The Chronicles of a Public Bus (part 3.16)

Tuesday, 7:00, route 31

As she struggles to pry apart the first two pages of the newspaper, Divinity lets her head hang, neck limp and eyes drooping. Her paper crinkles, and the middle pages peel apart and droop towards the ground, but she cannot turn to the second page.

“Gosh dang it,” Divinity mutters. “One thing goes wrong in the morning, and my whole day is thrown off. It’s not even Monday.”

“What went wrong?” Marie asks. A tourism pamphlet sits forgotten in her hands, and she angles her knees to better face Divinity in the seat.

With a crackle, Divinity lowers her newspaper. “I don’t even know. I woke up early to snoop, because my floor is now ghost central for the whole state, basically, and when I called my friends to update them, I just…”

“You just?”

“I don’t know. It was like I could see myself from outside of my body or something. It was freaky.” Unsure of what to do with herself, Divinity smooths out the newspaper in her lap. Then a sheepish smile bubbles up through her frustration, and she glances at Marie. “First time I’ve ever been caught snooping, too. What a day.”

Marie folds the pamphlet in her hands and beams. “I suppose I can brag that I have never been caught snooping.”

“But here’s the kicker: have you ever snooped before?”

Under the bus’s din, Marie’s quiet, wind-chime laugh is hardly audible, but her rosy cheeks lift, and her blonde curls bounce with her giggles. “Only once or twice, and certainly not to the same extent that you do.”

Crossing her arms, Divinity waggles her eyebrows, teasing. She lifts her newspaper up again and looks at it with fake interest. “So who is the better spy? The girl who gets out more and has only been caught once, or the girl who hardly spies at all?”

“That is an excellent question, but I do not think I am ready to think about it in English right now. Maybe we could have our debate in German.”

Divinity snorts. “No way. You’d kick my butt.” She licks her thumb and finally turns to the second page of her newspaper, still ignoring the black ink on the page. “Though I remember we’ve both taken some French. Maybe we could try that instead.”

“I am not about to believe I could win a debate against you in any language but German. You probably read the dictionaries and memorize every word before you even start taking the class.”

“That’s not- oh, wait.”

Though Marie does not, by nature, smirk, Divinity is sure that Marie’s knowing smile and cool, lifted eyebrows are meant to give a similar effect. Rolling her eyes, Divinity shakes out her paper and starts skimming over the bolded headlines until she finds something interesting. An article about the ghost bonanza at the apartments sits in the top left, but she skips over it, and a few articles detail new street names and businesses crisscrossing the old Talisman estate. Then, in the bottom right is a tiny piece about redistribution of city funds.

“Centennial cancelled,” Divinity reads, “public to decide on use of event money.” She lifts her head and finds Marie listening, head tilted to show her puzzlement.

“What is this centennial about? It is difficult to believe Franklin City is only one-hundred years old.”

Divinity shrugs, and her grunt is drowned by a chorus of squeals from behind. “I think it was meant to celebrate going one-hundred years without any powerful creatures in the vicinity or something. Obviously, the streak is over, so we can’t brag about it anymore.”

“When was it scheduled for? Surely it doesn’t take very long to save money for a centennial.”

Someone behind Divinity shouts about a pop singer, and another someone yells about a basketball player. The voices are dirty, as if the speakers are chewing gum while talking.

“The city started putting away money two years ago,” Divinity says, placing a finger on her lips. “I mean, the event was supposed to be in three years, and when they had the bicentennial in sixty-nine, the city was in the red for a while. We’re probably trying to avoid that.” As the words drop from her lips, she feels a tugging in her brain, like there is some important trivia she has forgotten to mention.

Then the shivering, ghostly sensation of someone touching her hair kills the thought, and Divinity attempts to whip around and lecture some middle school kids about appendage-awareness. However, a sharp tug on her scalp pulls her back, and she winces.

“Is something wrong?” Marie asks.

“My hair,” Divinity grumbles. “It’s stuck on something.”

Reaching an arm over the seat back, Marie strains her neck to see past Divinity’s massive black curls. “Oh dear. I think your hair has been caught on a bit of chewing gum.”

Divinity gags. “Oh gross! How bad is it?” She tries to turn the other way and look, but her squirming only hurts more.

“Very bad. Do you want me to cut it out or try peeling the gum out first?”

Groaning, Divinity slumps backwards and rests her head on the back of the seat. She closes her eyes and cringes. She could shout for someone with peanut butter, but the bus’s general commotion would only cover up her plea. No good option exists in this case.

“Divinity,” Marie says, a worried hand placed over her mouth. “You should not have leaned back like that.”

“What do you mean?” Divinity tries to lift up her head and stops. Her poor, poor scalp. She mumbles a curse word. “I think, Marie,” she says, watching the other girl hunt for a pair of scissors in her messenger bag, “that this day is only going to get worse.”