beckoning me to come over. I shook my head—he probably thought I was from here, spoke his language. It was weird that I felt so out of place, surrounded by people who looked at least a little like me—some shade of brown, black hair—till I realized that it was because back home, everyone was white and I wasn’t used to seeing so many people who weren’t. You grow up with them, you assume everybody everywhere is white. Holy crap. Johnny would love it when I told her. I stood on tiptoe to see her better, about to walk over.
And in that moment I saw a face that stood out at first simply for its colour—a pale grey, bluish at the extremities—and then for what I realized, sinkingly, its familiarity: the man in the Adidas jacket. I dropped into a crouch, and duck-walked the few steps separating me from Johnny, who had stopped yelling and was instead laughing with the ticket agent, which was beyond my comprehension but also not my problem right now. She accepted a few slips of printed paper and turned when I tugged on her bag.
“That guy from the airport is here!” I whispered. “I saw him! How in the hell did he find us? I didn’t see him on the plane!”
“Are you sure it’s him?”
“You could believe me for once in your life. Jesus. Look, he’s over there.”
She glanced over, then grabbed my bag to drag me behind a concrete support pillar. I leaned my face on it and tried to watch the guy, who was scanning the crowd, a still, white point in the swirling mass of people and luggage.
“What are we gonna do?!”
“Avoid, avoid, avoid,” she murmured. “Don’t draw attention to ourselves.”
“Did you get bus tickets?”
“Yeah, it’s over there. The grey one.”
“The one that’s... pulling out?”
“Yup.” She looked at me—for a moment the old Johnny, the one I remembered, all grin and wink—and we took off at a sprint through the crowd. I gasped at the roaring-hot air as we pounded the few steps towards the bus, which hadn’t picked up much speed behind the tour bus ahead of it. Black exhaust obscured Johnny for a second, and when I could see again, she was hammering on the bus door and waving something—her ticket, I thought. The bus slowed rather than stopping, and we swung aboard, wheezing and sweating. The last thing I saw as we got moving again was the face of the man in the blue jacket—staring right at me now, the expression slack, vacant, not angry.
It was packed, the air inside a solid wall of stench, body odour, cologne, diesel, garlic, feet, even a faint smell of animal shit, like a petting zoo, although I didn’t see any animals—maybe it was on someone’s shoes. The bus itself was an ancient, grease-smudged Nissan that was obviously burning some of the oil it had abundantly dripped on the concrete pad at the station. Delicate towers of blue smoke rose from the holes in the floorboards.
Johnny shoved down the aisle to the back, and we sat on the floor on top of several battered suitcases, to keep our pants out of the dirt. Half the passengers turned to stare at us, nearly all the standing men. The women, sitting, seemed too preoccupied with wrangling their bags, food, kids, and each other to care—mostly kids. I thought of Mom and felt a lump rise in my throat. I had always been the one who dealt with the kids the most, but they ran to us equally when they were hurt or scared or bored, seeking the love they knew we would give them, no matter who was doing the wrangling. Christ, where were they? How could Johnny have whisked them off like that? To not know made me feel slightly unmoored, as if I might finish this trip and discover that I had no home to return to, or that I’d never had a home at all. That I was an orphan, parentless, siblingless. Sweat was trickling down my face; I wiped it on my shoulder and glanced over at Johnny.
“Hope you don’t have to pee for the next six hours,” she said.
“The way I’m sweating, I doubt it. Man, how did they even sell tickets for a bus this full?”
“Let’s just say that not everybody here paid the same price for their ticket,” she said.
We waited while I worked that one out. “Like... bribes and stuff?”