The more I write these blogs, the more I feel the need to contextualize things through world-building. This one is mostly about my friend Wesley, but also about other things that will be important later. I hope you enjoy it.
Riding the bus was an experience that defined 9th grade.
The only other year that I spent on the bus was kindergarten, when I lived with my grandmother. Between then and the start of high school, I either lived too far from my school to be on any bus route or close enough to school to be within walking distance. In 9th grade, I lived ten miles from the school, which seemed like an incredible distance to me, but it was well within range of the West Ashley buses.
My stop was the first on the route, so the scheduled arrival time was 6 am. That meant that in order to make it to the bus stop in time, while still giving me enough time to get myself ready, I had to get up at 5 am. Realistically, I routinely wanted to be at the stop sign by 5:55. The bus driver was chronically late; however, the one time I made the mistake of walking out my front door at 5:59, the driver decided to be punctual. I had to sprint the quarter mile to my bus stop and then an extra half block to catch up with her– with my backpack on and my thermos sloshing hot liquid around in my hand– just to catch up with her.
When she stopped and let me on, she said, “The bus gets to the stop at 6.” –lesson learned.
So I got there at 5:55 every morning, hot coffee in hand, headphones in ears. I shared my stop with two other 9th graders in the AM, JJ and Freddie. JJ was in the Special Ed. program, so we didn’t really cross paths in school, but we made small talk at the bus stop. He mostly told me about his handmade confetti business.
One time, I asked him how he made the confetti, and he explained that it was just cut-up scrapbook/construction paper.
“Don’t get me wrong, cutting the paper up is the easy part. The hard part is choosing the exact right size ratio and color combination for each event,” he would muse.
Freddie was a sort of scene-emo-beast; he looked like a baby Marilyn Manson. He had long, stringy black hair. He wore all black every day. His resting expression was a scowl. He didn’t appear to be looking for friends, so I mostly let him be. All I knew about him was that he dated this cool girl from my health class, Emma. I only knew that because I’d seen her ride home with him a few times since the start of the year.
I felt like the middle ground between JJ and Freddie. Awkward and halfway emo.
The ride to school was an hour. For the first couple of weeks of school, I spent the hour alone, listening to my playlist, memorizing who got on at each stop, memorizing each person’s individual smell as it filled the space, and memorizing my songs. On the ride home, I mostly just did everything in my power to snag a solo seat, though that was often impossible.
Wesley and I knew each other, but for that first little while, we didn’t really go out of our way to interact, especially not in the morning. The inciting incident of our friendship happened on a morning in late August when the bus was especially late to pick everyone up. I was standing waiting with JJ. Freddie was nowhere to be seen. When the clock turned to 6:15, it was routine. When the clock turned to 6:30, it was mildly concerning. When the clock turned to 6:45, it was worrying. When the clock turned to 7:00, I stopped looking in the direction of the bus and back in the direction of my house, in the hopes of flagging down my dad on his way to work. When the clock passed 7:10 and I saw my dad’s car coming down the road, I flailed my arms like a crazy person. When he flew past me, I lost hope.
Not knowing what else to do, and feeling like a crazy person, I decided the best thing I could do was see if anyone else was still waiting. I took the shortcut around the neighborhood to Wesley’s stop. Lo and behold, he was waiting there with his friend Michelle, alongside a few other bored-looking high schoolers. Wesley and Michelle did not look bored; they appeared to be having the time of their lives. Michelle didn’t usually ride our bus; it was just a coincidence that she’d spent the night at his house the night before, and they were lucky enough to get all this extra hangout time waiting for the bus. They were enthralled in each other, but they seemed giddy to have me join them regardless.
The three of us speculated on what could have happened to the bus. We discussed the logistics of what we would do if it never came at all. We wondered if our absences would be excused. We discussed our common interests. Wesley and I both appreciated 90s sitcoms and Girly-pop boy YouTubers. I turned him on to the musical RENT. Wesley put his phone number in my phone under the name “Wessy-poo”.
By the time the bus did finally arrive (not even our bus, we had to share with the middle schoolers), Wesley was my new bus buddy, and Michelle was a sweet addition to the expanding network of girlfriends I was building.
Wesley started sitting next to me in the mornings after that. We were both watching the entirety of Friends on Netflix, so the morning proved to be a really valuable time for us to compare notes on what we had watched. In the afternoons, it was a coin toss between Sara and me, a 9th-grade girl who got off at my stop in the afternoon (and another one of Jannette’s best friends). Usually, I would still sit close to them so we could chit-chat, so long as I didn’t get too squished in next to an upper-classman.
One week, Wesley got it in his head that he wanted a vape. He said he wanted it “to do vape tricks”. I thought it was a dumb idea, because I did not think that nicotine usage was cool or practical— especially not in vape form (I may have thought it was marginally cooler if he’d decided to take up smoking cigarettes, because that, at least, looked cool). Remember, this was 2014, the era of vape-rigs. These things were massive, conspicuous contraptions, not unalike in appearance to the Sonic Screwdriver.
Wesley insisted, it wasn’t for the nicotine. It was for the vape tricks.
It was during this week, leading up to Wesley’s vape acquisition, I had my first encounter with Caylen Crowlin. I was sitting apart from Wasley and Sara. The seating arrangement was as follows: Wesley and Sarah were sharing a bench just behind the emergency exit on the right side of the bus. Caylen (who I did not yet know was Caylen, and was to me just a boy) was sitting on his own bench directly behind them. I noticed him when I got on: Dark curly hair, glasses, tall-ish. He didn’t do much, though. He was just like a lot of people, headphones in, gaze down.
I was in the bench across the aisle from the boy and diagonal-behind Wesley and Sara. From where I was positioned, I could see that beneath Wesley and Sara’s bench, there was what appeared to be a crumpled-up bill. I knew that I was the only person on the bus who could see it at the moment, but I also knew I had to act fast, or else it would slip into someone else’s view. Before I could think myself out of it, I hopped across the aisle, landing next to the boy.
“Excuse me,” I said.
He jolted up, then mumbled something like, “That’s alright.”
I bent down and fished around a bit before landing on the bill.
“Ha!” I held the money up for him to see.
He nodded with confused approval, then gave me a thumbs-up.
I tapped Wesley on the head. “Look what I just found!”
I uncrumpled the bill for them to see.
“Whoa!” Wesley shrieked, “How much is that?!”
I checked the value, gasped, then stuffed the bill into my pocket.
“Twenty!” I whispered.
“Twenty-dollars?” Wesley yelled. “Where did you find that?”
“Under your seat.”
“You need to give it to me!”
“No.”
“It was under my seat,” he argued.
“Technically, it was under both of your seats, and I bet you don’t even have change!”
“This is like colonialism!” he went on, “you’re taking our resources!”
“Let’s see what’s fair.”
I tapped the boy on the shoulder. Once again, he looked up, this time removing his headphones.
“My friend here,” I pointed to Wesley, “thinks that I should give him this money I just found.”
“Is it his money?” he asked.
“No, but he thinks he’s entitled to it, because it was under his seat. I leaned over in a stage whisper, “he wants to use the money to buy a vape—”
“Don’t be a narc!” Wesley started play-swatting at me.
The boy looked at Wesley and then looked at me, before offering the mantra “finders keepers.”
“There you have it, finders keepers,” I said to Wesley.
I mouthed thank you to the boy as I slid back to my original seat and Wesley called me fake. He still got that big-ass vape the next weekend anyway, so ultimately everything for him worked out.
After the money incident, I started to notice the boy on the bus more and more. It wasn’t just because of our brief interaction; it was also because he’d started sitting with this girl from my grade, Ashley Monarch. It was hard not to notice them when they got on the bus, because Ashley had an energy that carried through to every nook and cranny, every morning. Her energy was so pervasive that it seemed to come through earbuds and over conversations. No matter what you were doing, you were also listening to Ashley as she laughed at some inaudible joke the boy had told her, or as she crooned over some sweet inaudible nothing he may have whispered to her. I would have thought that the two of them were dating already, if it wasn’t for how often she referred to him as “best friend”. It was clear that she liked him, and it seemed like they were close. I didn’t really comprehend the ethics behind the whole situation.
On one hand, it seemed clear that Ashley liked this boy. On the other hand, I thought I might like that boy. On a third hand (a hand I was even aware of then), I didn’t know if I only thought I liked him because I was seeing Ashley like him.
But if they weren’t dating, it was all fine, right? On paper, that seemed correct, but I wasn’t sure.
On October 10th, 2014, there was another pep rally. It was still hot as hell in the low country, even though we were well into fall. Temperatures still passed 85 every day from noon to four, making it the perfect time of year to gather the whole school out onto the soccer field for a drone picture.
I didn’t mind. First of all, it meant that the pep rally got pushed earlier to make time for picture-taking. That meant classes got shortened to near-non-existent lengths. Secondly, it meant I got more time to hang out with my new friend, Solaria Weathervein.
As nice Ms. Martinson guided us to our assigned spot in the amorphic blob that would take the shape of a big WA from above, Solaria and I were busy in a competition of trying to get the other to fully cackle at jokes about our teacher’s breasts.
Solaria and I were growing closer every day. By this point in our friendship, we were texting non-stop from the end of the school day to the time we went to bed (which was usually the same time), starting up again as soon as we woke up. We had a shared OC named Terri the Emo Emu (based on a drawing I’d made for Melissa). We were developing a canon of lore for Terri as well as several original songs (potentially a musical or a feature film in the works).
In addition to the solo texts, we were also in a group chat with Jannette. It was from within that group chat that Solaria and I birthed our catchphrase and credo:
DRIFT.
Drift was something you really needed to be there for. Even to this day, as I write this piece, the word sends chills down my spine. Writing it and putting it back into my mind feels like I have awoken something deep within me. Drift.
Like so many juvenile inside jokes, drift started as a typo. Jannette accidentally said drift or maybe it was Solaria, or maybe it was me, but as soon as it was sent out into our kik chat, it was sent like a stone rolling downhill with no end in sight. Drift became cool, chill, peace, fuck you, hakuna matata. It was everything, and it was nothing. It was brainrot before brainrot existed, but instead of AI, it was just the two of us with our idiotic psychic link and our stupid nonsense language. Everyone around us was just subjected to us and our energy.
The whole time we were sitting out there, posed for the picture, I was half-heartedly trying to keep Solaria from flipping off the camera in the sky. In the end, we compromised, and both flipped off the camera in the sky, but low enough so that no one else could see it. It was like a little secret, just between us.
When I got to the bus line after all that fun, I was absolutely bubbling with weekend energy. The world felt like a fun place to be. I noticed that the boy was standing alone, no Ashley in sight, and I was thinking that maybe it was a sign for me to try and make a move.
Wesley and I were rough-housing when he pushed me. Perhaps I let myself stumble a little further than was warranted, and that stumble may have led me to inadvertently fall into this mystery boys arms. I can’t say I’m proud of this behavior.
“I’m so sorry,” I may have giggled as my hands brushed the sleeves of his shirt. “I’m soooo clumsy.”
When I got on the bus, I may have pretended that the seats filled up faster than they did as an excuse to sit next to him.
On that bus ride, I learned a few things: He told me his name (Caylin Crowlin) and his grade (10th grade). He told me his favorite movie was Guardians of the Galaxy. He told me he had a tumblr.com account that he didn’t use and no other social media. He told me he’d just moved to South Carolina from Golden, Colorado.
“I’m from Denver!” I must have shouted at him.
“That’s such a coincidence!”
And I found that he was going on a trip to Washington DC that weekend, and he wouldn’t be back until Tuesday.
Then we were at my stop, and I had until Tuesday to think about him.
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