I had some scary bus rides when I was in school. In fact, when I was in first grade a girl bit me in the leg on my school bus. But the most terrifying bus ride of my life was on an airport shuttle bus, while I was on my way home for Spring Break this year.
It was 5:45 a.m. and pitch black outside. Sara and I were half asleep and on our way to Florida. We had woken up at 4:00 that morning, just in time to watch Kim Possible before we left.
We rode the light rail for 15 minutes to the bus stop, and surprisingly, the ride passed without incident. At the time, I thought it was too early for anything crazy to happen, but now I know that fate, destiny and The Twilight Zone were just biding their time and preparing to gang up on us.
Our boarding time was 6:20 so we got on the shuttle in a rush. A girl with a stain on her shirt sat down next to me, looking antsy. I figured she was also running late. Then she began furiously muttering expletives to herself; it was at this point that I realized there was something wrong with her, but I convinced myself it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. She was probably just a drug addict.
“Do you have any Advil?” the drug addict asked Sara, who quietly answered that she did not. It was officially weird.
It occurred to me that the drug addict was holding her stomach, keeping her hand over the stain on her shirt.
“Is this the bus to Van Buren?” she asked me. We had come from Van Buren Street and were currently heading in a completely different direction. The drug addict was probably about 40 minutes away from the closest part of Van Buren and was going in the opposite direction.
“No,” I replied.
“That’s not good, because I just stabbed myself,” she said.
The stain on the drug addict’s shirt was blood; she might not have even been a drug addict. I don’t have very much experience in stabbing myself, but I think she was acting antsy out of pure agony.
I will never know how she stabbed herself, what she stabbed herself with or why she was asking for directions to Van Buren and not a hospital. Maybe she was a drug addict after all.
A better person would have called 9-1-1, but I’m not a better person. I’m the kind of person who writes funny blogs about a lady who stabbed herself in the stomach. At least I told her how to get to Van Buren. And while I’m looking on the bright side of things, at least no one bit me and at least Kim Possible was on.
Tell more about the time you got bitten on the leg by that girl in 1st grade on the bus. That was funny. Not at the time; but now it is.
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