”
Drake gags and sends frantic glances around the darkened bus to make sure no one is glaring at him for his disruption. “Err, no.” Next to him, Willow is tugging a black cord from the bottomless pit of her backpack, frowning at the knots and kinks in the wire. She isn’t paying attention, and it seems no one else on the bus is either, but Drake lowers his voice nonetheless. “After Martin’s text about the leopard print ghost, I figured I should wait.”
“Funny. That ghost is actually the reason I called.”
No reaction seems appropriate, so Drake allows a pause to stretch out. When he slides his gaze towards Willow, she is fumbling to pick apart a knot in her earbuds, fingers made clumsy by the lingering cold.
“Drake?” Divinity says. “Are you still there, or are you admiring Willow’s curly hair? Oh, hey that rhymed.”
Blushing, Drake stares at the clock above the driver’s seat. “How did you know about her hair?”
“Do you not remember her doing the same braid-and-forget routine in elementary school?” The phone conveys Divinity’s subsequent dramatic sigh as a burst of fuzz. “For someone who’s desperately in-
Somehow, Willow chooses this auspicious moment to interrupt, and Drake has the perfect excuse to prevent Divinity from finishing that sentence.
“Sorry, Divinity,” Drake says. His voice is too happy. “Willow wants the phone back now.” He’s fairly sure Divinity mutters one of her curse word replacements, but already, Willow is plugging her earbuds into the headphone jack and groping around the seat, searching for the earpieces. She finds one and holds it out in Drake’s direction, eyes straining to find the other half.
It takes her a few seconds, but soon enough, she and Drake are situated with one earbud apiece wedged into their ears and their mouths angled towards her phone.
“We’re all set up now, Divinity,” Willow whispers.
“Good! Took you long enough. Now then, I’m sure you both know I’m sleuthing.”
Drake and Willow both murmur their disappointed affirmations.
“But worry not,” Divinity says, “because I’m actually still in the hallway and haven’t trespassed or anything. Yet.”
“Are you implying that you plan to do something illegal?” Drake asks.
Divinity pauses in what can only be an eye roll. “What kind of girl do you take me for? I’m not that ambitious. But anyways, I’m right outside the leopard print ghost’s old apartment. She was living here for a week before she suddenly decided to move out, but now she’s dead.”
“I feel like I’ve seen her at some point,” Willow says. She fiddles with one of her ponytails, pulling the strands of hair as though they might straighten faster.
“That’s probably because we did. Last Monday, there was some grumpy blonde woman in a leopard print coat on the bus, and I cracked a few jokes about her. Don’t you remember?”
Willow doesn’t have a chance to respond. Instead Divinity hisses a string of oh-my-gods into the phone, and a huge thwack bursts through the earbuds. “Sorry, sorry,” she breathes a moment later. “I dropped my phone. Weirdest thing just--whoa.”
“Divinity?” Willow asks. “Divinity, are you okay?”
For a moment, there is only silence on the line. Then, harsh, tinny laughter that is definitely not Divinity’s, echoes from the phone.
“Finally!” Not-Divinity shouts. The voice is warped and far away. “I’ve gotten what I came here for.”
Divinity gasps. “Oh my freaking gosh,” she whispers. Her words are fast, furious, frantic. “I need a picture of this. Drake, we’re calling the police at lunch today, and I think whatever that was was my cue to leave.” A strange whooshing whirls into the background. “Okay, yeah, I’m leaving.”
“Wait, what?” Drake says. “Are you at least going to tell us what-
“I’m not sticking around for another out-of-body experience! Buh-bye!”
The call ends with a thick click, leaving Willow and Drake with their eyes bugged out and their hearts leaping in terror. With a shaking hand, Willow pulls her earbud out and presses the home button on her phone. “That was surreal.”
“Yes,” Drake agrees. “Very… surreal. I’m not really sure what happened there.”
Willow gulps. “I just wish she hadn't hung up before we knew she was safe.”
Points:
Time spent:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
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125,029 Literary Works • 672,781 Reviews
Hey there! I'm back again for another Review Day, crawling slowly through your story.
So wow! I really like this over-the-phone method of conveying what's going on with Divinity and keeping it intense and stuff. The dialogue is good enough and the description of what they're hearing is good enough that even though Willow and Drake aren't in any danger, it's still a very tense scene.
So that's who the leopard-print lady has turned out to be! I figured you were probably going to have her be important at some point. That's something you're pretty good at, weaving in everything before it actually becomes plot-relevant.
Maybe I'm just missing/forgetting something, but I'm actually not quite sure where Divinity actually is when this happens. All you really say is that she's in the hallway, but I'm not sure what form of hallway she's in.
So, interruptions are supposed to, well, interrupt. They should be abrupt and they feel like they happen fast, but since you had an entire paragraph between the end of Divinity's dialogue and the start of Drake interrupting her, it just felt a bit drawn-out and read weirdly. Did Willow actually say something, or did she just nudge him to interrupt?
The only other major point of critique I have is this: why did Divinity hang up? Sure, she wanted to get out of there, but it's perfectly possible to walk and talk with a phone, and I didn't get the impression that she needed to be that quiet, since she was talking to them before. Without a reason, it kind of makes the cliffhanger feel a little bit contrived, since there's no explicit reason why she has to hang up, and I feel like she could have given them a bit more of an explanation as to what happened.
That's pretty much all I've got for you! As usual, the dialogue was really good and overall it read very smoothly. Keep it up!
Staying on the phone... that's an excellent point. I think I'm going to change one of Drake's lines to work that in.
Thanks for sticking with me! Happy Review Day!
Hello again!
Starting the sentence with 'Her backpack' is a little awkward as I'm expecting you to say her back pack is open or her backpack is on her lap but it's odd to have the syntax flipped and for it to be her backpack she squeezes. I think it would flow better as She squeezes her backpack - it's what people are used to and unless the sentence sounds cooler the other way, it's generally better to stick to what people will be able to read really easily.Specifics
1.
Annnd that's all I have on the specific comments - another very fluid chapter. I was confused as to what happened at the end too but since Drake and Divinity share in my confusion, it doesn't really matter.
I like what you're doing with the setting but since they are always on a bus and you don't have as much to describe in terms of rooms, I think you need to turn up the description on objects and their surroundings just a little. Obviously there are other people on the buses and they'll sit in different seats each time and unless it's the same bus I'd imagine it's in various states of disrepair, though your title sort of suggests it might be the same bus? In which case, is there a seat they tend to avoid, are there people who we see in multiple chapters who make the same route as the characters previously? I expect you've covered some of these already like the lady in the leopard print who's now a ghost but having read two chapter back to back which have been very focused on just the smaller group of characters, I wonder if you don't need these cameos a little more frequently, even if it's just as a little padding at the start or end of a chapter.
Like, maybe when Drake looked around to see if he was bothering anyone, he could have seen someone frowning is disapproval or making a shushing noise and maybe it would be someone he recognised. I've not taken the bus to school for a long time and then I took a school bus so of course I started recognising people on it, though most weren't in my year/ classes, but even now when I'm commuting on the train to work, there are some people I have a vague familiarity with. I've talked to one lady a few times very briefly after getting off the train and when trying to cross this awful road between our offices - never anything seriously - but I'd seen her on the bus for months before that so it didn't really feel like talking to a stranger. There's other familiar faces as well, like the guy who gets on as my colleague and I get off and who tends to take our seat. Basically, it would build up more of a sense of there being an outside world and a little description of things seen out of the window from time to time might help as well.
Of course, you may be doing this every few chapters but I don't know. Perhaps I'll have to read the next one to find out
Before I do though, I think you've got another solid set of characters here and they're again distinguished very well.
All the best,
~Heather
Cameos would be pretty smart. I really should have thought of that. Also, I will try to describe more of the bus's interior. Hopefully that will flow better than describing what's outside the windows.
Also, I may not get around to replying to all of your reviews, because I'm in a car in a forest, but I promise I am reading everything and trying to remember it! Thank you a thousand times for reviewing so many chapters of this piece.
No worries, I'm glad the reviews are helpful and if you have any questions on any of them, feel free to ask! Whenever you're not in a forest is fine xD