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 Posted: Fri Mar 05, 2010 3:35 pm
Andrea grasped the bar overhead on the bus with one hand, and stuffed his other hand into the pocket of his hoodie to turn up the volume on his music player as the bus rumbled back into motion. He was dressed for ballet practice with a small duffel slung over his shoulder with the rest of his things. Though the boy was itching to get his drivers' license so he could go any number of places on his own schedule, he had been riding this bus to dance lessons for so long that he had the routine down pat. The dance school had moved once since he started, but other than that, the only real change to the commute to lessons was the invention of the tiny portable music player.
Listening to the music for the routine they would be practicing, the dark-haired boy tapped his feet in time and shifted his weight back and forth as he ran through the routine in his mind in a sort of miniature dance. He was not quite The Kid with the Earbuds in All the Time, but even bus rides that did not take him to ballet had Andrea dancing along a little. Even if there were places to sit, he preferred to stand for that reason, just because it kept him amused for the duration of the ride. And a bit of humming along and grooving to the music never bothered anyone else.
A pleased smile settled on Andrea's features as he swayed along with the bus and felt the Igor Stravinsky as he blasted it over the sound of the engine.
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Posted: Wed Mar 10, 2010 9:59 pm
Very few things in the world could pick up Genevieve's spirits like a good Erasure song set to loop for the past three hours.
Even fewer things could dampen them the way riding public transit did.
These two forces of good and evil battle for Jenny's very soul as she stepped onto the gum-carpeted step of the bus and pulled herself in. The driver grinned his wide, gap-toothed smile and tapped the kiosk to his side. Jenny fed the machine her tokens, returning the smile before all but skipping through the aisle. The skipping was made exceedingly difficult by the number of legs, briefcases, and backpacks crowding the walkway, but she picked over them with the ease of a teenage girl far too caught up in her own daydreams to realize social etiquette. Were it not for the pair of bright pink earbuds, she would have heard a slew of cursing and mutters following her down the aisle.
Fortunately, all Jenny heard was: Always, I wanna beeeee with yoooooou, and make beliiieve with you!
Ah, Erasure.
Small as Jenny was, she couldn't reach the overhead bar without discomfort. Given the alternative of sitting between two of the bus “regulars” who she had dubbed “Senor Stinkypack” and “Madame Moustache”, Genevieve opted to venture a bit farther back than usual, clinging to one of the center poles for support. It was there, while carefully checking to make sure her hands weren't about to grab onto something sticky, slimy, or covered in grease, that she saw Andrea. Jenny didn't know the boy personally, but even a week at Meadowview was enough to see almost every face a dozen times.
Whether it was just her own amicable nature or the way he swayed that caught her attention wasn't clear, but Genevieve nevertheless reached up and tapped his shoulder.
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Posted: Sun Mar 14, 2010 6:37 pm
At the touch, Andrea's head snapped up and he looked over Jenny before he noticed that the one likely responsible for the tapping was shorter than he had expected. At least the tapper was considerably less creepy than he was afraid of - not everyone who rode the bus was skeevy, but there were enough odd folk that Andrea worried when someone touched him while he was riding.
The girl looked friendly enough, though, and he smiled back. Andrea pulled his hand not occupied with holding the poll from his pocket, and waved to her with two fingers, while the other three remained curled around his portable music player. At the same time, he mouthed, "Hello", figuring with her neon pink earbuds in and the bus rumbling away, she wouldn't be able to hear him anyway. At the same time, though, he moved his hand near one of his own plain boring white earbuds, intending to indicate that he was willing to nix the Stravinski if she wanted to talk.
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Posted: Sat Mar 27, 2010 12:35 am
Jenny was always shorter than people expected, because nobody ever expected anybody to be as sort as Genevieve Prideux at the age of seventeen. She was towered over head ans shoulders by the average student, and all but vanished into the hallway seas between classes. A Jenny-eye-view consisted mostly of backpacks and t-shirt logos.
She plucked the earbuds from her ears, pinching each between thumb and forefinger and loosing a soft chorus of Erasure for the few moments it took her to jam her thumb down on the pause button. She tucked both earbuds and iPod into her pocket, waited until he could heard her, and said loudly (as though he was still blasting his music): “Whatcha listening to?”
Jenny was just that type of person. The thought that anyone might want to listen to their music in peace was foreign to her. Just like the thought that anyone might want to read a book without her lifting up the front cover to read the title was foreign to her.
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Posted: Tue Mar 30, 2010 7:10 pm
"Huh?"
The boy took one earbud out, then paused his player, then figured out what the girl had asked over the noise of the bus. Smiling, Andrea pulled his music player out of his pocket and held it so she could see the digital display, which currently read, "STRAVINSKI" in small glowing letters.
"Do you like classical music?" he asked then, taking out the other earbud and shouting a bit to be heard over the bus engine. "What's on your player?" He was pretty outgoing as well, and had no issues at the moment with sharing music tastes with a stranger. They were stuck on the same bus for now; might as well make the best of the ride.
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Posted: Thu May 06, 2010 6:13 am
Jenny stuck out her tongue and pulled her lower left eyelid down in an expression that nobody in real life had made since the 1980's. It wasn't that Jenny didn't like classical music – her mother had been adamant that she listen to it growing up – it was just that she didn't like Stinkinski. He was one of her mother's favorites, among many, and had filled their home night after night until all Jenny could associate it with was sitting at the dinner table until she finished her peas and combing knots out of her hair after her nightly showers. Beethoven was the soundtrack of her duck pajamas, Debussy the chorus to flossing her teeth.
“I like Mozart,” Jenny said, and she did not say 'prefer' because she preferred so many things to classical music that it would have been a horrible misuse of the word, “But never for bus rides!” She clicked the center button of the iPod and scrolled through the artists, picking out something modern and holding up one pink earbud to Andrea. She jammed it towards his ear on tippy-toes, mashing the play button down with a thumb.
From the earbuds came a terrible sound: All the things she said, all the things she said. Running through my head, running through my head.
From the wide smile on Jenny's face and the way she bounced on her heels, it was evident she hadn't the slightest clue what the hell the song was about.
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Posted: Sat May 08, 2010 9:28 pm
"Yeah, I don't usually listen to classical on the bus," he conceded with a slight chuckle at her rather obvious disapproval of his current musical selection. Andrea was about to elaborate at least a little, explain that he was on his way to a dance practice, but then she offered him an earbud.
He took it and tucked it in his ear, leaning down slightly just to be absolutely sure he had enough slack on the cord....
... And tilted his head to the side a little at the music coming out of it. Andrea listened to the radio and stuff, but was still not quite completely up to speed with all the popular music of the day. It was something that some other high schoolers might consider a tragedy, but it had never really bothered Andrea all that much. Though if he really had to guess, this one sounded a few years old.
"That's cool, I guess," he ruled, removing the earbud again and returning it to her. "Certainly a little easier to hear over the engine and all." Much as he thought he really should have been getting into The Zone for his ballet lessons, Andrea figured it could not hurt to share a little from his music player in return.
Fiddling with the scroll wheel on his own device, he selected a song and offered one of his plain default white earbuds, along with the sound of some lyrics in German: "Ich habe sieben Nägel, die schlag ich für dich ein...." Not many people knew of Subway to Sally here in Destiny City, but Andrea had picked up a CD or two of theirs while visiting his family over in Italy. His cousin adored them, and he had taken quite a liking to them as well. If nothing else, Andrea thought it would be cool to offer the girl on the bus some music she had most likely never heard before.
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