BUS STORY # 468 (There’s Ladies And There’s Maybe’s)

Cloud Strife, from Final Fantasy VII; downloaded from Giant Bomb

The doors have just shut, and the bus starts pulling away from the stop when we catch sight of the girl running past our windows toward the front door. Several of us call out to the driver who starts to stop, then realizes he’s out into the intersection. He reaccelerates and there is a kind of collective groan. She was so close!

But once he clears the intersection, he pulls over to the curb and waits. We wait till she crosses the street and runs to the door. She trips over a raised concrete block in the sidewalk, but she stays upright and moving.

Once inside, we can see her thanking the driver, then paying her fare. When she walks down the aisle, it’s as if she senses we were pulling for her. Or maybe the driver told her we’d raised the alarm for her. In any case, she does the figurative wiping of the sweat from her brow: “That was close!”

When I reach my stop, I go forward rather than exit through the rear door. I thank the driver for waiting for the girl. He starts chuckling, then says, “It wasn’t anything.” I head out the door.

As luck would have it, I catch the same driver on the return trip. He laughs when he sees me and says, “Hello, again.” After I swipe my card, he says, “You know that girl that almost missed the bus?”

Sure I do.

“Well, she wasn’t a girl.”

“You’re kidding.”

He says he thought it was a girl, too, until “she” stayed by the till after paying the fare to thank him. “It was obvious then,” he said.

He chuckles. It’s a good guy’s chuckle.